Of Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist, Arnold Kling says This Is What Textbooks Should Be Like:
In fact, the substance of UE is so strong, that I am tempted to review it as if it were a textbook. Not because it resembles the freshman textbooks that are commonly used today, but because it resembles what I believe such books ought to be. In fact, it is not far from the book that I argued for five years ago. If the Ivy League economics courses were designed for the benefit of students rather than the convenience of professors, then Harford, not Greg Mankiw, would be the $1.4 million man.The traditional freshman economics textbook says little or nothing about economic growth and development, asymmetric information, and tactical price discrimination. Harford covers those important topics, while omitting the usual long, boring, and not-so-enlightening discourse on cost functions and industrial organization.
In the five-year old essay he cites, Kling argues that “In putting a whole semester of macroeconomics into the freshman course, the profession is leading with its chin,” and suggests five other subjects more appropriate for a second semester of intro econ:
- The stock market and modern finance theory
- Statistical Modeling and Risk Management
- History and growth
- Intergenerational transfers
- Information economics