For about a year now, R. Preston McAfee of CalTech has been writing and revising his own Introductory Economics textbook, “The Open Source Introduction to Microeconomics.” He hopes that his final revision this month will serve as a starting point for many professors, who can tweak the book to their own needs, and then distribute their versions freely.
McAfee states a few reasons for doing this. He’s mainly concerned that the current intro books are extremely expensive ($136, $131.95 $133, $130.36, $93.80, $99) and overly “simplified.” He also believes that the principles-intermediate sequence is inefficient. Thus his textbook combines the intermediate course and the principles course together. Also, he assumes a “working knowledge of calculus.”
I skimmed over the book (353 pages), and it looks pretty good. There are certainly improvements to be made, but I really like what he’s done. I also applaud his direct use of calculus. Economics is a highly mathematical field, there is currently a huge disconnect between the graduate economics education (oceans of math) and the undergraduate education (no/very little math). Single variable calculus is only the beginning of mathematical economics. From one professor who uses his text:
“[T]his book reflects the approach actually adopted by the majority of economists for understanding economic activity. There are lots of models and equations and no pictures of economists.”
Mathematics comprises over half of the economists’ language, thus it’s difficult to be an economist without knowing mathematics. One of the most important concepts, “marginal” units, is really just the derivative of some total. That simple fact makes almost every micro equilibrium solution problem you encounter many times easier to solve.
Finally, I must add that the eloquent logic of bookstore economics books (and Austrian books), which lack any math at all, is also crucial to understanding economics. So the best ‘first’ economics course would be one which uses a rigorous text like McAfee’s to teach the concepts and methods and a few books like the recent The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford to teach the intuition.
I appreciate the review very much. One quibble: I hope readers will find all the intuition they would like in the book, and it is certainly my purpose to explain the intuition behind every theory developed there.
I just went to bed at 4:30 am a few nights ago! But alas the new semester begins soon and it’s time to be waking up and sticking to schedules.
Dr. McAfee, I apologize for only making time to skim your book. If it combines the intuition of each theory, then a triumph we have indeed! I suggested adding “pop” econ books to the introductory reading list simply because, in my limited bona fide economics education, the core economic intuition is either absent or not emphasized.
What I think would be an interesting extension of your endeavor is something like a restricted wiki-textbook. Most of these wiki-textbooks are…not good. What I envision is that users must register in order to make changes. Registrations would need confirmation by the project supervisor, and then changes would need approval for final inclusion.
Actually…as I wrote and begun to revise the last statement I thought of something different. Some (most?) open-source software is written collaboratively using “source tracker” websites. I am familiar with one particular implementation:
The development team: a group of coders making all the changes themselves. All changes are tracked via a ‘ticket’ system. The dev team would create a new ticket for any changes they are working on. They’d describe the changes in the ticket description (go figure), and mark its status (finished/in progress/etc.)
Users could also make new tickets, which would be examined by the dev team. If a new ticket represents a serious error, a dev team member would jump on it immediately to fix it. At any given time, the current entire source code is available to anyone who wants to see it.
Anyway, I think everyone gets the point: We can adapt this model of distributed software development to textbook writing. A set of authors works separately on different pieces of the book. They make tickets for what they’re working on. Any student, professor, or anyone reading the book with a suggestion can make a new ticket with their idea. This idea can then be evaluated by the team.
Any opinions?