Introduction

One standard definition of economics describes the field as the study of the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses. That’s accurate: if Adam and Eve had never left the Garden of Eden, they would never have needed an economist. But this sounds too dry, too abstract, to make economics seem like an exciting or interesting thing to learn about. Alfred Marshall, a great English economist of the late 19th century, used plainer but more enticing language: he said, more or less, that economics was the study of mankind in the ordinary business of earning a living. Anyone with reasonable curiosity would be, or should be, interested in learning about that. The idea for this book, which came from Professor Wolfgang Schürer, was to provide students near the beginning of their academic lives with a sampling of the sorts of problem that a group of pretty good economists — winners of the Nobel Prize, in fact — found it interesting and useful and possible to think about productively. What he and we hope is that some of those who read this book will be tempted to study economics, either professionally or because they find it interesting and important as citizens, whatever their professions.