A Preface to Economics [antikvár]

FOREWORD This is not a complété text for the elementary économies course; its purpose is to supplément, not to compete with, the full-length textbooks. It seeks to provide background materials that will en-able the beginning student to understand more quickly and appre-ciate more fully the significance of materials presented by the usual texts. There are now available so many elementary économies textbooks of such a wide variety that any général classification of them is difficult. With much hésitation, therefore, I suggest that they tend to fall into one of three catégories—historical, institutional, or theoretical. Each type is likely to have its peculiar shorteomings as an introduction to économies. A student meeting économies for the first time in a textbook employing the historical approach is unlikely to appreciate the significance of the chronological de-velopments studied because of his lack of understanding of the nature of basic economic problems, of the functions involved in economic processes, and of the current status of the economy. If a student is inducted into économies through a textbook employing the institutional or descriptive approach, he is likely to have difficulty in grasping the significance of the institutions studied and their relationship to the economic system as a whole because of his lack of knowledge of historical backgrounds and of the nature of basic economic problems and processes. Textbooks employing the theoretical approach are likely to have vii