Economics

Welcome to the 23rd edition of Economics, America's most innovative-and popular-economics textbook. The financial crisis and the subsequent slow recovery increased both student and faculty demand for principles-level content geared toward explaining directly and intuitively why markets and governments fail-sometimes spectacularly-in delivering optimal social outcomes. To satisfy that demand, our presentation of market failures, government failure, and public choice theory has been significantly restructured in Chapters 4 and 5 to allow students to quickly absorb the key lessons regarding externalities, public goods provision, voting paradoxes, the special interest effect, and other problems that hinder either markets or governments from achieving optimal social outcomes.