Understanding microeconomics

Why a new edition of Understanding Microeconomics? Surely there is not enough new in the basic principles of supply and demand or the ideas of marginal productivity or the behavior of the firm to warrant a new book. True enough. And the instructor who compares the basic analytical concepts of this edition with its predecessor will find little that has changed, save for a few details here and there.

Yet something has changed that does seem to warrant a new book on microeconomics. It is the cry that now reverberates through the classroom the cry for "relevance"-and the hard problems around which relevance is focussed are closer to microeconomics than to macroeconomics. Yet in the previous edition I think I failed to bring out many of the immediate points of contact between microeconomic theory and the issues that beset us as a nation. It is this shortcoming that I have tried to remedy in this new version of Understanding Microeconomics. There is much more than there was in the earlier edition on income distribution, discrimination, and social neglect. More important, I have added two wholly new chapters, one on the environment and one on poverty and power in the market. Both are chapters that should bring microeconomics home (or, equally important, show where it does not quite reach home).