Distinguishing Features:

An Emphasis on Core Principles: A few core principles do most of the work in economics. By focusing on these principles, the text assures that students leave the course with a deep mastery of them. In contrast, traditional encyclopedic texts so overwhelm students with detail that they often leave the course with little useful working knowledge at all.  Throughout the book, core principles icons flag areas in the text where a core principle is discussed.

Understandable Examples/Economic Naturalism: Throughout the text, Economic Naturalist examples pose “economic riddles” in the form of questions to spark the students’ interest in learning the answer.  These examples fuel interest while teaching students to see economics in the world around them.

• Why don’t auto manufacturers make cars without heaters?
  
  
• Why do movie theaters offer discount tickets to students?
  
  
• Why do we often see convenient stores located on adjacent street corners?
  

Modern Macroeconomics:  Recent developments have renewed interest in cyclical fluctuations while still paying attention to such long-run issues as growth, productivity, the evolution of real wages, and capital formation.  Thus, we offer the following organization:

•  A 3-chapter treatment of long-run issues followed by a modern treatment of short-term fluctuations and stabilization policy, emphasizing the important distinction between short- and long-run behavior of the economy.
  
  
• Designed to allow for flexible treatment of topics, these chapters are written so that short-run material (Chapters 21-25) can be used before long-run material (Chapters 18-20) with no loss of continuity.
  
  
• This book places a heavy emphasis on globalization, starting with an analysis of its effects on real wage inequality and progressing to such issues as the benefits of trade, the causes and effects of protectionism, the role of capital flows in domestic capital formation, and the link between exchange rates and monetary policy.

Modern Microeconomics: Economic surplus, introduced in Chapter 1 and applied repeatedly thereafter, is more fully developed here than in any other text. This concept underlies the argument for economic efficiency as an important social goal. Rather than speak of tradeoffs between efficiency and other goals, the authors stress that maximizing economic surplus facilitates the achievement of all goals.

Active Learning Stressed: The authors consistently introduce new ideas in the context of simple examples and then follow them with applications in familiar settings. Frequently, the text poses concept checks to test and reinforce the understanding of these ideas, and end-of-chapter questions and problems are carefully crafted to help students internalize and extend core concepts. Students are prepared to apply the important concepts to solve “economic riddles” drawn from the real world.

Assurance of Learning Ready: Each chapter in the book begins with a list of numbered learning objectives, which appear throughout the chapter as well as in the end-of-chapter assignments.  All end of chapter material, test bank material, and assignable content within Connect maps to a specific chapter learning objective in the textbook, as well as topic area, Bloom’s Taxonomy level, and AACSB skill area.  The reporting features within Connect allow student results to be aggregated, making the collection and presentation of Assurance of Learning data simple and easy.