Contents   

Introduction

  • Rush-Hour Blues and Rational Babies
  • Actions Speak Louder Than Words

     

    Section II: Price=Value=Cost: Solving a Simple Economy

  • Thinking on Paper: The Geometry of Choice
    The book has Figure 3-1b wrong; click here for the correct version.
  • What Would You Give to Get Off a Desert Island?
  • Bricks Without Clay: Production in a One-Input World
  • Ptolemaic Trade Theory
  • Putting It Together: Price Theory in a Simple Economy
  • The Big Picture

    Halftime: What We Have Done So Far

    Section III: In Search of the Real World

  • Bosses, Workers, and Other Complications
  • Monopoly for Fun and Profit
  • Hard Problems: Game Theory, Strategic Behavior, and Oligopoly
  • Time ...
  • ... And Chance
  • Who Gets How Much Why?

    Section IV: Standing in for Moral Philosophy: The Economist as Judge

  • Summing People Up
  • What Is Efficient?
  • How to Gum Up the Works
  • Why We Are Not All Happy, Wealthy, Wise, and Married

    Section V: Applications: Conventional and Un

  • Law and Sausage: The Political Marketplace
  • Rational Criminals and Intentional Accidents
  • The Economics of Love and Marriage

    Final Words
    My Publisher's Page
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    Tidbits for the Next Edition

    All paleontologists fall into one or the other of two classes, known in the trade as "lumpers" and "splitters." Faced with a new dinosaur skeleton, a lumper will confidently assign it to an already known species, explaining any differences from previously discovered skeletons by differences in age or sex. A splitter will, with equal confidence, assign the new skeleton to a new species. In a world of splitters, the number of species would be limited only by the number of specimens.

    Economics may not tell us very much about dinosaurs, but it can tell us something about paleontologists. The discoverer of a new species gets to assign it a name, and by so doing guarantees himself a small but permanent place in the professional literature, along with the associated prestige. The discoverer of the thirteenth example of a known species gets no such rewards.

    It follows that paleontologists have, from professional self interest, a bias in favor of identifying new specimens as new species--splitting pays. We cannot deduce that any particular identification is mistaken, but it seems reasonable to suspect that the result is too many splitters&endash;and species.

    Consider the history of the most famous of the fabulous dinosaurs. In the nineteenth century, two paleontologists, Marsh and Cope, were competing in the search for dinosaurs in the American West. One of them found a dinosaur head and, some distance away, a dinosaur body--both belonging, as we now know, to species that had already been identified. He concluded that the head and body belonged together, and named the resulting hybrid "Brontosaurus."


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