Economic Principles and Economic Analysis

Abstract

THE THIRD EDITION of Professor Brown's book' is essentially the same as the first edition. Since that edition was reviewed in this Journal2 with emphasis on economic ideas presented, the present review will consider the usefulness of the book as an elementary college text. The book is well written, as those familiar with the author would e:xpect it to be. The explanations are thorough, carefully worded, and cover the fundamentals of the discipline. I particularly like his description of the way free enterprise promotes the public welfare, while monopolistic practices detract from it. The discussion of the importance of the quantity of money in determining the price level or the volume of production is pertinent to the current demand pull and cost push controversy. The material is well organized and the instructor will not find the errors that are present in some hastily written contemporary texts. Compared with competing texts, which frequently run to eight or nine hundred pages, this five-hundred page volume may seem short. Despite its size, however, the book contains sufficient reading material for a year's course, since descriptive material of an institutional nature has been kept to a minimum and all statistical data and problems have been relegated to the appendix. Use of the appendix in this fashion has left the text unmarred by tables or diagrams-in striking contrast to most modern economics texts. For instructors who wish to make additional reading assignments, there is the supplementary volume of approximately two hundred pages. Professor Brown concentrates on the traditional fields in economics: