economics-textbook

I read this book as a student and consequently learned far more than I expected. The language is easy to understand and the comlexity of the subject/language increases at an acceptable pace. The opinion of the book leans more towards a conservative form of investing...one should expect a decent return but not get too greedy.

Even though the authors are academics, this book is not bogged down with heavy, collegiate, turgid text and calculations. Rather, Fredman and colleagues have simply gone about explaining the various difficult-to-understand aspects of the mutual funds industry. This information is essential to your understanding of the various ratings and types of mutual funds.

As a securities industry manager and former regulator, I first began to use the book to become familiar with the details of such things as 12b-1 fees, expense ratios, comparative assessment of funds, features offered as sales incentives or to ease transactions (e.g. dividend reinvestment, 1035 exchanges, intra-fund familiy exchanges, etc.).

As time went on I have kept this book in my office. It has become essential to answer the occasional questions that arise and which are more detailed and technical than my memory can answer. The book has never come up short on this count.

You should also look for other publications of NYIF (New York Institute of Finance). This is formerly the publishing arm of the NYSE. The material published by NYIF is "from the horse's mouth" and right on the mark for those seeking to learn details of how the profession of finance works. Despite this, the material is never overly technical and theoretical. Rather, the material is practical day-to-day information which will wind up on your reference shelf.

I have read several books on mutual funds but this one by far is the best. Fredman and Wiles cover almost every topic that you could think of: how to analyze the fund, sorting out costs, evaluating risks and much more. The authors make no assumptions about what the reader is likely to know about mutual funds and write in a manner that is both engaging and enjoyable. Also, it is not just an academic treatment of the subject matter. The reader is invited to perform his own calculations and check things out. This is accomplished in one of the concluding chapters where a mutual fund action plan is dicussed in great detail. The book is topped off with some very good sources of additional information for mutual fund investors and appendices which help the reader perform some of the calculations discussed in the book. Overall, this book makes for a good read for a beginner or even a seasoned mutual fund investor.

I have to agree with the other reviewer, this is a fantastic book. It explains very clearly how powerful a tool linear programming can be in economics. However, this book really ties its hands by only talking about matrices or any of the mathematical reasons why linear programming works as it does in an appendix. If you're a mathematician that wants to learn about linear programming, this is definitely not the book. But if you're an economist, or just someone interested in economics, that wants to learn about linear programming, then this book is definitely for you. It is very rich with economic ideas and covers a lot of interesting topics such as growth theory and welfare economics.

This book is a classical. It's important you'll buy for your library.

I LÝKE THÝS BOK ÝT'S FANTASTÝ

Catherine Beecher's famous sister, Harriet, may have sparked some of the ideas presented, but did not actually contribute to the work of writing this book. Catherine was a childless, unmarried, middle-class woman, whose great tragedy was that her fiance was lost at sea before they were married.

She was an intellectual who lived in a time when women were severely constrained by domestic drudgery. Catherine Beecher strived to ennoble women's traditional role through education:

"It is the aim of this volume to elevate both the honor and the remuneration of all employments that sustain the many difficult and varied duties of the family state, and thus to render each department of woman's profession as much desired and respected as are the most honored professions of men."

There is a great deal of moralizing in this book, about lifestyle, Christian charity, care of children and servants, and so forth. In this, Catharine Beecher was a product of her century. Yet some of the observations are surprisingly astute, even for today's readers. For instance, there is a humorous passage about cooking with butter that will have you smiling about rancid butter in every dish. In so many ways, the modern homemaker has less to worry about. We can purchase conveniences that were undreamt of 130 years ago.

This is a self-consciously "American" perspective on keeping a middle class house. Yet the French are looked to as having perfected cooking and many other things, and this sort of repetitious praise can grate on the American reader. Beecher was addressing the American woman during the Civil War and post-Abolition time period, during a great influx of European immigrants and when the population was actively expanding westward. She had it in mind to influence the young woman of a certain generation, and in many ways, her ideas were both more advanced and more orderly than what had gone before.

This book is a *must read* for students of Women's History as it pertains to women in the home. If you are interested in the 19th century lifestyle, you will find many domestic details here.

The Beecher sisters and Mark Twain were comfortable neighbors in 1869, living the good life on Hartford's elm lined streets. Mark wrote humorously about world travel or of his adopted home town, what was to become the "Insurance Capital of the World" while Harriet Beecher Stowe could claim authorship of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Catherine Beecher wrote a very practical "how to" book, the American Woman's Home, with a little help from her famous sister. The life they lived had not yet been saturated with the influence of petroleum....that would take some time to get up to speed.

The author had two broad objectives in this book. The first was to provide a critique of positivism, including logical positivism, logical empiricism, operationalism and falsificationism. The second was to identify the implications of this critique for economic methodology.

The first part of the book describes the role of the Vienna Circle in the rise of logical positivism during the 1920s and 1930s, followed by the maturation of the tradition in the form of logical empiricism, then the philosophical attack and the emergence of the "growth of knowledge" tradition with Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend.

The second part of the book consists of essays on various aspects of positivism and alternative approaches including the "Austrian" approach of Robins and Machlup (each pitted against Hutchison), Friedman's instrumentalism and Samuelson's "descriptivism".

The third part provides some provisional answers, notably a case for methodological pluralism.

In view of the way that positivism dominated the philosophy of science during the 20th century this scholarly appraisal of the rise and fall of the movement is a valuable contribution to the history of ideas. However as a contribution to contemporary thinking on these matters it would have been a more original and challenging enterprise if positivism had not already been devastated by Popper, who replaced justificationism and inductivism with critical rationalism and the non-authoritarian theory of knowledge.

This is a new edition of Caldwell's 1982 book but it is not really revised and so it does not do justice to his "mature" thinking which can be found in an article "clarifying Popper" in the Journal of Economic Literature, March 1991. This article draws on Popper's theory of metaphysical research programs and shows that when he is depicted as a critical rationalist instead of a falsificationist, several pieces of the jigsaw fall into place, including Popper's re-invention of "Austrian" praxeology and Talcott Parsons' "action frame of reference" under the heading of "situational analysis".

It seems that the field of economic methodology has been unduly influenced by Mark "Bluster" Blaug's commitment to Lakatos rather than Popper, to "falsificationism" rather than critical rationalism and to the Kuhn/Lakatos notion of research programs with inviolable "hard cores" rather than the Popperian program which subjects "hard cores" to critical appraisal. Lakatos, as a Hegelian, attempted a synthesis of Popper and Kuhn, to capture the Spirit of the Age, as it was, becoming in the process a Historical Figure. This grand scheme did not work out and the tormented progress of the Lakatosian World Spirit continued to cause confusion on several continents (and in the isles of Greece) even after Lakatos himself had gone.

When the idea of Popper as a critical rationalist is taken on board, as Caldwell appeared to be doing in his "clarification" paper, then some really interesting results emerge, as indicated by Boland in 1982. It may be that the real impediment to progress in economics is not the failure to be serious about falsification (as Blaug has argued) but the failure to recognize that the real driving forces in methodology are Instrumentalism (as per Friedman) and Conventionalism (as per Samuelson). These need to be subjected to critical appraisal, in the context of ongoing research, not merely as a part of the history of ideas.

In this book Caldwell has shown a remarkable open-mindedness to the much-maligned ideas of the Austrians. This would have taken a deal of nerve in view of the hard things that are said about them by his peers and by luminaries such as Samuelson. (There again, it was Samuelson who, up to the Fall of the Wall, thought that the Soviet economy was doing well and catching up fast with the US). Similarly, it was bold to champion Popper's ideas on the metaphysical aspects of scientific research programs. This is exciting stuff and one hopes that Caldwell is prepared to continue the maturation process that was apparent in his article, even to the extent of producing a seriously revised edition of this book.

This is probably the best introduction and overview to a broad range of philosophical concerns within the discipline of economics. It is accessible to the lay reader but is not dumbed down in order to be popular. It does not require any particular knowledge of economic theory but instead deals with general philosohical and methodological issues in economics. Nonetheless, the reader is engaged with key methodological debates within the discipline of economics.

The book implicitly contains a number of critiques of the (neoclassical) economic orthodoxy, set in their historical perspective. The basic concern of the book is with the influence of logical positivism and its descendants on economic theorising and accepted methodologies, and the book concludes with Caldwell's suggesting an approach to resolving many of these issues, called "methodological pluralism".

If you are interested in examining the philosophical foundations of economics, this is probably the best book around. If you are interested in the philosophy of economics, there is also a reader entitled "The Philosophy of Economics" by Daniel Hausman which would make a good companion. "Why Economics is not yet a Science", Alfred Eichner, 1983 is an interesting questioning of approaches and methodologies in economics. If you are interested in alternatives to mainstream economic approaches, then "A Modern Guide to Economic Thought" by Maire and Miller, 1991 is a good introduction (aimed at an interested university undergraduate without necessarily having a strong current background in economics studies).

There is also a large literature on the sociology of economics, examining how the discipline of economics adapts to new ideas and criticisms. "Canonizing Economic Theory : How Theories and Ideas Are Selected in Economics", Christopher D. MacKie, ME Sharpe, 1998 is a good starting point for this.

This book is a must read for volunteer board members and the staff who nurture them while trying to do their underpaid, undervalued jobs.

Boards from Hell is an easy read, reference manual that gives names to the dismay you're feeling when attempting to make your non-profit board productive and mission-driven. It also gives easy to follow, realistic steps to take to rescue faltering boards and put them back on the road to governance rather than abstinence or micro-management.

I use this book with struggling boards and with college students interested in "getting it right." In fact, this order represents my 60-something purchase of the book!

We have used this book as a trainiing manual for a leadership training program in our community. It is a no nonsense, easy to read book that helps anyone new to the board scene feel at ease. It provides tools to help board maintain their sanity and avoid burn out.

It is an excellent book for newcomers to the field of Business ethics.Being a new field the authors have given numerous examples of real life cases for the students to appreciate this field.The cases make understanding more easy.Its to be noted that this field has now drawn a roundtable among the giants of the corporate world.The book deals with the moral issues before going to the business front. Good reading.

Although I only purchased this book for an Business Ethics class, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject.

It's a great book for first year business students and all those who want to learn something about basic principles of macroeconomics and the influence it has on everyday business activities

In comparison with other macroeconomic texts around it should get 5 stars. It starts with a historical perspective of the crisis in economics at the time of Keynes, setting the picture for why anyone bothered to invent macroeconomics in the first place. It then rapidly proceeds to introduce the major schools of macroeconomics and to develop the relevant ideas and models. It is an ideal introduction for the interested or serious student and manages to be exciting as well as fairly comprehensive. If you're taking an introductory macroeconomics course, get this book instead of your text. If you're coming from outside the economics profession and have a mind of your own, this ones for you.

This is a classic Macro text used for many Intro to Macro-Econ.

I used a similiar text (many editions before) when I took my first econ class in college over 10 yrs ago.

This is a great book, easy to understand and fluid reading.

Thumbs Up!!!

author has good grasp of management in 21 century. What tools and skills will be needed

I learned a lot from each chapter.

Great summaries about corporations in the public eye.

Good case history and citing of heuristics

for running any good learning organization.

You learn the basics for Management 2000.

My professor, Jack Trabin used this book

for the University of Phoenix.

I really enjoyed learning about the various theories and paradigms for Modern Managers.

Being a Manager of a Real Estate Company myself,

I found the case histories useful for analysis

and my papers. Being a human resource Trainer,

this book will teach students the basics.

A book for the future CIO's, CEO's and HR Directors within us all.

This book is one of the best foundation establishers I've read. I am the Chief of Strategy for a major headquarters and currently teach for three universities in such subjects as Strategic Management, Business Policy and Strategy, Business Communications, Supply Chain Management, and Production Operations Management. The point of that statement is that this book that I use on the job, as well as, to some degree in each course I teach. It is well written, organized, and provides outstanding tables and figures to clearly articulate the concepts. This is a desk-reference that will get lot's of handling. A must read!

Amazon lists this book for over 100 dead presidents. The campus book stores in the area sell it for around 90 dead presidents. College book stores are not known for their great discount prices, so why does Amazon sell this book for so much?

Great intro and thorough review of operations for any manager or student. Author adheres to clear, relatable and practical concepts. A little pricey in my opinion.

Studying for APICS CIRM (Certification in Integrated Resource Management), I have accumulated a shelf full of books about enterprise management. "Operations Management: A Value-Driven Approach" rises above all the others. It is large book, almost 1000 pages. It covers all the operations management bases (and all the acronyms), including just-in-time, total quality, demand and supply chain, inventory and materials including MRP and MRPII, planning and scheduling, and so forth. It is a well organized and clearly written textbook, with good examples and problems throughout.

The best, however, is this book's point of view: Delivering VALUE to customers and stakeholders is the raison d'etre for the enterprise. If it doesn't do this well - compared to customer expectations and the competition - it won't survive. Moreover, delivering value is dynamic. The enterprise must constantly improve and its processes, products and services, to respond to the constantly changing needs of its customers. This book brilliantly applies this value-delivery critera throughout, putting techniques and frameworks such as JIT and TQM in proper perspective. Published in 1996, this book is becoming a bit dated in this age of the World Wide Web and virtual marketplaces. (A suggestion: revise and expand the book to cover e-Commerce, including business-to-consumer and business-to-business, to maintain, in my opinion, it solid 5-star rating.) Still, "Operations Management" does a good job anticipating new technologies and marketplaces, and the fact that the enterprise must constantly respond to these changes.

This book is a classic. It deserves to be read by every serious student - and every practicing manager - of operations.

This book is an excellent source for understanding the major principles of economics. It seems more geared towards those people who want a general but accurate working knowledge of economic topics, especially since it shuns use of mathematics like the plague. It is this fact however, that makes the book less useful to the intermediate and higher level student of economics who just wants topics explained in as clear a way as possible, but then also wants to see the mathematical methods involved in these areas. Nonetheless, this is the first economics book that I have ever read that has such a high level of lucidity and clearness to it.

This book took an otherwise dull subject and made it interesting. This was the 3rd economics book that I read, and I found this one to be the best.

If you read only one book on economics, read this. It deals clearly and concisely with the substance of economics and with the economists' approach -- an approach that far too few people appreciate, and which this book will instil in you. Claims that the book does not have enough math and does not cover Keynesian macroeconomics are misguided.

Regarding the supposed lack of math, one must remember that math is merely a tool that should be used to clarify and not confuse economics. If one can explain economics in English, so much the better. Economics needn't be hard. Mankiw's economics is at least as good as the best of the harder and more mathematical textbooks, and better than the rest. The need is for good economics to be explained well to a large audience, and this book does it superbly.

Regarding the exclusion of Keynesian short run macroeconomics, all I can say is "Whew! Finally! At last!". Keynesian short run macroeconomics taught at the undergraduate level is mindless, unintuitive curve pushing and generates neither understanding nor love for the subject. Teaching that (especially in a first course to a general audience!) is absolutely unforgivable. If anyone is married to Keynesian economics, they can use Mankiw's "Macroeconomics" which covers with exceptional clarity and brevity all the standard material in an intermediate macro course including the ugly Keynesian short run macroeconomics. However, I am against such an approach. The proper way would be to do Mankiw's "Principles of Economics" in the introductory course and then cover the market-clearing approach to macroeconomics of Barro's "Macroeconomics" in the intermediate macroeconomics course.