Talk:Economics (textbook)

Avoiding commercial bias
I removed a promotional link to a specific bookseller since this is againt Wikipedia policy (see Neutral point of view).

The ISBN link provided in the References section on the main page will take visitors to a special Wikipedia page where the book can be found at a variety of booksellers (see ISBN about this). -- RayBirks 16:48, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

"The Perseverance of Paul Samuelson"
http://www.mskousen.com/Books/Articles/perserverance.html is linked in the references section. I've read the whole thing, and I really wonder why it is included. The point of the article is to show "rigorously" that Paul Samuelson had a Keynesian bias, and the thesis of the writer is that he "slipped his bias" into a foundational Economics text to brainwash an entire generation of Economists into accepting Keynesian ideas. (The author doesn't use these precise words, but the intent is clear.) The author's concluding paragraph suggests that Samuelson's "advice has contributed to certain of the economic problems that the United States faces today." I just don't think Mark Skousen, (http://www.mskousen.com/About/Biography/biography.html) deserves to be the critical voice by which people judge a hugely influential economist like Samuelson. I have removed it as a result.


 * Mark Skousen is qualified enough to have his own wiki entry and is also the author of "The Structure of Production" and several other books on economics. Now if it were Wikipedia policy to exclude links to articles that are reasonably critical views of a mainstream work, that would be something else--but it's not. It makes sense to allow readers to make their own decisions. -- RayBirks 23:13, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

How Many Did He Sell?
"It was the best selling economics textbook for many decades and still remains popular, selling over 300,000 copies of each edition from 1961 through 1976.[2] The book has been translated into forty-one languages and in total has sold over four million copies..." Uh, 19 editions at 300K apiece comes to 5.7 million, so somebody's asleep at the switch here. And one has to wonder what text it was, "many decades" ago, that sold more. This has rather a whiff of bogosity about it altogether. David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 00:53, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Simple Lunacy
"The 1958 text introduced a "family tree of economics", which by the 20th century consisted of only two groupings, "socialism," listing Marx and Lenin, and the "neo-classical synthesis," listing Marshall and Keynes..." This has at least half a dozen errors in a single sentence. The whole article should be withdrawn and replaced either by something competent or by a simple placeholder. As it stands this is not fit for inclusion in Wikipedia. David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 00:58, 4 September 2017 (UTC)