Tyler Cowen and his co-author explain why they resisted their publisher Macmillan's demands to add chapters like indifference curves to their economics textbook. They wanted to write for "inframarginals" who'd love it for years, not chase every institutional requirement. Most students never take another economics class, so they focused on intuitive supply-and-demand over abstract formalism.
Chapters
Our lived experience is writing a textbook, Modern Principles of Economics. And when you and I started to write this textbook, we had the goal pretty explicitly of not writing the most popular book. That's right.
We did succeed, but it's in fact become a very popular book.
It has become a popular book, but our goal was to write a textbook which the inframarginals, if I could put it that way, would love. Some people would really love. We wanted to write an, an Alchian Allen. We wanted to write a a McCloskey. We wanted to write a book which would last. And to do that, we had to make some choices, like not including, you know, a lot of things which people wanted, right? And we had to get this by our publisher.
That's right. And over time, they want you to put everything in an appendix. It's a compromise.
Exactly. So every new edition, you know, we face this battle or this conflict with the— with our publisher, who is otherwise a great publisher, Macmillan Press. In that Macmillan, they don't get the love. They only get the revenue, right? So they don't care that people love our book. They only want it to be popular. And so we get this, well, if only you had a chapter on indifference curves, then more people would use your book. And we're like, indifference curves shouldn't be taught in Principles. We are a supply and demand book. Supply and demand, supply and demand, supply and demand. Teach supply and demand better, give more applications. Don't throw the students who are never going to take— most of them are never going to take another economics class. Don't throw them into indifference curves and explain why indifference curves don't cross, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you just give them one application and then they forget it, right? But the company is like, oh, well, but some places, you know, they have to teach this model. And so we have this battle. Sometimes we give in.
And sometimes we don't. But I've been on these phone and Zoom calls where I'll say, well, if you want to teach indifference curves in the latest edition, that's in an appendix.
