《经济学的思维方式》是一本出版50年、迄今已更新13版仍长销不衰的经济学通识经典。全书共16个章节，着重研究人们的理性选择及其货币和商业结果，阐释了经济学规律如何作用于个体选择和社会积累。它颠覆了传统经济学著作名词解释式艰深晦涩的讲述，以接地气、充满逻辑性的方式娓娓道来，帮助普通人建立思维框架，养成边际选择思维、沉没成本归零、结果优于动机等经济学的思维习惯。这本书不设公式、函数，却是凝聚大师级的经济教育学家多年心血的严肃著作；数百个生活化案例，使人切实感受到，经济学不是**学问，而是柴米油盐、日常选择，是让一生过得从容、富足的人生必修课。 自初版以来，《经济学的思维方式》便是经济学通识教育的经典之选。它所传达的思维方式，当然也有助于每个人过上更好的生活。

Good mechanics can locate the problem in your car because they know how your car functions when it isn’t having any problems. A lot of people find economic problems baffling because they do not have a clear notion of how an economic system works when it’s working well. They are like mechanics whose training has been limited entirely to the studying of malfunctioning engines. When we have long taken something for granted, it’s hard even to see what it is that we’ve grown accustomed to. That’s why we rarely notice the existence of order in society and cannot recognize the processes of social coordination upon which we depend every day. A good way to begin the study of economics, therefore, might be with astonishment at the feats of social cooperation in which we daily engage. Rush-hour traffic is an excellent example. Recognizing Order You are supposed to gasp at that suggestion. “Rush-hour traffic as an example of social cooperation? Shouldn’t that be used to illustrate the law of the jungle or the breakdown of social cooperation?” Not at all. If the association that pops into your mind when someone says “rush-hour traffic” is “traffic jam,” you are neatly supporting the thesis that we notice only failures and take success so much for granted we aren’t even aware of it. The dominant characteristic of rush-hour traffic is not jam but movement, which is why people venture into it day after day and almost always reach their destinations. It doesn’t work perfectly, of course. (Name one thing that does.) But the remarkable fact at which we should learn to marvel is that it works at all. Thousands of people leave their homes at about eight in the morning, slide into their automobiles, and head for work. They all choose their own routes without any consultation. They have diverse skills, differing attitudes toward risk, and varying degrees of courtesy. As these passenger automobiles in their wide assortment of sizes and shapes enter, move along, and exit from the intersecting corridors that make up the city’s traffic veins and arteries, they are joined by an even more heterogeneous mixture of trucks, buses, motorcycles, and taxicabs. The drivers all pursue their separate plans, with an almost single-minded devotion to their own interests, not necessarily because they are selfish but simply because none of them knows in detail the plans of the others. What each one does know about the others is confined to a few observations on the position, direction, and velocity of a changing handful of vehicles in the immediate environment. To this they add the important assumption that other drivers are about as eager to avoid an accident as they themselves are. Thereare general rules, of course, that everyone is expected to obey, such as stopping for red lights and staying close to the speed limit. That’s about it, however. The entire arrangement as just described could be a prescription for chaos. It ought to end in heaps of mangled steel. And sometimes it does—but that is the rare exception. Instead we witness a smoothly coordinated flow, a flow so smooth, in fact, that an aerial view from a distance can almost be a source of aesthetic pleasure. It is guided as if by an “invisible hand.” There they are—all those independently operated vehicles down below, inserting themselves into the momentary spaces between other vehicles, staying so close and yet rarely touching, cutting across one another’s paths with only a second or two separating a safe passage from a jarring collision, accelerating when space opens before them and slowing down when it contracts. Rather than anarchy and chaos, the movement of rushhour traffic, or indeed of urban traffic at any time of day, really is an astounding feat of social cooperation. The Importance of Social Cooperation Everyone is familiar with traffic but almost no one thinks of it as cooperative. We depend on processes of coordination for far more than what we usually think of as “economic” goods. Without institutions that encourage cooperation, we couldn’t enjoy the benefits of civilization. “In such a condition,” as Thomas Hobbes observed in an often-quoted passage of his book, Leviathan(1651), “there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Because Hobbes believed that people were so committed to self-preservation and personal satisfaction that only force (or the threat of it) could keep them from constantly assaulting one another, his writings emphasize only the most basic form of social cooperation: abstention from violence and robbery. He seems to have supposed that if people could merely be induced not to attackone another’s persons or property, then positive cooperation—the kind that actually produces industry, agriculture, knowledge, and art—would develop of its own accord. But will it? Why should it? How Does it Happen? How do people encourage one another to take precisely those complexly interconnected actions that will eventually produce the multitude of goods and services that we all enjoy? Even a society of saints must use some procedures for inducing positive cooperation of the right kind if the life of each saint is to be more than “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Saints must, after all, somehow find out exactly what ought to be done and when an where it ought to be done before they can play an effective part in helping others. Three hundred and fifty years have passed since Hobbes examined society. Hobbes probably failed to see the importance of this question for understanding life in the “commonwealth” because the society he knew was far simpler, more bound by custom and tradition, and less subject to rapid and disruptive change than the societies in which we have grown up. Not until well into the eighteenth century, as a matter of fact, did any significant number of thinkers begin to wonder why it was that society “worked”—that individuals pursuing their own interests, with extremely limited information, nonetheless managed to produce not chaos but a remarkably ordered, productive society.

A Tribute Preface 1 The Economic Way of Thinking 1 2 Efficiency, Exchange, and Comparative Advantage 18 3 Substitutes Everywhere: The Concept of Demand 43 4 Cost and Choice: The Concept of Supply 73 5 Supply and Demand: A Process of Coordination 96 An Appendix: The Coordinating Roles of Money and Interest 109 6 Unintended Consequences: More Applications of Supply and Demand 120 An Appendix: Framing Economic Questions Correctly 141 7 Profit and Loss 153 An Appendix: Profiteering in Futures Markets 167 8 Price Searching 181 9 Competition and Government Policy 204 10 Externalities and Conflicting Rights 227 11 Markets and Government 253 12 The Distribution of Income 280 13 Measuring the Overall Performance of Economic Systems 304 An Appendix: Limitations of National Income Accounting 325 14 Money 335 An Appendix: What About Gold? 352 15 Economic Performance and Real-World Politics 358 16 The Wealth of Nations: Globalization and Economic Growth 393 Postscript: What Economists Know 420 Glossary 423 Index 429