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… is a text sent to me earlier today from first-year GMU Econ doctoral student – and regular Cafe Hayek commenter – Jon Murphy; one of the courses that Jon and his classmates are taking this Fall semester is Walter Williams’s Microeconomic Theory I – and the principal text for that course is Armen Alchian [2]‘s and William Allen [3]‘s Exchange and Production [4]:
When I am a professor, chapter 1 of Alchian & Allen’s “Exchange and Production” will be required reading. So many important points that many books gloss over.
Indeed.
In fact, not only do most other economics texts gloss over many of the important points that Alchian and Allen emphasize, these other texts typically ignore altogether lots of these points. The sad reality is that if every one of today’s PhD-boasting economists sat down to study – to really study and to absorb – economics as taught by Alchian and Allen, much, and perhaps even most, of the material in that book would be foreign to many of these economists. They never before encountered a large chunk of this material – material all of which should be second-nature to professional economists.
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Jon, by the way, blogs at A Force for Good [5].