择业、工作、婚恋、理财，要想获得世俗意义上的成功，你须具备经济学的思维方式。
出版50年、迄今已更新13版仍长销不衰的经济学通识典；
数百个生活化案例，让经济学思维方式实实在在应用于生活；
没有公式、函数，很少运算，却是凝聚师的经济教育学家多年心血的严肃著作；
以科学分析和理性认识，直接击破不假思索、不经辨析的“常识”
既威，又通俗；是严肃的科学，又有接地气的应用；
它是一副思维工具，一个框架，一部坚固、优美、科学、稳定的脚手架，用来帮助我们建立起更好的价值观，成为更好的人；
要想获得世俗意义上的成功，须掌握经济学的思维方式
当每个人都具备了经济学的思维方式，整个社会和个人福祉的增长也将更加良性。

《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，却是凝聚师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，经济学不是殿堂学问，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。

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

保罗·海恩（Paul Heyne, 1931—2000）
美国芝加哥大学伦理学与社会学博士、华盛顿大学经济系教授。专业研究领域为经济学史和经济系统伦理学批评。大学本科经济学教育的改革者，终生致力于改变僵化刻板的经济学教学方式。海恩仅在华盛顿大学就教过15000名学生，学者评价他在25年间对美国经济学教学的贡献屈指。
彼得·勃特克（Peter Boettke）
美国乔治·梅森大学经济学博士，现为该校经济学教授，同时担任担任梅卡图斯中心资本主义研究方向零售业银行及信托服务专业教授。
大卫·普雷契特科（David Prychitko）
美国乔治梅森大学经济学博士，现任北密歇根大学经济学教授。编著有《市场过程理论》《为何经济学家不同意：经济学思想流派概论》等。
鲁冬旭
香港大学经济金融系本科毕业，普林斯顿大学金融系硕士，现居美国加州伯克利，自由译者。已出版译著《平面国》《一个利他主义者之死》《X的奇幻之旅》等。

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.”