Stand-Up Economist

Ask your local bookstore for my new book (co-authored with Grady Klein), or you can order it for about $12 from Amazon.com or B&N. (PS to buyers and bloggers: Please use the links above: at no extra cost to you, a few more pennies go to me instead of Jeff Bezos.)

Scroll down for excerpts, reviews, information for teachers, updates on foreign translations, and corrections.

PS. Click here for similar info about Volume One: Microeconomics.

Comedy/book tour

Details about upcoming shows here, but in general I do gigs year-round if I can fit them into my teaching schedule—so contact me to bring economics comedy to your high school, college, corporate event, or comedy club! If you are with a public high school or community college or the U.S. Armed Forces or otherwise looking for a free show, click here.

Excerpts

Below is one of my favorite chapters! To download it in PDF (plus the front and back covers and Table of Contents), click here. Or you can just download the front and back covers and Table of Contents.

Reviews

From the back cover of the book:

• “People don’t usually chuckle over unemployment, inflation, and recessions. But they’ll get plenty of laughs out of this book—and a good introduction to macro too.” —Eric Maskin, Nobel Laureate in Economics
• “If you don’t want to cry about the state of the economy, why not laugh instead? This book is an ideal introduction to the subject for anybody who thinks they ought to understand what’s happening around them but is put off by the usual dense text and economics jargon.” —Diane Coyle, author of The Soulful Science
• [Praise for Volume One] “Learning economics should be fun. Klein and Bauman make sure that it is.” —N. Gregory Mankiw, Professor of Economics, Harvard University, and author of Principles of Economics
• [Praise for Volume One] “Bauman and Klein present solid basic economics in a brilliant cartoon wrapper. The authors successfully shine a happy light on the dismal science.” —Hugo Sonnenschein, Distinguished Service Professor and President Emeritus, University of Chicago
• [Praise for Volume One] “Had Art Spiegelman and John Maynard Keynes collaborated on a comic book on economics, they could only have dreamed of coming up with something this good.” —Jonathan A. Shayne, a.k.a. Merle Hazard, country singer and founder of Shayne & Co., LLC

Reviews on the web include a lovely review from Bryan Caplan at Econlib, a 5-star review from an 11-year-old boy who happens to be the son of economist Joshua Gans, a more middling review from Kirkus Reviews (“Laugh-a-minute or not, an accessible introduction to a densely complex subject”), and this from Publishers Weekly: “The major concepts of macroeconomics are broken down with wit, verve, and clarity… While the authors do an admirable job keeping politics out of it, they’re clearly fans of the free market and a well-reasoned, balanced role for the government. This clever, lucid, and lighthearted book is a godsend to anyone who needs a simple but complete primer on the ins and outs of economics.”

Information for teachers

If you ‘re a college or high school instructor looking to adopt the cartoon book(s) for a class and you don’t want to shell out $12 you can click here to get a desk copy (free if you order 20 copies) or an examination copy (just $3 per book :). Send a note on school letterhead to the address in the link and ask for a copy of The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Volume Two: Macroeconomics, ISBN 978-0809033614 and/or The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Volume One: Microeconomics, ISBN 978-0809094813.

Also FYI both cartoon books should be available at a steep discount (possibly even free!) as part of a Worth Publishers package deal with intro texts by Krugman/Wells, Cowen/Tabbarok, or Stone. For more info contact Julie Tompkins at jtompkins at bwfpub.com, and if you have any trouble please contact me.

Translations

Translations will be coming in 2012 or 2013 for the following countries (note that links are to the Micro book which is already published by the same company): Taiwan, China, Japan, and Italy.

Corrections

The items below are mostly quibbles rather than corrections, but in any case email me if you find anything to add to this list!

• Pages 56-57: I went back and forth about 2-3% inflation and whether it should be 2% or 2-4% or what. I still don’t know…
• Page 69: My guess that China will reach 50% of U.S. per capita GDP (in terms of PPP) in 2040 is I think optimistic if I remember correctly what I read in Angus Maddison’s Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, but here’s an estimate from Andrew Mold that suggests it will be more like 2030… I guess time will tell :)
• Page 117: I pushed hard for a shout-out here to Harriet Tubman. I lost, in part because the book was near completion and a revision would have affected multiple pages.
• Page 132: There were questions about whether Grameen Bank really charges 20% interest, and in fact our intent was to have a non-Grameen micro-lender in the bottom panel. But Yunus ended up in the bottom panel (again, a last-minute issue) and fortunately their own website says “Grameen Bank’s highest interest rate is 20%.”
• Page 140: We went back and forth about whether to change “In Europe many countries use Euros” to “In Europe many countries use Euros… at least for now!” We chickened out and went with the former.
• Page 141: Using the market for cars at the top is confusing because in the Micro book we use cars to describe adverse selection. This should be changed if we get a chance.
• Page 146: Every time I look at the bottom panel I’m afraid the guy is sticking out his middle finger.
• Page 160: The “unfortunately” at the top of this page is awkward. Maybe there’s a better way.
• Page 182: The first quote at the top was inspired by a quote from climate scientist David Rind in Field Notes from a Catastrophe: “I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed.” We shortened it, and I lost a battle with the copy editor, who changed “most things were destroyed” to “most things have been destroyed”. Oh well.
• Page 217: In the middle panel, maybe “short-run stability” and “long-run growth” should be reversed.