Ask your local bookstore for my new book (co-authored with Grady Klein), or you can order it for just $12.21 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) and if you want to qualify for Amazon’s free shipping try buying two copies plus some glue sticks or pens or a bamboo spatula :)

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

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 otherwise looking for a free show, click here.

Excerpts

The Table of Contents and front and back covers are available for download as a hi-res PDF, and you can click below to read one of my favorite chapters!

Reviews

From the back cover of the book:

• “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
• “Hilarity and economics are not often found together, but this book has a lot of both. It also does a great job of explaining important economic concepts simply, accurately, and entertainingly—quite a feat.” —Eric Maskin, Nobel Laureate in Economics
• “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
• “This is a seriously funny book! Klein and Bauman offer an enlightening and entertaining look at why our day-to-day choices matter and how they all combine. Students will find this a great addition to their textbooks, and critics of the discipline will learn what economics is really about.” —Diane Coyle, author of The Soulful Science
• “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 (I’ll add more as they cross my desk) include more from Greg Mankiw (”a painless way to learn economics”), kind words from marginalrevolution’s Tyler Cowen (”the next step in economics education”), a nice review in the Boston Globe (”uproariously funny, practical, and relevant”), another nice review in the Boston Globe (”a warp-speed, entertaining and enlightening journey through the basics”), and a mostly critical review from Bryan Caplan (with responses here and here, including my final 2 cents in the comments section).

Information for teachers

If you ‘re a college or high school instructor looking to adopt the book for a class and you don’t want to shell out $12.21 you can click here to get a desk copy (free if you order 20 copies) or an examination copy (just $3 :). Send a note on school letterhead to the address in the link and ask for a copy of “The cartoon introduction to economics, Volume One, ISBN 978-0809094813.” Also FYI the cartoon book is available at a steep discount as part of a Worth Publishers package deal with micro principles texts (Krugman/Wells, Cowen/Tabbarok, or Stone) or with Harrington’s book on game theory. For more on the Worth Publishers package deal please contact Elizabeth Buckley at ebuckley at worthpub.com.

Foreign language translations

The traditional Chinese translation is out as of 28 July 2010! Other translations are coming in 2011 or so for markets in Europe (German, Italian, and Polish) and Asia (Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, and simplified Chinese)! For the simplified Chinese version, I’ve suggested as a working title The Cartoon Introduction to Socialism with Chinese Characteristics :)

Corrections

• Steve Pratt (a self-described “Father, Husband, Fisherman, Churchgoer, and Economist” from Anchorage, Alaska) writes that there’s a mistake on page 13 (“The metaphor of the invisible hand was coined by Adam Smith in 1776…”) because Adam Smith first mentioned the Invisible Hand in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which dates from 1759. This is absolutely correct, at least if Wikipedia is to be believed.
• The annuity formula on p34 is not wrong, but it would be easier and clearer without the compound fraction, i.e., as (x/r)*etc. If I get a chance to change it in a 2nd edition I will!

Both versions have chapters that line up with the chapters of The Cartoon Introduction, with follow-up supplemental chapters on inflation, sequential-move-games, etc. Compared to previous versions of this textbook, I’ve also improved the Q&A at the end of each chapter, e.g., you can now easily click back and forth between each Q and the corresponding A.

Please let me know if you’re using the book, and definitely let me know if you find any mistakes!