It is not the purpose of this course to provide you with a set of managerial tools that can be applied in formulaic fashion. This is one important goal of this course. A second goal is to provide you with an understanding of the broader economic environment in which businesses must operate. A subsidiary task is to make you a more competent critical reader of articles on economics that appear in the popular press, e.g. the Wall Street Journal . Finally, this course should provide some philosophical perspective on the functioning of free-market capitalist economies.
Most people are unable to coherently defend either viewpoint.
This course should provide you with some of the logic needed to think about such issues sensibly. There is no single textbook for this class. I have instead chosen to use selected chapters from several different books. This price includes all royalties paid to the publishers of the included materials. While this price is not low, it is cheaper than most economics textbooks.