"This is a book about microeconomics, and right off the bat you must be wonder ing what ""micro"" means. It comes from the Greek word for small, but you will quickly learn that there is nothing small about the problems we will be tackling in these pages. Rather, microeconomics is a word that describes a certain op prosach to economic problems, an approach that begins from the vantage point of an individual actor in the economy-a consumer such as yourself, or a working person or a businessman-rather than from a perspective that looks out upon the whole system, as if we were flying over it in a spaceship.
That second, spaceship, approach to economic problems is called macro economics. ""Macro is the Greek word for large, and therefore it might seem as if the view from the spaceship were larger or more important than the view we get as individual actors. But it isn't larger, it is simply different, some problems are much easier to examine from one perspective and some from another. If we are interested in probing the nature of inflation or unemployment or eco- nomic growth, macro is the approach we normally use. But if we want to know more about riches and poverty, or the dynamics of big business or labor, or the causes of and cures for environmental problems, micro is the place from which to start.
This means, in effect, that learning about economics takes two exposures, mier and macro. Either one by itself will teach you a lot, but not quite enough If this is your first book in economics, therefore, you will only be half an econo mist when you're finished. If you haven't already studied macro, you should com- plete vour introduction to economics by looking into a text on that subject"