Acknowledgments
I am most indebted to my students at the George Washington University, Cornell University, and Sichuan University and the visitors at the International Economics Study Center Web site. Students during the past twenty plus years and Web site visitors for the past ten plus years have been the primary audience for these writings. Nothing has been more encouraging than hearing a student express how much more intelligible are economics news stories in the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times after taking one of my courses or receiving an e-mail about how helpful the freely available online notes have been. I thank all those students and readers for their encouraging remarks.
I am also indebted to my teachers, going back to the primary school teachers at Assumption BVM in Chicago (especially Sister Marie), high school teachers at Lincoln-Way in New Lenox, Illinois (especially Bill Colgan), professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and my economics professors at Cornell University (especially Henry Wan, George Staller, Jan Svejnar, David Easley, Mukul Majumdar, Tapan Mitra, Earl Grinols, Gary Fields, and Robert Frank).
For my teaching style, I am grateful to my teachers via textbooks, including William Baumol, Alan Blinder, Hal Varian, Paul Krugman, Maurice Obstfeld, and especially Eugene Silberberg, whose graduate-level book The Structure of Economics, offering detailed and logical explanations of economic models, was most illuminating and inspiring.
I am also grateful to my colleagues at GW, all of whom have contributed in numerous ways via countless conversations about economic issues through the years. Particular students who have contributed to the Flat World edition include Runping Xu, Jiyoung Lee, Andrew Klein, Irina Chepilevskaya, and Osman Aziz. Finally, I am thankful to the reviewers and production staff from Flat World Knowledge.
On a personal note, I remain continually grateful for the loving support of my family; my children, Ben and Katelyn; and M. Victoria Farrales.