Interesting Textbook

I recently completed a review of Economics by Stephen Slavin.

What I found provocative about Slavin's approach, was his emphasis on economic history. He begins his book with a Brief Economic History of the United States and continues the use of history throughout the text to illustrate key points.

While references to Adam Smith and David Ricardo are common to most introductory texts, in Slavin's book we find:

John Kenneth Galbraith
Thorstein Veblen
Milton Friedman
Frederick Hayek
Ludwig Mises
Frank Knight
Frederic Bastiat

As an instructor of classes in economic history and the economic history of the US, I found Slavin's integatration of history as a key thread in his text very useful.

On the downside, Slavin suffers from the challenge of McConnell and Brue and many other texts, this book is overly comprehensive.

When Mankiw's first principles book was published, his competitive advantage was topic selection and brevity. Now in the 4th edition, Mankiw is suffering from content creep, but Slavin and McConnell certainly are at the top of the size scale. Few survey course can treat all the topics found in Slavin with any depth.

As Colander points out in The Complexity Vision and the Teaching of Economics, the market tends to push textbook authors into a similar approach in terms of breadth and depth.

Slavin falls into this trap, however instructors looking for a strong thread of economic history and tools to introduce the history of economic thought might well review this book.