This new edition builds a comprehensive picture of the microeconomic tools required to solve a wide range of problems by using an innovative combination of written, illustrative and mathematical analysis. It helps the reader to think like an economist - in particular demonstrating how individuals, firms and policy-makers decide their best course of action.

Examining the emergence, in the inter-war years, of what came to be called 'Keynesian macroeconomics'. This study accepts the novelty of the latter, as represented by the IS-LM model, which in various forms came to dominate the sub-discipline for three decades. It argues, however, that this model did not represent a radical change in economic thinking but rather an extremely selective synthesis of those which had permeated the preceding literature, including Keynes's own contributions to it, not least the General Theory. Hence the book questions the appropriateness of thinking of this development as the outcome of a 'Keynesian Revolution' in economic thought, partly because the most radical aspects of Keynes's own intended contribution were excluded from it, but mainly because IS-LM is better viewed as the end result of twenty years or more of intellectual development to which many others besides Keynes contributed.

It is a commonly held belief that, in 1936, Keynes' General Theory ushered in a new era in economic thought, with faith in the free market being replaced by reliance on systematic government intervention as a means of keeping the economy on an even keel. This book surveys the writings of a large number of economists in the interwar years and argues that the "Keynesian Revolution" is a myth, and that the "new economics" was a careful and selective synthesis of an "old economics" that had been developing for twenty years or more.