In its fourth edition, Economics Explained continues its announced purpose—to explain that mysterious thing called economics—with a new urgency. It is announced in the first sentence of the introduction: "Just in case the reader-to-be hasn't noticed, disturbing things are going on in the American economy these days." This new edition is about these disturbing things: a trend toward inequality of incomes, the appearance of a new "globalized" capitalism, the "specter" of inflation. As before, Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow treat these problems in language that seeks to make clear their causes and treatments. In this straightforward, highly accessible reference, Heilbroner and Thurow -- two of America's most respected and articulate economists -- offer all the economics essential for becoming an effective investor, a savvy business decision maker, or simply an informed member of society. The Boston Globe An excellent course in the history of capitalism and socialism, of growth, progress, and decline. Ms. At last, a patient but not condescending, detailed but not recondite, conversational but not glib discussion of the factors and terms that any reader of the daily newspaper needs to understand. Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor and author of Locked in the Cabinet In this delightfully written primer, Heilbroner and Thurow sweep away the debris of economic theory to expose the political and social choices lying just below it. Robert L. Heilbroner was an American economist and historian of economic thought. The author of some 20 books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. Lester Carl Thurow was a political economist, former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of books on economic topics. Chapter 1 Capitalism: Where Do We Come From? We live in a capitalist economic system. Politicians constantly talk about capitalism, or if they don't like the word, about the free-enterprise system. We are constantly being told that capitalism is the wave of the future, or would be the wave of the future if only it were left alone, or sometimes that capitalism is in decline and will fall on its own weight, like the Roman Empire. Perhaps there is no more important economic question than the future of capitalism, none that affects more deeply our private destinies and those of our children. As we will see in our next chapter, the great economists of the past were vitally concerned with this issue. Modern economists are wiser or blinder, depending on how you look at it, and say relatively little about our long-term prospects. Nonetheless, we feel that it is impossible to understand capitalism without at least some understanding of its roots. So we are going to begin the study of our economic system rather the way a doctor begins to become acquainted with a patient -- by taking its history. Many people speak about capitalism as if it were as old as the hills, as ancient as the Bible, implying that there is something about the system that accords with human nature. Yet, on reflection, this is clearly not the case. Nobody ever called the Egyptian pharaohs capitalists. The Greeks about whom Homer wrote did not comprise a business society, even though there were merchants and traders in Greece. Medieval Europe was certainly not capitalist. Nor would anyone have used the word to describe the brilliant civilizations of India and China about which Marco Polo wrote, or the great empires of ancient Africa, or the Islamic societies of which we catch glimpses in The Arabian Nights. What made these societies noncapitalist was not anything they possessed in common, for they were as different as civilizations could be, but rather, some things they lacked in common. To become aware of these lacks will give us a sharp sense of the uniqueness and special characteristics of capitalism itself. To begin with, all these noncapitalist societies lacked the institution of private property. Of course, all of them recognized the right of some individuals to own wealth, often vast wealth. But none of them legally accorded the right of ownership to all persons. Land, for instance, was rarely owned by the peasants who worked it. Slaves, who were a common feature of most precapitalist systems, were only rarely permitted to own property -- indeed, they were property. The idea that a person's property was inviolate was as unacknowledged as that his person was inviolate. The Tudor monarchs, for example, relatively enlightened as sixteenth-century monarchies went, could and did strip many a person or religious order of their possessions. Second, none of these variegated societies possessed a central attribute of capitalism -- a market system. To be sure, all of them had markets where spices, gold, slaves, cloth, p