One may wonder why I think that it makes sense to add yet another introductory
textbook to the overfilled shelf of well-established books on microeconomics. There
are three reasons that motivated me to do so.
First, a lot of textbooks in economics want to make one believe that the theories
presented are more or less context-free and objective. This is a wrong and dangerous
belief. First of all, all theories are embedded in an intellectual milieu from which
they borrow and on which they build. No man is an island, and no scientific theory
is either. The tendency to shun any contextualisations of the theories comes at the
risk of blindness towards the implicit assumptions, value judgements and epistemes
on which the theory depends. This makes economics prone to being misused for
ideological purposes. Economic literacy does not only mean that one is able to understand
the rules and patterns of modern economies, but also that one understands
how economic theories relate to other social sciences and the culture from which
they emerge. This textbook is an attempt to contextualize modern economics in the
hope that students will get a better overview of its strengths and weaknesses. It puts
also a specifc emphasis on case studies that range widely from the functioning of
coffee markets, the logic of over?shing, to price discrimination in the digital age.
This approach makes this book also potentially interesting for students who study
economics as a minor and who want to understand how economic theories relate to
other social sciences and how they can be used to better understand markets as well
as phenomena like climate change, among many others.