What is economics and what can you expect to learn from studying it? In this guide, Paul Heyne, for many years one of America’s most respected free-market economists, takes this question as his guiding principle. The story of the progress of economic thought—as embodied in the methods and theories of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich von Hayek, James Buchanan, and other influential scholars—provides Heyne with the material for an effective demonstration of the power and promise of the economic way of thinking.