While we were driven to write this book by many small ideas about particular aspects of economics, we also had one big idea: an economics textbook should be built around narratives, many of them pulled from real life, and it should never lose sight of the fact that economics is, in the end, a set of stories about what people do. Many of the stories economists tell take the form of models—for whatever else they are, economic models are stories about how the world works. But we believe that student understanding of and appreciation for models are greatly enhanced if they are presented, as much as possible, in the context of stories about the real world that both illustrate economic concepts and touch on the concerns we all face living in a world shaped by economic forces. 

当我们在写这本书的时候，被许多关于经济学的小观点所驱使，我们也有一个大的想法：一本经济学教科书应该建立在叙事的基础上，其中许多是从现实生活中提取出来的，它永远不应该忽视这样一个事实：经济学最终是一套关于人们所做的事情的故事。经济学家讲的许多故事都是以模型的形式出现的，不管是什么，经济模型都是关于世界如何运转的故事。但我们相信，如果学生们尽可能地把模型放在真实世界的故事中，既能说明经济概念，又能触及我们生活在一个由经济力量塑造的世界中所面临的问题，那么他们对模型的理解和欣赏就会大大增强。