Essentials of Economics

Foster Economics Skills in Every Student—For Life

As award-winning professors who research and specialize in economics education, authors Dirk Mateer, Lee Coppock, and Brian O’Roark know how to engage and motivate students. In the new third edition, Essentials of Economics continues to anticipate where students need help and provides the right nudges needed to succeed in the one-semester course. New lead media author Dr. Carla Nietfeld now scaffolds interactive, assignable learning features throughout the courseware, and the team also emphasizes AI literacy in both the text content and new teaching tools.

With features that emphasize how students can build economic skills for life and a cutting-edge courseware package, this text nurtures students’ problem-solving skills and brings you best-in-class teaching techniques that have engaged thousands of students.

Highlights of this edition’s new content:

• New coverage of recent tariffs and AI in the micro and macroeconomy help students learn more about these hot news topics, and a revised Chapter 17: “Money and the Federal Reserve,” offers a tested approach to teaching and learning the Fed’s new monetary policy tools.
• New interactives created by Dr. Carla Nietfeld are scaffolded throughout the courseware, expanding students’ hands-on learning and building economic intuition as they try them.
• NEW Economics at Work profiles showcase how recent grads are using Principles concepts in their current jobs and careers, and updated chapter openers highlight key life skills students will learn in each chapter.
• NEW Economics in the Media examples make economics fun and relatable, and new coverage of tariffs and AI help students apply what they’ve learned to these hot topics.
• Updated Office Hours videos have been reworked in an animated format, and include math reviews, as well as coverage of AI in Economics.
• NEW Norton AI in the Norton Illumine Ebook boosts student engagement and is grounded in your textbook’s trusted content. Norton AI uses a powerful generative AI engine with strategic guardrails to support—but not replace!—the process of learning.
• Updated Smartwork and InQuizitive courses now include 80 new Economics in the News questions. Additional new questions also use Dr. Nietfeld’s interactives, providing cohesion across the courseware and deepening students’ exploration of concepts.
• NEW spiral-bound instructor supplement, Best of the Ultimate Guide to Teaching Economics, provides tools and ideas to help instructors engage their in-person, hybrid, and online classrooms. This manual offers curated “best” tips for teaching each chapter, a new primer and activities for using AI, and support for using the 1,000+ resources on the full Norton Teaching Tools site.

Dirk Mateer is a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, and an award-winning instructor. He has been featured in the Great Teachers in Economics series and he was also the inaugural winner of the Economic Communicator Contest sponsored by the Association of Private Enterprise Education. Previously, while he was at Penn State, he received the George W. Atherton Award, the university’s highest teaching award, and was voted the best overall teacher in the Smeal College of Business by the readers of Critique Magazine. Then, at the University of Arizona, he received the best large class lecture award in the Eller College of Management. He also founded the Journal of Economics Teaching in 2015 in order to create a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to innovative instruction in economics. He is also the author of Economics in the Movies (Cengage, 2014).

Lee Coppock is a professor and undergraduate director in the Department of Economics at the University of Virginia, where he has taught more than 15,000 students principles of macroeconomics. He has received several teaching awards, including the 2017 Kenneth G. Elzinga Distinguished teaching Award from the Southern Economics Association, and the 2018 UVA Alumni Distinguised Professor Award. Before teaching at UVA, Professor Coppock taught for nine years at Hillsdale College, where he honed his skills in small classes of 10–15 students, giving him an understanding of each student’s point of view. Now teaching more than 1,000 students in a class, he applies what he learned in those small classes through participation, captivating imagery, and relevant stories that draw students' attention.

Brian O’Roark is a university professor of economics at Robert Morris University, where he has won the President’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching and the School of Business Teaching Innovation Award. Additionally, he has won the Middle Atlantic Association of Colleges of Business Administration’s Undergraduate Teaching Innovation Award, and the Best in Class Teaching Award from the National Economics Teaching Association. Professor O'Roark's research focuses on teaching economics, including a series of articles on the role economic education plays on how members of Congress vote and various articles on teaching economics using superheroes. His list of books includes the textbook Essentials of Economics, published by W. W. Norton, Why Superman Doesn't Take Over the World: What Superheroes Can Tell Us About Economics, published by Oxford University Press, and Superheroes and Economics: The Shadowy World of Capes, Masks and Invisible Hands, published by Routledge Publishing. He is also a contributor to The Ultimate Guide for Principles of Economics, The Ultimate Instructor’s Resource Guide for Essentials of Economics, and Smartwork for Principles of Economics. Professor O'Roark is the new editor for the Journal of Economics Teaching and the editor for Routledge Publishing’s Economics and Popular Culture series.