For better or worse, I have spent m

For better or worse, I have spent much of my career writing and revising undergraduate textbooks. Macroeconomics, my intermediate macro text, is now in its tenth edition, and Principles of Economics, my introductory text, is now in its ninth. In this essay, I reflect on what I have learned about this activity over the past several decades. These reflections will, I hope, be of interest to those who are thinking about becoming textbook writers themselves and to the larger number of instructors who use textbooks in their courses. At the outset, I should confess to a perhaps peculiar fondness for economics textbooks. When I entered college, I did not intend to major in economics. But I remember picking up the textbook a friend was using for a course (it was Lipsey and Steiner’s introductory text, Economics) and being fascinated by the material. The use of straightforward mathematics, of the sort everyone learns in high school, to shed light on how society functions was, to me, novel, elegant, and compelling. I started taking economics courses the next semester and my career began.