This book provides a fresh introduction to real economics. Highlighting the complex and changing nature of economic activity, this wide-ranging text employs a pragmatic mix of old and new methods to examine the role of values and theoretical beliefs in economic life and in economists' understanding of it.

It attends to the problems which have come with high productivity, rapidly changing technology and skills, changing proportions of earning and non-earning years in most people's lives, and a faltering revolution in childhood and parenting which has brought stress and over-work for many women.

It addresses such issues as rising poverty, inequality, insecurity and the slow progress of environmental reform. In focusing on such abuses of affluence the text draws on institutional, Keynesian, green and feminist theories, while emphasising all approaches to understanding economic life.