Microeconomics for Life: Smart Choices for You, 1st edition

Published by Pearson (June 18, 2026) © 2027
  • Avi J. Cohen
  • Scott Wolla

Title overview

For principles of microeconomics courses.

Connecting economics to students’ lives

Microeconomics for Life presents concepts and strategies for making smart economic choices as a consumer, businessperson and citizen. Rather than simply training economists, it takes a literacy-targeted (LT) approach to help students “think economically.” By prioritizing practical scenarios over theory and formulas, Cohen and Wolla aim to have a direct impact on students’ careers and life choices.

To meet the needs of economics majors, the text supports various approaches to teaching microeconomic principles: LT, traditional and model-focused, and combined approaches. Three Keys to Smart Choices, a framework for economic decision-making, is visually represented throughout the content to help students choose which direction to take at key junctures.

Hallmark features of this title

The relevance of economics

  • Three Keys to Smart Choices appear as “key” icons throughout the text to call out information that’s important for making sound economic decisions.
  • Chapter openers connect the economic principles discussed in the chapter to students’ everyday decisions.
  • Economics Out There boxes provide real-world examples of economic concepts discussed in each chapter.

Active-learning pedagogy

  • Refresh multiple-choice questions after each section let students assess their understanding before moving on.
  • Think About It assessments throughout chapters pose a prompt or application that encourages students to reflect on the content they’ve just read.
  • End-of-chapter material includes a chapter summary, multiple-choice questions and true/false questions.

Key features

Features of Pearson+ eTextbook for this title

  • Refresh questions are followed by immediate, targeted feedback for both correct and incorrect answers. Appearing after each section, they assess students’ understanding of the content they’ve just read.

Features of MyLab Economics for this title

  • Animated figures bring to life key analytical graphs from the text. When students click on the graph, a short MP4 video walks them through the meaning of the figure and explanations for shifting curves and outcomes.
  • Digital Interactives are dynamic activities that offer practice applying key economic principles. They progress in difficulty and require variable amounts of analysis and application.
  • Single Player Experiments let students play against virtual players. Pre- and post-experiment questions are available for assignment within the MyLab.
  • Dynamic Study Modules pose a handful of questions and then respond to each student’s progress in real time. Learners deepen their grasp of concepts as they go.

Table of contents

  1. What’s in Economics for You? Scarcity, Opportunity Cost, Trade, and Models
  2. Making Smart Choices: The Law of Demand
  3. Show Me the Money: The Law of Supply
  4. Coordinating Smart Choices: Demand and Supply
  5. Just How Badly Do You Want It? Elasticity
  6. What Gives When Prices Don’t? Government Policy Choices
  7. Getting the Most Bang per Buck: Utility behind Demand
  8. Finding Producers’ Bottom Line: Profits and Cost Behind Supply
  9. Pricing Power: Market Structure and Pricing
  10. What’s Perfect About Perfect Competition? Productivity, Costs, and Efficiency
  11. Pricing for Profits in Imperfect Competition: Marginal Revenue and Marginal Cost
  12. When Markets Fail: Natural Monopoly, Gaming, Competition, and Government
  13. Acid Rain on Others’ Parades: Externalities, Carbon Taxes, Free Riders, and Public Goods
  14. What Are You Worth? Inputs, Incomes, and Inequality
  15. Are Sweatshops all Bad? Globalization, Trade, and Protectionism

Author bios

About our authors

Avi J. Cohen is a University Professor of Economics at York University and also teaches at the University of Toronto. He has a PhD in Economics from Stanford University and a BA in Economics from the University of Michigan. Professor Cohen is a Life Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; past President of the History of Economics Society; and a former Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. His research interests are in economic education, the history of economics and economic history. He has published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Education, Eastern Economic Journal, History of Political Economy, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic History, and Explorations in Economic History, among other journals and books.

He was a pioneer in the integration of writing into economics courses. A 1991 AEA-commissioned report on “The Status and Prospects of the Economics Major” (Siegfried et al. 1991) introduced the importance of Economics of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement. The Journal of Economic Education was followed by a 1993 mini-symposium on writing, which included his first collaboration with a writing instructor (Cohen and Spencer 1993). A more recent collaboration, integrating abstract and op-ed writing assignments into a face-to-face principles course with 500 students and an online course with 400 students, also appears in the JEE (Cohen and Williams 2019).

Prior to authoring Micro/Macro Economics for Life, he was a long-time creator of educational materials, starting in 1992 and continuing through eight editions of Study Guides for the Parkin and Bade introductory economics textbooks.

Professor Cohen was an early adopter of technologies. After a 2003 visit to the University of Central Florida (award-winning pioneers in online and blended learning), he created a UCF-like 10-week faculty development course called do TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning), training instructors interested in transforming traditional courses into blended and online formats.

Professor Cohen is a member of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Education (AEACEE) and the winner of numerous teaching awards, including the 3M Teaching Fellowship, Canada’s most prestigious national award for educational leadership.

Scott Wolla is a lifelong economic educator and curriculum developer. As assistant vice president and economic education officer, he directs economic education programming at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He earned a PhD in curriculum and instruction from Saint Louis University, an MA in economics for educators from the University of Delaware, an MS from Bemidji State University, and a BS from Minnesota State University Moorhead.

He has produced more than 300 published teaching resources, including lessons, online learning modules, videos, articles, and podcasts. He has hosted the popular Economic Lowdown podcast and video series, hosts the Teach Economics podcast, and is a primary author and content editor of Page One Economics.

His research on economics education and pedagogy has appeared in The Journal of Economic Education, The American Economist, Review of Political Economy, Journal of Economics Teaching, Social Education, and Social Studies Research and Practice. He has also contributed chapters to books, including Innovations in Economic Education: Promising Practices for Teachers and Students K–16.

In 2019, recognizing a gap in monetary policy curricula, Scott partnered with an economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to develop a national public-information campaign explaining significant changes in how the Federal Reserve implements monetary policy. Together, they created teaching resources to help instructors incorporate the new framework into their courses. Their work helped modernize the teaching of monetary policy and was featured in The Economist, The New York Times, and NPR’s economics podcast The Indicator.

From 2024 to 2025, Scott led a Federal Reserve System initiative to launch Federal Reserve Education, a national website that brings together hundreds of classroom resources, interactive learning modules, and professional development opportunities for K–16 educators.

Scott is a member of the American Economic Association’s Committee on Economic Education (AEA-CEE) and a trustee of the Calvin K. Kazanjian Economics Foundation. He also served on the writing team for the third edition of the National Content Standards in K–12 Economics. From 2015 to 2022, he served on the Federal Reserve Economic Education Leads Committee, which he chaired from 2019 to 2020. He also served on the executive board of the National Association of Economic Educators (NAEE) from 2019 to 2022. In 2020, NAEE presented him with the Bessie B. Moore Service Award in recognition of his service to the economic education community. He also received the St. Louis Fed’s 2018 President’s Award for Innovation for creating the Women in Economics Symposium.

Before joining the St. Louis Fed, Scott taught economics and history in Minnesota for 14 years. During that time, he received numerous teaching awards, including the 2006 3M Economic Educator Excellence Award and the Minnesota Council on Economic Education’s 2003 Innovative Economic Educator Award. Currently, Scott teaches economics as an adjunct instructor at Washington University in St. Louis.

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