Thirty Percent-Off Friday: February

Happy Friday! Like last month, we are excited to offer a 30% discount on an MIT Press title to our blog readers (when purchased through the MIT Press website). 

In honor of Valentine's Day (we couldn't resist), the February discount pick is The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance by Russell Roberts. Russell Roberts is Professor of Economics and the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith Distinguished Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is the author of The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism and is a frequent commentator on National Public Radio. Follow this link, which will automatically apply the discount, to get your copy of The Invisible Heart. *In the (unlikely) event that the discount doesn't appear when you click the link, have no fear--simply manually enter the discount code "IHFRI12" in the shopping cart to get the discount.*

Here's an excerpt from The Invisible Heart. Check back on the first Friday of March (3/2) for our next "Thirty Percent-Off Friday" pick.

 

The Edwards School hired Sam because he had a master’s degree in economics and four years of previous teaching experience. He had turned thirty the previous summer. In his first year at the school, he had taught a couple of sections of the advanced placement course in economics along with a class on government and politics. This year he had added his first elective, “The World of Economics,” where he had free reign to teach whatever he wanted…

“Work with me,” Same said, smiling. “You’re happy because you love pistachio nuts. Outside the Nut Room, they’re expensive. Inside, they’re free. There’s only one rule in the Nut Room. As you eat the nuts, you’ve got to leave the shells in the room. You can’t take them out with you. At first, that’s no problem. For the first few days and maybe weeks and months, the pistachios are plentiful. But as the years go by, it takes longer and longer to find a pistachio. The shells start getting in the way. You come in with your friends and you spend hours wading through the shells of pistachios you’ve already eaten in order to find one containing a nut. Your friends say, we’ve got to stop meeting like this. ‘Why?’ you ask. ‘Don’t you like free pistachio nuts?’ And what do your friends say in response?”

 “The nuts aren’t free anymore,” Amy said.

 “Exactly! Sam shouted in triumph. “After a while, you’re better off paying for nuts in the store rather than spending hours trying to extract a nut from the depths of the pile. The cost of the nuts in the Nut Room has gotten too high. It’s the same with oil. Years before the last drop of oil is found and extracted, we’ll walk away from oil as an energy source. It will be too hard to find new reserves. Or too expensive to extract the reserves we know about. Long before we run out of oil, we’ll switch to cheaper alternatives. Remember the pistachios!”

The kid in the back row leaned over again to his friend. “I told you he was crazy. Too much time in the Nut Room.”