In the wake of his enormously popular books The Armchair Economist and More Sex Is Safer Sex , Slate columnist and Economics professor Steven Landsburg uses concepts from mathematics, economics, and physics to address the big questions in philosophy: What is real? What can we know? What is the difference between right and wrong? And how should we live? Landsburg begins with the broadest possible categories from a mathematical analysis of the arguments for the existence of God; to the real meaning of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Godel Incompleteness Theorem; to the moral choices we face in the marketplace and the voting booth. Stimulating, illuminating, and always surprising, The Big Questions challenges readers to re-evaluate their most fundamental beliefs and reveals the relationship between the loftiest philosophical quests and our everyday lives.

经济学是每个人都无法回避的，收益与成本的计算在我们的生活中几乎每天都发生，但是真正懂得经济学思想的人却少之又少。本书就是将经济学思想简单化、生活化的一部佳作，作者的目的就是将经济学的核心思想用通俗易懂的语言、生动活泼的例子讲给孩子们听。事实上，许多经济学问题，跟孩子们解释起来，比对大人解释要容易很多，因为大人们总是带着一生积累的偏见去看待经济学问题。 作者从一个父母的角度出发，联系许多生活中的例子，为女儿讲解经济学的核心思想，使她从小就能理解经济学家思考问题、分析问题的基本方法。那些在课堂上用严谨的话语讲来晦涩难懂的思想，在作者如话家常的语言说来，则非常简单、清楚。 本书旨在向孩子们讲授经济学的基本思想并使他们从小就树立起经济学的观念，能够用经济学的方法分析、思考个人生活和社会生活中遇到的各种现象和问题。更为重要的是，本书还能教给孩子们做人的一些基本道理，因为经济学的核心思想就是公平。