ABSTRACT
The second edition of any work on economics is an uncommon enough phenomenon, and when the work is a monograph on a subject as abstract as tax shifting, a second edition is certainly an extraordinary rarity. Let me say at once that in this case the success of the work seems to me thoroughly deserved. Seligman is a master of popular presentation, in structure and linguistic formulation he almost always hits the nail on the head; as for the content, he knows as few do how to steer a middle course between too little and too much, between, on the one hand, those barren commonplaces that make the reader neither wiser nor better, but to which so many recent writers in this very field confine their remarks and, on the other hand, the overly abstruse discussion of minor points in a matter confronted with which the present state of our knowledge fails to yield any very precise information.
