Try looking into political betting sites.
Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
141–150 of 313 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
#142"All" you have to do is watch "How the economic machine works (in 30 minutes)" by Ray Dalio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0 Read his insights and watch his interviews. That's a good basic start. Everything more then that: Nobody really knows. I have read countless of books, but one thing you have to know: It is a market - period. Something has value just because another person wants to buy it (at a given…
I wish there was a book (or even video lectures) that goes more in depth, but with the same style as that video.
Not in the same style, but this is the research that the video summary is based upon. https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/
It's free
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
#143Everything Lyn Alden has written:
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
#144Always read David Beckworth: https://www.davidbeckworth.com/popular , https://twitter.com/DavidBeckworth Nick Rowe: https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/nic... , https://twitter.com/MacRoweNick Scott Sumner: https://www.econlib.org/author/ssumner/ https://twitter.com/MoneyIllusion Maybe, Antonios Fatas: https://twitter.com/AntonioFatas And Also Maybe Sam Bell: https://twitter.com/sam_a_bell
Matt Levine's Money Stuff is also helpful and usually entertaining.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
#145The only school that has any explanation for this is the Austrian School of Economics. Their theory of the business cycle is the reason they successfully predict every crisis to the tee (except for timing, no one can do that), while other economists are just blown away in surprise that it even happened. Mises and Hayek wrote big and hard to read books about it, but two that explain this to the layman are "Meltdown" b…
A very simplified version of Austrian economics boom and bust cycles would be that central banks provides money too cheaply which leads to non productive investments resulting in a first a boom and then a bust when those investments don't pan out. Worth noting is that empirical evidence for this is slim at best. I think a better explanation for the 2008 crisis is that commercial banks mismanaged risk of mortgage back…
You should check out corporate debt levels over the last 10 years.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
#146Where to begin? I’ve been reading about economics for about 15 years, and I have to say that this crisis has brought a level of clarity about certain economic truths that I never would have seen otherwise.
First: accounting. I got an MBA five years ago and accounting was my favorite subject because it is behind everything that a business does. Accounting is the instrumentation that allows humans to organize their activity across tremendous scale and complexity and still be confident that they are producing value (making a profit). In the modern economy, accounting is everything. Try reading Jerome Levy’s “Where Profits Come From” to check your accounting chops: https://www.levyforecast.com/assets/Profits.pdf
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
#147The Economist magazine, they have a paywall but you get to read a handful of articles for free. Many of the Covid-19 relevant articles are publicly viewable and you can access more if you sign up for a newsletter.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
#148The only school that has any explanation for this is the Austrian School of Economics. Their theory of the business cycle is the reason they successfully predict every crisis to the tee (except for timing, no one can do that), while other economists are just blown away in surprise that it even happened. Mises and Hayek wrote big and hard to read books about it, but two that explain this to the layman are "Meltdown" b…
The Austrian School seems to have been wrong about the last 15 years' money printing causing inflation. In particular, the general Austrian school would have predicted a lot more inflation by now. The prediction on this has fared so poorly that the last 15 years has given rise to a school nearly diametrically opposite to the Austrian school: modern monetary theory. (My understanding of the Austrian response to this i…
This kind of rebuttal to the Austrian school is often based upon a misguided idea of monetary neutrality. Inflation does not happen everywhere in the economy at the same time - this is called the Cantillon effect and is a central pillar of Austrian Business Cycle Theory.
You are right, there is very little inflation in the consumer price index (at least nominally), but there is a significant amount of inflation in assets and other parts of the economy that are relatively close to the central bank/printing press. Inflated Silicon Valley salaries, maintained by an influx of VC money bidding up the price of labour, are a great example of this.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
#149John Ralston Saul's The Collapse of Globalism. Published ~2005, it (arguably) makes sense of the previous several decades of western economics. https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/non-fiction-books/the-collap...
I just read the blurb and summary on the page you linked to.
It might be an interesting read, but the main thesis seems false? Globalism has done just fine.
> Elsewhere, the world looks for answers to African debt. the AIDS epidemic, the return of fundamentalism and terrorism. all of which perversely refuse to disappear despite the theoretical rise in global prosperity.
Most of these don't look so intractable any more, even if we haven't solved them, yet.
Re: Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?
#150The only school that has any explanation for this is the Austrian School of Economics. Their theory of the business cycle is the reason they successfully predict every crisis to the tee (except for timing, no one can do that), while other economists are just blown away in surprise that it even happened. Mises and Hayek wrote big and hard to read books about it, but two that explain this to the layman are "Meltdown" b…
I'm sad that economic cycles are considered a natural law, rather than something to be mitigated or designed away.
FWIW, Richard D. Wolff doesn't accept crashes as a given. He advocates worker self-directed enterprises as a mitigation. Having done some workplace democracy (am a huge fan), I regard his effort as more aspirational than prescriptive, but it's nice to have people floating new ideas.