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Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?

#231

Post by tim333 »

tim333 wrote: post #146
thanatropism wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, much of Graham's "investment philosophy" has been thoroughly invalidated by the Modigliani-Miller theorem published in the 1960s. But like Deepak Chopra, he's still around!

I'm not sure how a theorem is even supposed to invalidate a philosophy. Invalidation is normally done by experimental evidence not making up a theorem.

Aside from that modigliani-miller's theorem "that in the absence of taxes, bankruptcy costs, agency costs, and asymmetric information, and in an efficient market, the value of a firm is unaffected by how that firm is financed." has basically nothing to do with Graham's idea that in the real world with bankruptcy costs, agency costs, asymmetric information, and an inefficient market you should seek a margin of safety in investment. Graham's ideas have much empirical evidence and are completely unlike Chopras nonsense. See The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville for details, written by Warren Buffett who has quite a good record in this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham-a...

http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/rtfiles/cbs/hermes/Buffett1984....

Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?

#232

Post by xapata »

oli5679 wrote: post #114

I'd recommend textbooks or corsera rather than pop econ books. Mostly Harmless Econometrics - Angrist and Krueger Principles of microeconomics - Mankiw (beginner) Intermediate microeconomics - Varian (intermediate) You also want to cover finance and time series - I don't know what would be good there.

Mankiw's text is decent, but heavily influenced by his politics.

Regardless of who you read, it's good to be skeptical and consider their personal agenda.

Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?

#233

Post by dredmorbius »

aoro wrote: post #54
bbayles wrote: post #45

I read Dubner and Levitt's Freakonomics in 2005. It's lame to say that a pop-science book changed my life, but since then I've thought about economics every day. I would recommend some pop-econ to become familiar with a stylized version of how economists think. I'd recommend Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist Strikes Back and The Logic of Life and Robert Frank's The Economic Naturalist . (Dubner's and Levitt's bo…

Can you give me some examples of the academic econ blogs? I'm looking to get into it

Reddit's /r/economics has a fair and conventional list.

Evonomics, The Institute for New Economic Thinkng, CrookedTimber, are fairly moderate but nontraditional blogs.

Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?

#234

Post by yomritoyj »

marmot777 wrote: post #224
reqres wrote: post #149

Please do not look upon popular economics best sellers as a good way to get a rounded economics education. While many have value in critical insight and entertainment, they often offer only a narrow perspective on economics. Novice economists typically lack the ability to critically appraise them without a wider economic framework to work from. An academic reading list (i.e. university course texts) will provide you…

Would an economist go through an entire career and never read, say, John Locke? I don't know the answer. I'm genuinely curious.

Quite possibly, just as one can be a productive physicist without reading, say, Einstein, in the original.

Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?

#237

Post by blahi »

forgetsusername wrote: post #208
blahi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very glad this is the top voted answer. Forget investing books and blogs and whatever. All worthless junk. Read the accounting textbooks and figure out valuations. Then you can figure out trading with your stats skills. A couple of good youtube channels though! Martin Shkreli's channel and Aswath Damodaran. Then some books might be beneficial to you but you yourself can be the judge of that. Everybody thinks the…

> All worthless junk This is a ridiculous statement, especially when combined with the implication that some amateur will be able to "trade", successfully, with a bit of statistical knowledge. The fundamentals of economics and finance are stored in books. If you're starting out, you have a long way to go before you can no longer learn from them. I do agree with your recommendations for sites. But you're going to get…

There's quite the difference between a textbook and an investing book. If you read my comment again, you will notice that I recommend getting textbooks.

Damodaran's Corporate Finance is a textbook. Taleb's books and any other "philosophy of investing" are junk. Some philosophy of investing books provide some value but only after the reader already has quite the knowledge and experience.

tl;dr - Read the curriculum, not amazon's top section.

Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?

#238

Post by damptowel »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #93

Top of my list would be "the ascent of money", by Harvard Prof Niall Ferguson. It explains what money and financial instruments are, by telling the stories of their history. Hes a great story teller, and for each aspect of finance that he explains, there's a story of a famous piece of history which it caused. For example, the application of oriental maths to finance caused a huge boom for Italian bankers, especially…

I only watched the tv series but it's basically "finance according to neoclassical economics" which is about as relevant to the real world as Alice in Wonderland.

Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?

#239

Post by damptowel »

turar wrote: post #191
vegancap wrote: post #167

Henry Hazlitt - 'Economics in one lesson' Mises - 'Theory of Credit and Money' Adam Smith - 'Wealth of Nations' Milton Friedman - 'Capitalism and Freedom' Murray Rothbard - 'A New Liberty' Have been my personal, but somewhat one-sided favourites.

You're right that it's one-sided toward neoliberal doctrine. In addition, I would suggest Keynes, as well Marx, or even Kropotkin's "Conquest of Bread".

And Kaldor, Kalecki, Sraffa, Minsky, Lavoie, Shumpeter, Hayek, Graziani, Khaleman, Wallerstein, Thaler. And anything systems oriented and lots of history, sociology and anthropology. Economics tends to be highly reductionist.
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