I suggest building reading lists baed on a list of Nobel Prize winners for the subject.
Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
181–190 of 274 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
#182If you know Chinese, there is a must read: Economic Explanation(經濟解釋） by Steven Cheung. If you don't, you can read: Economic Explanation: Selected Papers of Steven N.s. Cheung. (Same book name but different content - collection of essays vs a book on theories) Why Steven Cheung? As a close friend to Ronald Coase, he too focuses on empirical research (the real world) rather than blackboard economics (the imaginary wor…
> how empirical work destroys blackboard economics The value of empirical work hinges on the assumption that the economic environment you're modeling is ergodic, or at the very least stationary AND that you have enough data of good enough quality. If those conditions are not given, then you need theory. To establish relationships, not just time-series properties, this needs to hold for all variables separately as wel…
thanks for the Polya recommendation
Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
#183Please 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…
Academic economics textbooks need to be read with a skeptical eye as they tend to be overly simplified. Think of it as a useful framework for future work and a shared language, not an explanation of what actually happens.
Much like how physics textbooks love frictionless surfaces.
Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
#184After a few pop-sci economics books (freakonomics, the undercover economist...) I progressed to Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide.
It's covers all the major schools of thought, along with their pros and cons. I highly recommend it.
Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
#185After a few pop-sci economics books (freakonomics, the undercover economist...) I progressed to Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide. It's covers all the major schools of thought, along with their pros and cons. I highly recommend it.
Ha-Joon Chang is one of the most interesting economists out there, one who eschews mathematical formalism and takes a much more social history looks at the way economics operates. I was really delighted when the FT gave him a food column last summer - fantastic, diverting discussions about trade, war and development in the middle of a discussion of his favorite dishes. Always read him if you can!
Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
#186Henry 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.
Legal ebooks and audiobooks of various formats provided gratis from some fine nonprofits: Henry Hazlitt - 'Economics in One Lesson': https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson-2/ Mises - 'Theory of Credit and Money': https://mises.org/library/theory-money-and-credit Adam Smith - 'Wealth of Nations': http://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf Murray Rothbard - 'For a New Liberty': https://mise…
That's the neo-liberal cannon. Also Marx, Das Capital?
Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
#187Earlier 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…
Wait, Martin Shkreli's channel? The guy who's been indicted on securities fraud?
Oh, that same guy that did this http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-...
Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
#188The following list will introduce you to Western Economic Philosophy as it relates to modern history specifically. This list is weighted heavily toward neo-classical economics and does not get into computational model based economics - specifically microeconomics, which comprises the bulk of economics education today: Schumpeter - History of economic analysis Adam Smith - Theory of Moral Sentiments Kaynes - The Gener…
How heterodox are Hayek and Mises compared to Milton Friedman. I'm not trolling here. I'm actually asking. I thought that they were essentially proponents of similar theories? I'm the definition of a layman though, so I could easily have that all wrong.
Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say that he wasn't important. I definitely think he's foundational especially to center-left political economics. I just said that nobody is a Keynesian in the original sense anymore. You have to be a neo-Keynesian now. I think it is safe to say that most of his theories are dead as a doornail. Keynesian thought always had this problem melding macro and microeconomics (similar to physicists have with relativ…
>The stagflation of the 1970s seriously attacked the very foundation of Keynes ideas. It was literally impossible for it to happen How so? Most of his ideas seem pretty valid. The 70s stagflation was set off by the oil shock when oil prices rapidly increased four fold. I'm not sure how his failure to analyse that happening after his death invalidates that his ideas worked ok under normal circumstances?
Perhaps start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve
And the oil shock was sort of a one time thing, and can't be viewed in isolation of Nixon having to close the gold window, more specifically how the US took advantage of the previous fixing of the US dollar price of gold before that fell apart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis#End_of_the_Bre...).
In other words, these were discontinuous and unique things, or turn it around, was it an oil shock, or a dollar devaluation shock? Nothing obliged OPEC to accept less and less value in the dollars they price their oil in.
You could go further and say that the relaxation of these Federal government interventions, including the price and distribution controls on oil and distillates in the '70s, it was pretty much a command economy until Reagan dismantled it, has better allowed the market to function.
(Not that the government has stopped manipulating the money supply, interest rates, etc. ... although that got rather out of control by the end of the '70s as well, with double digit annual inflation and > 20% prime rates to fix that.)
Re: Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?
#190I will resist the urge to tell you what NOT to read and merely recommend a few favorites:
1. I am a big fan of John Kenneth Galbraith, who writes very clearly about a few things. I recommend both "The New Industrial State" and especially "The Affluent Society", where he argues that economics is insufficient to deal with post-scarcity.
2. Deirdre McCloskey's "If You're So Smart" is a great skewering of the blinkered nature of economic inquiry. Much of what is wrong with economics is what is wrong with scientific inquiry generally (being stuck in a formalism, confusing their models with reality); this is an excellent criticism.
3. Anything by Ha-Joon Chang. He writes intelligently about development and globalization; he is unorthodox in his economic practice, and his arguments are simple and drawn from history. There are a lot of "My god, it's full of stars!" moments in his work.
4. Still looking...