5 ms·

Are there some interesting engaging books that I can read to honestly learn about economics without having to pick a side or hold political beliefs? (something

Are there some interesting engaging books that I can read to honestly learn about economics without having to pick a side or hold political beliefs? (something that will be really useful for me to understand the world better... not something that will attempt to convert me...)

tc 17y ago
The most insidious form of conversion is when you don't even realize a viewpoint is being advanced on you, instead believing it to be 'objective.' Every model of the world has certain assumptions, certain axioms, built into it. To maintain the ability to think for yourself, the best material to read are those works that are very clear and honest about their axioms. In a very real sense, those are the most 'scientific' works. But those same works will often appear more partisan as well, in the same way that a research paper is both more scientific and more focused on one model of the world than is a generic textbook. I recommend starting with Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty, which takes a very bottom-up approach to economic principles: http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp There are plenty of other excellent books and materials available freely from the Mises Institute as well: http://mises.org/literature.aspx http://mises.org/literature.aspx http://mises.org/media.aspx http://mises.org/media.aspx
- trominos 17y ago
  Your point is fairly well-argued but, I think, essentially untrue. > "Every model of the world has certain assumptions, certain axioms, built into it." This is almost a tautology. Of course it's impossible to make a truly objective model of the world, particularly if by "model of the world" we really mean "economic model that has a priori had most of the nuance stripped out of it". There's no truly objective way to approach economics, yes -- because economies are so enormous and so complex that to study them you have to ignore most of what's actually going on. But that doesn't mean all approaches to economics are equally objective, and you're wrong to suggest that objectivity of analysis isn't worth considering. I'm quite sure that some economists have less of an axe to grind than others -- and as a result have more dedication to getting at the truth -- and I'd bet that they get better answers than their competition does. They're the ones I'd like to learn from. And I'd imagine that they wouldn't adhere too closely to any given philosophy, because it seems unlikely that any one philosophy is completely right. So, having said all that, I'd like to reiterate the grandparent's request: does anybody know of any primers to economics that seem concerned more with trying to get the right answers to the questions of economics than with pushing a particular philosophy?
  - tc 17y ago
    You missed my point completely. Let's see: you're wrong to suggest that objectivity of analysis isn't worth considering I abhor anything but objective analysis, which to me means something very close to "honest analysis." My suggestion above basically boils down to the idea that independent thinkers should read primary documents (while understanding their context). Go read Marx's manifesto. Read Mussolini's writings on why Marx was wrong and how fascism is a better system. Read Keynes. Read Friedman's deconstructions of Keynes. Read Mises' deconstructions of socialism (particularly the problem of economic calculation). Read Rothbard's deconstructions of monetarism. Et cetera. But skip the false textbook-style 'objectivity' that just randomly assembles the ideas of history into an incongruent mush. But that doesn't mean all approaches to economics are equally objective Correct; I would never suggest as much. Some are logically inconsistent, or consist of arguments mired deeply in logical fallacies. Some grossly conflate cause with effect and correlation with causation. Many focus only on the benefits of a policy to a concentrated group while ignoring the diffuse costs to the rest of society. And some advocate policies that never produce the outcome that is promised.
    - dan_the_welder 17y ago
      There is no such thing as objectivity. For such a thing to exist an entity with no desires, interests or stakes would have to make this objective judgment. All we can do is perhaps identify the different subjective components in a argument.
      - tc 17y ago
        It is perhaps a semantic point, but I consider a && !a objectively false and a || !a objectively true -- but even there, you have to accept certain axioms of logic. And I consider initiating violence against a peaceful person objectively immoral -- but if you don't already accept that, I'm not sure how I could convince you. Epistemology is interesting and complex.
        Xixi 17y ago
        I respectfully disagree. a && !a is not objectively false, and neither is a && !a objectively true. You are correct within a set of accepted axioms, defined by Mr. Boole. You might be incorrect within another set of axioms. That's exactly what this thread is about : when you do real maths you always start from definitions and axioms. It's not objective or subjective, it's well defined. I do prefer to read opinions of people who state their axioms first, rather than people who pretend to be objective. Initiating violence against a peaceful person is immoral in lots of cultures (including mine). Your culture is your set of axioms here.
davidw 17y ago
This textbook is free on line, and as far as I can tell is fairly "standard" economics: http://www.introecon.com/ http://www.introecon.com/ One that is very relevant to our field is "Information Rules" by Varian and Shapiro. I can't recommend it enough. Definitely look for standard stuff and get that figured out before you go looking at mises.org or marxist.org or whatever. Those guys definitely have an Agenda with a capital A. It's difficult to separate economics and politics completely (which is why I flagged this too), and it's a guarantee that someone will start hauling out all the mises and Austrian links on any given thread on the subject here. In other words, learn enough to reason on the subject for yourself, rather than joining some sort of echo chamber. The best place to do that is with what's considered the "state of the art" by mainstream practitioners. Maybe they're wrong, and Marx or Mises is right, but it's certainly the best starting point.
- tc 17y ago
  You're basically suggesting that people learn the current fashions. Which is fine, as far as it goes, just stay skeptical, because unlearning falsehoods is extremely difficult for most people. Empirically speaking, it seems almost (but not absolutely) impossible for humans. People should learn economics like you learn physics [1]. You don't start out with string theory (fortunately). You start with the Greeks, then move to Galileo, Euler, Newton, Laplace, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, etc. In macro economics, that might read: Bastiat, Locke, Smith, Mill, Malthus, Marx, Engels, Mussolini (who would typically be expunged, despite his continuing relevance, for obvious political reasons), Mises, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard. [1] There are obvious differences, of course. Economics has more forks and fewer merges in the tree of thought (which makes knowing the history all the more important). And unlike physics, old, discredited theories get dug back up, polished, and repeated for a new generation (how many times do we have to endure CNN talking about how a hurricane will help the economy before people understand the broken window fallacy that Bastiat articulated in 1850?). And economics also overlaps with both politics and morality. Value-free economics exists only if you consider "you could do X, but more people will starve" to be a value-free argument.
  - philwelch 17y ago
philwelch 17y ago
My best advice is to avoid macroeconomics to begin with, since that seems the most heavily politicized. Microeconomics teaches you the most interesting parts: marginal reasoning, opportunity costs, supply and demand curves--basically the things that everyone agrees on. You'll be surprised to find that even liberal economists agree that minimum wage laws cause unemployment, rent control laws cause housing shortages, and price controls cause economic inefficiencies. Why? The answer is all in the supply and demand curves. When you do get into macro, start with the pure factual basis before you get into theory. For instance, instead of diving into debates about the gold standard, get a good factual understanding about how the FED works, what M1, M2, and M3 are, how fractional-reserve banking figures in, and so forth. A gold standard may or may not be an improvement, but learning how a centrally banked fiat currency is run will teach you important facts about how most currencies in the world are run. (My macroecon course covered this, as well as a little bit about currencies like China and Hong Kong that peg themselves to the USD, using similar but distinct approaches. I don't recall exactly how China does it but Hong Kong operates a "currency board" where they hold a reserve of USD that they exchange for HKD at a fixed ratio. Interesting, eh?) Most of the economic debates center around what should be done, or how certain economic or monetary policies affect the economy. There are even controversies about the past--what caused the Great Depression and whether the New Deal helped is a particularly sticky tarpit. It's useful to learn these controversies, but do so by reading all viewpoints involved rather than just one. Then maybe you can choose your favorite. I would not take a historical viewpoint, starting with the oldest economists and working forward. That's not even how physics is taught, really. That's how philosophy is taught. Unlike philosophers, economists have actually gotten to a point of relative agreement about most things. Remember that you want to learn economics, not the history of economics, so while we use a lot of Adam Smith, we also use the supply and demand curves and other tools that came after Adam Smith, just as a biology class would talk about genetics when teaching evolution, even though Darwin never knew about genetics.

tc 17y ago

The most insidious form of conversion is when you don't even realize a viewpoint is being advanced on you, instead believing it to be 'objective.' Every model of the world has certain assumptions, certain axioms, built into it. To maintain the ability to think for yourself, the best material to read are those works that are very clear and honest about their axioms. In a very real sense, those are the most 'scientific' works. But those same works will often appear more partisan as well, in the same way that a research paper is both more scientific and more focused on one model of the world than is a generic textbook. I recommend starting with Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty, which takes a very bottom-up approach to economic principles: http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp There are plenty of other excellent books and materials available freely from the Mises Institute as well: http://mises.org/literature.aspx http://mises.org/literature.aspx http://mises.org/media.aspx http://mises.org/media.aspx

trominos 17y ago
Your point is fairly well-argued but, I think, essentially untrue. > "Every model of the world has certain assumptions, certain axioms, built into it." This is almost a tautology. Of course it's impossible to make a truly objective model of the world, particularly if by "model of the world" we really mean "economic model that has a priori had most of the nuance stripped out of it". There's no truly objective way to approach economics, yes -- because economies are so enormous and so complex that to study them you have to ignore most of what's actually going on. But that doesn't mean all approaches to economics are equally objective, and you're wrong to suggest that objectivity of analysis isn't worth considering. I'm quite sure that some economists have less of an axe to grind than others -- and as a result have more dedication to getting at the truth -- and I'd bet that they get better answers than their competition does. They're the ones I'd like to learn from. And I'd imagine that they wouldn't adhere too closely to any given philosophy, because it seems unlikely that any one philosophy is completely right. So, having said all that, I'd like to reiterate the grandparent's request: does anybody know of any primers to economics that seem concerned more with trying to get the right answers to the questions of economics than with pushing a particular philosophy?
- tc 17y ago
  You missed my point completely. Let's see: you're wrong to suggest that objectivity of analysis isn't worth considering I abhor anything but objective analysis, which to me means something very close to "honest analysis." My suggestion above basically boils down to the idea that independent thinkers should read primary documents (while understanding their context). Go read Marx's manifesto. Read Mussolini's writings on why Marx was wrong and how fascism is a better system. Read Keynes. Read Friedman's deconstructions of Keynes. Read Mises' deconstructions of socialism (particularly the problem of economic calculation). Read Rothbard's deconstructions of monetarism. Et cetera. But skip the false textbook-style 'objectivity' that just randomly assembles the ideas of history into an incongruent mush. But that doesn't mean all approaches to economics are equally objective Correct; I would never suggest as much. Some are logically inconsistent, or consist of arguments mired deeply in logical fallacies. Some grossly conflate cause with effect and correlation with causation. Many focus only on the benefits of a policy to a concentrated group while ignoring the diffuse costs to the rest of society. And some advocate policies that never produce the outcome that is promised.
  - dan_the_welder 17y ago
    There is no such thing as objectivity. For such a thing to exist an entity with no desires, interests or stakes would have to make this objective judgment. All we can do is perhaps identify the different subjective components in a argument.
    - tc 17y ago
      It is perhaps a semantic point, but I consider a && !a objectively false and a || !a objectively true -- but even there, you have to accept certain axioms of logic. And I consider initiating violence against a peaceful person objectively immoral -- but if you don't already accept that, I'm not sure how I could convince you. Epistemology is interesting and complex.
      - Xixi 17y ago
        I respectfully disagree. a && !a is not objectively false, and neither is a && !a objectively true. You are correct within a set of accepted axioms, defined by Mr. Boole. You might be incorrect within another set of axioms. That's exactly what this thread is about : when you do real maths you always start from definitions and axioms. It's not objective or subjective, it's well defined. I do prefer to read opinions of people who state their axioms first, rather than people who pretend to be objective. Initiating violence against a peaceful person is immoral in lots of cultures (including mine). Your culture is your set of axioms here.

davidw 17y ago

This textbook is free on line, and as far as I can tell is fairly "standard" economics: http://www.introecon.com/ http://www.introecon.com/ One that is very relevant to our field is "Information Rules" by Varian and Shapiro. I can't recommend it enough. Definitely look for standard stuff and get that figured out before you go looking at mises.org or marxist.org or whatever. Those guys definitely have an Agenda with a capital A. It's difficult to separate economics and politics completely (which is why I flagged this too), and it's a guarantee that someone will start hauling out all the mises and Austrian links on any given thread on the subject here. In other words, learn enough to reason on the subject for yourself, rather than joining some sort of echo chamber. The best place to do that is with what's considered the "state of the art" by mainstream practitioners. Maybe they're wrong, and Marx or Mises is right, but it's certainly the best starting point.

tc 17y ago
You're basically suggesting that people learn the current fashions. Which is fine, as far as it goes, just stay skeptical, because unlearning falsehoods is extremely difficult for most people. Empirically speaking, it seems almost (but not absolutely) impossible for humans. People should learn economics like you learn physics [1]. You don't start out with string theory (fortunately). You start with the Greeks, then move to Galileo, Euler, Newton, Laplace, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, etc. In macro economics, that might read: Bastiat, Locke, Smith, Mill, Malthus, Marx, Engels, Mussolini (who would typically be expunged, despite his continuing relevance, for obvious political reasons), Mises, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard. [1] There are obvious differences, of course. Economics has more forks and fewer merges in the tree of thought (which makes knowing the history all the more important). And unlike physics, old, discredited theories get dug back up, polished, and repeated for a new generation (how many times do we have to endure CNN talking about how a hurricane will help the economy before people understand the broken window fallacy that Bastiat articulated in 1850?). And economics also overlaps with both politics and morality. Value-free economics exists only if you consider "you could do X, but more people will starve" to be a value-free argument.
- philwelch 17y ago

philwelch 17y ago

My best advice is to avoid macroeconomics to begin with, since that seems the most heavily politicized. Microeconomics teaches you the most interesting parts: marginal reasoning, opportunity costs, supply and demand curves--basically the things that everyone agrees on. You'll be surprised to find that even liberal economists agree that minimum wage laws cause unemployment, rent control laws cause housing shortages, and price controls cause economic inefficiencies. Why? The answer is all in the supply and demand curves. When you do get into macro, start with the pure factual basis before you get into theory. For instance, instead of diving into debates about the gold standard, get a good factual understanding about how the FED works, what M1, M2, and M3 are, how fractional-reserve banking figures in, and so forth. A gold standard may or may not be an improvement, but learning how a centrally banked fiat currency is run will teach you important facts about how most currencies in the world are run. (My macroecon course covered this, as well as a little bit about currencies like China and Hong Kong that peg themselves to the USD, using similar but distinct approaches. I don't recall exactly how China does it but Hong Kong operates a "currency board" where they hold a reserve of USD that they exchange for HKD at a fixed ratio. Interesting, eh?) Most of the economic debates center around what should be done, or how certain economic or monetary policies affect the economy. There are even controversies about the past--what caused the Great Depression and whether the New Deal helped is a particularly sticky tarpit. It's useful to learn these controversies, but do so by reading all viewpoints involved rather than just one. Then maybe you can choose your favorite. I would not take a historical viewpoint, starting with the oldest economists and working forward. That's not even how physics is taught, really. That's how philosophy is taught. Unlike philosophers, economists have actually gotten to a point of relative agreement about most things. Remember that you want to learn economics, not the history of economics, so while we use a lot of Adam Smith, we also use the supply and demand curves and other tools that came after Adam Smith, just as a biology class would talk about genetics when teaching evolution, even though Darwin never knew about genetics.