/econ/ Economics General

It'd be easier to change government than to do all that through the current sysyem, and more efficient because people always want stuff added to bills.

Even classical economists make sure to read Marx, even if they don't agree with his solutions

Not that guy, but OP's sin was not including Marx. It was including Marx but not Mises.

>hurr leftists
>its le joos

I’d go so far as to say that all serious scholars read at least the introductory works of Marx — e.g. The Communist Manifesto. You cannot ignore the most influential thinkers in history and call yourself an intellectual. You could say the same about Virgil, Darwin, Einstein, Plato, etc.

Do the audiobook, Piketty will grind you down otherwise, and the ideas aren't complicated enough to need the graphs unless you're analysing it actively.

Marx is the shadow of capitalism, all should study. It's kind of bizarre how even econ masters programs only examine like 3 of the modern schools.

>Piketty

Seconding this. It's probably the best and most accurate pop econ book.

After that, your probably best off using textbooks. If you have a solid grounding in maths you can jump straight to the intermediate ones.

Nah there's plenty of middle-ground between true pop-econ and textbooks.

Ha-Joon Chang's books are a great long-view of the whole discipline from the ground up, and would let you pick an interesting area to read more about.

Geez, I didn't remember that part of Das Kapital.

>Ha-Joon Chang's books

Just realised he has like 20, so the one I mean is "Capitalism: A User's Guide".

It's also v good for starting to spot the inherent ideology in any economic analysis, because he has a huge socdem bias but in obvious ways, and constantly declares it too.

Care to start the conversation?

How Rich Countries Got Rich . . . and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor by Erik Reinert.

Some name to check out (both lefties and righties):

Friedman
Hayek
Stifler
Sowell
Moses
Thornton
Wicksell
Hazlitt
Ricardo
Krugman
Stiglitz
Piketty

etc. That should give OP a good overview and differing views.

Stigler and Mises, it should say.

Economics: The User's Guide

Best single volume introduction is still The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner, gives an accessible history of economic thought from Adam Smith up to Schrumpeter.

Most under-respected major economist of the 20th century is Kalecki. Originally trained in the Marxist traction, he would independently develop most of the major ideas which Keynes would become famous for, and do it years before. Unfortunately he wrote them all in Polish so he hasn’t been recognized for that. Everybody should read his short essay “The Poltical Aspects or Full Employment”.

The other economist people should look up is Anwar Shaikh. He’s exactly perfect for this thread. He sees modern economics as having gone astray and he’s been on a one man mission to restore something of the realism and scope of the Classical economists. He has a video lecture course on YouTube explaining his new system of economics and while it’s technical and dense it’s pretty mind blowing. He’s the one sorta Marxist who takes deadly serious the works of people like Friedman, and every other major thinker in economics, and honestly and critically examines them.

Speaking as a straight up communist, if you are into economics, and not just a general ‘history of ideas’, don’t bother with the Communist Manifesto, it’s overhyped. If you are use to reading older texts, Capital isn’t even that challenging, it’s just long, most people just struggle with the fact it’s written in the tone of academic 19th century texts, and if you don’t know your Balzac and Shakespeare a lot of jokes and references Marx makes will go over your head.

Personally I think Piketty is a bit overhyped, he just happened to be finishing a massive 15 year project right when it was very culturally relevant, and that boosted its popularity.

This isn’t to say he’s not worth reading.

he’s broadly in the Keynesian camp so some familiarity with Keynes would help. If you have some familiarity with Marx you are definitely going to find his depiction of Marx in the introduction to be baffling. The reason he says what he does is because he’s only read the second volume of Capital and basically nothing else from Marx.

Here, have the (you). You look like you need it.

Yeah, but it included Friedman, which is kinda similar.

The big difference is that Friedman actually contributed something to economics

Second Heilbroner, just finished him and it's clear, with an actually entertaing prose.

>Piketty
That filthy wife-beating champagne communist.

Read Erik Reinert instead.

public choice theory

>ctrl+f : list, friedrich
>0 results
>mfw

Actually, economic departments don’t teach Marx anymore, not because Marx is wrong, but because Marx places a lot of political issues front and center, which is what neo-Classical economists are notorious for ignoring.

I definitely am not recommending Piketty as being a communist, he’s just not.

There are plenty of communist economists I’d recommend, none of whom are named Piketty.
Luxemburg, Bukharin, Grossman, Hilferding, Baran, Sweezy, Dobb, Kalecki, Mandel, Mattick, Yaffe, Kilman, Amin, Moseley, Shaikh etc.

>dude stamp collecting lmao

You guys seem to be smart, can anyone tell me what it means when Capitalism or Communism is not an entity, but a practice and a process?

I’ve found in my economics education that the history of economics is totally non-existent. My first economic textbook doesn’t mention the names of basically any historical economists. I think that’s kind of a huge problem for the field. My textbook and class basically started with axioms and built up a system across a semester, and it creates this sense that economics as a field is already finished and doesn’t need to be considered as a developing thing through time. It badly hurts the development of a sort of reflexive criticalness towards it. Weirdly I’d say in physics and biology those classes did a far better job of giving a picture of the development of the field, starting from basic Newtonian stuff and developing through electricity, talking about the crisis which led to GR and QM etc.

you learn this stuff in later classes if you continue on in economics, but mainly it just doesn't actually matter. ask yourself what you gain by spending time in a survey course on historical figures in the field. anybody who actually wants to learn about this can do so in their free time with next to no effort, it's not hard to find out who developed purchasing power parity for example.

in an econ undergrad you build up in a similar way to physics and whatnot in that you'll start with easy partial equilibrium analysis and eventually move on to late developments in the discipline, but economists generally don't talk much about the people who developed ideas. these ideas are generally (obviously not always the case, but generally) in historical order

if you want to learn this stuff its best to do it on you own, but economics is a particularly notorious discipline in that learning on your own more often than not leads to people adopting some cockamamie view like austrianism or mmt or something like that because people are too lazy to do math. these people are all over the internet and tend to overpower actual economics discussion by a huge amount (a lot of this is politically motivated, but people are also just kind of lazy and don't want to learn the math you need to read econ papers)