What are the best economics books? Neo-liberal to Marxian, I don't care as long as it's economics

do bother

t. majored in economics

Most people paint Hayeck as an extreme libertarian/far-rightist for some reason, but The Road to Serfdom is a neat light read, if not all that convincing to a critical reader.

The banking tricks and tools are thousand of years old. They're as old as civilization itself, and were invented by the sumerians. 4500 years ago. Nothing new was invented, except bankers are greedier than ever and don't understand than unlimited credit and debt leads to economic disaster.

Honestly I found this book to be extremely comfy, and I read it as a layman some years ago.

As someone who has actually studied Economics here's my opinion.

Economics as a field is a self-containing theory that has little relevance to what actually happens. Sometimes it will capture bits and pieces of what's happening (nearly always out of context and in a way that offers zero applicability) but more often than not its utility lies near zero. Economics is an unholy conglomerate of awkwardly glued together mathematics, statistics, sociology, history and psychology. Ironically,one would easily learn about economic/monetary activity as a whole by studying ANY of those fields in isolation rather than pursuing economics. The study of economics is more likely to produce someone who gets things wrong more often than if he had not heard about any economics theory in the first place. It's not illuminating, its very function is concealment, unknowing, and confusion. Economics as a whole is a political tool. Those intelligent enough who started studying economics truthfully, abandoned it shortly upon realizing its function. The remaining are the stupid/deluded ones who got lost in its mazes and opportunists. Both of whom are happy to play in this little fantasy sandbox for reasons of delusion or profit/self-promotion respectively. Economics is like an occult complex system that is used by political power to conceal the blatant and simplistic theft that is occurring. It's voodoo and sorcery and judgment will come upon it.

What's wrong with Road to Serfdom? He's certainly very ambitious in his arguments, but his predictions more or less proved to be true, and even with the advent of resource-allocating software simulations and other tools allowing for a successful planning infrastructure, the essential gap between needs and services remains.

Mainly some of his claims lack sufficient supporting evidence, like his claim about the ineffectiveness of British propaganda during the war due to political leanings of the team toward planned societies with Great Britain, and some of his other broader sociological claims.

It's not that I find those claims problematic myself, but after seeing even center-left publications claim Hayeck was, of all things, a pseudo-facist, I assume there exists audiences that would look for anything to go on in anything written by him.

Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political-Economy

I'd recommend this because it's a quick read and is pretty thought provoking, especially if you aren't already a libertarian. Then read J.K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society for an entirely different perspective

One cannot deny, however, the vastly different outcomes of different economic systems. Compare the egalitarian Nordic model to the neo-feudalism of the USA, the horribly designed Venezuelan economy to the efficient machine of the Dutch one -- economic thinking does matter.

>neo-feudalism
How so?

try the egalitarian nordic model in Albania and tell me how it works.

Economics is much of the time the least-bad option: it's full of assumptions that don't quite hold, but almost every "economics is wrong" claim is followed up by some "society is a lie" or other kind of nonsense that doesn't even try to deal with scarcity or incentives.

Honestly Veeky Forums really should read Capital; besides Marx's critiques of society and political economy remaining extremely valid and >right about everything,< it's exceptionally well written and, while challenging, is rewarding in how it gets the reader to think about the world around them from a critical angle.

David Harvey does a decent walkthrough of Vol. 1, and it's on YT

youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk&index=1&list=PL0A7FFF28B99C1303&t=3480s

Absolute shit

Economics: A User's Guide, ha joon chang.

Agreed. There's also a book version of those lectures, and a companion to Volume 2.

As a fellow economics graduate, I took different lessons from my degree. Maybe it's just that my faculty was radically different from all the others, or maybe it was yours.

Our professors always stressed the fact that our models were just approximations of reality and would never apply perfectly in the real world. The idea behind them is to isolate one thing and try to estimate its effect.

In that vein, we never talked about how something would certainly happen, but rather that something may happen.

A couple of lessons that I found very useful were multivariate problem solving, ordinal rankings of preferences, and constrained optimisation. I also enjoyed my stats courses.

In my experience, also, most of my profs were down to earth. They actually tried to avoid macroeconomics as much as possible because micro was safer and less political.

As an addendum, I'd like to caution the OP against drawing too many conclusions from his readings. It's very easy to get drawn in to one viewpoint to the exclusion of all others. And economics is notorious for locking people into one paradigm, especially people who are not formally trained.

There seems to be a popular understanding of economics as very close to a science, with lots of appeals to the authority of people like Krugman, Piketty, or Friedman. These guys are all brilliant, but there are drawbacks to every view, especially since all models are based on assumptions about the world that don't always hold true.

An example of people locking themselves to one view too much is when people who have taken Econ 101 try to tell you that the minimum wage causes unemployment. That's what they teach in introductory economics courses, and it's theoretically correct. But the real world doesn't always match up to the theory. There has been a lot of empirical research on the matter, and the record is more mixed than the open and shut case you learn early on. The most obvious flaw with the model as it's presented in Econ 101 is that there isn't perfect information in the labour market.

Anyway, that's just my two cents. Good luck with your readings, OP!

>le market freedom corresponds to civil liberties meme

Read Hoppe

Libertarianism should be a dead ideology after the disastrous results of the 1980s neoliberal reforms. Just as Marxism has been proven to suck in practice, the free market ideology had its time to “shine” and it sucked.

For some reasons, it still lives on.

As a third positionist, economics hold no sway to politics if you are a third position. Grasping economics would only help you as a soulless ultra capitalist.

So?

>Our professors always stressed the fact that our models were just approximations of reality and would never apply perfectly in the real world. The idea behind them is to isolate one thing and try to estimate its effect.
>In that vein, we never talked about how something would certainly happen, but rather that something may happen.

Precisely my point, that basically makes you astrologers.

>disastrous results of the 1980s neoliberal reforms
Yeah all that awful 2% unemployment and low taxes. UGH.

Reagan himself back-pedalled his initial reforms for how unpopular they were.

>tfw there will never be an analysis of economics in terms of the occult, voodoo, and sorcery

The Wealth of Nations by A. Smith

There's a world of difference between something being an imperfect analytical tool and being astrology. Macroeconomic models, while not perfect, help us analyse how individual variables can affect economic output. These models are usually pretty good approximations of one or two things, but they can never completely predict an outcome because real life doesn't allow us to hold other variables constant.

At any rate, to assume that economics consists only of horoscope-like predictions of economic output is a fundamental misunderstanding of the discipline. At the heart of the study of economics is an appreciation that some things are outside of our control and we have to make due with what little we can control. There's also microeconomics, which is an analysis of how individuals make economic choices rather than predictions on the state of the entire economy.

Sraffa and Marx are both pretty cool.

Probably the constant shilling from business interests

This desu.

Economics is like a dead star that still seems to produce light; but you know it is dead.

Das Kapital. Freakonomics is a meme but legitimate worth reading.

Principles of political economy and taxation Ricardo. Basically refines smith so don't have to read le invisible hand man
Capital obvs.
Progress and poverty
Keynes' general theory.
Late capitalism Mandel.
Socialism, capitalism and democracy schumpeter. Best non ideological economic work. Only person who disagrees with Marx who's has actually read him and treats him fairly.
Not an exhaustive list but good to get a large scale view

The most stupid post I've read on Veeky Forums in a while, and there's plenty of stupid posts to go around each day.

The leftists on this board should all kill themselves, you are nothing but a cancer.

Found the ant mentality niggers.

If you actually want to learn, get an economics textbook.

Pop economics is wrong, or selling you something

Even Keynes said had almost nothing but positive things to say about The Road to Serfdom:

"In my opinion it is a grand book. . . . Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement."--John Maynard Keynes

It is a fantastic book, but I still think that Hayek's "Denationalisation of money" is slightly more interesting.

>Popular opnion
>Good opinion
Haha

The amount of leftist idiots on this board is truly frightening. Makes one fear for the future.

This is a good introduction

Then this: Always remember economic systems are a result of history, they can never be separated from politics, and be careful of what the overall aim of economics is.

>feign interest
I don't either, to me the interest is pretty genuine.

>Here OP, read only leftist economists.

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And why not.
Economics? Politics? Government??

Ha. You're the second teenager who has mistaken me for a leftie. The ultimate irony is calling others lefties when both sides of the political spectrum are in reality arguing for the exact same thing - Obedience. Both righties and lefties are docile pets of the system.

>Ha.
>teenager
>pets of the system
>ultimate irony

>What are the best economics books?

whichever one explicitly predicted the 2008 crash.....none of them.

economics is worse than sociology for being a croc of shit

>Ecunumics didn't predict i'd loose all my tendies !!!1!1!
Neck yourself.

#rekt #shotsfired

The Road to Serfdom by Hayek.

>wouldbuy.jpg
if you catch my drift

>he thinks there weren't economists who saw it coming
>he thinks all crashes aren't predictable
>he thinks infinite growth is sustainable

LOL

I'll let Veeky Forums know how the definite edition is. Only read the original, which I enjoyed very much.

bataille

I find it hilarious how triggered people are getting in this thread at the proposition, which anyone with sanity and commonsense could see is true, that most economics is just masturbation that doesn't match up with the real-world, made up by intellectuals who have a certain artificial layering around their feeble, almost non-existent self-awareness, this layering formed of things they know nothing about and have mechanically repeated in their so-called "learning" since childhood, preventing them from ever making contact with the real world.

you simply underestimate astrology and what it means in the minds of the people who plan and act its order

Just because you are too stupid to understand economics doesn't mean that nobody else should be interested.

>Marxian
>economics

Muh 15 equal nords

I've never seen any substantial criticisms of this book. I'm only a quarter of the way through it now so my opinion is limited but so far I think he does a good job of explaining the benefits that a price-coordinated economy has over a centrally planned one--namely in how efficiently scarce resources with alternative uses are distributed. He'll occasionally point out some faults or misconceptions that Marx had and the consequences they had on his philosophy, like how he viewed profit or "surplus value" as an unnecessary charge tacked onto a product instead of as an incentive; a price paid for efficiency.

What is neo-feudalism and how does it apply to the US?

Because like corporations are rich and we're poor man. Duh 1%

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This should be required reading

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>There are unironic socialists on this board

>there are unironic COINTELPRO agents on this board

This whole board consists of angsty, teenage rebels worshipping Marx.

reddit.com/r/neoliberal/wiki/readinglist

go back there

You are no better than them. Marx has by far the best analysis of society. Right wingers are totally deluded, thinking they can reform society according to their incoherent ideologies. At least lefties openly praise their life denying, freedom killing communist ideology.
Now if you read Marx(which neither lefties or righties did) here's what happens:
-If you're intellectually dishonest, you realize communism is the only coherent form of society, but you think(hope) individuality will somehow prevail the mechanism of communism. The room starts spinning and you see red everywhere.
-If you're honest you realize that communism is the only coherent form of society, therefore admitting that society and individuality cannot coexist, ever. You proceed to fall into a violent stupor à la Kaczynski.

Hahahahahahahahahha

You should be so ashamed of yourself.

>communism is the only coherent form of society

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

t. CIA

You haven't read marx and think communism is a moral ideology. lmao. Marx didn't come up with communism because poor workers were being abused by capitalism. He wrote about the inevitable outcome of industrial societies and how capitalism will be replaced by communism. He obviously misses a few points because of the technological progress he couldn't predict, but overall his analysis is simply the best.

Oh and I'm absolutely not a communist. I'll be happy to answer any you might havequestions, as it seems you have the political knowledge of an american.

Alan Greenspan