Economics LIT

Read Hume's Essays,

Also, Ricardo >>>> Malthus

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I used to think this wasn't particularly relevant to modern discourse but with the way people are starting to think of trade as a zero sum game where nations win and lose it's needed more than ever.

Is the study of economic principles the same as free market diatribes written by the hired nerds of finance capital?

read serious works instead of meme propaganda

Ascent of money

>trade as a zero sum game where nations win and lose
What does Smith say about this?

The zero sum fallacy in economics is rooted in mercantilism which is essentially the idea that the purpose of trade is to accumulate as much of a trade surplus as possible and if you don't that means your nation is losing out or being exploited. I've noticed that this sort of thinking is making a comeback, especially on the left but also on the right. Trump while on the campaign trail was constantly talking about our trade deficient with China as if that in itself was a bad thing and was threatening them with tariffs. Adam Smith deals with this sort of muddled thinking particularly in book 4.

This book is the most biased ideological piece of shit.

Unironically yes and I have a degree in economics.

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Anything by him

>Austrian School
*breathes in* AAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Like debt, while trade deficits aren't inherently bad they are unsustainable in the long term.

I just bought this off of Amazon. I doubt I'll get far in it but economics and finance has been my interest these past few months

That's a nice unsupported assertion you got there.

Assuming we're still just talking about the US, it's just common sense. The US has a negative NIIP, it will have to run a trade surplus eventually.

Why exactly do you believe a trade deficient is unsustainable? People used to believe that importing more than they exported resulted in a loss of national wealth but this is bullshit because the nations true wealth consists of its goods and services, not in the money or gold used to pay for them.

ufff very complex. But very interesting. It's hard to say he's wrong about too many things in this book.

The last book is the most relevant one today. We have a growing national debt, and book IV covers this extensively.

why nations fail

It's not a belief, it's a mathematical certainty. The US must run a trade surplus at some point in the future.

Von Mises is probably the most reputable of that whole school. Him and Keynes are at ends with multiple different sorts of things in their books. They are antithetical almost. It is very interesting. For a person like me, who usually likes to take the best part of most economists and remember them and reconcile them with other economists, to have these two, Von Mises and Keynes, be ABSOLUTELY DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED like this is very frustrating. I'm curious if Keynes just felt like shitting completely on von Mises on a whim or if it was because von Mises shit on Irving Fisher's mathematical approach to Neoclassical economics. Or if these two views just naturally come about.

Unless Carl Menger counts as being in the Austrian school. But no one makes fun of Carl Menger.

Again, you're just making assertions without giving any reason to accept them. You may find it interesting that the US had a trade surplus throughout the great depression. It's almost as if it doesn't really matter what the balance of trade is.

I'm not going to write out a whole proof for you here. NIIP can be seen as a function of the difference of all future annual trade balances. Our current NIIP is negative so at some point in the future our trade balance must be positive.

Again, more assertions. I'm not asking for an essay, just a reason to believe what you say is true. I would have asked why you believe the national debt in itself is unsustainable but I've had enough of this and I know you can't answer because you don't know what you're saying.

This should be the first thing to read user. It was required reading in Econ 101, back in my business school days. It's the tried and true basics, proven over time. Everything else is political propaganda, or financial scammers.

I'm sure it's in here somewhere, this is undergraduate-tier stuff.
columbia.edu/~mu2166/UIM/notes.pdf
I'm not saying that we should have a trade surplus or that it's somehow more advantageous than a trade deficit, there are pros and cons of both. I'm saying that mathematically it is impossible for us to maintain a trade deficit indefinitely.

The unsustainability of our national debt is actually a lot more intuitive though. Debt is a great way to smooth your consumption if you know that in the future you will be able to pay it off. The problem with our national debt is that there's no reason to think we'll be able to pay it off, and that it's seemingly ever-increasing.

I think some of economic theories have been refined since then, but that's a decent starter.

Page 37

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just stop being lazy and read mankiw's textbook

THIS

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>X cannot fail, it can only be failed.
very insightful

This book is very fun. Leeson goes through the motives of Pirates and explains their actions.

Not only about economics but basically the whole package as well

The Growth - Delusion

tackles GDP and shows why its so arbitrary and bad metric to rely on

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If I could purge one field of knowledge from the world, it would be conventional economics.
You're either going to be naive and hopeless or sad and hopeless. Nobody predicted '08.

eh neoclassicals didn't but a lot of austrians and post-keynesians certainly did

You begin with Macroeconomics by Mankiw and Microeconomics by Varian.
Then you can read a book on money and financial markets by Mishkin, on international trade and economics by Krugman, on public economics by Gruber.
If you want to go further there is a book on labor economics by Tito Boeri and a book on industrial economics by Carlton and Perloff.
Economic Theory in Retrospect by Mark Blaug is interesting for the history of economic thought.
There is also a nice series of book by Paul Bairoch on economic history, but I don't know if they are translated in English.

It's easy to predict that the gargantuan, unsustainable system is going to flounder sooner or later. Austrians and post-Keynesians just got the vague "I told you so". Lehman bros still caught everybody off guard.
There's no joy in the centrally planned economy. Learning about it just hurts.

That's shit

Why would you spend any more time talking about Keynes when all you have to do is say that he was wrong and move on?

You probably licks Marx's butt, too, you little kiddie-fiddler.

Keynesian economics sure worked well in Venezuela. It's not like they're hunting down dogs in the streets to eat them or anything lol.

this list is BAD

>Recommending anything that isn't an econ textbook
Mankiw has some great stuff OP

We don't like Finance. We like Economics.

Keynes being wrong isn't really true. Plus, he was wrong about what? His theory that the system of economics inherently needs government to function? That statement is just a reiteration of Irving Fisher

I was kind of disappointed in Sowell's books on economics (which have been recommended ad nauseam). I mean, if you've taken econ 101 and read a few wiki pages you kind of understand what he's writing about. There's nothing more-than-surface to his economic books, which is not a problem, and I don't really know what I expected from reading "Basic Economics."

Just putting the warning out there that Tom Sowell is literally talking about basic economics. You won't enjoy it if you understand how markets work on any more-than-base level.

>be economics dummy
>economics major cousin gets me Economics: A User's Guide by some chinese dude for christmas
>says I need to learn about economics it's important
>tfw can't read for more than 10 pages before getting bored and forgetting everything about those 10 pages and switching to literature

Is the book bad or am I just an idiot? I literally know nothing about economics.

How do you even go about learning from a textbook by yourself? Do you just literally read it cover to cover?

>tfw can't read for more than 10 pages before getting bored
I'm kinda in the same predicament. However, in my case, I'm reading a finance textbook. I know learning about economics/finance is important, but I get really bored reading it. I read "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell, without taking notes, so it was a fairly quick read and entertaining. However, when I take notes it feels like it takes forever just to get through a page, and I start getting bored (talking about the Finance book). It's like reading a novel and having to stop to look up the definitions, and at some point, you just get tired of it. Should I just read the book without taking notes?

>How do you even go about learning from a textbook by yourself? Do you just literally read it cover to cover?
Yes.

Keynes wasn't exactly well-read on economics, even though he had a brilliant mind. He could've found a number of antecedents to his inflationary policies from many a economics before his time.

And yeah, when the government steps in to "help" the economy, it almost always ends up doing more harm than good.

The book you were given is utter nonsense. Try reading a better book, and see if that helps to catch your interest.

Unless you're going into the field of economics, I would just stick to books like Sowell's, instead of venturing into textbooks...

Where do I go after getting the quick rundown on uni econ? Do I start with Smith then progress with more obscure early economists like Locke and Ricardo, go on with later classical economists, austrians, the keynesians, monetarists and then what?

I'd love an econ reading chart tbqh

Ricardo I would definitely recommend.

Yeah then stuff like Henry George, try to hit Carl Menger on the way up to Irving Fisher. Only read Irving Fisher if you're actually smart. Then go for von Mises for the refutation of Fisher (who admittedly made some cogent points), then go for the person who hates von Mises, Keynes (also a very smart man. )

Keynes was EXTREMELY well read on economics. I don't know if you read his General Theory book, but he doesn't really mention anyone until the very end, and then he mentions like 15 different economists back-to-back-to-back in an in-depth economic analysis of what the quantity of money for value theorists did right and wrong. Absolutely impressive if you ask me.

>Keynes was EXTREMELY well read on economics
Now I see you're just trolling. He was extremely well read on a wide arrange of subjects, but not economics. He didn't view economics as a subject important enough to dedicate his whole mind to it (had he done so, he really could've become a master of economics).

He knew little about the famous economists like Ricardo of course. but he didn't have any idea about people like Thornton or Wicksell when it came to contemporary monetary theory, he had never given much thought to the theory of capital, he was very shaky on international trade etc.

He was also very capable of rapidly changing his opinion, being the intuitive genius that he was as opposed to a more rational and logical thinker like Hayek.

>Veeky Forums

a thread of mediocre works

>Try reading a better book

What's a better book?

I was under the impression that Venezuela's policy was further left than Keynes' prescriptions.

furthest left and middle right
if you can't read either of those, stop voting

Not the guy you're quoting, but the argument that saving money is bad is wrong, unless we're talking about people saving by just stuffing their pillows full of cash.

Japan

Also, if you're into audiobooks, see if you can get your hands on one of these. Rukeyser does a phenomenal job teaching the history of economic thought. To my knowledge, he has done tapes on:
>Adam Smith + the other classicals
>Karl Marx
>Léon Walras
>Alfred Marshall (also Henry George, briefly)
>Carl Menger + early Austrians
>Thorstein Veblen
>Mises and Hayek
>Frank Knight
>John Maynard Keynes
>Post-Keynesians and Neo-Keynesians
>Milton Friedman + other monetarists

youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk

youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc

>but the argument that saving money is bad is wrong,
I don't think he ever said this, he just viewed economics from an inherently productive point of view. Saving money isn't productive. He didn't say whether it was bad or good. It's just how it is.

His view of the 'national subsistence fund' is completely antithetical to Mises though. They both view the same thing as being prescriptive of production cycles. But Keynes says the longer the national subsistence fund is, the longer the production cycle and therefore the smaller the interest needed to generate a decent profit (he usually made the assertion newer industries have shorter production cycles and higher profits initially, and in their later stages this reverses), and Mises says the longer the production cycle the larger the interest, because of the forgone time invested in the projects.

The reason I say that saving isn't bad, is simple. The economy isn't helped by poor people spending their money on hamburgers. What spurs the economy is the creation of new products and services and that is only going to happen through people with enough expandable capital to invest in the creation of these services and products that make our lives better.

Saving is only bad if you stuff the money in your pillow. Most people don't do that. They put their money in the bank. And banks are in the business of lending money, and they lend it out to people who then create these new services that over time become cheaper through competition. The money that is used to create it didn't just come from nowhere, it came from a lot of wealthy people who didn't just spend their money on shit.

If you don't do the reading, you won't get the learning. Economics does not give away participation trophies to losers.

Veeky Forums econ recommendations are always so Youtube-tier

>This book is the most biased ideological piece of shit.
Biased against/towards what?

wow dude you literally watched one Hayek video about Keynes knowing nothing (tip: hayek was assblasted)

>I don't like the person who said it so it must be WRONG

I'm so glad my money is going into the creation of vibrant new services like Juicero and Wi-Fi Dildos.

>He is widely cited in both libertarian and conservative circles.
guess

i like hayek, but this particular disrespeck of Keynes was just dummm

It's not enough to simply state that an author is biased because the accusation amounts to saying that an author has an opinion. Every author has an opinion and those opinions generally only become a problem when the author doesn't provide sufficient reasons to believe they're true or they treat the opposition unfairly by misrepresenting them. If you believe an authors bias or opinion is a problem you need to explain why you believe that.

I dont understand, by whom he's cited is evidence of his bias? How about something substantive.

That judgment sounds pretty fokn biased

>my money

>It's not enough to simply state that an author is biased because the accusation amounts to saying that an author has an opinion.
OP asked for good books about economics. This book is titled "Economics in One Lesson" which implies a degree of neutrality whereas in reality it is about as neutral as Kapital just with a different ideology. Just pointing this fact out to OP who might not be aware of that.

>If you believe an authors bias or opinion is a problem you need to explain why you believe that.
Actually I don't because I'm posting on a chinese cartoon imageboard and not writing a fucking book review.

Thomas Sowell

>This book is titled "Economics in One Lesson" which implies a degree of neutrality
that's why I despise both hazlitt's book and sowell's "basic economics"
they're both shills pretending to be objective

They're biased to the right, because they are right.

Again you're operating under the assumption that it's possible to be neutral. Even the most dry and boring textbook will be biased toward something, especially with a topic like economics with so many diametrically opposed theories. It's not realistic to expect an author to give equal time and expertise to everything.

You are right that you don't have to do anything but you should explain your reasoning for believing things if you want to be taken seriously by rational people.

Wrong. Go and read the penultimate chapter of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

Try to understand the book at all, I'm guessing you haven't read it.

Wrong. Try actually reading and (this is the more important part) understanding the book. Then come back.

Capitalism and Freedom is extremely comfy reading for the laymen, in my experience.