The world would be a magical place if every human bean was forced to read this book

Daily Reminder: Economic science > Sociology, Psychology, Politics

not him, but I personally recommend man state and economy, wealth of nations, and marx's capital if you really want to know whats going on big guy.

otherwise hazlitt economics in one lesson if you want to pretend to know what's going on.

>man state and economy, wealth of nations, and marx's capital
Still way too obvious my man! Try again.

>reading Chicago School economists in 2017

Neoliberalism has always failed. Time to move on.

To what? More or less economic freedom? More economic planning or less?

Learn math first or all you'll be able to do with it is approach the most unrealistic, idealized situations. The problem with people "learning basic economics" is that they never learn anything beyond that. It's good that you acknowledge that you don't understand, that already puts you a step ahead of people who read Sowell or Hazlitt. Sowell and Hazlitt aren't really bad by themselves, they just easily give people the unfounded impression of actually being informed. They have the same appeal as a lot of communists for example since they're more about concepts and ease of access than rigor.

I'll be reading this soon. I want to become at least basically literate when it comes to economics. I studied Mankiw's textbook briefly and I found it was easy to understand.

Why don't you look at the curriculum of top graduate programs in economics? You will have to learn some analysis, topology, probability, and statistics, though.

marx's capital is essential to understanding modern economic thought. It may be in the big red no-no list for lvl 1. pseud libertarians but a serious understanding of the progression of economic thought requires having read it.

a barebones reading list for someone seriously interested in beginning to think about economics might look like:

book 1 & 2 of aristotle politics -> 3 mjr bastiat essays (what is money, capital and interest, that which is seen and that which is unseen) -> wealth of nations -> On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation -> marx. capital (big jump, need help here) -> keynes general theory of employment interest and money (if you want a counterpoint read milton friedman not required, nothing revolutionary) -> man state and economy

capital is essential to understanding progression of economic thought.

More economic planning. Important infant industries should be heavily subsidized and tariffs on imported goods should be raised.

t. neoclassical fag

economics is a praxeology, not a math in the sense you are speaking

like geometry, the number-crunching (what you are calling math) is incredibly trivial if one understands the actual math (or praxeology) of the field.

t. nationalist

t. Brainlet
Don't compare geometry to number crunching if you don't want to look like a retard. Economics is clearly not "a math," math is a language you use to understand economics just like in physics or statistics. People want to believe that understanding these things is as simple as understanding some simple concepts. That isn't true.

>More economic planning

Yeah because economic planning works, just look at the U.S.S.R!

>Important infant industries should be heavily subsidized

Yeah, let's waste tax dollars in industries that have little to no demand, because that clearly went well for all those "green tech" startups Obama funded.

>tariffs on imported goods should be raised.

Yeah let's kill trade.

Economic nationalism is a meme.

>Muh minimum wage
The funny thing in the US is that the people who buy into this type of cheap libertarian thinking are so often the exact type of people who have a labour value near enough or at the very bottom, which, if left as an unregulated bottom will push and keep them constantly on the verge of real poverty at all times.

Thomas Sowell seems to have made a career out of convincing people that he is a dispassionate engine of critical thought, when his arguments and clever use of certain statistics and not others show him up to just be another ideologue who thinks that it is a normal state of affairs for a society to just defer all questions of structured life to some supply and demand market problem solving matter. This pangs of the same kind of semi-autism of Ayn Rand, and delights people who fantasize about how formidable they think they would be in a system of re-branded social Darwinism.

So in other words...

These books are good for a general overview but if you want more than superficial knowledge you're better off majoring in the field and/or consulting an active professional?

Which of Mankiw's books did you read?

Economics is all hocus-pocus bullshit. We need less of it, not more.

What do we need more of in its stead?

Read a history book. Economic nationalism is how every wealthy nation developed, not one excluded. For decades the US had some of the highest tariffs in the world. When Britain opened up their markets and lowered their tariffs their economy shrunk drastically.

Only this one.

>in a system of re-branded social Darwinism

Good job on not even knowing the argument presented against the minimum wage presented by Sowell.

The whole critique of the minimum wage is that it is actually social darwinism.

Yes.

""""basic economics"""" is garbage, especially when you try to apply it to any real life scenarios like government policy.

If you really want to know how money and finance really work, read MMT. As long as a sovereign government has an army and the ability to tax, it has unlimited capacity to pay for any programs.

What's interesting to me is that the Jesus Christ of international free trade based his invisible hand theory, and most of his other theories on the assumption that leading figures in the economy would retain a home bias, and act in ways that we would call nationalistic. I only discovered this recently after putting off reading Adam Smith for so long.

Also, the labor market doesn't follow econ 101 models of supply and demand. Raising the minimum wage doesn't necessarily lead to a rise in unemployment. The reasons for this include increased overall demand, sticky wages, disparities in bargaining power, disparities in information and so on.

So we don't have to worry about scarcity?

I guess we can just abandon economics.

>Raising the minimum wage doesn't necessarily lead to a rise in unemployment.

The key word being necessarily.

Most economists know that the minimum wage causes unemployment in a normal case (obviously the dollar amount necessary for this to occur being contingent).

> this level of straw-manning

We don't have to worry about sovereign debt(in and of itself). Governments can't default, because money comes from the government in the first place. On the contrary, when the government runs a surplus, the private sector has to run a deficit. This is an accounting identity. Google sectoral balances.

You can't analyze the government as a household or a business.

>The whole critique of the minimum wage is that it is actually social darwinism.

Yes, I know. His arguments for why that is was one of the main jolts I got when reading him that made me realise just how much of an ideologue he is at times, and how much I was duped by him initially.

I still have plenty of time for many other parts of his writing, but I can't help getting irritated by people suggesting that he is a paragon of dispassionate academia. People like him getting his way with completely abandoning the minimum wage would make our society even more ugly than it already is, and his reasoning for wanting it abolished is far less rational than he makes it out to be.

So what's the counter argument?

The root problem with Sowell or Friedman is they don't even understand what competition actually is. Competition is firstly a process of creative destruction, firms eliminate each other, they aren't facilitating adjustment to any sectoral norm of efficiency. Technological benefits come from this process but it doesn't generate any type of harmonious equilibrium throughout the economy.
Most '''economics''' is teleological, probably because most of those who laid the foundations predated Darwin and were still stuck in a 17th century metaphysics of God and natural law directing things. The real economy is open and dynamic you can't tell me how things are going to develop before they do.

All neoclassical microeconomic's derives from nominal demand not effective demand. This means in the absence of full employment an economy is demand constrained. A demand constraint implies no analytical difference between the quality supplied and demanded, because prices are not parametric. At the macroeconomic level the parable of money neutrality fails to hold out of general equilibrium, not even in a full employment disequilibrium.

>Analytical
>Parametric
>Constraint
Uh, we're talking about economics, not math you fucking nerd
Most interesting post itt though

>heterodox economics

Into the trash it goes!

>Uh, we're talking about economics, not math you fucking nerd
do you really think actual economists at reputable institutions don't use math? Veeky Forums hasn't left the 1800s and is still busy reading Marx or le black economics man.

Please translate this to english

>do you really think actual economists at reputable institutions don't use math
They do, and that's why economies of developed nations are so batshit assfucked. Economics is a praxeology, not a math.

What do you mean "fucked"? The average person in a developed economy is doing relatively worse because the supply of low-skill, low-IQ labor has been vastly increased thanks to globalization, though it would be improper to say this. People with degrees from reputable universities are doing fine. Many European countries also have backwards economic policies that are contributing to their problems.

Not that user, but I was under the impresion that almost the entirety of modern economics literature outside of Sowell and a few others from his school of thought here in the US are in favor of a minimum wage?

I'm only in my first year of studying economics, but it sounds like a weird question to ask someone "what is THE counter-argument to the absence of a minimum wage", when there is so much stuff out there to read about its justification from different angles. The complete absence of the minimum wage is the one to be argued it seems because it is the outlier opinion that is seen as extreme.

if you had basic literacy you would realize that my point was not only not comparing geometry to number crunching, it was in fact to point out that your conflation of the two in the economic field is just as much of a misstep as you have accused me of committing with geometry.

Math follows theory, not the other way around. Mathematical concepts need no explanation of the theory has been clearly explained from first principle and isn't just a collection of facts and scenario specific-formulas as most professors teach neo-classical economics in modern universities.

If one does not understand the concept of ratio, it is still plain to understand the texts which introduced the fact that 2 acids maintain a ratio to one another when titrating different bases. There is some mathematically complicated stuff going on here, but if you read the text you would be helped by some knowledge of ratio, but it is by no means necessary to possess it.

meanwhile modern textbooks teach that

acid1:base1::acid2:base1:::acid1:base2::acid2:base2

which is entirely unintelligible to someone without a strong background in ratio.

no, I gave you a reading list that is not unreasonable at which is not unreasonable if you actually want to get economics, you don't need to major in it. if you are smart and only read important excerpts of capital and man state economy (which I can give you) that reading list will take a month of casual weekend reading.

Yeah, that's still a solid book. He has revised his work many times but I think that is just pearson-led money grabbing.

this

for example

>because prices are not parametric

instead of describing a quality of prices, a mathematical consequence of a quality of prices has been described despite the fact that in logic, the quality of price being described is prior to its mathematical consequence

Just what the minimum wage does depends a lot on the context.

But economists from Friedman to Krugman know that some minimum wage levels will produce unemployment in some situations.

Economists argue about the minimum wage a lot, but it still stands that everybody agrees that it can cause unemployment, while not everybody agrees that it won't and will simply boost wages.

Not many are going to say to get rid of it completely because that's just outside the Overton window or whatever. You could just keep it where it is, and as wages rise, it wouldn't be much different from not having it at all. So you can say that you support its existence without really supporting it.

I'll address your second line onwards.
Math does not always follow theory assuming you mean economic theory (which is unclear btw). Math is often developed before it has any useful "real" applications, in the physical or social sciences. The next sentence of yours is hard to parse due to the confusing usage of theory and concepts without any qualifiers. Math is basically entirely composed of concepts. Still, when I say math is like a language and it needs to be learned before you can understand a field, I mean that, for example, you need to know what Lagrangian optimization is and when to use it and how. The how at least must be taught independently of economic theory.
I'm not arguing that you can't understand titration, balls falling in vacuum, perfectly competitive markets, etc without math. But an understanding of how individual factors affect systems, idealizing everything else away, does not give you any meaningful understanding of how systems actually behave.

I do not mean that mathematics is not in some significant way prior to economics or other math-heavy fields. Merely that there is some cross section of math in those fields of theory.

In other words, if I see a cube, touch a cube, and use aural cues to determine that a cube is approaching, I do not need some concept of cube to abstract some idea of an object from only one of these perceptions.

Similarly, economics displays a particular cross-section of mathematics, just as watching an apple be taken away from a basket containing 3 also displays a particular cross-section of mathematics. The point being that in all the things I've described, math is not prior to the particular, but comes from the particular. The notion of number comes from counting, we did not deduce the ability to count from a notion of 1, 2, and 3. The same is to be said of economics.

Your last statement is entirely reflective of the criticism that austrians aim at neo classical economics. Namely that if you can not clearly demonstrate to me how it follows from your initial premise that this variable affects this system in some precise and known way, you are only estimating a consequence, not doing economics. If an economic theory does not precisely describe what information Lagrangian optimization provides that directly follows from the first premise (and my point from the beginning was that in order to precisely describe such a thing the optimization itself must first be described as it is found in economics, and then abstracted as a mathematical tool which can be reused, removing any need to explain how it works.

In other words, if an economic text does not teach you a lagrangian optimization implicitly through precise description of some factor in a market, but expects you to understand it in order to compute some variable it dictates you will receive, even with strong justification, that text is not an economic one.

>neoclassical economics
We calculate as follows:

>Austrian economics
Here is my argument by citation of Von Mises:

Read Michał Kalecki & Marxist theory

These are the only decent answers

makes a good attempt but is unintelligible to those not already on his level

Wow an economics thread on Veeky Forums, which isn't the worst active thread. Well done!

I'm reading Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market right now and am liking it quite a bit

Nah, it's just neoclassical nonsense.

This one: digamo.free.fr/keen2011.pdf

How's this for hard data :^)

I remember I have to read Economix by Michael Goodwin in high school. I'm not particulary interessed by economy and world trading but this comix it's a good appraoch for beginner.

Techonological progress has devalued low-skilled workers. Jobs that are created increasingly require high intellect and creative ability. For example low-iq worker in the 50s could earn a decent amount just by working hard, but it isn't really possible anymore since these people are competing with robots that can be operated by fewer people, and the task of programming and operating these robots is much More intellectually demanding, so they are forced to do low-wage jobs. Technological advancements inprove the efficiency of production and quality of life for all. Poverty has been on a steady decline for a long time, but what se are seeing is a raise in relative poverty. This has caused an illusion that things are going to the worst, and they might be for people who aren't capable of doing complex jobs. Other than that it's only getting better for people.

>Other than that it's only getting better for people.
In aggregate, sure.
But only because China bumps up the numbers. Take out china and global poverty has been relatively steady (Africa actually got worse iirc.)

It's really basic income or hell going forward.

Some modern western countries don't have minimum wages, e.g. Sweden.

Minimum wage is almost as bad as rent control.

>when you're so blinded by ideology that you can't see basic facts

>Some modern western countries don't have minimum wages, e.g. Sweden.
Disingenuous. There's no *uniform* minimum wage, but companies have a series of agreements with trade unions that amount to de-facto minimum wages per sector.

Not everywhere is Sweden, with Swedish culture and Swedish trade unions structures. The question of whether there should be a minimum wage (and what it should be if so) is ridiculously contextual, not a binary, objective question. (Which is one reason most attempts to simplify economics down to "basics" will always fail. It goes to autistic levels to avoid considering context and trade-offs.)

>My economic ideology = fact

>It's really basic income or hell going forward.
It will Be worst for more diverse societies such as U.S. where the black community are pretty much sparating itself from the rest of society. Jobs that they're capable of doing are disappearing, leading to increased poverty and separation from rest of the society. Even with basic income it will get tough because if these people have no jobs to do, meaning no way to rise up on the hierarchy, the only option young black men have left is to commit crime and do drugs. Same will happen in Europe with muslim communities. Basically we're fucked either way.

Africa is up to the people living there, but they seem to be completely incapable of building a decent society so it's probably going to stay shit.

People like you are the problem with economics these days. You tell people that somehow it has to be harder than it actually really is. Economics is just about allocating scarce resources as Sowell himself says.

It's really that simple and most of it is common sense. Austrians and Chicagoans just look at the long term effects on everybody of economic policies. And it makes sense because it's just common sense.

The neo-Keynesian mess that we're in is because morons like you insist that we need all kinds of dumb policies to manipulate the economy to a better place or something. Or that we can boost aggregate demand and that's going to solve our problems. It's stupid. Prices tell you everything you need to know. And no protectionism or welfare or price control is going to fix anything because it's fake. It undermines a price's ability to convey information.

Don't listen to these faggots, OP. We've been listening to people like Krugman for century and our economies are ticking timebombs.

Hazlitt makes arguments for unions raising wages when they are too low in sectors, but the idea of a minimum wage that is mandated is indeed a bad idea. There's obviously an amount that is excessive to pay for unskilled labour. And it's obvious that more people could be earning some money than a smaller amount of people earning more money with probably shorter hours.

The problem with criticisms of free market economics is that the alternative is 1) not consistent (free market reliance on prices applies to everything from labour to interest rates to currency and remains consistent whereas other economic ideas rely on groups of elitists making what they hope is the right decision for everybody) and 2) not sustainable (you can't implement any socialist or Keynesian or whatever policy without first having the capital created by a free market. The restraints and redistribution follows. That's why we can't fix third world or developing nations by simply introducing minimum wage or price control or welfare. Because there's no capital to waste on such stupid ideas. Meanwhile, with a free market, countries can start with sweat shops and build themselves into wealthy nations. Ever wondered why the sweatshops of 30 years ago aren't sweatshops anymore? Because they created wealth and because the price for their labour went up).

>We've been listening to people like Krugman for century and our economies are ticking timebombs.
Krugman is unironically closer to chicago-school than to Keynes.

One fundamental thing Keynes realized was uncertainty, and in particular the difference between risk and uncertainty, between the knowable and the unknowable. You cannot price the unknowable, and fudging it into "risk" (the knowable probability.) is ridiculous. You cannot convey information that does not exist.

>Ever wondered why the sweatshops of 30 years ago aren't sweatshops anymore?
I actually can't think of a nation to which this applies. (Maybe China? But even then, they're hardly a free-market utopia and they're scarcely better than sweatshop tier in many areas.)

But sowell and the Chicagoans champion supply side economics, which through mass growth of supply manipulates prices by devaluation. This means that margins across industries shrink and as does overall value for the economy, even the value of intangible skills are affected. With lower margins a company must sell more to make as much, for the company to sell more the consumers must buy more, but for the consumer to buy more he must have more money, but the consumer is being paid less/working part time because employer was looking to fatten the margin through employment strategy, but now the employer is having trouble with sales growth because the consumer is poorer/saturated with goods, the consumer wants to buy more so he does so with credit. Credit which is subsidized by the government in order to encourage continued purchasing power against the grain of the the value drain caused by the supply side cycle. It's a race to the bottom.

I'm working on a revised edition with proper annotation and editor's notation that references prior proofs, think Euclid.

woah epic correlation truly is causation, love what they're teaching you kids in school

>muh supply side strawman
epic bait

"Correlation doesn't equal causation" is one of things stupid people say when confronted with evidence they disagree with, especially when its said without supporting statements or theories for why the evidence they disagree with is the way it is. When used in this way it's merely a trick to end the argument while protecting your ideology.

you know what, you're right, because I used an argument that I admit: people who don't know what they are saying use and people who have no defense left use.

therefore: correlation does equal causation, good proof user.

>therefore: correlation does equal causation, good proof user.

It's more accurate to say correlation can equal causation. If you wish to dismiss evidence the burden is on you to explain why correlation does not equal causation in that specific case.

The world would be a magical place if economics worked like described in this book.

> in a particular case a -> y and b-> x therefore a-> y b->x

this is not a true statement, there is nothing for me to refute, because in spite of the fact that the evidence you bring up, might be something we could discuss with important implications, your claim based on that evidence is entirely nonsensical.

I think we should favor theory over uncontrolled social science "evidence."

A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Let’s build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can-opener..."

Not really. It's ideology shilling, pick something more impartial. It'd be better than nothing, as it does have substance but it's nonetheless, ideology shilling.

These are not good either. Good to read later on but for each individual (many of whom may not even read books at all) to read a single book to illuminate the world in this particular way, something introductory and more impartial is better. These suggestions are even worse than OP, they're absolutely horrible, as they amount to "lol, let's all be in the single marxism-tinted, fanatical frame of mind".

To be honest, it's hard to be impartial at all when almost all of economics is ideology-fervoured pseudoscience. I'm speaking of formal ideology relating to economics, I'm aware "ideology" in general is for the most part, all-consuming.

I'm currently reading "free to choose" along with the show. It's an amazing work and my understanding is that sowells book mainly repeats the points made by Friedman. Is this true or should I pick up "basic economics" as well

>book mainly repeats the points made by Friedman

I don't know if it's true but I wouldn't be surprised since they both come from the same school of thought. I imagine you'll see a lot of Hayek and Adam Smith in his writings too.

I'm not sure where you are but they only introduced a minimum wage in the UK in 1999. There is plenty of evidence since then that sides with Sowells views. It just made things worse.

neoclassical economics never factors in that the definition of efficiency in daily life isn't finding the ideal solution, it's kludging something that works acceptably.

consider every possible combination of goods you could buy in a supermarket, for example. combinatorial explosion is such that it'd be impossible for a human to assess the relative merits involved, even if you eliminated obviously unattractive options (i.e. buying one orange when you can have two.) - the result being most shoppers receive is not purchasing the ideal basket of goods that maximises their utility at the lowest price, but purchasing a basket of goods that's vaguely good enough in instead of spending a decade in the store calculating the relative merit of each possible choice. time and convenience are key factors not properly accounted for, particularly since each individual's heuristic choice will very based on arbitrary factors.

and so on and so on

>not Black Rednecks and White Liberals

That book is a libtard slayer

>It's more accurate to say correlation can equal causation

No it isn't. If you have two correlative factors/events A and B. You have four potential scenarios, either:

1) A caused B, or;
2) B caused A, or;
3) some third factor C (or more) underlies A and B, or;
4) A and B are a coincidence (no underlying causative element).

When someone says "correlation doesn't equal causation" they are talking about possibilities (3) and (4). You are being a typical contrarian Veeky Forums faggot, because someone drops the reddit tier response.

>I do not need some concept of cube to abstract some idea of an object from only one of these perceptions.

This is completely ass backwards to how actual concept formation works in the brain. Go read the chapter on concepts in a cognitive psychology text. Pay attention to the parts on prototype theory, exemplar theory, and theory-theory.

This, gotta love the "muh gay space luxury communism" crowd who simultaneously support mass immigration while crying about automation and basic income. Good luck with a system that works where social trust is nonexistent and there are explicit ideologies like idpol, which are supported by both capital and the left, whose practical consequences exacerbate social conflict. If you are from Europe, in 50 years time many of you here will either be thrown off rooftops by Muslims, or locked in gas chambers by moron skinheads. There is no future for the left, and it is half your fault.

>This is completely ass backwards to how actual concept formation works in the brain. Go read the chapter on concepts in a cognitive psychology text. Pay attention to the parts on prototype theory, exemplar theory, and theory-theory.

good argument man, i'll give you another chance to respond by reiterating. we do not move from the general to the particular but the other way around (with the initial problem of not being able to distinguish the particular from the general).

namely, number as number (not some pseud concept of number being ingrained in the brain but understanding number as what it is for it to be number) is not that from which we derive counting but vice versa. similarly, we do not move from an articulation of triangle as triangle (the thinghood or essential quality of a triangle) to it's particulars such as having three angles that add up to a straight line, or three sides who are in proportion to the angles opposite them but the other way around.

similarly, in economics, mathematics is not known prior to a study of market but understood through it. mathematics is first known through it's application, not as itself. and as I said before, if the actual mathematic of economics is described, (the features of market are articulated in such way that their corresponding mathematical features are implicit) there will be no need to expect knowledge of a mathematical feature as it ought to have been articulated in the description of the market feature, if that feature is actually connected to the mathematical one.

using prebuilt formulas from other fields which describe the nature of any function of some nature is foolish and shortsighted, as presuming such a thing is to presume that because some thing that *looks* like function known in general mathematics is observed in a market, that it is just the same as function in general mathematics, and that the tools which give us information about a function will produce some relevant information about a market

>cognitive psychology textbooks for adults in daycare has given answer to a question which philosophers have been thinking about for thousands of years

enjoy having your mind bound to earth you colossal faggot

Thoughts?

I don't even care about economics, not even a little bit. Why should I read it?

So that you can tell people who think they're educated for regurgitating the neoclassical synthesis memes that got us into our current stagnatory mess and caused the recession (both 2008, and the likely pre-2020 one. Definitely no later than 2022.) to kill themselves for being retards shilling pseudoscience.

Made me reply, top kek

HAHAHAHAHHA holy shit, here's a (you)

I educated myself in economy from Pound's Cantos, this is all I need

this one is great! I also recommend it OP