Economics
30 Dec 2007 10:46
I have always felt a certain horror of political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good.
---Attrib. to Benjamin Jowett
History of markets. QWERTY. Other parts of evolutionary economics. Arrow-Debreu model of general equilibrium. Market failure. Input-output models. Planning and regulation, esp. during the World Wars. Economic policy of US, Europe, East Asia, 3rd World. Development economics, growth theory. Corporations. Finance. Claims of analogies between physics and conventional economics (whether with laudatory or debunking intent) --- not to be confused with applying methods of theoretical physics to economic questions ("econophysics"). Agent-based modeling.
See also decision theory; historical materialism; information economy; institutional economics; socialism, market socialism
- Recommended non-technical works:
- Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer [Full text free online]
- J. Bradford De
Long [Prof. at UC Berkeley; arrived after I graduated, or else his
courses'd be another foolishly wasted opportunity. What's
New page.]
- Slouching Towards Utopia [Draft of an economic history of the 20th century]
- "Old Rules for the New Economy"
- "The Corporation as a Command Economy"
- and Michael Froomkin, The Next Economy?
- William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
- Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System [Review: Turning the Wheels]
- Robert H. Frank, Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of Emotions
- John Kenneth Galbraith
- The Affluent Society
- The New Industrial State
- Money
- The Great Crash 1929
- A Tenured Professor
- Culture of Contentment
- The Good Society
- a typically prescient article from early 1987
- Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers [If you don't have time to actually learn economics, this will help you fake it. Faking it is very important in a soi-disant information society, and for the following reason: if you are over your head in debt, the last thing you want to do is suddenly live frugally.]
- Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom [Free online!]
- John Maynard Keynes
- Economic Consequences of the Peace [To the best of my knowledge, the only accurate economic prophecy ever, written in Keynes's usual immaculate prose.]
- Essays in Persuasion [Especially the last essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren".]
- Paul Krugman
- The Age of Diminished Expectations
- Peddling Prosperity [Shows, very effectively, that all the conventional wisdom about America's economic problems --- "the twin deficits," globalization (for more on which, see Pop Internationalism), the success of supply-side economics, "high-value added, high-technology manufacturing jobs," etc., etc., is wrong.]
- Pop Internationalism [Review: International Economics with the Brothers Grimm, or, Krugman Discovers Ideology]
- Charles Lindblom
- The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It [Probably the single best treatment of the subject I have read. Reviews by Danny Yee and George Scialabba.]
- "The Market as Prison", The Journal of Politics 44 (1982): 324--336 [JSTOR]
- Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
- Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior
- Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Schumpeter was arrogant, elitist, reactionary and brilliant. Half the time he had me saying "why didn't I see that?" and half the time he has my blood boiling. These two states are not mutually exclusive. --- My father suggests that Schumpeter should be counted as the most unorthodox Marxist ever, but perhaps he must share the honor with Neurath.]
- Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom
- Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance [Is the stock market overvalued? Hell yes! (Comment written in late 1999; still true in April 2001.)]
- Herbert Simon
- The Sciences of the Artificial, [Especially ch. 2, "Economic Rationality." "As Samuel Johnson said of the dancing dog, `The marvel is not that it dances well, but that it dances at all' ---- the marvel is not that markets optimize (they don't) but that they often clear."]
- "Rationality as Process and as Product of Thought", American Economic Review 68 (1978): 1--16 [JSTOR]
- Tom Slee, No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice
- Robert Solow, Work and Welfare [On-line essay derived therefrom]
- Statistical Abstract of the United States ["The best book published in the America.... If more people would get into the habit of checking it, our politics would be utterly transformed." --- Paul Krugman.]
- Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society [But many of his later books aren't worth the time, and some are actively misleading]
- Shigeto Tsuru, Japan's Capitalism
- Recommended semi-technical works (jargon but no math):
- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "Walrasian Economics in Retrospect", Quarterly Journal of Economics (2000): 1411--1439 [PDF reprint]
- Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean [Everything you know about small companies and business networks is wrong.]
- F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order [Bearing in mind the important distinction between Hayek-the-profound-social-scientist, and his evil twin, Hayek-the-right-wing-ideologue. "The Use of Knowledge in Society" is superb, and in "Economics and Knowledge" he seems to have been channeling evolutionary game theory...]
- Frank Levy and Peter Temin, "Inequality and Institutions in 20th Century America", MIT Economics Working Paper 07-17 [SSRN]
- Reinhard Selten, "Evolution, Learning, and Economic Behavior", Games and Economic Behavior 3 (1991): 3--24 [In the form of a dialogue between a Bayesian, an economist, an experimental psychologist, an adaptationist biologist, a population geneticist, and an ethologist]
- Joseph Stiglitz, Whither Socialism? [This book is really much broader than its title suggests; effectively it's a primer on the economics of imperfect information and imperfect competetion, and their implications.]
- Sweezy and Magdoff [Of course they're Marxists. They're also damn
good economists, and they've supported distinctly fewer dictators than Milton
Friedman. Deal. --- These books, it should be said, are about capitalism, not
its alternatives.]
- Stagnation and the Financial Explosion
- The Irreverisble Crisis
- Richard H. Thaler, The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life [Why rational-expectations-and-efficiency is demonstrably not right, though there's no comprehensive replacemen]
- Recommended technical works (jargon and/or math):
- Theodore Bergstrom and John Miller, Experiments with Economic Principles [Textbook on experimental economics; very nice]
- Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution [In my humble and supremely unqualified opinion, the best book on microeconomics now available.]
- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "The Inheritance of Inequality", Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (2002): 3--30 [PDF reprint]
- Gerard Debreu, Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium [One of the stupidest things I ever did was pass up a chance to take mathematical economics from Debreu. This is neo-classical economics in its purest form, and absolutely beautiful.]
- Herbert Gintis, Game Theory Evolving: A Problem-Centered Introduction to Modeling Strategic Interaction [Author's book-site]
- Paul Krugman
- Development, Geography and Economic Theory
- Geography and Trade
- The Self-Organizing Economy [Review]
- Rosario N. Mantegna and H. Eugene Stanley, An Introduction to Econophysics: Correlations and Complexity in Finance [Review: Not Exactly Rocket Science]
- Oskar Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations [Read this, and you will never pay any attention to forecasters, or most of the economic news, ever again: and you'll be better off for it.]
- The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics [An encyclopedia, really, with excellent articles from all over the spectrum, many from Big Names --- Arrow, Debreu, Nove, Simon, Sweezy, Winter, etc. --- and a rich feeling for history throughout.]
- Ariel Rubinstein, Modeling Bounded Rationality [Review: O docta simplicitas!]
- Herbert Simon
- An Empirically-based Microeconomics
- Models of Bounded Rationality
- Robert Solow
- Growth Theory: An Exposition
- Learning from "Learning by Doing": Lessons for Economic Growth
- John Sutton
- "Gibrat's Legacy", Journal of Economic Literature 35 (1997): 40--59 [JSTOR]
- Marshall's Tendencies: What Economists Can Know
- Technology and Market Structure: Theory and History
- To read:
- Peter S. Albin, Barriers and Bounds to Rationality: Essays on Economic Complexity and Dynamics in Interactive Systems [Blurb]
- Armen A. Alchian, Economic Forces at Work
- Masanao Aoki
- Backhouse, The Ordinary Business of Life
- William J. Baumol, Downsizing in America: Reality, Causes, and Consequences
- J.-P. B&eacite;nassy, The Macroeconomics of Imperfect Competition and Nonclearing Markets: A Dynamic General Equilibrium Approach [Blurb]
- Giuseppe Bertola, Reto Foellmi, and Josef Zweim¨ller, Income Distribution in Macroeconomic Models [Blurb, ch. 1]
- Mark Blaug, The Methodology of Economics: or How Economists Explain [Blurb]
- Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century
- Samuel Bowles, Steven N. Durlauf and Karla Hoff (eds.), Poverty Traps [Blurb, intro]
- Steven Brakman and Ben J. Heijdra (eds.), The Monopolistic Competition Revolution in Retrospect
- Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble
- William A. ("Buzz") Brock and Steven N. Durlauf, "Interaction-Based Models," SFI Working Paper 00-05-028 ["By interactions, we refer to interdependencies between individual actions that are not mediated by markets"]
- George P. Brockway, Economists Can Be Bad for Your Health: Second Thoughts on the Dismal Science
- Pierre Cahuc and Andre Zylberberg, The Natural Survival of Work: Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Growing Economy [Blurb]
- Colin F. Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction
- Colin F. Camerer and Ernst Fehr, "When Does 'Economic Man' Dominate Social Behavior?", Science 311 (2006): 47--52
- Card and Krueger, Myth and Measurement [The minimum wage]
- Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce
- Carl Chiarella, Foundations for a Disequilibrium Theory of the Business Cycle: Qualitative Analysis and Quantitative Assessment [Blurb]
- Michael P. Clements and David F. Hendry (eds.), Companion to Economic Forecasting
- Russell W. Cooper, Coordination Games: Complementarities and Macroeconomics
- G. Cuniberti, A. Valleriani and J. L. Vega, "Effects of regulation on a self-organized market," cond-mat/0108533 [Conclusion: "the introduction of regulation on the market contributes to lower the average fitness of companies." Of course, since "regulation" is interpreted as a penalty on companies whose fitness improves faster than normal, this is a completely transparent and completely tendentious result...]
- Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure
- T. Di Matteo, T. Aste and M. Gallegati, "Innovation flow through social networks: Productivity distribution", physics/0406091 [Those look an awful lot like log-normals to me.]
- Avinash Dixit, The Making of Economic Policy: A Transaction-Cost Politics Perspective
- Engelbert Dockner et al., Differential Games in Economics and Management Science
- Robert Dorfman, Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, Linear Programming and Economic Analysis
- Steven N. Durlauf, "How Can Statistical Mechanics Contribute to Social Science?" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sceinces USA 96 (1999): 10582--10584
- Robert B. Ekelund and Robert F. Hebert, Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics: Dupuit and the Engineers [Blurb. The book description raises a nice question, which I'm sure the book deals with. Assume, for the sake of argument, that these engineers did invent the ideas of modern micro. before Marshall et al. did — did anyone else pick up on them, or did everyone actually get them from Marshall? In the later case, in what sense did modern micro. originate with these people?]
- Yi Feng, Democracy, Governance, and Economic Performance: Theory and Evidence [Blurb]
- Franklin M. Fisher, Disequilibrium Foundations of Equilibrium Economics []
- Robert H. Frank
- Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status
- Luxury Fever
- and P. K. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society
- Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert T. Boyd and Ernst Fehr (eds.), Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life
- Paul Glimcher, Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain: Science of Neuroeconomics
- Dhananjay K. Gode, Shyam Sunder, "Allocative Efficiency of Markets with Zero-Intelligence Traders: Market as a Partial Substitute for Individual Rationality", The Journal of Political Economy 101 91993): 119--137 [JSTOR]
- Zvi Griliches, "Economic Data Issues" in Handbook of Econometrics, vol. III. [Opens: "My father would never eat minced meat patties in the old country. He would not eat them in restaurants because he didn't know what they were made of, and he wouldn't eat them at home because he did." --- Incidentally, that a set of four books, each large and solid enough to be used as catapult ammunition, can call itself a "handbook" is one of the wonders of the dismal science.]
- Gene M. Grossman, Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy
- Benedetto Gui and Robert Sugde (eds.), Economics and Social Interaction: Accounting for Interpersonal Relations [Blurb]
- Hari M. Gupta and Jose R. Campanha, "Firms Growth Dynamics, Competition and Power Law Scaling," cond-mat/0201219
- Joseph Y. Halpern, "A computer scientist looks at game theory," cs.GT/0201016
- Omar Hamouda and Robin Rowley, Expectations, Equilibrium and Dynamics
- Zellig Harris, The Transformation of Capitalist Society [in the direction of giving workers more power over decisions]
- Bennett Harrison and Marcus Weiss, Workforce Development Networks: Community-Based Organizations and Regional Alliances
- Hayek
- Constitution of Liberty
- Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and New Studies
- The Counter-Revolution of Science
- Geoffrey Heal
- Valuing the Future: Economic Theory and Sustainability
- Nature and the Marketplace: Capturing the Value of Ecosystem Services
- Doug Henwood, After the New Economy
- Jack Hirshleifer and John G. Riley, The Analytics of Uncertainty and Information
- Hobson, Imperialism [Hilferding and Hobson are about the unprecedented increases in global trade and the mobility of capital, emerging markets and the export of manufacturing industries to the third world: so it's more than slightly astonishing to find that they were written before the Great War.]
- Kevin D. Hoover, Causality in Macroeconomics
- Douglas Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade [Review by Krugman]
- Eric L. Jones, Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture [Blurb]
- Essays in Biography
- Treatise on Money
- An Almost Practical Step Towards Sustainability
- Monopolistic Competition and Macroeconomic Theory
- Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
- Theory of the Moral Sentiments
