Economics

09 Nov 2009 16:24

---

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
• Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street [Review by Steve Laniel]
• John Kenneth Galbraith
  • The Affluent Society
  • The New Industrial State
  • Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went [Review by Stephen Laniel]
  • The Great Crash: 1929
  • A Tenured Professor
  • Culture of Contentment
  • The Good Society [Review by Paul Krugman]
  • 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 [Comments]
• 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]
• David Colander, Hans Follmer, Armin Haas, Michael Goldberg, Kataraina Juselius, Alan Kirman, Thomas Lux and Brigitte Sloth, "The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics" [PDF preprint]
• David Colander, Peter Howitt, Alan Kirman, Axel Leijonhufvud and Perry Mehrling, "Beyond DSGE Models: Towards an Empirically-Based Macroeconomics" [PDF preprint]
• Jan Elster, "Excessive Ambitions", Capitalism and Society 4:2 (2009): 1
• 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]
• Alexander Rosenberg, Economics: Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? [Mini-review]
• 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. Review by Steve Laniel]
  • "Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics" [Nobel Prize lecture, 2001. PDF]
• 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):
• Nabil al-Najjar, "Decision Makers as Statisticians: Diversity, Ambiguity and Learning", Econometrica forthcoming [preprint]
• 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]
• Bent Jesper Christensen and Nicholas M. Kiefer, Economic Modeling and Inference [Good as a summary of current recommended practices for setting up, solving, and estimating dynamic programming models. I wanted to like this more than I did.]
• 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. PDF]
• Steven N. Durlauf, "How Can Statistical Mechanics Contribute to Social Science?" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96 (1999): 10582--10584
• Herbert Gintis, Game Theory Evolving: A Problem-Centered Introduction to Modeling Strategic Interaction [Author's book-site]
• Trygve Haavelmo, "The Probability Approach in Econometrics", Econometrica 12 (1944, supplement): iii--115 [JSTOR]
• Jack Hirshleifer, "The Private and Social Value of Information and the Reward to Inventive Activity", American Economic Review 61 (1971): 561--574 [JSTOR]
• Charles Kenny, "What Does the Eastern European Growth Experience Tell Us About the Policy and Convergence Debates?" [PDF preprint]
• Alan Kirman, "Whom or What Does the Representative Individual Represent?", Journal of Economic Perspectives 6 (1992): 117--136 [Answer: no one; accordingly it "deserves to be buried". JSTOR]
• Paul Krugman
  • Development, Geography and Economic Theory
  • Geography and Trade
  • The Self-Organizing Economy [Review]
• Aki Lehtinen and Jaakko Kuorikoski, "Computing the Perfect Model: Why Do Economists Shun Simulation", Philosophy of Science 74 (2007): 304--329 [This seems right, but more like reasons for economists to change their ideals than anything else.]
• Charles Manski, Identification for Prediction and Decision [Review: Better Roughly Right Than Exactly Wrong]
• 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 half 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
• Laura Spierdijk and Mark Voorneveld, "Superstars without Talent? The Yule Distribution Controversy", The Review of Economics and Statistics 91 (2009): 648--652 [PDF preprint]
• John Sutton
  • "Gibrat's Legacy", Journal of Economic Literature 35 (1997): 40--59 [JSTOR]
  • Marshall's Tendencies: What Economists Can Know? [Micro-review.]
  • Technology and Market Structure: Theory and History

To read:
• George A. Akerlof, Explorations in Pragmatic Economics
• George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism [Blurb]
• 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
• Michael Alexeev and Robert Conrad, "The Elusive Curse of Oil", The Review of Economics and Statistics 91 (2009): 586--598
• Masanao Aoki
  • New Approaches to Macroeconomic Modeling: Evolutionary Stochastic Dynamics, Multiple Equilibria, and Externalities as Field Effect [Blurb]
  • Modeling Aggregate Behavior and Fluctuations in Economics: Stochastic Views of Interacting Agents [Blurb]
• Backhouse, The Ordinary Business of Life
• Nicholas Bardsley, Robin Cubitt, Peter Moffatt, Graham Loomes, Chris Starmer and Robert Sugden, Experimental Economics: Rethinking the Rules [blurb]
• William J. Baumol
  • The Free-Market Innovation Machine
  • Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism
• J.-P. Bénassy, 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]
• Richard Blundell and Thomas M. Stoker, "Heterogeneity and Aggregation", Journal of Economic Literature 43 (2005): 347--391 [JSTOR]
• Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century
• Tito Boeri and Jan van Ours, The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets [blurb, ch. 1]
• 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
• 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
• Fred Campano and Dominick Salvatore, Income Distribution
• 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
• James Crotty, "Are Keynesian Uncertainty and Macrotheory Compatible? Conventional Decision Making, Institutional Structures, and Conditional Stability in Keynesian Macromodels" [PDF preprint]
• 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
• David N. DeJong and Chetan Dave, Structural Macroeconometrics [blurb, sample chapters]
• Marco Del Negro, Frank Schorfheie, Frank Smets and Rafael Wouters, "On the Fit of New Keynesian Models", Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 25 (2007): 123--162 [Including discussion and reply]
• 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
• Kevin Doogan, New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work
• Robert Dorfman, Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, Linear Programming and Economic Analysis
• 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 [blurb]
• Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s [Blurb]
• 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
• Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg, Imperfect Knowledge Economics: Exchange Rates and Risk [blurb, ch. 1]
• 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 (1993): 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]
• 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
• Michael Heller, The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives [Review by Stephen Laniel]
• Doug Henwood, After the New Economy
• Jack Hirshleifer, The Dark Side of the Force: Economic Foundations of Conflict Theory [blurb]
• 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]
• Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences [Review by Danny Yee]
• Keynes
  • Essays in Biography
  • Treatise on Money
• Charles Kindleberger, Historical Economics: Art or Science? [online]
• Janos Kornai, Anti-Equilibrium
• Roberto Leombruni and Matteo Richiardi, "Why are economists sceptical about agent-based simulations?", Physica A 355 (2005): 103--109 ["We look at the following problematic areas: (i) interpretation of the simulation dynamics and generalization of the results, and (ii) estimation of the simulation model. We show that there exist solutions for both these issues."]
• Michael Margill and Martine Quinzii, Theopry of Incomplete Markets [Blurb]
• James G. March, A Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen
• Bhashkar Mazumder, "Fortunate Sons: New Estimates of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States Using Social Security Earnings Data", The Review of Economics and Statistics 87 (2005): 235--255
• Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction
• John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar: The Natural History of Markets
• Diana A. Mendes, Vivaldo M. Mendes, J. Sousa Ramos, "Symbolic Dynamics in a Matching Labour Market Model",nlin.CD/0608002
• Pierre-Michel Menger, "Artistic Labor Markets and Careers", Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 541--574
• Franco Modigliani, Adventures of an Economist
• Barrington Moore, Moral Aspects of Economic Growth, and Other Essays
• Mary S. Morgan, The History of Econometric Ideas [blurb]
• Gustavus Myers, Hereditary American Fortunes
• Jean-Pierre Nadal, Denis Phan, Mirta B. Gordon and Jean Vannimenus, "Monopoly Market with Externality: An Analysis with Statistical Physics and Agent Based Computational Economics," cond-mat/0311096
• Edward J. Nell, Making Sense of a Changing Economy: Technology, Markets and Morals
• Leland Gerson Neuberg, Conceptual Anomalies in Economics and Statistics: Lessons from the Social Experiment [blurb]
• Kiyohiko G. Nishimura, Imperfect Competition, Differential Information, and Microfoundations of Macroeconomics [Blurb]
• Haim Ofek, Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution [blurb]
• Paul Osterman, Securing Prosperity: The American Labor Market: How It Has Changed and What to Do about It
• Muge Ozman, "Interactions in economic models: Statistical mechanics and networks", Mind and Society 4 (2005): 223--238
• Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism
• Joel M. Podolny, Status Signals: A Sociological Study of Market Competition
• Adam Przeworski, States and Markets: A Primer in Political Economy
• Don Ross, Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation [Blurb]
• Alvin E. Roth, "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets", Journal of Economic Perspectives forthcoming (2007) [PDF preprint. Thanks to reader Nicolas D. P. for pointing this out to me.]
• Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment
• Gilles Saint-Paul, Innovation and Inequality: How Does Technical Progress Affect Workers? [blurb, intro]
• Paul Samuelson, Foundations of Economic Analysis
• Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics [That is, the debt of economic thought, in its formative period, to ideas about the natural world. Blurb]
• J. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis
• Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice
• Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life
• Robert Solow
  • An Almost Practical Step Towards Sustainability
  • Monopolistic Competition and Macroeconomic Theory
• Adam Smith
  • Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
  • Theory of the Moral Sentiments
• Joe Stiglitz
  • Promoting Competition and Regulatory Policy: With Examples from Network Industries
  • Towards a New Paradigm for Development: Strategies, Policies, and Processes
• Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism
• John Sutton, Sunk Costs and Market Structure: Price Competition, Advertising, and the Evolution of Concentration
• Leigh Tesfatsion and Kenneth L. Judd (eds.), Agent-Based Computational Economics, vol. 2 of the Handbook of Computational Economics
• Richard Thaler, Quasi-Rational Economics
• Hal Varian, Microeconomic Analysis [The standard reference for lo, these many years; need to actually read it...]
• Geerat J. Vermeij, Nature: An Economic History [Review in American Scientist]
• Dejan Vinkovic and Alan Kirman, "A Physical Analogue of the Schelling Model", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 19261--19265
• Steven Vogel, Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Economies
• Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode, "The Psychological Consequences of Money", Science 314 (2006): 1154--1156
• Joel Waldfogel, The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can't Always Get What You Want [Blurb]