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What should every aspiring economist read?


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I've finished with all of my applications so I've got some free time until the spring semester starts and I'm looking for something to read. So i was wondering, what do you think every aspiring economist should read? I'm not looking for PhD prep books, just suggestions for some good books either in or related to the field of economics. Thanks!
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This may be a bit unpopular, but learn some history of economic thought. When you do you will realize that many of the "novel" ideas in recent years are 100+ years old, only now they have more formal math. After Krugman won the Nobel, I was talking to one of my profs who has done a lot of HET work, who said that almost every idea of Krugman's was actually around 100-150 years old, but Krugman and most of the profession never realized it because they don't know HET (though the prof did admit that Krugman added a formal mathematical model). Also, this prof is a URPE member, so it is not some Krugman hating Austrian or supply-sider saying this. For another example, some behavioral economists talk about this "new" idea that stock market traders sometimes trade just for the thrills and not because they are trying to make money. However, Adam Smith himself made references to such a concept. Some members of the German Historical School in the late 19th century already developed some of the framework later used in Law and Economics. There are quite a few more examples of this.

 

There are even books on the history of mathematical methods (Gram and Walsh 1980 comes to mind), so it is not all just some historical philosophy fluff as many tend to think of HET. Learning some basic HET will give you a better understanding of the economic concepts and where they are coming from.

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Some of direct relevance:

 

Elster, Nuts & Bolts for the Social Sciences

Klamer, Conversations with Economists

McCloskey, Rhetoric of Economics

Stigler, Economist as Preacher

Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions

 

Some of my personal favorites, in no particular order:

 

Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Book I, at least)

Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior

Braudel, Civilization & Capitalism

E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature

Friedman, Capitalism & Freedom

 

Below are some journal articles--drawn from bibliography I happen to have handy, so not representative by any means. (Also see the Becker book above for a collection of some of his best). They're a mixture of readable classics, useful summaries, and musing about methodology...

 

Armen A. Alchian, “Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory,” The Journal of Political Economy 58, no. 3 (June 1950): 211-221

 

Armen A Alchian and Harold Demsetz, “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization,” The American Economic Review 62, no. 5 (December 1972): 777-795.

 

Kenneth J. Arrow, “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare,” The Journal of Political Economy 58, no. 4 (August 1950): 328-346.

 

Kenneth E. Boulding, “Economics as a Moral Science,” The American Economic Review 59, no. 1 (1969): 1-12.

 

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Walrasian Economics in Retrospect,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 4 (November 2000): 1411-1439.

 

R. H Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no. 16, 2 (November 1937): 386-405.

 

R. H Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics 3 (October 1960): 1-44.

 

David Colander, “The Making of an Economist Redux,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 175-198.

 

Harold Demsetz, “The Exchange and Enforcement of Property Rights,” Journal of Law and Economics 7 (October 1964): 11-26.

 

Steven N. Durlauf, What Should Policymakers Know About Economic Complexity? (Santa Fe Institute, October 1997), RePEc, What Should Policymakers Know About Economic Complexity?.

 

Milton Friedman and L. J Savage, “The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk,” The Journal of Political Economy 56, no. 4 (August 1948): 279-304.

 

F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945): 519-530.

 

J. R. Hicks, “Mr. Keynes and the "Classics"; A Suggested Interpretation,” Econometrica 5, no. 2 (April 1937): 147-159.

 

Harold Hotelling, “Stability in Competition,” The Economic Journal 39, no. 153 (March 1929): 41-57.

 

Daniel Kahneman, “A Psychological Perspective on Economics,” The American Economic Review 93, no. 2 (May 2003): 162-168.

 

Paul Krugman, “Two Cheers for Formalism,” The Economic Journal 108, no. 451 (November 1998): 1829-1836.

 

Robert E. Lucas, “Nobel Lecture: Monetary Neutrality,” The Journal of Political Economy 104, no. 4 (August 1996): 661-682.

 

N. Gregory Mankiw, “A Quick Refresher Course in Macroeconomics,” Journal of Economic Literature 28, no. 4 (December 1990): 1645-1660.

 

Stephen A. Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production,” Review of Radical Political Economics 6, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 60-112.

 

Donald [Deirdre] N McCloskey, “The Loss Function Has Been Mislaid: The Rhetoric of Significance Tests,” The American Economic Review 75, no. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 1985): 201-205.

 

Donald [Deirdre] N. McCloskey, “Economic Science: A Search Through the Hyperspace of Assumptions?,” Methodus 3, no. 1 (1991): 6-16.

 

Elinor Ostrom, “Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 137-158.

 

A. C. Pigou, “Newspaper Reviewers, Economics and Mathematics,” The Economic Journal 51, no. 202/203 (September 1941): 276-280.

 

Martin Shubik, “Game Theory and Operations Research: Some Musings 50 Years Later,” Operations Research 50, no. 1 (January 2002): 192-196.

 

John J Siegfried and Wendy A Stock, “The Market for New Ph.D. Economists in 2002,” The American Economic Review 94, no. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association San Diego, CA, January 3-5, 2004 (May 2004): 272-285.

 

Herbert A. Simon, “Rationality in Psychology and Economics,” The Journal of Business 59, no. 4 (October 1986): S209-S224.

 

Robert M. Solow, “Does Economics Make Progress?,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 36, no. 3 (December 1982): 13-31.

 

George J Stigler, “The Conference Handbook,” The Journal of Political Economy 85, no. 2 (April 1977): 441-443.

 

George J. Stigler and Gary S. Becker, “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum,” The American Economic Review 67, no. 2 (March 1977): 76-90.

 

Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The Causes and Consequences of The Dependence of Quality on Price,” Journal of Economic Literature 25, no. 1 (March 1987): 1-48.

 

Robert Sugden, “Spontaneous Order,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 3, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 85-97.

 

Cass R. Sunstein, “Foreword: On Academic Fads and Fashions,” Michigan Law Review 99, no. 6 (May 2001): 1251-1264.

 

Leigh Tesfatsion, “Agent-Based Computational Economics: A Constructive Approach to Economic Theory,” in Handbook of Computational Economics, Volume 2: Agent-Based Computational Economics, ed. Leigh Tesfatsion and Kenneth L. Judd, Handbooks in Economics (The Netherlands: North-Holland/Elsevier, 2006), http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/hbintlt.pdf.

 

E. Roy Weintraub, “The Microfoundations of Macroeconomics: A Critical Survey,” Journal of Economic Literature 15, no. 1 (March 1977): 1-23.

 

Also, a couple of the above are Nobel lectures, and in general the various Nobel lectures are a great way to get a bird's-eye view of economics. They're available collected in book form, probably at your school's library...

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Since I double-posted, and this silly software doesn't allow deletion of posts, let me add that I agree that reading the history of economic thought--as well as economic history--is useful. And it's not something you'll have much time for in grad school (unless you're attending a rare program that requires a course in one or the other), so now is a great time for it.
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buckykatt, I think you love economics more than I do.

 

I remember finishing finals last april and being all gung-ho to read all these economic books and learn all sorts of math by myself. I ended up spending two days on it over the whole summer. Spent most of the time playing video games on the laptop in the backyard, if I recall.

 

It's important not to burn yourself out, but it's also important not to get rusty. I did no math over summer and it took math camp and a month of classes to get my brain back in fighting trim.

 

Some books I've heard good things about include 'The Art of Strategy', 'Lords of Finance', and 'Europe Between the Oceans'.

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After Krugman won the Nobel, I was talking to one of my profs who has done a lot of HET work, who said that almost every idea of Krugman's was actually around 100-150 years old, but Krugman and most of the profession never realized it because they don't know HET (though the prof did admit that Krugman added a formal mathematical model).

I think you're misrepresenting Krugman by asserting that he didn't realize/suspect his ideas were "new." This is exactly what he was saying in his Nobel lecture (and his How I Work essay, which is in the Passion and Craft book I linked earlier this thread), when he says "Listen to the Gentiles, even if they don't speak your language."

 

Formalizing ideas that originated centuries ago that have since been neglected can be a successful research strategy. Ditto for taking ideas from other fields that having approached these subjects with what economists would consider sufficient rigor.

 

And yes, generally, this is a good time to read stuff that interests you that could potentially inspire truly original ideas for economic research. First couple years are deadline after deadline, and you don't have as much time for that.

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I think you're misrepresenting Krugman by asserting that he didn't realize/suspect his ideas were "new." This is exactly what he was saying in his Nobel lecture (and his How I Work essay, which is in the Passion and Craft book I linked earlier this thread), when he says "Listen to the Gentiles, even if they don't speak your language."

 

Formalizing ideas that originated centuries ago that have since been neglected can be a successful research strategy. Ditto for taking ideas from other fields that having approached these subjects with what economists would consider sufficient rigor.

 

And yes, generally, this is a good time to read stuff that interests you that could potentially inspire truly original ideas for economic research. First couple years are deadline after deadline, and you don't have as much time for that.

 

I don't want to get this thread off track, but I just want to say two things. First, it was not me but one of my profs who was talking about Krugman. The second thing is, I am not (and my prof was not) denigrating Krugman coming up with a formal mathematical model. That is a great contribution to the field. Rather it was just saying that many in the profession were talking about how original his ideas were, and my prof was saying how his ideas were not particularly original and that original ideas which change economics are deserving of a Nobel, but creating a formal mathematical model of what people have come up with in the past is not.

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I just finished "The Prisoner's Dilemma" by William Poundstone which is a fun read. It's mostly a history of the development of game theory, but it's centered around the life of John Von Neumann and the parallels between game theory and cold war strategy that was taking place when game theory first flourished.
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Also for another book to read, Colander's "Why Aren't Economists as Important as Garbagemen" is an interesting collection of some of Colander's essays and papers on the economics profession.

 

And for anyone going to grad school in econ, Leijonhufvud's paper Life Among the Econ is a must read. Absolutely hilarious and still true 35 years later.

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I recommend history of science and history of philosophy. Durant and Russel have good histories of philosophy. For history of science, maybe look at Blaug, but I think lecture notes and reading lists you can find online from university courses are better.

 

I'm a big fan of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty is an interesting collection of essays in a similar vein.

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I'm a big fan of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty is an interesting collection of essays in a similar vein.

 

Kuhn is too scattered, even when he's talking about his own theory. I like Feierabend, too, but wouldn't recommend him without caveats. I think philosophy of science is a lot nicer to read and understand when there is plenty of context, so even if you jump into Kuhn or Rorty or whoever, you should have a good outline of the subject and where they fit in.

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I just finished "The Prisoner's Dilemma" by William Poundstone which is a fun read. It's mostly a history of the development of game theory, but it's centered around the life of John Von Neumann and the parallels between game theory and cold war strategy that was taking place when game theory first flourished.

 

I like Poundstone, too. On the subject of von Neumann, RAND, the Cold War, etc., I just ran across Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science in the library recently. It covers similar ground, though it looked a big dry even to an economics & computer geek like me...

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The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner, a must read for any economist in my opinion. The Worldly Philosophers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm given to understand that this is a famous book. For some reason though, when I started it, I found it so boring that I couldn't get past the first or second chapters. That was a couple of years ago, however, so maybe I was just unfair to it.

 

I like Poundstone, too. On the subject of von Neumann, RAND, the Cold War, etc., I just ran across Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science in the library recently. It covers similar ground, though it looked a big dry even to an economics & computer geek like me...

Mirowski, be warned, is a postmodernist. But his potential economics future scenarios will at least make you think about the scope and nature of economics (and god knows we need more of that) even if you do not agree with him on whatever point.

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