I also got rejected from the Asian Jersey Shore show…they said I wasn’t spontaneous enough…w/e
FrankArabia Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > there is a lot one can learn from economics if > they stay away from mathematics. > > one of my(and most academic) biggest mistakes > was/is spending so much time learning maths in > econ when the fruits were really in plain > language. > > i don’t regret studying econ but i wish i never > got pass basic calculus. > > if you need an equation to explain the result, > ignore it. economics is basic common sense that > should be understantable within 5 minutes of > explanation. I like this post.
Re: Economics & Math: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?_r=1&ref=paulkrugman I know… *Krugman*… think of him what you will, but this is a fairly insightful article.
Chasing Goldman Sachs: How the masters of the universe melted wall street down …and why they’ll take us to the brink again by Suzanne McGee will make u rethink finance.
George Cooper Origin of Financial Crises
Thomas Sowell has written a ton of books on economics, some more accessible (e.g. Applied Economics) and some more difficult (e.g. Knowledge and Decisions) all of them insightful and written in plain (enough) language. Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” is great as is anything from Bastiat.
Thomas Sowell is incredible. I love how he makes his points so clear and understandable without sacrificing substance.
Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan
I’m surprised someone commented negatively about Keynes’ writing style. I read ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ in college and thought it was really well written. He has some others writings and commentary on other areas (including stock investment) that survive and are worth a look. Sure ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ is going to be a hard slog to read, but that is the nature of the beast. It is a very long and technical document. Galbraith and Krugman are both excellent writers also in my opinion. I know Paul Krugman has become very political of late and is now quite a controversial figure, but when I was studying his microeconomic work in college a few years ago, I read ‘The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science’ and ‘The Return of Depression Economics’ and thought they were very good.
I think Krugman and Galbraith have overwhelming left wing political bias. Sowell is too much libertarian bias. I have difficulty granting them high marks for objectivity and reliability… They all write fairly well, though…which translates well for their career as public intellectuals.
True. To strip out most of the politics, you really need to read the academic journals. The problem with that of course is that they tend to dense, unwieldy and full of esoteric language. There is also a very high level of knowledge assumed of the reader. Once top economists start writing books for the masses, I think it is simply human nature for them to be loaded with their own biases and opinions.
there is no way to strip out politics from political economy. its absurd to study economics outside of politics. economy is the study of the social system, not a study of experiments on robots. when all you have are a set of mathematical equations based on clean assumptions you essentially have some interesting insight on logical reductionism. however, their applicability in the form of economics is often misleading and downright stupid. take for instance the economics of crime. what was the prescription from U of C to lower crime? more jail sentence and capital punishment. from what i gathered, that didn’t work out too well. human beings are rational calculators that malfunction consistently so any assumption otherwise is most likely going to lead to misleading conclusions that hold only in situations that don’t really matter.
Yeah, I agree. But people like “Keynes’ high priest” Krugman and “Adam Smith” Sowell seem to be fronts for their respective parties. Krugman rarely says a foul word about Democrats and Sowell never says a foul word about Republicans/libertarians… And many of their arguments have a strong “straw man” vibe. I also get the impression that there seems to be historical data points omitted for an agenda.
human beings are biased. that is what makes them human. objectivity is always the burden of a third party.
Of course most human thinking has bias…I mean there’s neurosciencific research and psychology studies that have proven this. However, there is a difference between a mildly biased popular intellectual and a popular intellectual who gets paid under the table (and/or is performing self aggrandizement) to be a fanatic.