An economist is often asked at a cocktail party what to read to learn some economics. People realize that it matters to them what’s happening in the economy, such as inflation or recession or regulation or foreign trade, no less than the computer science of AI or the psychological science of manic depression.
It’s easy to answer the question about chemistry or ancient Greek or any settled science. If you ask an astronomer what to read to learn some astronomy, she’ll have no problem. “Pick up any university textbook for the first course in astronomy.” Actually, I did that decades ago, inspired by a friend who had done so. He was better at math than I was, and his daughter later won a Nobel in astronomy. I had been a fan of astronomy as a child, until I learned it was applied physics and physics was applied mathematics. As an adult economist, though, I was less frightened by the mathematics, which anyway isn’t much in that first-year textbook.
But there’s a problem with economics, even first-year economics. Economics isn’t settled.
That’s not all bad, or a disgraceful scandal in the science. Obviously, for one thing, economics involves issues of ethics about which humans disagree. For another, the disagreeing, talking, loving, hating of humans are not as simple to think about as are point masses in physics. An economist once pointed out that physics would be radically different, and less settled even about point masses, if atoms could converse with each other.
And a science that is entirely settled is intellectually dead, in the way optics in physics has been for centuries now. Elementary physics at the level of F = ma is settled, and therefore any old physics book can instruct you in it. At the frontiers of physics the issues are far from settled, in a way that reminds one of economics. The biggest scandal among several in modern physics, as any candid physicist can tell you, is that 95 percent of the energy and matter in the universe is “dark,” the word being a way of saying “Damned if I know what the hell it is.” Ninety-five percent.
The embarrassments in economics are comparable. We do not have a settled theory of business cycles or a settled theory of economic growth or a settled theory of how well government works.
So I can’t quite say, “Pick up any university textbook for the first course in economics.” Most teachers of economics in Brazil are statists for sure, and often Marxists, and the books they will recommend will teach you to be a statist, or a Marxist. Mazzucato is an example. Most such teachers in France are math-mad, always statist, and teach you to be so, and never understand actual economics. Piketty is an example.
What to read, then? Well, my own books. Ha, ha. But seriously, you can learn a lot from Why Liberalism Works, or from two books by Art Carden and me. Or from reading this column religiously. All highly recommended.
But I could give you a reading list of others, and I will next time.
Meanwhile, don’t read most popular “economics.” That’s like reading physics before Galileo and Newton.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.
Good text. But do you think that it is better for newcomers in economics to study a diverse list of materials, that have diferent approaches to economy (including not only liberal and libertarian material, but also Marxist, keynesian, statistic, egalitarian and other approaches)?
The world does not NEED a single, “settled” theory of business cycles, economic growth, etc. It needs the cognitive capacity for multidimensional thinking, that is, the ability to recognise that the practical relevance of any theory largely (if not entirely) depends on context and on its interaction with multiple economic, institutional, social, cultural and political factors.