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Comment by wjn0 | Hacker News Reader

When I read articles like this I wish I had a better grounding in economics, I guess specifically macroeconomics? Is there a well-known, digestible textbook?

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Principles of Economics by Greg Mankiw is the intro text at most universities, it's very well written.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-7th-Mankiws/dp/1...

Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/...

^ Not this one. Mankiw is already ideological enough, Sowell and Hazlitt should be stayed far away from. The real answer to the above commenter is that you can't, not really. You can put a lot of work into understanding Mankiw and then you go to econ grad school and learn all the caveats and how much of it is basically wrong. Economists themselves barely understand the economy and they spent years and decades getting to 'barely.' A layman is basically incapable.

In that sense maybe I'm wrong and maybe Sowell is the good choice, just decide your ideological viewpoint on the economy now, read enough to defend your viewpoints to other laymen and let that be that.

Macroeconomics by Abel, Bernanke and Croushore is a digestible text.

Macroeconomics by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells is a good one.

Please don't read anything by Paul Krugman, unless you believe we are in the global recession he predicted after Trump's election.

While this particular prediction didn't (yet) come true, Krugman is at least one of the few name-brand economists who will admit when he is wrong. He's also got a Nobel in the field, so to write off his textbook as unreadable for a failed prediction seems like a little much.

An economics Nobel is not the same thing as a Nobel in (for example) Physics, and citing it as an appeal to authority is intentionally misleading.

Surely you would still accept credentials, right? Like, I would expect a PhD, etc. Nobel in economics certainly isn't without meaning in that regard.

Economists have predicted 7 of the last 5 recessions.

Krugman now is a political hack but his earlier work was ok, including his early books.

His early work on trade policy is good, his other stuff is not great

Agree, his school book was fine. His stuff on the recession is terrible simplified populist Post-Keynsian wash.

"The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought" by Jerry Z. Muller is one of my favorites for history. "The Growth of Economic Thought" by Henry Spiegel is also good.

"Money Mischief" by Milton Friedman is a good short one monetary policy.

"Fault Lines" is a solid book by Raghuram Rajan.

Those will get your more interested than reading raw economic textbooks, imo.

This is good as an alternative take: https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded-...

Yeah maybe don't start with some snake-oil anti-everything guy. Read the actual literature first and then go to those claiming to know better.

Or better, read some review of the actual literature before investing in a book, to see if it's snake oil. For instance:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...

From the cited text: "The question is considered why the economics profession has failed over most of the past century to make any progress concerning knowledge of the monetary system, and why it instead moved ever further away from the truth as already recognised by the credit creation theory well over a century ago. The role of conflicts of interest and interested parties in shaping the current bank-free academic consensus is discussed."

My 100 year old theory is better then your 100 theory. Even if it has no support form most people who have spent their whole lives studying it.

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