I’m looking to expand my knowledge of economics. Macroeconomic policy seems to be a topic of heated debate lately and I’d like to hold more informed opinions.
The thing is, trying to find objective web-based resources on topics like the Federal Reserve leaves me with the impression that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad at the moment. I can find a million blogs and YouTube videos shouting about the Fed being unconstitutional(!) but a clear picture of the underlying policies and motivations driving it all seems too unsexy or too complicated to merit a lot of commentary from the web.
…So, back to books. Any recommendations? I know I can’t expect to read a single tome and become a guru but I’d like to know more than I do.
Background: I have an admittedly superficial, “wikipedia level” knowledge of these topics currently. I also possess an engineering degree and the ability to parse complicated math but statistics are a weak point for me. Most importantly, I’m interested in how it works rather than how it should work; I can find all the editorials I want on the web.
Well, here we are a month and change later with nary a reply. Am I permitted a bump? Perhaps hard core economics wonks just don’t frequent IMHO?
We’re talking near abject ignorance here, people. Throw me a bone.
Mods:
I initially considered posting this in GQ (but didn’t because, “recommend a book”, didn’t seem like a factual question) or GD (but didn’t because I wanted recommendations rather than a fight about recommendations) before settling on IMHO. If you, in your moddery, feel that another forum is better suited for this task than IMHO, please move the thread. Or let it plummet into the abyss again if you deem it necessary.
MIT has course materials from their economics department online as part of their OpenCourseWare initiative. If your serious about developing economic literacy, you could do a lot worse than to go through some of the basic classes.
Any basic textbook on macroeconomics would be a good start for someone with “near abject ignorance.” I would just look at amazon and grab one that was cheap and had decent reviews.
Maybe something like: Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know by David A. Moss (Hardcover - Jul 5, 2007)
Buy new: $26.95 $21.08
That MIT thing looks promising, ultrafilter. Thanks for the suggestion.
And mining for ratings on Amazon was not my first choice, FasterThanMeerkats– that’s pretty fast, btw-- but it’s something I’ve done before and might do again. Was just hoping someone who’d read a lot of them would point me to “the good one” if possible. But I guess that’s just another form of review-mining, right? :dubious:
The MIT pages seem to be a good start. You could supplement that with a popular intermediate textbook. They should cover the same material.
If you want to understand the business cycle, the boom and bust, expansions and recessions, I’d say the most important thing to absorb first is the model of aggregate supply and demand. The funny thing about the aggregate curves is that they are basically shaped in the same way as the microeconomics supply and demand curves, but for entirely different reasons. Understanding the business cycle is an exercise in understanding the interaction of the curves, which means at core, why they’re shaped that way. Aggregate demand is a real bear. It’s where most of the squabbling takes place.
The downside with the textbook/academic approach is that it will be a bit detached, and sometimes not even true. The textbook explanation of the “money multiplier”, for example, is a convenient fiction. Real banking doesn’t work that way. You really only get a grip with some of the material when you see it in the real world. But the tricky thing is that the problems that macroeconomics deals with tend to be core problems of society, which means it’s essentially impossible to remove the opinion element. If you find someone providing objective facts about how the economy as a whole works, and has worked in the past, then that person will necessarily have policy recommendations that are in accord with the stated facts they provide.
The key to finding real insight isn’t, then, to ignore commentary. It is to get a balance of commentary from fact-based people who hold differing political alignments.
If you get an idea of what aggregate supply and demand really are – not just as curved lines on paper but as core concepts – then I’d recommend you go through the blog archives of Paul Krugman, the famous liberal economist, and Scott Sumner, the somewhat obscure libertarian economist. The contrast, two intelligent people with different perspectives looking at the same set of facts, can be illuminating.
I’m reading ‘Crisis Economics’ (for fun :eek:), by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, ATM. I’m biased as Roubini is my favorite economist, but I recommend this book*.
*It so far has been a very good read, although unsurprising as I’ve been reading about economics for quite a while and stick to authors that Roubini also tends to agree with. Some confirmation bias, maybe.
And with this in mind I shall devote myself to achieving a standard of conversance with the subject matter that will make it possible for me to differentiate between fact and fiction. At the moment I feel like anyone with the capacity to hand-wave authoritatively about the various “M’s” can snow me right out of the conversation. Which is unsatisfying.
