Meta Econ Takeover Day 45
3338 sats \ 14 comments \ @Undisciplined 30 Nov 2023 meta
I missed Hazlitt's birthday yesterday. I'm probably one of the few people who read Human Action before Economics in One Lesson, which is widely considered the best introduction to economic thought.
Where did everyone start with learning economics?
What do you think is the best introductory economics work?
Remembering the Great Henry Hazlitt on His Birthday By Gary Galles "Henry Hazlitt, a great champion of liberty and Austrian economics, was born on November 28, 1894. His most famous book, Economics in One Lesson, remains a best seller thirty years after his death."
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1117 sats \ 3 replies \ @grayruby 30 Nov 2023
I read Econ in One Lesson but I haven't read Human Action. Should I add it to must list of must reads?
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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 30 Nov 2023
Human Action goes deep into the philosophical underpinnings of economics, before building out the theory itself. I don't think there's a better book for understanding economics, but it's very long and pretty dense.
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670 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 30 Nov 2023
Sounds good. I will add to my list of must reads but long and dense so procrastinate for a couple years before reading. Haha.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 30 Nov 2023
Bob Murphy wrote Choice, which is a shorter synthesis of the main ideas in Human Action. I haven't read it though, so I don't know how well it conveys the parts I found most profound.
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1120 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 30 Nov 2023
I was always a math nerd and was a physics major in college. But I went to grad school in econ when I found out how mathy econ was and I thought it was cool to use models to predict human behavior.
It was a fun intellectual exercise, but now I am much more skeptical about the usefulness of economic models and would advocate a more holistic approach to economics which values experience, intuition, and discourse in addition to modeling and statistics.
That being said, models, math, and statistics have an important place. Disciplines that don't ground their theories in rigorous analysis also tend to go off the rails.
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670 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 30 Nov 2023
Disciplines that don't ground their theories in rigorous analysis also tend to go off the rails.
Yup. Or condemn themselves to irrelevance. Answering all criticisms by pointing to your deductive system is not a winning recipe.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 30 Nov 2023
My background was also math and physics, before going into econ. However, I was already pretty skeptical of using the same kind of mathematics in econ that gets used in physics. I think the Austrians get that mostly right.
I do think there's a huge role for set theory and abstract algebra, though; a la Kenneth Arrow's famous work.
I mostly do econometrics in my own research. While I don't think that's the right way to understand economics, I do think it's invaluable for understanding economic history.
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1270 sats \ 5 replies \ @siggy47 30 Nov 2023
One lesson was my first economics book, but my first libertarian book was Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick. That book certainly touched on Austrian economics and also was a good intro.
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866 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 30 Nov 2023
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is one of my favorite books. I can't recommend it highly enough.
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1157 sats \ 3 replies \ @siggy47 30 Nov 2023
Me too. I discovered it in a bookstore in 1989 and it changed my life.
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1192 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 30 Nov 2023
I was already an ancap, but I hadn't read a ton of the literature, yet. Because of that, there were a few places where I spotted holes in his arguments, but I loved the style of analysis.
My wife bought it for me as a birthday present, because she knew I was getting really into libertarian thought and she's really into philosophy.
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1179 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 30 Nov 2023
He was a bright guy. In later life he backtracked on a lot of his libertarian philosophy. I remember reading that he was still living in his New York City rent controlled apartment! Talk about not walking the walk.
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485 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture 1 Dec 2023
Yes, great to see the forward progress. A great example!
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1157 sats \ 0 replies \ @franzap 30 Nov 2023
I first read Economics in One Lesson, recommended on national TV by Javier Milei
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