Economics

I also have a degree in economics and can confirm that and are correct

Also potentially Basic Economics by Sowell though it has a thick ideological slant towards non-interventionism. Still great at explaining important concepts

Mankiw's textbook is for non-economists to learn the basics of economics. It is not supposed to be deeper than that.

Mankiw's intro econ course goes into much more detail than his own book. It's a book for brainlets. It won't teach you to do anything except parrot mainstream thinking, and even then, you will only understand simple and sterile cases. You won't learn how things came to be, for the most part, and you won't be able to critically examine the issues either.

The only *real* positive I can think of from reading this book are the snippets of articles and editorials, mostly about the 2008 economic crisis, that were peppered into the textbook. They show just how fucking clueless and naive most economists, bankers, and regulators actually are when it comes to ensuring that everything runs smoothly.

btw, most of my critique was based on the macro section of the book... micro seems fine although there's not much that can go wrong with micro.

>Also potentially Basic Economics by Sowell though it has a thick ideological slant towards non-interventionism. Still great at explaining important concepts
There's absolutely no concepts explained at all. He says scarcity exists and just precedes to state markets work without introducing any tools to understand anything. For example here's a quote from "Basic Economics":
>Although government bonds get paid off when they reach their maturity dates, usually new bonds are issued and sold, so that the national debt is turned over rather than being paid off, though at particular periods of history some countries have paid off their national debts, either partially or completely. This does not mean that selling government bonds is without costs or risks. The cost to the government includes the interest that must be paid on the national debt. The more important cost to the economy is the government’s absorption of investment funds that could otherwise have gone into the private sector, where they would have added to the country’s capital equipment.
>When the national debt reaches a size where investors begin to worry about whether it can continue to be turned over as government bonds mature, without raising interest rates to attract the needed buyers, that can lead to expectations that higher interest rates will inhibit future investment—an expectation that can immediately inhibit current investment. Rising interest rates for government bonds tend to affect other interest rates, which also rise, due to competition for investment funds in the financial markets—and that in turn tends to reduce credit and the aggregate demand on which continuing prosperity depends.

Anyone who has empirically studied or understands the bond markets knows this is total bullshit.

bondeconomics.com/

>It won't teach you to do anything except parrot mainstream thinking, and even then, you will only understand simple and sterile cases. You won't learn how things came to be, for the most part, and you won't be able to critically examine the issues either.

That's literally what a textbook for "non-economists to learn the basics of economic" is for. His textbook is pretty large and has 880 pages.
An in-depth book would require much more than that and a decent knowledge of mathematics.

Not really. Having the content of a book like this would make help a lot of my concerns.

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There is nothing theoretically wrong with what Sowell is saying, though the comment about state bonds being a cost to the economy is kind of a fuck you to MPT

>Anyone who has empirically studied or understands the bond markets knows this is total bullshit.

I worked fixed income at a BB bro, I don't know nor care who this guy is but he sounds heterodox so opinion discarded

Do you actually want to understand economics or do you want to buy some loser's narrative on what economics is supposed to be? Modern "mainstream" economics has developed so deeply in addressing virtually every concern economics could possibly face as a field, but people (read: idiots) are quick to disregard it because 1) a hatred of the status quo and 2) its not as easily digestible as someone's edgy narrative as would be published in an 'anti-textbook'

I really don't know what to fucking tell you, dude. Read Mankiw if you want to actually learn economics. If you want to have half-baked midwit opinions on economics to fool your economically illiterate friends into thinking you understand the field then go ahead and read whatever meme books with cool-looking covers you can find. Just don't be intellectually dishonest and say you want to actually learn about economics when you clearly don't want to learn anything and have no respect for the field

>do you want to buy some loser's narrative on what economics is supposed to be
did you check out this "loser's" book? they're tenured economics professors. here's a quick Wikipedia blurb: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economics_Anti-Textbook
While I'd rather a book focus on foundational principles and epistemic methodology to cultivate critical thinking in economics, Hill & Myatt do a pretty good job at getting newcomers to examine the difficulties of implementing economic theory than any introductory textbook would. if your intro textbook can't inspire passion in the field, then that's a massive failing.

>modern "mainstream" economics has developed so deeply in addressing virtually every concern economics could possibly face as a field
lmfao, economists thought they had economics "solved" 15 years ago. push some buttons, twist some dials, and pull some levers, and the economy would magically fall into place. people complained that they couldn't predict the financial crisis when the warning signs were blatantly obvious if you knew where to look... into the industries that make up the "organs" of an economy. it's as if nuclear technicians thought they could run a nuclear power plant from the control room without ever strolling around to check up on the cooling systems, examining the piping and wiring, hiring security firms, etc. To me, it's unfathomably bizarre. But maybe that's just me in all my weirdness.

> If you want to have half-baked midwit opinions on economics to fool your economically illiterate friends into thinking you understand the field
lmfao, you would be in the same exact place with Mankiw that you describe, parroting mainstream thought. At least with Hill & Myatt, you could have nuanced opinions that deal with cutting to the root of the matter instead of repeating bullshit like "comparative advantage proves that trade makes us all better off" when you have no way to prove a nation's comparative advantage in *anything* IRL. Meanwhile, economists have few explanations for why countries like the East Asian Tigers and the 19th century United States went against the grain and prospered as a result.

>you clearly don't want to learn anything and have no respect for the field
When I took Mankiw's class, I set curves for exams. At the end of the course, where he answers emails in a Q&A, my question was *the* only one that addressed anything of substance instead of asking about his personal life or talking about the representation of women and minorities at the economics department. You think I'm not interested in learning? On the contrary, I think I'm one of the few people interested in learning compared to the general population at large.

Sadly, I can already see that there's not much substance to the field at large. Economics as a profession seems more like an exercise in smoke and mirrors than a science that could be used to progress humanity in 90% of cases. Respect is earned, and economists have not earned it.

>did you check out this "loser's" book? they're tenured economics professors. here's a quick Wikipedia blurb

I know what the critique is, but the point of introductory economics is never to explicitly describe market failure but to demonstrate the theoretical systems at play that make markets operate. market failure is a more advanced topic and is covered in further courses that have the standard econ 101 as a prerequisite. If you want to have a qualitative overview of economics idk why you would take the econ-stream introductory course and not a general non-prerequisite course about 'the economy', idk what it's called at Harvard but at Yale it was econ001 iirc

>if your intro textbook can't inspire passion in the field, then that's a massive failing

it inspires it for plenty of people, not really anyone's problem you didn't like it

>lmfao, economists thought they had economics "solved" 15 years ago.

no they didn't

>people complained that they couldn't predict the financial crisis when the warning signs were blatantly obvious if you knew where to look

this is revisionist, it was widely understood that the housing market was in a bubble but the underlying mechanism was far more complex than most people understand even today. also, economists' response to the crisis basically averted a second great depression and brought things back to normal in a few years. consider that unemployment in 2009 was lower than the early 80s recession despite the former's severity

>when you have no way to prove a nation's comparative advantage in *anything*

outright wrong, why would you even think that? you can analyze the productive factors in a nation and its exports quite readily

>Meanwhile, economists have few explanations for why countries like the East Asian Tigers and the 19th century United States went against the grain and prospered as a result.

Yes they do, are you kidding me? 19th century America is probably the most studied economic history topic besides the great depression... and what do you think could explain its success? while the old world was burning in revolution and conflict, why would a peaceful state rich in natural resources that attracted massive amounts of immigration from the old world do well? hmm really makes me fucking think

also the east asian tigers' economic liberalization and investment into economic success story is probably the most widely studied and well understood contemporary topic in development economics. and the consensus has successfully defended itself against claims that industrial policy, for instance, was more important than liberalization - there's many papers written about the welfare losses associated with industrial policy and the fact that the competitive advantage inherent to the nations would have emerged in the absence of any policy whatsoever.

cont.

but at the end of the day, all of this is far more than you could possibly hope to engage with in an introductory class. it's as though you're discarding contemporary physics because you took an intro physics course and it didn't explain string theory to you satisfactorily. it's demeaning to the field as a whole and intellectually dishonest

>When I took Mankiw's class, I set curves for exams. At the end of the course, where he answers emails in a Q&A, my question was *the* only one that addressed anything of substance instead of asking about his personal life or talking about the representation of women and minorities at the economics department. You think I'm not interested in learning? On the contrary, I think I'm one of the few people interested in learning compared to the general population at large.

Good for you. Honestly i'm not inclined to believe you given that you claim to be from Harvard but you don't namedrop chetty's changes to the curriculum because they address literally the same meme concerns that you have, but even if this is true it doesn't really mean anything. you're not an expert because you aced an introductory course. i won a physics olympiad in high school but i never studied physics after that so you'd better believe i'd defer to people that actually have and not say some bullshit about physics as a field

>Economics as a profession seems more like an exercise in smoke and mirrors than a science that could be used to progress humanity in 90% of cases.

Ben Bernanke saved the world in 2008 - never forget

>If you want to have a qualitative overview of economics idk why you would take the econ-stream introductory course and not a general non-prerequisite course about 'the economy', idk what it's called at Harvard but at Yale it was econ001 iirc
no such course exists in the catalogue. you have to start at ec10 before you can do anything interesting. the only econ course I really enjoyed was taught by prof. george borjas on labor, but I digress.

>no they didn't
Yes they did. See pic-related.

>this is revisionist
pointing out massive blind spots isn't revisionist. many alarm bells were rung, but economics in theory, policy, and regulation, were wholly unequipped to notice them.

>outright wrong, why would you even think that? you can analyze the productive factors in a nation and its exports quite readily
okay, show me how you would quantify that in real life, outside a simplified textbook example. it's not like you can retool a substantial amount of a country's productive factors, like building cars to developing software, in any meaningful way. what am I missing?

>hmm really makes me fucking think
it really makes me fucking think that the USA built the world's greatest economy in the backs of 20%+ tariffs for more than a century when nearly every mainstream economist today would tell you that it would only hurt the economy in the long-run. if you have any good material that can explain this dichotomy, please save me the snark and educate me.

>it's as though you're discarding contemporary physics because you took an intro physics course and it didn't explain string theory to you satisfactorily
Not at all. Intro physics does a pretty good job at showing how physics lends itself both to mathematical beauty and to empirical science, even if it's at a very basic level. You can walk out of an introductory physics course and have a decent appreciation of a lot of the physics-related phenomena in your every day life. It makes you want to delve even deeper into the mysteries of the world. You wouldn't be able to say the same for economics, there's nothing nearly as "axiomatic" or "foundational" outside some microeconomic concepts.

It's an ugly science, to put it bluntly. And I can't think of many other fields of study that lack that much self-awareness about its ugliness and lack of rigor (where rigor is necessary, anyway).

>chetty
I don't know who that is. Judging from a quick Google search, he wasn't faculty until *literally* last year. Great pseud response, another rhetorical sleight of hand in an attempt to discredit me. Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.

>you're not an expert because you aced an introductory course.
Never claimed to be one. I'm only asking questions because I'm frustrated. I've been frustrated for a very long time.

>Ben Bernanke saved the world in 2008 - never forget
And not a single person responsible for the crisis went to prison. Every banker knew they'd get away with it. Never forget.

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>There is nothing theoretically wrong with what Sowell is saying
I just grabbed something at random but there's many such cases of saying things which are just nonsense... the problem is he's thinking in terms of "scarcity" and barter while sidestepping the institutional realities of how a modern monetary economy works.

>The more important cost to the economy is the government’s absorption of investment funds that could otherwise have gone into the private sector, where they would have added to the country’s capital equipment.
He's claiming whenever the government issues bonds ipso facto the private sector is being robbed of "investment funds". Is this operationally true?

>When the national debt reaches a size where investors begin to worry about whether it can continue to be turned over as government bonds mature, without raising interest rates to attract the needed buyers, that can lead to expectations that higher interest rates will inhibit future investment
He's claiming there's some theoretic number the nation debt can reach where the governments only option will be to jack up interest rates. What the number or the ratio to other variables when this will become the case?

You goofy bastards really need to learn how to write. If you're not capable of responding to somebody without quoting individual sentences then you're probably not saying anything worth reading.

>if you address your opponent's argument by tackling major contentions or assumptions one at a time, then you aren't saying anything worth reading

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I'm the last guy you cited but all I'm saying is Sowell doesn't understand how finance or banking works so he ends up making claims on how things functionally operate which are just wrong.

real answers

troll answers

Yeah you think you're having a proper debate and being very formal and addressing points one at a time but in reality you're two bums arguing with each other at a bus stop. Using "lmfao" and simply quoting somebody and saying "no they didn't" is not how a good conversation takes place. A dialectic can only happen with both parties know how to express themselves and structure an argument.

I can't imagine why you think I would care.

>muh decorum

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That's not what I said at all. This is why you type the way you do, it's because you're retarded. You literally have to quote and respond to individual sentences.

pseud alert

you're that third asshole on bus pretending to be a big brain faggot who give his retarded argument when the argument is over

Post another Wojak. That would really own me.

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we’re three different people retard. you really took a shit on an already shitty thread with your stupid fucking autism.

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Why does it matter that there's three different people?

This is a low iq post

Has a LOT of mathematics and is not beginner friendly.

>/sci/ doesn't consider economics to be a science
Because they're clueless about philosophy of science. This is your average STEMfag.

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Not a book, but you can watch Turd Flinging Monkey's monkeynomics series.

bitchute.com/video/LnfNadcVKrsa/

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I hate /sci/ but it’s also the same hate I afford to people who hate stem

Have sex

>no such course exists in the catalogue

I'm sorry to hear that, maybe then you should've taken the intermediate varieties then instead of ending your education at the introductory course and making your judgements based on that

>that image

I love Krugman but he likes to doomsay and be contrarian for the purposes of effect in his column. no economist has ever claimed that economics is 'over' and that there are no more unresolved empirical and theoretical questions. Fundamentally even the quotes in that picture have been shown accurate - there is a broad convergence in macro, the central problem of depression-prevention has been solved (i mean, they literally DID prevent a depression where one would've happened without the fed's intervention) and, despite the 2008 crisis, the great moderation continues - single-year output changes over the post 1980s period are still nothing compared to what they were before, even including 2008

also financial economists have been wary of predicting that shit is 'solved' ever since LTCM showed that that kind of thinking can be dangerous. micro-efficiency in a macro-inefficient market has been a well-known concept and slogan since Samuelson decades ago.

>pointing out massive blind spots isn't revisionist. many alarm bells were rung

Not really, the obscurity of the markets and their relative lack of prominence in most firms' balance sheets and income statements hid the fact that securitized instruments were as dangerous as they were. it was widely understood that a recession was imminent but the full nature of the crisis was incredibly difficult to pinpoint as it was happening. there was no precedent and the majority of the risk was generated in very obfuscated ways, through incorrect credit ratings, multiple level derivative instruments, etc. that were not even created on some broad level with someone having knowledge of all of them but on incredibly micro levels between individual economic actors. what is more important anyway is that the causes were identified, regulatory measures brought in, and the crisis was resolved before it became incredibly dire

Well, OP originally asked in /sci/, so I was assuming scientifically rigorous stuff.

There are of course many pop culture introductions to practical economics, but int terms of economics they boil down to common sense platitudes about supply and demand for MBAs. And if the position is for an MBA, it's not easy to fake it with youtube lectures because compared to their barely surface economic stuff, it's far more involved with the practicalities of running a business (MBA would say "soft skills").

>chetty's changes to the curriculum because they address literally the same meme concerns that you have
I'm (obviously) not the one that you are discussing with.
Isn't his plan to change econ 101 to be more about applied micro? A collection of anecdotes rather than theory? Or am I mistaken?

If that is the case, I think it would weaken econ education.

cont.

>okay, show me how you would quantify that in real life, outside a simplified textbook example. it's not like you can retool a substantial amount of a country's productive factors, like building cars to developing software, in any meaningful way. what am I missing?

okay, let's talk about that example specifically. the United States was a manufacturing hub but lost its comparative advantage because the vast amounts of efficiency-increasing capital investments made were made obsolete by still-cheaper production due to low labor costs in other countries. it had a comparative advantage in the burgeoning tech industry because it had massive R&D capabilities and the power to attract human capital. thus it became a global leader in IT. I fail to see what is difficult to understand. The same can apply for any country. A lot of the manufacturing hubs in eastern europe deindustrialized substantially after the fall of the iron curtain but have experienced economic growth by specializing in lower-cost IT services aided by the fact that they have generally well-educated populations.

in general though emergent advantages are difficult to pinpoint before a market mechanism makes clear where they are able to manifest themselves. this is precisely the reason why industrial policy usually fails - if the government fails to pick winners then the entire enterprise fails at significant public expense.

>why did the US build the world's greatest economy etc.

there's a lot of reasons but they don't change the fact that tariffs generally suck. the US succeeded in spite of the tariffs and not because of them, and the US had MANY things going for it - I already mentioned several of the biggest ones - but there's a more general case made by guys like Acemoglu and Robinson related to the country's institutions and the ability for free enterprise to exist in a country. google the book 'Why Nations Fail'. Also it's worth noting that the United States in the late 1800s had the largest population of any western country so their economic might was largely in numbers. As late as the early 1900s the United Kingdom had a higher per-capita productivity than the United States

>there's nothing nearly as "axiomatic" or "foundational" outside some microeconomic concepts

Well, of course. Microeconomics gives you the same feeling as physics because they give you context to explain the phenomena that you can perceive individually. The macroeconomy is far more than can be perceived by one individual except when something like a job loss happens. But in those cases, does having some kind of understanding of macroeconomics not help you appreciate why that has happened?

upvote

cont. 2

> I can't think of many other fields of study that lack that much self-awareness about its ugliness and lack of rigor (where rigor is necessary, anyway).

lol even if this were true I'd say economics is far ahead many of the liberal arts anyway. and economics as a modern field is literally 200 years old. give us some credit

>chetty

chetty taught at harvard before too, he had a brief stint at Stanford. looking at his cv now, there was no 4 year period where chetty did not teach at harvard so unless you went to harvard before 2009 you would have been there at the same time as chetty. but it is possible you'd have never encountered him if you only had a passing interest in economics

>Never claimed to be one. I'm only asking questions because I'm frustrated. I've been frustrated for a very long time.

you implicitly claim to be one by criticizing an entire field that you're not educated in. it's the most pseud thing possible

>And not a single person responsible for the crisis went to prison. Every banker knew they'd get away with it. Never forget.

nobody knew they were doing anything wrong and nobody deserved to get arrested, you have bitten the bait of uninformed populism. you seek power over others and want to harm and imprison so you conveniently sublimate it into a moralizing crusade against an easily scapegoatable group of people. you are the kind of person that burned jews at the stake in the 15th century

i'm talking with some guy on a fucking imageboard you retarded lunatic, nobody here claims they're in any sort of intellectual discussion

yeah something like that. he wants it to be more relevant to the swaths of plebs that take first year economics. honestly it probably would weaken the education and it would create a lot of disappointed idiots who take second year economics after liking his course and get absolutely rammed by quantitative study they're totally unprepared for. but i don't really care, the economists that will shine through will shine through anyway so it won't really make a difference. maybe it will introduce some fresh new perspectives. who knows

Whenever I think of those curriculum reforms, the first thing I think is "because what we need is obviously more economists who are weak in economic theory".

>modern monetary

If you're an MMTer there's literally nothing I can say to you that will convince you that Sowell is right about anything. The conflict between what we believe is not easily resolvable. The best broad argument I can make is that people are not easily fooled repeatedly - this is the Lucas critique that changed Keynesian economics in the late 70s. MMT likes to use Keynesian identities as models and in some way represents a naive continuation of pre-Lucas Keynesian theory - that you can just use those identities to power fiscal and monetary policy and people will not expect them to occur (and hence price them out and otherwise invalidate them). They have some good insights but in general there's a reason the school is floundering

If you're not an MMTer and what I said is gibberish then all I can say is even at the highest level, concerns about scarcity and friction in all markets exist because no economic entity is not responsible to others to the point where it can disregard the usual economic concerns

>He's claiming whenever the government issues bonds ipso facto the private sector is being robbed of "investment funds". Is this operationally true?

It depends on who you ask but that's pretty in line with mainstream thought. the actual mechanism is a bit more complicated but the notion of 'crowding out' is well studied: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowding_out_(economics)

Though there has been controversy regarding the size of the effect, fundamentally he isn't saying anything that is demonstrably incorrect or out of line with modern thought

>What the number or the ratio to other variables when this will become the case?

It depends on the country and its ability to raise revenues and service its debt. His argument is more applicable when it comes to high-debt countries with low productivity and a poor fiscal situation but among the major economies the amount of debt that a country can take on is very high - higher than America has ever observed. Japan is doing fine with 250% debt to GDP so it's clear that the upper limit for an advanced economy is at least that much.

I'm not fully subscribing to MMT (e.g. job guarantee idea seems worse than using other methods such as lowering work time to manipulate variables) but it's a better description of how things actually work today. Like I'm saying Sowell's making empirical claims, do bond markets actually work like he claims?

>'crowding out'
Notting he said is controversial but it's wrong and keeps influencing public policy e.g. this was the big line of thougth behind the Clinton administrations drive to "balance the budget"
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.857.7828&rep=rep1&type=pdf

When the government was going into surplus territory the media was happy but got upset about private savings disappearing... strange. It's totally wrongheaded understanding of things.

>but among the major economies the amount of debt that a country can take on is very high - higher than America has ever observed. Japan is doing fine with 250% debt to GDP so it's clear that the upper limit for an advanced economy is at least that much.
That's a total none answer. There's some magical limit but no one knows what it is? Also there's no difference between America/Japan and smaller economies in how they can finance their spending except the IMF tells them to take on massive debt loads in foreign currencies, cut spending and raise taxes.

Thesis: "Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy" by Thomas Sowell
Antithesis: "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" by Steve Keen
Synthesis: "Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly" by John Quiggin

>do bond markets actually work like he claims

If you're referring specifically to the question of whether bond sales do actually observably crowd out investment, the answer is: maybe... there's conflicting empirical studies, from what I understand (this is not my areas of expertise). It was certainly omnipresent throughout the 20th century. A modern reduction in the crowding-out effect can theoretically be tied in part to growing global financial and capital interconnectivity, which has exploded in the 21st century. So I don't fault Sowell too much for not including more nuance given that the book is already 20 years old.

In general that passage is in line with the goal of the book itself which is to describe elementary economic theory in plain English. Crowding out is taught as a theoretical possibility and it makes sense that he would mention it.

>re debt and debt limits and budgets more broadly

This is an area where the consensus has been in turmoil over the past few years because of how much new research has been going on. There have been estimates of limits for each country - see pic. Issues start to appear before that limit is reached, though.

Overall there is no one optimal debt ratio or one debt ratio limit that works for all countries. It's very much on a per-case basis. I'm sorry if that's an unsatisfying answer but that's the way she goes

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>If you're referring specifically to the question of whether bond sales do actually observably crowd out investment, the answer is: maybe... there's conflicting empirical studies, from what I understand (this is not my areas of expertise). It was certainly omnipresent throughout the 20th century.
And governments for a good part of the 20th century pegged their currency against gold and did other weird things. The assumption is savings are finite and that government spending is financially constrained... the competition for that finite saving pool must drive interest rates up and damage private spending. There shouldn't be to much theoretical ambiguity there.

>Overall there is no one optimal debt ratio or one debt ratio limit that works for all countries. It's very much on a per-case basis. I'm sorry if that's an unsatisfying answer but that's the way she goes
The idea of comparing Japan and some place like Greece shows you don't get the important differences.