Freakonomics adeptly presents the fascinating and often counter-intuitive findings from microeconomic studies for a general audience. Each chapter describes a piece of economic research, such as why drug dealers live with their mothers. The insights from these studies introduce the reader to the role of incentives, among other aspects of microeconomics. Co-written by an economist and a journalist, it is an accessible book for beginners to become familiar with microeconomics. It is about how people and organisations interact with each other, that makes up one half of the economics field. The other part is macroeconomics.
The Cartoon Introduction to Microeconomics, written by Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman, is a humorous and easy-to-understand guide to the subject. Award-winning illustrator Grady Klein and stand-up economist Yoram Bauman, PhD, have made microeconomics more accessible by presenting complex concepts, such as the optimizing individual, game theory, and price theory, in a cartoon format. This 200-page book is the perfect introduction to microeconomics for anyone looking to learn the subject in a fun and digestible way.
books on economics for beginners
As the title suggests, this book literally summarizes all of economics in a single lesson, which can be stated very briefly: The good economist focuses not just on the short-run and obvious consequences of a government policy or event but traces out the long-run and unseen consequences as well. Then Hazlitt applies the lesson to numerous topics, such as the minimum wage, tariffs, and public works spending. Many readers still consider this the single best introduction to economics for the intelligent layperson.
Although I am a fan of the Austrian School of economics, this selection is from a master in the Chicago School tradition. Landsburg teaches short yet powerful lessons using funny examples and memorable thought experiments.
Tim Harford is a senior columnist for the Financial Times, a bestselling author and a broadcaster. His books include The Undercover Economist, which is also the name of his FT column in which Tim shares economic ideas behind everyday experiences). Tim is a believer that the power of economics can be used for good and has made his case in all of his speaking performances, including at TED and Sydney Opera House.
Soumaya is the US economics editor for The Economist. She also co-hosts a weekly podcast about the economics of trade policy called Trade Talks with Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Soumaya did research on the public finances and pensions at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an economic research institute. She has an M.Phil. and B.A. in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge.
Robert Murphy is an economist, consultant and author. He is an economist with the Institute for Energy Research (IER) and a research fellow with the Independent Institute. Robert was a senior fellow in business and economic studies at the Pacific Research Institute. He is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Robert received a BA in economics at Hillsdale College in 1998 and a Ph.D. in economics at New York University in 2003.
This book has to be one of my personal favorites on this list. Mainly because it opens by explaining why the Starbucks in a London train station charges so much for coffee, and continues to talk through similar real life, relatable scenarios. This is a book which shows you that economics plays a massive part in every section of your life, and how knowing about the economics behind these everyday things can help you understand the world slightly better.
Hopefully there will have been something on that list that takes your fancy. Each of the books on the list will give you a good insight into at least one economic theory, and you will be able to reference them in essays etc. whilst at uni, so they are definitely worth a read.
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You could probably say that about all kinds of subjects, but I think having some grasp of economics does let you appreciate certain very interesting things about the way the world works and, in some circumstances, make better decisions.
A nice piece of intuitive economics that I heard from Martin Lewis, the money-saving expert, was when he was speaking on a panel about trust in banking and regulating banking, and how bankers should behave.
This book was very educational for me. As an undergraduate, I learnt economics as ahistorical, a kind of maths. This is a book that talks about the history of economic thought and makes it very personal. It talks about economic thinkers and their hopes and dreams and their personal failings.
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Erika Rasure is globally-recognized as a leading consumer economics subject matter expert, researcher, and educator. She is a financial therapist and transformational coach, with a special interest in helping women learn how to invest.
One of the best ways to discover your particular passion in the field of economics is to read a range of books. This list, while by no means an exhaustive study of the best economic texts, contains a mix of classic and contemporary works that will give you a historical understanding of economics as well as an idea of how modern economics are applied today.
This book was published in 1998 by Routledge and is the culmination of ten years of teaching introductory economics at Sydney University. It started life as a set of lecture notes, the purpose of which was to engage the student in a critical discussion of the models residing in standard textbooks.
The idea was that the economics textbook, contrary to widely held belief, contains a great deal of philosophically and politically interesting assertions. Moreover, I was convinced that an otherwise boring course (economics is usually reviled by a large majority of students) could be enlivened if the student is allowed a glimpse into these hitherto unexplored parts of economics. The end result of exposing students to a critical assessment of the textbook would be, I claimed, beneficial not only for students but also for the profession.
This book is written with the conviction that the economics textbook, contrary to all evidence, contains delightful mind-teasers, philosophically exciting questions and lots of intriguing politics. It is also written in the conviction that beginners who are usually dismissed as insufficiently sophisticated to get involved with these higher order issues, are perfectly up to the detective work necessary to bring these delights onto the surface. Additionally, I embarked on this book with the certainty that pursuing these discoveries promises not only to enliven an otherwise dull course but also to help students do well in it. Who knows; it may even inspire us, the teachers of this all-conquering but prosaic discipline, to lift our game.
Now we all know how boring manuals are. No wonder students find economics a touch too dry. However it might be argued that if one wants to learn to do things one has to plough through the manual. That, as in physics, a beginner must conquer the boring stuff first (eg. classical mechanics) before she can discuss black holes sensibly. I do not think this is a good analogy with economics. Let me explain why.
All physicists agree on the method of mechanics. You will not, for example, find them arguing fiercely on the value of differential equations for describing the motion of fluids. Yet economists seem unable to agree on the same scale. Effectively there is no commonly agreed borderline between (i) a set of topics within which all practitioners agree (such as there is in natural science, eg. mechanics) and (ii) another set of topics (including black holes and the origin of the universe) in which they do not. In economics the set of disagreement encompasses almost all of economic life. For instance a Keynesian and a Neoclassical economist do not even agree on the meaning of probability in a social setting!
The point here is that if those who teach economics find it hard to agree with one another on basic things, is it not a trifle hypocritical to use textbooks which pretend that there is a set of answers and questions which students must learn to recite? Or, equivalently, that economics students can be trained in the same way students of chemistry can? I think it is and this book is written with a sense of shame for such hypocrisy. It is also written with passion, though I hope without rashness.
Of course there are those who think that passion gets in the way of sound reasoning; they would prefer the detached style of conventional texts. For my part I feel that taking emotion and controversy out of economics is responsible for losing a great deal of analytical power. The greatest thinkers to have tackled economics were motivated by debates so passionate that their emotions were stirred until new ways of understanding economic relations emerged. The danger is that the way we teach economics today has become so banal that the brightest are bored and leave the discipline early for greener pastures. The future generation of economics graduates runs the risk of leaving University with a large box of tools and the motivation of a gravedigger. Perhaps the time has come to give these old emotions another stir. 2ff7e9595c
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