Boshembechle's suggested reading list for Economics

[Matty]

1. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt: This is an excellent, easy to read introduction to the harmful effects of the broken window fallacy in every sector of our economy.

2. The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek: This work is a bit challenging, but it explains perfectly why centrally planned economies are bound to fail.

3. The Law by Frederic Bastiat: My favorite (see my sig). Bastiat was so far ahead of his time when it came to discourse on government involvement in the market.

These three works should be read by all, so that our populace will be able to differentiate between good policy and bad policy offered by politicians.

[bedstuy]

What's your background in economics that qualifies you to prescribe what books people need to read on the subject?

[Foucaulf]

Since those are just books in the Austrian School canon, reading them won't help one bit in differentiating modern policy in any substantial way. All they do is provide vocabulary that makes inchoate rage sound sophisticated.

Phknrocket had a econ book review thread a few years ago, but I can never seem to find it. Stuff from Mankiw's summer reading list here would probably be good.

[Хahar 🤔]

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=192793.msg4173118#msg4173118

[AggregateDemand]

Since those are just books in the Austrian School canon, reading them won't help one bit in differentiating modern policy in any substantial way. All they do is provide vocabulary that makes inchoate rage sound sophisticated.

Phknrocket had a econ book review thread a few years ago, but I can never seem to find it. Stuff from Mankiw's summer reading list here would probably be good.

The best Austrian theories always move from heterodoxy to orthodoxy. Attacking the school is a waste of breath, even if you don't particularly care for them. Besides, most Austrians are opposed to strict econometrics, which the hard-left has always loathed.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

lol

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The Road to Serfdom isn't 'challenging'.

[King]

A libertarian telling me to read Hayek? You don't say...

[Meursault]

Georges Batailles' The Accursed Share is 'heterodox' in the same way child sacrifice is. It's also incredialy literary, operating in the same intellectual space as Tzara and Breton.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Georges Batailles' The Accursed Share is 'heterodox' in the same way child sacrifice is. It's also incredialy literary, operating in the same intellectual space as Tzara and Breton.

I never knew Bataille wrote on economics.

[Meursault]

Well, "economics". The worthless members of the priesthood of orthodoxy wouldn't recognize The Accursed Share as anything resembling mainstream economics, and that includes the various right-libertarian diseases. It is economics' answer to Lovecraft's non-Euclidean architecture.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Well, "economics". The worthless members of the priesthood of orthodoxy wouldn't recognize The Accursed Share as anything resembling mainstream economics, and that includes the various right-libertarian diseases. It is economics' answer to Lovecraft's non-Euclidean architecture.

This sounds like something I might actually want to read. A cursory search indicates that it deals primary with Bataille's characteristically eclectic theories about the concept of surplus?

[Meursault]

Yes, and particularly his view that deliberately destructive rituals are necessary in all societies to dispose of that surplus, whether it be sacrifice, war, etc. It's the perfect antidote to neoliberal 'rationalism'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Yes, and particularly his view that deliberately destructive rituals are necessary in all societies to dispose of that surplus, whether it be sacrifice, war, etc. It's the perfect antidote to neoliberal 'rationalism'.

That sounds really interesting--and passes the first-impression smell test, at least for me. (I'd question the idea that such rituals have to be 'destructive', but I'm long past the point where I expect to fully agree or fully disagree with Georges Bataille on much of anything.) I'll definitely have to give this a look.

[Kushahontas]

hahaha

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Rand doesn't 'critique' anything, because 'critique' implies sustained, relevant, coherent though.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Rand doesn't 'critique' anything, because 'critique' implies sustained, relevant, coherent though.

Have you ever read an argument from Ayn Rand?

Yes.

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Yes, and I was president of a large university's philosophy club for a year.

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Rand's staggering ineptitude as a philosopher.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Rand doesn't 'critique' anything, because 'critique' implies sustained, relevant, coherent though.

Have you ever read an argument from Ayn Rand?

Yes.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Yes, and I was president of a large university's philosophy club for a year.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Rand's staggering ineptitude as a philosopher.

How has Rand not critiques government?

Rand certainly argues against government. My point is that I don't consider her arguments either valid or sound enough to merit being referred to in terms of critique. They're essentially projections of a stripped-down, seemingly almost purposefully banal version of a Grecian heroic ideal, which at times appears to be more a sexual fantasy than anything else, into the modern political sphere by somebody with no background in economics, history, sociology, or any related subject. It's not so much critiquing as inveighing. At least boshembechle's recommendations, awful as many of them are, are actually by economists.

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Well, to list the first few examples that spring to mind, her proposed resolution of Hume's Fork is pat question-begging that answers literally nothing, her concept of the individual doesn't follow from its own proposed aetiology (although this problem is not unique to her by any means), and in the process of proposing said aetiology she somehow manages to conflate the Law of Identity with an argument against the existence of God. And since she was insistent that Objectivism was a seamless and self-contained worldview, incoherence on questions of metaphysics by her own terms calls the politics into question as well.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

The very idea that a poster who just recently converted from conservatism to communitarianism to libertarianism could produce a list of suggested reading on economics is utterly ridiculous, especially at what I'm guessing is your young age. Maybe classes on economics might actually be a better idea instead of books with an ideological bent. I don't necessarily oppose whatever these writers are saying, but a book supporting an ideology isn't what's best to "understanding" something. That might be comparable to referring to the Bible as a good book on the study of religion, or something to that end.

[GaussLaw]

This reminds me of a friend I had who thought he was an economics whiz because he watched Stossel every week.  I remember once he talked about how much more he knew than  Paul Krugman and how he was just a giant idiot.