What are /r/academiceconomics' favorite Products & Services?

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To state the obvious, an introductory textbook is probably your best bet. Mankiw's <em>Principles of Economics</em> is as good a place as any to start (and can probably be found online in pdf format somewhere at no cost to yourself, if you're into that sort of thing).

Others here may try to recommend Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. I would caution you away from reading this book. To a layman, it's a well-written and extraordinarily convincing exposition as to why many government policies designed to improve things are bound to accomplish the exact opposite. Unfortunately, the analysis is quite fragile in ways that are not obvious to those who don't study economics, and in many cases Hazlitt grossly oversimplifies what are really very complex issues. Without a firm grasp on the fundamentals of economics, reading this book may put you at serious risk of contracting a virulent and incurable strain of ignorant libertarianism.

For a crash-course in economics without math, my suggestions are:

• Micro: Landsburg, The Armchair Economist
• Macro: Harford, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back

It's often useful to read an intro textbook. That's what they're made for: lots of knowledge per page. Read:

• Any intro book. Mankiw, Cowen/Tabarrok, Krugman/Wells, Acemoglu/Laibson/List, whatever. I teach out of CT and recommend ALL for those who want more. I use problems out of KW. I don't personally use Mankiw, but others find him useful.
• Either Blanchard's or Bernanke's intermediate macro book should be pretty good for a practical/business-oriented person. For macro theory, Williamson's intermediate book is better.
• Varian's intermediate micro book is basically the gold standard in that area.
• Let me give a specific shoutout to Leamer's Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories for those who want an MBA/MPP-oriented macroeconomics book.

Those are all the economics you probably need for an MBA type program.

1. Pick up an intro textbook. No, seriously. Mankiw's good. I have an affinity for Cowen-Tabarrok.
2. The Armchair Economist (Landsburg) is the best pop-micro book around.
3. There is no satisfactory pop-macro book. Maybe get your hands on The Affluent Society (Galbraith) and Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), though both are a bit dated.
4. For a fun romp through the profession, and for a sort-of-pop-macro book, read Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.
5. Stay away from the blogs as a general rule, because you don't know enough yet to distinguish between good economics and stupid bullshit.

Poor Economics - Banerjee and Duflo [development]

Economic Gangsters - Fisman and Miguel [development]

Misbehaving - Thaler [behavioral econ, theory, memoir, history of contemporary econ]

Scarcity - Mullainathan and Shafir [behavioral econ, theory]

Nudge - Sunstein and Thaler [behavioral econ]

The Worldly Philosophers - Heilbroner [history of economic thought]

Economics Rules - Dani Rodrik [Methodology, Theory]

[All general interest books on economics by people who know what they are talking about, so you can follow the footnotes and references to more scholarly work that you can look into. I really enjoyed all of them]

/r/cooperatives has some good non-academic resources--mostly articles on existing cooperatives. They would be good background for your introduction or to use as examples in your analysis.

For academic sources, this article has a literature review that may be helpful.

As always, Google Scholar is one of the best places to start. Be sure to look at articles that have a high number of citations.

Although not answering your question particularly well (sorry), as a project I put together a website of videos on the Solow Model. Perhaps helpful generally.

https://sites.google.com/site/economicurtis/intermediatemacro/solow

(these are prettimuch all the notes I go over about the solow model in my tutorial sections....)

Go back to school. Full-time if you can afford it. Splitting your attention between a FT job and absorbing massive amounts of information will tax you. You'll learn so much better if you can focus all your attention on your studies. Engross yourself in it. Eat, sleep, and breathe it. When I was in grad school I read 3-5 papers a day, any research papers that interested me (but also read ones that don't), and any international news I could find online. Grad school was, for the most part, spent on campus studying or at happy hour with the university professors. Don't neglect to do either.

Professors often employ grad students as research ~~slaves~~ assistants or TAs. The pay sucks, but you're getting paid in experience...maybe scholarships or grants if you're lucky. This is where it really pays to have a good relationship with your major professor as they can introduce you to the people who can help you find a related job.

You'll be taking statistics, so you might want to watch some Kahn Academy videos to brush up. You'll also take a class on research methodology, and a few electives in the area of your choice. Talk to a few different schools and see what options they can offer you. Be sure you ask for a list of jobs recent grads have found.

I just finished Labor last semester and my professor used Borjas' text book. If you buy the international edition its pretty inexpensive. But the book is readable and explains the material well. http://www.abebooks.com/9780073523200/Labor-Economics-Borjas-0073523208/plp

Math snobs will scoff at the idea, but LyX is a WYSIWYG editor, and actually quite good! It makes for a good, gentle introduction to LaTeX before you plunge into just using Vim/Emacs. :)

> I really don't think it takes any mental effort to recognize that $4.99 is equivalently $5.00.

It takes mental effort to engage the part of the brain that thinks about such things at all.

Seriously, you should read Thinking, Fast and Slow.

>Obviously it still works for some consumers, but that strategy, no doubt was much more effective a decade or so ago

It's actually possible that it was less effective when it first came out--the first time the butcher offered a steak for 99 cents rather than a dollar, you'd think, "wait, that's weird. What's going on?" That is, you'd already be engaging your thinking brain, and it would be a short jump to "99 cents is for all intents and purposes the same as a dollar." Now it's so commonplace that we don't find it odd and almost never engage our thinking brain.

>(not sure when they originally began to implement this pricing strategy).

Waaay more than a decade ago (source: I'm old).

>I just think using the strategy I've mentioned could be more effective. Especially for the less expensive goods that are purchased frequently.

Well, the only way to know for sure would be to run the experiment, and I'm not aware of anyone who's done it either. But I don't think it would work--I think the sales you would lose at $5.05 would not be offset by the extra few cents of profit per unit.

I highly recommend "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman (one of the founders of behavioral economics) here.

His point is that rational thinking--going "wait, $4.99 is just $5"--takes mental effort. It's a cost, as much as money is. It's a lot easier to just use a different, low-cost part of our brains to just go "four something something" and not waste the energy.

So even if we know, rationally, that $4.99 is kind of a scam, it still works on us, because we can't summon the energy to fight the scam every time. So this:

> My theory is that by now, nearly everyone is aware of this marketing strategy and it is no longer very effective.

Is half right: Everyone is aware of this marketing strategy. But despite that, it's still effective.

For graduate-level work, peruse Varian's "Microeconomic Analysis." It's old but still dominates and covers all of the basic theory and math you'll need. Peruse Mankiw's "Introductory Microeconomics" for the philosophy: Pareto efficiency, consumer sovereignty, externalities, welfare, and the positive-normative dichotomy.

Check out Integrald's reading list in the /r/Economics wiki if you want a break from textbooks. Read Friedman's essay on positive economics. Read Krugman's various essays on his personal website about modeling, comparative advantage, etc. Read Krugman's "The Accidental Theorist" article. Read the Journal of Economic Perspectives (open access) for more descriptive, less math-y surveys of whatever area interests you. Become a lurker at /r/BadEconomics and see examples of what NOT to do, which is a pretty good strategy for gaining that intuition you seek.

You might be interested in the literature on ambiguity aversion. Maybe take a look at this paper.

It's an awkward question to answer because "uncertainty" has some different meanings. It could mean random events, which is handled in a standard way, or "ambiguity" where the probabilities aren't used/known.

What part of Economics are you interested in? There's no point giving you links to Macroeconomics or Computational Finance courses if you're really only interested in Marketing.

I took both Game Theory classes on Coursera and I can confirm that they're excellent, they could easily replace a real university lecture.

They offer a data science specialization: https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1

I wouldn't say that it is very conceptual, but I really like how it is taught, where it's a lot like learning something from a smart colleague. It could be a great way to get really confident in your ability to use data apart from learning theory and concepts.

Have to recommend Money Mischief. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WUYQ6Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1

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So far its only book I've found that talks about monetary history in way that's suitable for non-academics that's simultaneously not super inaccurate. If you've heard of Friedman before you may think it reads like a libertarian manifesto because its authored by him but its more or less just an intuitive look at the history of money and monetary policy in the US.

Well, I googled the book, and used the "Look Inside" feature on amazon.

Author says the book is aimed at graduate students, but that this includes MBA students. He also says it can be used for undergraduates. As to the mathematical pre-requisites / level, it seems to be the standard Simon &amp; Blume.

Have a look at what the author says here.

Tao’s book is free on his website

I’ve heard that Royden as well as Stein & Shakarski are better/more modern than papa Rudin and each stands on its own. If you have the money, it’s nice to have a print copy of one of them. I have Rudin and it’s very difficult to learn from for a first course.

My program uses Junghenn, which I’ve enjoyed so far but is also very terse and makes you figure most things out from exercises.

I’ve also found this book of problems to be very useful for practice.

I think you mean "piqued"** : )

And I'll take a stab since nobody has answered you, even though I haven't started grad school yet (I start in the fall) and the books I read are hardly original or suprising:

• Freakonomics
• The Black Swan
• Thinking Fast and Slow
• Predictably Irrational
• Nudge
• Lots of Malcolm Gladwell's stuff
• The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs

The Undercover Economist Strikes Back is all about macro.

If you like trade, Paul Krugman has a number of books on the topic that are great for lay readers. Also read his 2008 Nobel acceptance speech.

If you want to do research one day, a master's is the bare minimum for working in the private sector, and a Ph.D. is required for academia and most research jobs with a lot of independence in general. A Ph.D. in econ takes 5 or 6 years, requires a ton of math, and you'll be poor during those years, so be sure you want to do it.

> The book 'Economics in One Lesson' is a great intro to microeconomics, though it is overly disparaging of macroeconomics.

I don't want to sound offensive, but don't you find Economics in One Lesson a bit ideologically charged?...

I know every author has it's ideology, Mankiw clearly teaches one particular stream of thought, as every economic teacher does... but, anyway, I found Hazlitt a bit biased when I read him, whereas other authors -especially those who write manuals- usually include a wider view on things, remarking for example that there might be some assumptions widely discussed...

If you're completely new to the subject and don't have a background in graduate economics I might start with this Nicolas Wapshott book. It's a great historical perspective of the rise, and fall, of Monetarism through the lens of the public debate on the topic (and others) between Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. I think it probably undersells the amount of credence academics and policy makers actually gave/give to money supply issues, but also correctly dispels the notion that many I talk to seem to have that there was ever full support for the ideas.

If you're looking for academic work I think you probably need to be more specific. The rough consensus is that the relationship between monetary aggregates and inflation likely holds in the long run (ie the quantity theory holds) while short run inflation dynamics are pretty strongly disconnected from them. There's also evidence that the money-inflation relationship is changing over time. I've done some work in the area and found this paper to be a nice starting point.

From a modelling perspective it's tricky because you don't need to even put money in, and if you do there's a question of how you make agents hold it. Generally either making them "want to" (ie money in their utility function), "have to" (ie a cash-in-advance constraint requiring it for payments), or endogenously choose to (ie complicated, but more realistic payment/search frictions that money overcomes). These choices, along with decisions about Keynesian price/wage frictions and financial market imperfections can all affect the qualitative and quantitative implications for money growth policy with respect to inflation. It's hard to really discuss those things if you haven't had a pretty deep introduction to graduate macro theory.

This is the book you're looking for, though I would guess that your professor is well aware of the book and would have bought it if he wanted to. If you enjoyed the class and are interested in taxation, read it for yourself!

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https://www.amazon.com/Rebellion-Rascals-Revenue-Follies-through/dp/0691234027/ref=sr\_1\_1?crid=HACR6YTHQBW3&amp;keywords=keen+and+slemrod&amp;qid=1654536022&amp;sprefix=keen+and+slemrod%2Caps%2C2770&amp;sr=8-1

The degree gets you on the interview slate. Zero job descriptions ever says "minor in yadda yadda" requried. They do, however, say "BA/BS in Economics"

Human Resources uses degrees as a sorting mechanism to get 1,000 applications down to 5. Personally, I avoid ivy when interviewing candidates. They usually don't stick around and underperform state school employees.

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=economics&amp;l=florida

Adding to /u/1283619264's point about looking into Catalonia, you can also watch The Take, a more recent example along with Ben & Jerry's corporate structuring.

Additionally, I would be careful assuming all worker or state controlled enterprises as being inefficient. Take Gillette, which spent $US 35 billion just getting the Mach 3 razor to market and immediately saw the worst performance in a decade with loss of 11% share value, massive global lay offs, and plummeting revenue that took almost another 10 years to recover from.

R is the open source linux of statistical programming. SAS is still the industry standard but I'm seeing R pop up because it integrates with tableau and is free vs. $15k per SAS license per year.

http://www.r-project.org/

Good applied book that teaches you ways to deal with problems:

https://www.amazon.com/Econometric-Analysis-8th-William-Greene/dp/0134461363

If your pure stats isnt too good I suggest casella and berger statistical inference

Economics is not what the news or politicians talk about. Graduate level economics is solely and rigorously about quantitative modeling and econometrics.

https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Macroeconomics-McGraw-Hill-Economics-David/dp/0073511374

They let you read the first chapter for free by clicking on the icon. Read about the Solow model.

No offense, but I honestly don't think you understand what you want to study.

I'm a huge fan of davidson and mackinnon.

https://www.amazon.com/Econometric-Theory-Methods-Russell-Davidson/dp/0195123727

It's very pedagogical and good for self studying, in contrast witch green which feels more like a reference text.

A must read for Macroeconomics: "A Modern Guide to Macroeconomics: An Introduction to Competing Schools of Thought"

https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Guide-Macroeconomics-Introduction-Competing/dp/1852788828

I don't know the level you are interested in but there is a really really light book by Mark Skousen with an Austrian leaning view: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Modern-Economics-Lives-Thinkers/dp/0765645440/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1531721495&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=mark+skousen

• Why nations fail

• Capital in the 21st Century

• Rise and Fall of American Growth

• Economic Rules: Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science

• On Politics: A History of Political Thought: Herodotus to the Present

• Misbehaving

• Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Ben Bernanke: Courage to Act

• "The Origins of Political Order" and "Political Order and Political Decay"

I'm working on an Austrian reading list to be hosted at /r/PraxAcceptance. Let's start with the basics:

• Mises, Human Action

• Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State

These are literally the Bibles of the Church of Austria. Once you start thinking that human action is purposeful behavior, it's hard to think of anything else.

Also note that I am following the Misesian tradition of Austrian Econ by rejecting Hayek as a quasi-mainstream buffoon whose only redeeming feat was Austrian Business Cycle Theory.

For further exposition of the method of Praxeology, see Rothbard's In Defense of Extreme Apriorism, published in the Southern Econ Journal and free access on the Mises Institute website. Philosophy of economics ended with Rothbard, but unfortunately he was tossed to the wayside by lamestreamers.

Now on to contemporary Austrians:

• Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

A great introductory presentation of economics from an Austrian perspective, the only good one.

• Hoppe, Democracy--The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order

More advanced, but crucial reading for anyone wishing to understand the current state of Praxeology and AnCapism.

Beyond that, maybe pick up some Bastiat and become active on /r/Anarcho_Capitalism, or /r/Libertarian if you aren't praxxy enough. Make some dank memes and post them /r/libertarianmeme. Troll lamestream havens like /r/badeconomics or /r/economics and link to people who disagree with you on /r/ShitStatistsSay, then go to /r/economy and /r/bullion where Austrians are truly welcome. Also be sure to pwn Keynesians by commenting on all of Paul Krugman's NYT posts.

You will probably cover what you need for antitrust in your managerial class. But you couldn't be hurt by grabbing a nice intermediate micro book to review perfect competition and monopoly, or even some game theory.

If you are more analytically inclined, Varian's intermediate book - focus on the cost, supply and competition chapters and monopoly. It's attainable in pdf on the web.

For game theory, grab Thinking Strategically (or the new version which has a somewhat new title I forget) by Dixit and Nalebuff. It's more of a chatty book, but will get through equilibrium and backwards induction for you.

It's a good idea to pick up some books too. For a really simple walk through (that can seem a little dated at times), get Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hazlett. And for an alternative view, try Economics: The Users Guide by Ha Joon Chang. I haven't read it (yet), but I've seen some of his talks and he offers a more comprehensive explanation of some off the less orthodox economic theories.

I am just an undergrad, so perhaps I had the misconception that economics is fundementally based on utilitarianism. I thought it was? I even read so in Heilbroner's classic The Worldly Philosophers. Am I wrong, and if so, can you give me a quick overview of the philosophical development of economics (when was it mainly utilitarianism, when was it not. What concepts of economics are not based on utilitarianism; as far as I know, the 2 main welfare measures, Hicks and Pareto efficiency, are utilitarianism).

Ha-Joon Chang's new book is an excellent, crush-in-a-day place to start: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Economics-Users-Guide-Pelican-Introduction/dp/0718197038

Otherwise: Read a summary of The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith).

Thinking fast and thinking slow (Daniel Kahnemann) is excellent, but is more of a physchology/behavioural economics text.

I have read some stuff like that. I recently finished the book "Keynes Hayek" and I got done another one a long time ago called "The Worldly Philosophers."

I tried reading Veblen but only got halfway through his Leisure book before I got bored. I think I may sign up for a university class called "History of Econ Thought" sometime soon... but I may not do that since I think I should save up my units to use them on an econometrics class instead.

I tried very hard to like the classics but I fooled myself into liking it at one point. They're very dry and I don't like reading Keynes or Marx or Smith or Veblen but I haven't tried Friedman... not sure if his Freedom book will be very entertaining. It sounds more like preaching to the choir for an econ major to be reading that, huh?

Start with The Worldly Philosophers by Heilbroner if you're interested in learning about Smith, Keynes, Marx etc. Marx and Smith are not easy (or fun) reads, and I'm not sure how useful it would be.

Try some of these instead: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/09/this-years-freshman-seminar.html

While slightly dated, History of Economics by J.K. Galbraith and The Worldly Philosophers by R.L. Heilbroner still make for quite an interesting read imho... The Galbraith book actually made me laugh out loud a number of times...

For a reaaaaal pageturner on the financial crisis, try too big to fail by A.R. Sorkin. Very captivating, with enough finance jargon and "inside"-info to make you feel pro (and sympathize with the rich b****rds when their pretty world starts imploding)

The Economist is brilliant, if conservative, although calling it The Politician would make just as much (or maybe more) sense... Just stick to the finance & economics articles. And if you're a student it's not too pricey either =)

The best place to start is probably a Principles of Economics textbook. Mankiw is the most popular, and if you get an older edition it should be too pricey. Alternatively, listen to some of a Principles course online, perhaps on Coursera or ItunesU. The MRUniversity course on development economics has been good too. The book 'Economics in One Lesson' is a great intro to microeconomics, though it is overly disparaging of macroeconomics.

I have a BA in Economics and the book that made me want to be an economics major was "The Worldly Philosophers" by Heilbroner. It is a book that follows the great economic thinkers and discusses their ideas and their applicability to the world. The book is fairly layperson friendly as I read it as a freshman with no prior classes, yet is considered one of the better books out there for actually learning about economics, how theories developed and how they are applied.

If you can get through the errors this book is ok.

As an aside, you should look into areas like credit risk or retail, consumer-lending at banks. I routinely do real estate analysis and look at overheating markets for reporting purposes. Even if that's not a 1-to-1 it's definitely something to get experience in and be able to drill down to something more specific to what you're looking for.

Good question! I haven't seen much in the way of general literature review books. As I see it, you have a couple options:

• Read/work through a textbook. This will be rather difficult if you don't have a lot of math skill, a ton of intuition, or a great tutor. I suggest Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green, the standard graduate textbook on microeconomics.

http://www.amazon.com/Microeconomic-Theory-Andreu-Mas-Colell/dp/0195073401

• If you are interested in technical overviews of some subfields, there are certain standout books that can give you a thorough technical overview. E.g. in health economics, read one of Joe Newhouse's books, or in Development, read something by Abhijit Banerjee. In either case, find ones written for other experts, not for the general public. E.g. don't read "Poor Economics" by Banerjee, read "Understanding Poverty".

Really, there is no one "Economics" but a series of overlapping subfields. At the vanguard, research is done within these fields, and so you should focus on the ones that interest you.

this is a tremendous book for beginners and explains the concepts very well.

Alternatively, if you want a hard copy, it's only $9.

I studied Statistics in undergrad and I'm studying data mining in grad school, so keep in mind that I'm not an "Economist".

Anyway, I'm taking a Time Series analysis class this semester and we're using Time Series Analysis : Univariate and Multivariate Methods. Just know that my professor is a statistician and not an economist.

You'll want a good macroeconometrics textbook. Be warned, this topic is somewhat advanced, so if you don't have at least a graduate course each in econometrics and macroeconomics you might find the material challenging.

In any case, I can recommend DeJong & Dave's <em>Structural Macroeconometrics</em>. Canova's <em>Methods for Applied Macroeconomic Research</em> is also good, but more advanced and probably not the greatest textbook as an introduction to the material.

For econometrics, the best thing you can do is get a copy of Kennedy's A guide to Econometrics: http://www.amazon.com/A-Guide-Econometrics-Peter-Kennedy/dp/1405182571

It explains the intuition behind lots of econometrics concepts without getting bogged down in formulas. Not to say that the formulas are not important, but if you are going through another rigorous econometrics text, this is handy to have as a supplement so that you can get the big picture and intuition of what you are doing. This book seriously should be mandatory for anyone starting a masters or phd.