Reddit reviews A New Economic View of American History: From Colonial Times to 1940 (Second Edition)

You can shape a course on mathematical economics and cover a portion of say, Chiang and Wainwright. But the book isn't meant to teach mathematics. It's meant as a review.

The AP exam covers the principle level material in micro and macro. The next step in core econ theory is intermediate level micro and macro. Some texts will require knowledge of calculus, but it's usually limited to simple derivations for optimization problems/marginal analysis. So you can look towards intermediate texts instead.

Another option is to take a subfield course. Look for university economics electives that only have the principle level courses as prerequisites. You don't want a course that has econometrics or intermediate level econ as prereqs even though some of them rarely use intermediate level econ or make you understand the metrics in any papers you read.

Some subfields are less reliant on theory than others. There's not that much formal theory in economic history and economic demography, but you'd basically be reading conclusions from econometric analyses without understanding how they reached those conclusions. Although you do that in all of your classes, really. Atack and Passell is a good econ history text.

Labor econ might serve as a good middle ground if that doesn't sound interesting to you.

[Atack and Passell] (http://www.amazon.com/New-Economic-View-American-History/dp/0393963152) have a chapter on it in their book if you can get a copy of it. The chapter isn't the long, but it might help.

What I'm saying is that they're two different things. Financial crises cause recessions. Not all recessions are financial crises. Some are productivity shocks, inflation shocks, currency exchange shocks, etc. What /u/urnbabyurn was saying was that once you account for the different kinds of recessions there's no difference between now and before. I suggest reading this book for a historical perspective on the US economy.

I've only got a BA in Economics, but one of my favorite class is "Economic History of US" with A New Economic View of American History: From Colonial Times to 1940 as one of the required readings. It's an amazing book with plenty of graphs and statistics to support their conclusions. It explains the importance of the Erie Canal or "wealth" of a farmers in the 1800s or what does USD500 means to someone in 1800s.

edit: another interesting book called "The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates" by Professor Peter T. Leeson, a Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. The book is about the economics of 18th century pirates/privateers/buccaneers, there's also a podcast episode of two Econ professor (writer & host) talking about this book.

> Global poverty has actually been declining precipitously over the past 40 years[1] . The struggles of the 1% vs the 99% in the United States are frankly struggles of the wealthy vs the less wealthy, and completely ignore the tremendous gains made by those who are truly poor in an absolute sense. Globally, poverty is declining, and merely living in the United States makes it overwhelmingly likely that one is part of the 95th percentile globally.

This has been known however to be fraught with controversy and disagreement in the economics community. First of all, there's the problem of sorting between absolute versus relative measures of poverty and inequality, which is why I picked a less controversial and more widely accepted one like GDP.

> The article you cited listed the CIA and US Military as the instruments of force. The fact that Capitalists "pulled the lever" as you put it is a flaw in the State, not capitalism. We agree that the CIA and the US Military should not be used to corrupt ends - maybe the government should not permit itself to be used in that way then?

Are you saying that capitalists are barred from using the State as an economic instrument? This is simply false. The US has always been a business run society, even at the level of government activity (I raise this not as a point to controvert you, but as a potential source to look into). The naive idea that the existence of government is a completely independent actor of high level business interests is incredibly facile and simply false.

> I'm a bit confused here. Are you defending socialism or anarchism? Socialism requires a powerful state as well. In any event, I'm not defending Corporatism or Fascism, I'm defending Capitalism. Capitalism as a concept does not entail a powerful State under the control of an oligarchy, whether dictators or Corporatists. Are you making a pragmatic objection? It sounds like you're saying that Capitalism sounds very well and good, but in practice it can't be implemented?

Me personally, I'm a socialist. Socialism has nothing to do with State activity (perhaps you're thinking of Social Democracy?), in fact, it's exactly the opposite. It's clear to me what you're arguing, and while you're not defending fascism, what I'm simply doing is trying to cite empirical realities, and not argue over highly restrictive definitions. Nowhere in there did I say that capitalism requires a powerful State, what I said is meant to be taken at face value: the business interests in the US would never allow it.