Reddit reviews Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution (The Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics)

Personally, I'm still mostly a market anarchist because I think to have a working system, we need to assume that people will act selfishly, and take any unselfish acts as a bonus. As such, people need incentives to work on unpleasant tasks. I don't see a way to do it without property rights, but I'm open to suggestions. (Also, I think Samuel Bowle's Microeconomics has a chapter on how property rights naturally arise, without requiring any sort of imposition from the top down...that book's on my todo list.)

On the other hand, I part with some ancaps on their insistence on absolute property rights over all things. I was leaning that way due to Lessig's works, then the book The Gridlock Economy killed it off for me, in pointing out the "tragedy of the anti-commons." We need a commons, and I think there are several viable ways to provide for them (eg., assurance contracts).

At the same time, I'm not quite convinced that we've completely figured out how to solve externalities problems in an anarchist way, while also being dissilusioned about the potential for political action to make any difference, so I guess I'm sort of a minarchist aspiring to agorism.

And I suspect that when we do finally figure this stuff out, it will easily outcompete the social structures we have now. Given the work that game theorists are doing with mechanism design, I'm kinda optimistic.

My favorites:

Introduction to Economic Analysis - Free textbook. Taught at a much higher level than your average college textbook, so it provides a better introduction if you think you might go on to study more economics.

Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution - "But of course those ideas are not part of the generally-accepted microfoundations of economics. This is why every graduate student in economics reads (something equivalent to) Varian's Microeconomic Analysis, but not Bowles's Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution; would that they did. If you read Bowles, you will in fact learn a great deal about the ultimatum game, the rule of law, and so forth; in a standard microeconomics text you will not. I think the Hobbesian vision is wrong, but anyone who thinks that modern economics's micro-foundations aren't thoroughly Hobbesian is engaged in wishful thinking." _ I try an reread this once a year; seriously a fantastic book.

The Company of Strangers - An Economic History of Natural Life - The book that made me decide to be an economist.

Unless you have a particulat desire to learn macro, you'll probably be most satisfied learning micro or game theory. For micro, Bowles' Microeconomics provides a nice balance between mathematical modelling and psychological or institutional details. The standard graduate textbook is Mas-Collel, Whinston, and Green, which is a reasonable place to start with a math degree, although the models are a bit decontextualized.

On the game theory side, Gintis' Game Theory Evolving is structured around problems, with good solutions in the back. Myerson's textbook provides a little more standard approach.

Well, you can do lots of things.

The government hires tons of economists, notably the Federal Reserve for macroeconomic research, the FTC/DOJ for antitrust enforcement, and the CBO, which evaluates the economic impact of legislation. I imagine most departments have a few economists economists on staff though.

International organizations like the IMF and the World Bank also hire lots of economists. I have a couple of friends who worked there as research assistants before going to grad school. Big development organizations in general hire lots of economists to do program evaluations, for example.

Then there are the think tanks, which hire economists to design/evaluate policies.

Most big companies hire economists now too, I think mostly for data analysis. Google notably employs a large team to design its ad auctions.

Financial institutions like investment banks are full of economists who do, e.g. asset pricing, for them. Also forecasting, although my impression is that that comes with a whiff of quackery.

I'm sure other people have more insight on what you can do with a PhD - I've always been academic-track, expecting to teach and do research as a professor, and so I've never seriously looked at other things I could do. Economics is one of the few fields left that still has a good academic job market, partly because a lot of talent gets poached by the private sector.

I totally sympathize with you. Economics is a sprawling discipline and nobody seems to have condensed the developments of the last 50 years down to a curriculum for the introductory level. So you're left with guys like Mankiw who corner the market on undergrad textbooks, which are typically full of cutting-edge economics from the 60s or 70s.

If it's any consolation, an undergraduate major in economics is typically not necessary to go to grad school in economics, (as long as you have plenty of math and a plausible claim to be interested in econ) which says something about how divorced the intro textbooks are from "real" economics.

If you're looking for a good textbook about economics, I'd recommend Sam Bowles' Microeconomics.

I read it in upper-level undergrad, so I'm not 100% how useful it would be to a beginner, but I think it does a nice job of presenting microeconomics in a way that's accessible (there's pretty minimal math) but rigorous. Also it's written more like a book to read, not a traditional textbook, which is nice.

It's just one economist's perspective, (and a slightly heterodox one at that) so take it with a grain of salt, but Bowles is a serious economist with a good sense (and enough intellectual honesty to admit) of where the field is and what it does well (and badly). I think the axe he's grinding is more methodological than ideological.

The most relevant and prescient for you would be Bowles' “Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution”. It’s a Ph.D. level text, but I throw some of the stuff at my undergrads because it is so well written.

http://www.amazon.com/Microeconomics-Institutions-Evolution-Roundtable-Behavioral/dp/0691091633