Reddit reviews The Invisible Hand: Economic Equilibrium in the History of Science

Other 'essential' readings

It's hard to list the essential readings in economics but your list seems like a good start though I must mention that I had never heard of Progress and Poverty. If I were to recommend additional readings I'd definitely add something on mathematical economics and the history of econometrics. There is an immense gap in style, presentation, and overall methodology between a book like Keynes' General Theory and the more recent On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets. The latter is cited amongst the top 20 articles from the American Economic Review I mentioned before and it reads almost like a mathematics paper. Grossman and Stiglitz begin their work presenting a mathematical model and then follow it by listing conjectures and then go on to postulate and prove theorems and to derive corollaries from these theorems. Economics has become a mathematical and statistical science. You won't find much equations or mathematical theorems (if any) in the books you've mentioned. Even Hicks' Value and Capital, the most 'mathematized' of them is still fairly light compared to modern economics. Indeed, several of the most important economists of the 20th century had a thorough training in mathematics. A short list includes: Jan Tinbergen , Ragnar Frisch , Kenneth Arrow , Simon Kuznets, Leonid Hurwicz, Wassily Leontief, Leonid Kantorovich, Tjalling Koopmans, Gérard Debreu, Maurice Allais, Trygve Haavelmo, John Harsanyi, Harry Markowitz, John Forbes Nash, Daniel McFadden, and many others could still be mentioned. All the names I listed received a Nobel Prize in Economics and all had academic training in either mathematics, physics, statistics or engineering.

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This is perhaps the single most important change in economics and I believe it is essential to understand it to properly appreciate contemporary economic theory. The change was rather swift and intensified itself in the post WWII period. Grubel and Boland (1986) notes that "[i]n 1951 only 2.2 per cent of all pages [of the American Economic Review] contained at least one [mathematical] equation. By 1978 this proportion had risen to 44 per cent.". A broad overview of mathematical economics is offered by Debreu, a French mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in general equilibrium theory, in the New Palgrave. The historical context of postwar economics is summarized by Backhouse (2008). Interwar economics is contrasted to postwar economics in Morgan and Rutherford (1998). Blaug (2009) calls this change in the 1950s the formalist revolution noting how mathematical economics began mainstream and arguing that economists began to emulate the "formalist" or axiomatic programme associated with German mathematician David Hilbert.

Perhaps the most comprehensive study on the 'mathematization' of economics is Weintraub's How Economics Became a Mathematical Science. Weintraub goes deep into questions of mathematical rigor and formalization. His study of Gérard Debreu brings him to the Bourbaki Group in mathematics and to the turn of the century Foundational Crisis. Another important book is Ingrao and Israel The Invisible Hand: Economic Equilibrium in the History of Science. This book narrates the history of general equilibrium theory in economics, starting from important economists such as Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto, some of the first to introduce mathematics to economic theory.

Econometrics is the other topic I suggested and to keep my argument short I will simply state that a typical graduate course in economics is divided into three major branches: microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics. The Econometric Society was founded in 1930 and it's journal Econometrica is one of the most influential until today. A history of econometrics is available in Morgan's History of Econometric Ideas. Finally, another book that I highly recommend is also from Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think. Models are a central part to economic thinking and theorizing. As early as Quesnay's Tableau and Ricardo's model farms economists use models as ways to not only understand but, to some extent, experiment with reality. Throughout the years, economists have changed their perspectives on how to construct and properly utilize models, but, overall, it's safe to say that they remain one of the major workhorses in economic theory.