(Part 2) Best comparative economics books according to redditors
We found 344 Reddit comments discussing the best comparative economics books. We ranked the 89 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
I'm currently reading David Skarbek's The Social Order of the Underworld, and one of the related factors he's talked about is the size of American prisons, which makes information about prisoners and their social situations relatively expensive to transmit within the hampered environment of the prison.
Because of this, social assurance groups are most effective in remedying this problem when they fall along very visual lines. Essentially, assigning social groups based on race makes information transfer cheaper. If a white guy cheats you on a drug sale, you know which gang needs to make it right or risk retribution from your gang.
Conversely, in smaller prisons, you don't see the level of racial stratification because prisoners can know more about one another individually.
Highly recommend this book, by the way - the fundamental thesis is that prison gangs actually exist to bring order to a chaotic situation in which traditional forms of protection/rights enforcement are closed off, and that the situation is better with them than it would be without them (which is not to say that they're a good thing).
Although it is very difficult to measure, there seems to be consensus that private prisons are about as effective/safe/well run as public prisons, but that might not be saying much. Private prisons typically are a bit cheaper and can be built more quickly because they don't have to go through the usual political channels. Sharon Dolovich has a very nice piece on this in the Duke Law Journal:
>Dolovich, S. (2005). State punishment and private prisons. Duke Law Journal, 437-546.
I should also add (self-servingly) that both private and public prisons have to deal with many of the same informal dynamics, and both are known to have fairly active prison gangs (as I argue in
[my book](http://www.amazon.com/Social-Order-Underworld-Prison-American/dp/0199328501/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406052457&sr=1-2&keywords=prison+gangs
))
The bottom line is that private prisons do whatever the state contracts with them to do. Good contracts = relatively effective private prisons.
Note also that the concern that Oliver's video raises of private prisons lobbying for more incarceration, or of creating incentives for stricter enforcement, seem to be misplaced. On the former, private prisons lobby for more private prison use, but arguably not more prison use. Since private prisons are such a small percentage of prisons (~10% depending on how you measure), then it provides a massive public good to public prison employees, etc to lobby for more prison use in general. On this see,
>Volokh, A. (2008). Privatization and the law and economics of political advocacy. Stanford Law Review, 1197-1253.
The common claim that private prisons have an incentive to drag people off the street to fill their cells also seems to be not based in reality. Private prisons contract for a fixed number of beds, whether empty or not.
TL:DR Private prisons aren't typically worse than public ones, and that might be good reason for concern.
Here is a PARTIAL list of economics books I've read cover to cover, and why I appreciated Bitcoin earlier than most:
Adam Smith
Ludwig von Mises
Murray N. Rothbard
And many many more: https://forum.bitcoin.com/economics/blockstream-supporters-mock-those-who-study-economics-t49159.html
Well, Lange and Lerner (1938) were the ones who first put forward a strong opposition to the Austrian School's criticisms by proposing a new hypothetical model of a socialist economy- their idea was essentially to have a market socialist system, with the means of production being publicly owned, capital markets being overtaken by a Central Planning Board (CPB), and markets remaining for distributing final consumer goods. In this model, the CPB would set goods prices through a Walrasian auction, while instructing state enterprises to match price to marginal cost. This latter part is important because it means that the model would be Pareto optimal- the same criteria used by economists in their assumption that perfect competition would naturally pressure price to be equivalent to marginal cost (also hence why monopolies etc. are not considered efficient outcomes). Lange believed his system would qualify as socialism by virtue of instituting public/cooperative ownership of the MOP with public returns, while maintaining a rational pricing system.
This approach, other than being seen by some on both sides of the aisle as a sort of cop-out "capitalism without capital markets", was also attacked by some on theoretical grounds. The main problem, according to it's detractors, was its reliance on neoclassical premises: since general equilibrium does not, in fact, exist, the Lange model has questionable applicability to comprehensive economic planning. The two main authors who put forward this view and proposed alternatives were the Russian economist Alexander Nove, and the Hungarian economist János Kornai. The former has an excellent book which I would almost certainly recommend, titled "The Economics of Feasible Socialism". In it, he explores broadly the problems and history of the ECP and outlines a socialist economy consisting of a CPB combined with publicly lead enterprises. The latter (Kornai) is mostly known for his mathematical contributions. Linear programming is the most important mathematical basis for full central planning (the founder of the method itself, Leonid Kantorovich, was a Soviet mathematician and economist), and the time complexity of linear programming with regards to balancing physical inputs/outputs was a major topic of the ECP debates. János Kornai created an algorithm for decomposing intractably large problems into tractable sub-problems (although this was also predated by a similar method proposed by Dantzig & Wolfe). When specifically applied to planning, Kornai's algorithm models a way of decomposing a linear programming problem of the CPB into decentralized sub-problems mediated by coordination between individual enterprises.
Some modern authors who have recieved a lot of attention on this topic (at least on the heterodox side of the fence) are Computer Scientist Paul Cockshott and Economist Allin Cottrell, who argue that non-market cybernetic planning is computationally viable. They propose their model in their book Towards a New Socialism, but also have a number of papers on it: see here, here, or here. From how I understand it, many of the objections to Cockshott & Cottrell stem from the fact that they address the idea of computational possibility rather than (truer to the original formulation of the ECP) logical possibility.
Peter Joseph also, from a liberal rather than Marxist socialist perspective, has written an interesting book titled The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression. In it, he makes some interesting proposals about how the commonly cited role of a pricing system in relaying necessary feedback about consumer preference, scarcity, etc. will eventually become obsolete due to the expansion of information technology and adoption of fully integrated sensor-based networks.
One final thing to follow would be the field of Algorithmic Mechanism Design- it's still a relatively new subject, and IMO will be a major factor in putting to rest this planning debate one way or the other. Many people in AMD have essentially looked at planning with the view that much of the debate boils down to understanding of how to overcome informational problems preventing ideal coordination between actors in an economy- thus necessitating integration of recent developments in information technology into modern economic models.
Nope, I am not saying that. I am saying if we compare and contrast markets vs. command economy in this aspect, there is no comparison.
You should read the relatively Marx-sympathetic economist William Baumol.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J0HCLB0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
There is a series of graphic guides to some of the political ideologies that I enjoyed. You can buy the titles as part of a broader set or individually.
Marxism - available free on Kindle. Or a bigger guide.
Capitalism - currently free on Kindle. Or a bigger guide.
Fascism - free on Kindle.
There is also a free sampler available for free on Kindle ATM.
Taiwan and Korea had similar models to Japan. HK and Singapore don't count as city states. Nonetheless as Joe Studwell points out in his book, Korea did it best and continues to do so -> http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00B3M47VC/
"The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199328501
Economics of a Feasible Socialism by Alec Nove
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Feasible-Socialism-Alec-Nove/dp/0043350496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462490112&sr=8-1&keywords=economics+of+a+feasible+socialism
Murray Bookchin (Not quite a Marxist, but his ideas are heavily influencing the events in Kurdistan currently):
http://www.amazon.com/Next-Revolution-Popular-Assemblies-Democracy/dp/1781685819/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1462490185&sr=8-3&keywords=murray+bookchin
Existe uma literatura acadêmica relevante sobre as inspirações cristãs da teoria econômica (exemplo), de forma que muito da retórica e das soluções é uma versão secularizada da escatologia cristã. É meio comum ver isso referenciado ao marxismo, mas isso é tão válido quanto à economia neoclássica.
I don't mind people attempting an answer or trying to start a discourse with their limited knowledge from Econ 101. However, it should be constructive and be part of the search for a deeper understanding rather than a following of your favorite Economic Religion.
For more on this: http://www.amazon.com/Economics-As-Religion-Samuelson-Chicago/dp/0271022841
That ranking of OCED they use showing the US near the bottom with 24% is only comparing the federal income tax rates, not state/provincial, which is not a good comparison IMO. The rate I calculated was much higher.
"For instance, OECD data don’t include taxes paid at the state, provincial or local level (such as sales and property taxes in the U.S.), nor do they include other national taxes, such as gasoline and cigarette taxes in the U.S. or value-added taxes in dozens of other countries. And they include only the individual portion of social-insurance taxes, not anything paid by employers. (In the U.S., for instance, employers and workers both pay Social Security and Medicare taxes.)"
Doing my calculations I also started thinking the US was lower when I started at federal. But once I do the full calculation with provincial and state taxes living in SF became basically the same as living in Toronto. But that didn't include health care, so it was much more in the end.
I'd love to see the calculations for living in different big cities around the world with the full realistic rates what you pay. Also at ~3 different income levels because the rates vary heavily based on income brackets almost everywhere. I might try to do this one day.
That being said I don't doubt that some state heavy European countries are higher on average. But governments have grown in size everywhere over the last 50 years.
The book "The Fourth Revolution" has a good history of how the nation state has grown and the US is right up there with many top heavy European states, especially when you factor in the myriad of regulations and agencies you have to interact with. And the book is not some cliche anti-goverment rant but very balanced.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143127608
The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge.
In Defense of Global Capitalism, by Johan Norberg.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon.
The Road to Serfdom by F A Hayek.
Asquith, by Roy Jenkins.
This is a weird one, but Woodrow Wilson by John Milton Cooper Jr. This influenced me a lot, but it obviously won't have the same effect on everyone.
well played. I'm reading this on my kindle right now: http://www.richardpowers.net/the-overstory/.
It's fine. Good literature, even, but not really moving the needle yet. In theory when that's over I'll read at least some of this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07THBXS88/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1.
I was a 100-pleasure-book-a-year guy in high school even while gaming a lot, but I read maybe three a year recently.
In the midst of my final year at university and thought I'd share my essentials. A lot of these pieces are essentials from this sub - which I give many thanks to!
From left to right:
• Macbook Pro
• Staedtler Highlighter
• AmazonBasics Gold iPhone Cable
• A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy
• Warby Parker Glasses
• Casio World Time AE1200WH-1A
• Saddleback Leather Co. Card Holder
• Alcohol Swab - Essential
• Victorinox Pioneer X
• Mac Charger
• iPhone 6 w/ Mophie Charging Case
https://www.amazon.com/Fate-Empires-Inquiry-Stability-Civilization-ebook/dp/B01MF5HKXN
Non-mobile: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B3M47VC/
^That's ^why ^I'm ^here, ^I ^don't ^judge ^you. ^PM ^/u/xl0 ^if ^I'm ^causing ^any ^trouble. ^WUT?
The Nordic Model- Embracing globalization and sharing risks An MIT report.
The Nordic Model: Scandinavia since 1945 (Contemporary Worlds) By senior lecturer in contemporary Scandinavian history at the University College, London.
I’d also consider Viking Economics, more of an advocates take.
> Here's the missing information on what caused a lot of famines in communist countries. It's not badeconomics
While I am sure what you say is true you should not underplay Soviet economic incompetence (or negligence) in agriculture. Before the Bolsheviks seized power Russian grain exports were 30% of the world total. After dependence on imported grain became a long term feature of the system. There were three types of agricultural production unit: the under prioritised (you could say exploited) pseudo coops called the collective farms, the favoured and subsidized state farms, and the personal plots the peasants were allowed to work in their own time to help with their basic subsistence. Those personal plots despite being only 4% of the total arable land would come to produce 40% of fruits berries and eggs, over 60% of potatoes and 30% of meat, milk, and vegetables. All traded in the shadow economy. A rather perverse situation for one of the two most powerful and influential nations on Earth. My source for this btw is Barkley Rosser's comparative economics textbook Chapter 10, p274
I sometimes like to read Socialism by Ludwig von Mises as a way to counter the anarchist/socialist theories I've come to believe. And why not go to the source of so many critiques of what I've come to believe?
I usually just come away with more questions about why the hell capitalism is so great, though...so...I don't think it's working.
Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
Historically direct anction would preceed any meaningful change in the state's politics. There's just so many examples of it, but the latest is the one in Iceland. They didn't just vote, they organized first and made sure that the people they voted into power will not be overruled by private interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Icelandic_financial_crisis_protests
There's also a couple of chapters about what happened there in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Viking-Economics-How-Scandinavians-Right/dp/1612195369
"The response to experts has been for non-experts to call
experts “conspiracy theorists.” In other words, they substitute name-calling."--Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic
Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.
It is currently standard practice in America to simply dismiss any piece of information that punches a hole in any widely accepted explanation of a disturbing event. In many cases, especially when a serious crime is in question, the "conspiracy theory" tag is immediately attached to any new discovery about the event.
There seems to be no set criteria for dismissing information as a foolish conspiracy theory. The only prerequisite for information to be so categorized seems to be the desire to reject it. The reason for the rejection does not seem to matter. It appears that anything people do not want to believe is simply set aside as not believable. It almost seems that if you set some people of fire they would dismiss the flames as non-existent, simply because they did not want to believe what was happening. The pain and damage done by the fire, no matter how devastating, would not be evidence enough to convince these people that the fire was real. Their need to believe otherwise would win out. In the same vein, people dismiss information and apply the conspiracy theory tag to anything they chose to disbelieve at their own discretion, regardless of any hard evidence that accompanies the "theory."
It's time to put an end to this nonsense once and for all. It's also time dispense with the name calling.
Right wing? Yeah... Right. Try reading his book here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00BLPJNWE?pc_redir=1395542195&robot_redir=1
https://www.amazon.com/Economics-As-Religion-Samuelson-Chicago/dp/0271022841
what are you talking about? Are you a bot, or just don't know what you are talking about? Stop sharing nonfactual information. Go read something that isn't conspiracy based and actually is accurate. https://www.amazon.com/Comparative-Economics-Transforming-World-Economy/dp/0262681536/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=
The 1%ers are not the problem, although their ridiculous wealth can be revolting. Luckily I live in a society where I don't have to bump into such people daily. However it is the top 20% upper middle class that potentially will shift the society so much that it breaks. Peterson is aware of this - the primary societal problem for him is the inevitability of radical inequality in a meritocracy as productivity follows the Pareto distribution. This will likely get worse through globalization and (for JP) merely redistributing resources and re-qualifying those left behind (as the standard left model goes) is not enough. Neither does conservatives notion of just dumping the minimum wage. He does not ignore this problem and contrary to many others acknowledges that inherent biological differences in ability make this problem very hard to solve. Check his interview with Martin Daly for more on this.
The connection between this and his adoption of a Christian value system (remember he also speaks fondly of Buddhism and pre-Christian mythology) are not wholly clear to me, if there is any. Maybe he sees it as a remedy, but perhaps it is the opposite.
I doubt they're peer reviewed, and I don't see why that would matter, except to someone who doesn't know anything about what peer review is and just wants to use it as a litmus test. Hopefully, the reader is capable of reading critically and recognizing whether or not arguments are good and based on well-sourced data.
That said, Sowell is an accomplished scholar, and if you have access to a good university library with peer-reviewed economic journals and monographs, then you'll be able to find plenty of peer-reviewed work from him, including on this topic by searching the databases that anybody who understands what peer review is would already be familiar with.
But see especially the following:
https://www.amazon.com/Civil-Rights-RHETORIC-Thomas-Sowell-ebook/dp/B000RO9VI6/
https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-America-History-Thomas-Sowell-ebook/dp/B00ANRU64A/
https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell-ebook/dp/B07JLS7P8D/
Here's a book I've not read but have seen recommended before about this topic.
Also, the economist Yanis Varoufakis blogged about some economic topics while he worked for Vavle.
BTW: I highly recommend this book if you are interested in the design around virtual goods:
Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (Information Policy)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262027259/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_cjkjDbYP3NJB3
> Yeah, but that misses the point. I'm not talking about direct incentive when I talk about the importance of the price mechanism. The OP is about a planned economy and this isn't a planned economy.
It doesn't miss the point, actually this is fundamental to my argument. Admitting that the price mechanism doesn't influence directly the behaviour of the agents inside of the firm (outside the boundaries decided by the plan of production) I can clearly argue that the lack of price mechanism in the relationships inside a vertically integrated firm is enough to demonstrate that even in the capitalist enterprise the price isn't the main component of inside decision-making. It isn't why managers or workers at any level work, those are material incentives.
Therefore, again, democratic planning won't have similar problems. I'll go on explaining addressing your other points.
​
> No, I don't agree with that. It is impossible because the state ultimately does not operate on the basis of prices and competition like companies do.
The fact that the lack of competition needs us to find new material incentives for managers to do a good surveillance it's true, but you are making a slippery slope fallacy if you are arguing that it's impossible to find them.
If that was true, all the public services around the world would be bad. That's obviously wrong.
Again: there's an entire field of economics studing bureaucratic incentives. There are thousands of academical papers, empirical studies that analyze the best material incentives instead of competition.
​
> It is real and the empirical evidence is the failure of planned economies.
Here you are making a TERRIBLE logical fallacy.
You are saying: the socialist bloc has the ECP -> the socialist bloc failed -> ECP is true
This is circular reasoning and it goes against historical evidences from the socialist bloc: I suggest you to read more about the fall of the USSR from good academical resources.
I suggest you to start from this Professor Ellman's book to fully understand pros and cons of socialist economies from a comparative point of view. You'll see that the ECP is not the cause of the fall.
​
> Nothing is perfectly inelastic, so this is irrelevant. Literally any food that you can name can be ditched for some other kind of food.
Actually, modern microeconomics has great statistical tools to understand even consumer pattern of elastic goods. The fact that some necessity goods aren't completely inelastic isn't a problem. We don't have to perfectly exactly allocate everything, we aren't talking about some abstract model to achieve a paretian optimum. Under capitalism there is a massive waste of resources and if we produce a little more electricity than what statistics about consumer behaviors tell us to be sure that everyone has everything they need nothing bad will happen.
In conclusion thinking that since necessity goods aren't perfectly inelastic then the whole planning will be wrong is true only if we are trying to achieve the perfect allocation and this is something we can't do in any economic system. We will produce a little more to be sure.
​
>Production does come before consumption, but it is determined based on customer demand. Same with prices.
We agree. That's what I wanted to achieve.
What you wrote is the first step towards the marxian labor theory of value, nice my friend ;)
> What is there to excuse when pointing out the evils in a political ideology?
I suggest a re-reading of my first comment.
>Are they calling the squad in the House socialists?
They do try to pretend their book has relevance.
>I see economists writing about economics.
I see stale propaganda. The key thing about propaganda is that it's a caricature. It is not, by design, a serious intellectual exercise. Now, propaganda is appropriate under some circumstances. But it is not "economists writing about economics". The problem with this propaganda is not even that it's a caricature, but that it's stale, irrelevant, and counterproductive.