(Part 3) Top products from r/AskEconomics

This is my field of study, so if you have questions or comments don't hesitate to ask, but I think you need to think this through a bit. What is your goal? Are you writing a paper? Or are you just trying to understand the impact of privatization? In short, I will say that some people made their entire careers on understanding the complexities of telecom regulation. It is a dense subject with a lot of nuance that shouldn't be taken lightly.

As a general matter, then, I think you should shift the framing away from good or bad and talk about the effects for consumers or how it changed the status quo. You can make the assessment of whether or not it was good or bad after you have laid out the costs/benefits. If you need a solid read on cost-benefit analysis or public policy analysis, check this out.

A couple of words on terminology. Do you really care about the privatization OR do you care about the regulatory regime that BT was put into afterwards? The UK government owned all of the shares of BT and then one day said that they were going to put them up for sale. Is that important and if so why? A quick search turned up this paper, suggesting that the private/public distinction didn't matter much.

What did matter was the change in the regulatory regime. In the US, we didn't have a national telecom company, we had a government granted monopoly. But we did enact much of the same regime on AT&T as was enacted on BT, as did a lot of other countries. To this effect, I would check out this paper from Jerry Hausman where he talks about the effect of unbundling and such around page 33. Hausman, if you haven't taken a lot of econometrics, has a number of statistical tests named after him. He is highly respected.

As I see it, the paper entitled "Public ownership, privatisation and regulation: social welfare counterfactuals for British Telecom" is the best since it is using a counterfactual analysis. I would start there and try to understand the gist of the social effects.

Finally, a word about prices. In the US, IIRC, prices did go up for short distance calls, but long distance calls prices went down. Interestingly, the immediate effect of an increase in prices was that people talked more often using long distance and less often with a short distance. In other words, consumers budget didn't change, but how and what they consumed did. Be careful of this.

Other comments / resources:

• Another paper worth reading
  
  
• Regulation Body of Knowledge <- This web site has a lot of citations. To find out what I am saying, put the mouse over "Price Level Regulation" and then click the "Annotated Reading List." Under the "Price Regulation" subheading, click the read more link. There is a lot here to read if you want to know more about this space.
  
  
• ICT Regulation Toolkit <- This is a web site maintained by the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union.
  
  
• Jean Tirole's Nobel Prize Lecture, which touches on telecom regulation.

Now this is an interesting and difficult question, which depends on many things. For starters, if you find this process frustrating that is unfortunate, because learning how to code is usually a trail and error + revise your work process. In other words, its supposed to be both frustrating and rewarding, like a hard (text-based) video game. For me its half of the fun.

What you want to learn really depends on the context. If you are really diving into econ, Stata is still very common. More stats-heavy, new, or interdisciplinary fields tend to use R. If you work with big, live datasets, or work with computer scientists, learning Python is always a plus. But obviously start with one.

I am proficient in stata simply because I had classes in it, it is difficult for me to advice how to self study. I learned most of the basics through An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata, and later on most of my R through R for Stata Users (Statistics and Computing) . I also learned some R through Discovering Statistics Using R, but I find Field obnoxiously failing to be funny, so I wouldn't reccomend it.

I'm now in the process of learning more Python, to do some more programming work on the side. As a start I used Learn Python 3 the Hard Way recommended to me by a very proficient friend of mine. This however does not give you much of an intro to stats in python, only the very very simple basics you can use as a vantage point for further work.

If you have learned the basics, tbe hest way to learn more is just to fool around. What is your field of interest? I like a lot of macro, so I used to just go to Quandl, pick some free databases, import them, and run some fun stuff. This is the best way to learn, especially if you for example try to merge free World bank databases with a different database from Quandl, as it will give you a lot of errors whilst merging and conversion problems later on.

If you are a bit more proficient you can start using websites like upwork to get some assignments. Usually it doesn't earn you much at the start, but the experience of actual assignments is the best way to self-teach. A different manner I like to do (if you are still studying) is offering your services (for free) to a professor. Ask him/her if there are still projects they are working on for which they need some to look at. Usually you will be treated solely as someone for the code, but it generally gives you a lot of experience and the right contacts.

These are just some of my thoughts. If you could provide some more context of where exactly you want to go, I could go into more detail.

Edit: What I forgot to say is that if it is not possible to study a course, I would recommend doing at least one MOOC to get you at a basic level.

Not OP but I glanced over these books and will definitely read Floored, Boom and Bust Banking and, The Midas Paradox. If you have any more books you'd recommend, even if they aren't about the Fed, please share. OP may be interested in After the Music Stopped by Alan S. Blinder. While it's not explicitly about the Fed, there are several chapters dedicated to what the Fed did to help cause the crisis, what the Fed did to help solve it and, the Fed after the crisis. The best part is that you can skip the chapters you're not interested in and it will still make sense.

You've stumbled onto a whole subfield of economics: Development Economics.

Here is a list of all NBER papers tagged with development.

This is a good resource regarding the EITC (check the citations).

If you are looking for "lay person friendly" books, I'd recommend:

• Gregory Clark- A Farewell to Alms (more of an economic history but essential context in my view)
  
  
• Acemoglu & Robinson- Why Nations Fail (This is a book that attempts to answer the age old "why are the poor poor" question and possible ways out)
  
  
• Angus Deaton- The Great Escape (Deaton recently won the economics Nobel)
  
  
• William Easterly- The White Man's Burden (A pretty scathing view of the West's efforts to help poor countries).
  
  This is a really wide field in economics.

If you're a practitioner or academic, I recommend Trading and Exchanges by Larry Harris (USC). Joel Hasbrouck (NYU) also has a great set of lecture notes for his course, Securities Trading: Principles and Procedures. Finally, Eugene White at Rutgers has written extensively about the history of equities trading; his papers would be a great place to dive in.

For lighter reading, I don't have great recommendations for equities. On the derivatives side, I recommend The Futures by Emily Lambert and Zero-Sum Game by Erika Olson.

These two are great, I use them for my BSc Econ. The first ones goes from basics to advance. The second one is more advanced, lots of proofs and derivations.

It’s best to have an intuitive understanding of the models graphically first (like the book your using currently), and then supplement it formally with rigours math.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Maths-Economics-Geoff-Renshaw/dp/0198704372/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1551313424&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=maths+for+economics&dpPl=1&dpID=51OLxsrZTIL&ref=plSrch

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Further-Mathematics-Economic-Analysis-Financial/dp/0273713280/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1551313548&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=mathematics+for+economic+analysis&dpPl=1&dpID=51FIVGBU1UL&ref=plSrch

Anything in political economy. Your questions are not about the ins and outs of marginal cost or Cournot analysis - you want to know how economic ideas impact policy and social actions. Try this book.

As for how the stock market works, simple. When rates are low, stocks go up, when rates go up, stocks go down and because people start to buy bonds. Except now because rates were really low and that pushed up price of bonds (and stocks). People are now selling out of bonds because the rates are going to increase and the value of bonds will fall, so they're investing in stocks. For all the shit it takes, CNBC is actually pretty good to understand all this.

There were several Milton Friedmans.

As an academic economist, he made important contributions to business cycle theory, monetary history, and consumption theory. For an overview of Friedman's scientific contributions to economics, see here. These contributions have largely stood the test of time.

But there was another Milton Friedman: the policy advocate. In this role, we can look at his popular books like Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose. Whether one accepts the conclusions of his popular work is nearly orthogonal to whether one accepts the contributions of his scientific work. For a critical account, see Krugman.

I loved The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. It's a great economic history of the Reich, and the role of monetary policy is discussed there as well.

If I can offer up a possible partial explanation from a non-economist with a strong interest in demography, I think a lot of the "hollowness" people feel today comes from mistaken beliefs about how well-off the typical person of 1950something was compared to the typical person of today.

A surprisingly easy way to start getting a handle on this is to look at old mail-order catalogs in one tab and using the BLS Inflation Calculator in another tab to convert historical prices to 2019 dollars. I tend to focus on electronics, specifically television sets and audio equipment. So, like, the cheapest television set available through Sears in 1957, a 21" black and white TV, sold for the equivalent of $1,539.35 in 2019 dollars. I bought a 60" 4k TV for less than half that price two years ago, so.

Also, people tend to think that strong-union manufacturing jobs were typical back then, ignoring the vast swaths of the population who lived in anti-union states, who toiled in the fields, who tried to scratch out a subsistence living in the pre-Great Society-reforms era, and who were locked out of "good" jobs because of their race. (I've tried asking around about exactly what percentage of the population held relatively-well-paying manufacturing jobs, but I've never gotten an answer.)

EDIT with data! I'm having a manic episode, so I couldn't stop digging. I found a handy breakdown of 1957 incomes, in 1957 dollars. The 1957 median income in 1957 dollars was $4,175; adjusted to 2017 dollars for comparison purposes, the 1957 median personal income was $35,492. Flashing forward, the 2016 median personal income in 2017 dollars was $31,099. So there was a pretty big decline in the median personal income between 1957 and 2016. But the median earner in 1957 could buy 21 cheap TVs, while the median earner in 2016 could buy 236 cheap TVs--an order of magnitude more. So I guess ultimately it comes down to the unsatisfying conclusion that there isn't even really a good way to compare the lifestyle of today to the lifestyle of yesteryear because there are just so many moving parts. (I'm not even addressing the increasing number of earners per household because I'm lazy like that.)

What part of finance are you interested in?

Asset pricing?

• Asset Pricing - Cochrane
  
• Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory - Duffie
  
  Corporate Finance?
  
  
• Theory of Corporate Finance - Tirole
  
• Theoretical Foundations of Corporate Finance - Matos
  
  Behavioral Finance?
  
  
• Inefficient Markets - Schleifer
  
  Financial Econometrics?
  
  
• The Econometrics of Financial Markets - Campbell, Lo, Mackinlay
  
• Analysis of Financial Time Series - Tsay
  
  Market Microstructure?
  
  
• Market Microstructure Theory - O'Hara
  
• Empirical Market Microstructure - Hasbrouck

Borjas’s textbook is what I used in undergrad, and I think it’s fairly good. It only requires an understanding of principals, though an understanding of intermediate micro would be better. Also, the older editions are very cheap.

the best book on the industrial revolution is probably by T. S. Ashton

https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Revolution-1760-1830-OPUS/dp/0192892894

So I usually tell my MBA students to just read books, not textbooks. Here are a few of my general suggestions:

Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein

Misbehaving Thaler

Superforecasting Tetlock and Gardner

Zombie Economics Quiggin

If you need more suggestions or want to discuss any of the ideas in these books, don't hesitate to ask.

For that I recommend Mishkin's Money Banking and Financial markets 100x over a general intro econ textbook. Its understandable by a layman, imo. You can get a fairly recent edition here used hardcover for under $20

Here is the table of contents from an older edition to give you an idea of the type of stuff covered in the book

If I were you I would read the last part of the book (the last few chapters which covers general macroeconomics) before reading the rest, but its up to you

MWG is the bible of microeconomics, but it's almost entirely unreadable. If you want a step up from Mankiw I'd start with Blanchard's Macroeconomics and Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics. These are the books I use when I teach intermediate macro/micro. The math is straight-forward (nothing beyond calculus), but you're going to be swimming in MWG or Stockey and Lucas unless you have the fundamentals down first.

My health econ professor for undergrad made us use folland's health econ book. I'm not sure how good it is though compared to other textbooks.