(Part 2) Top products from r/badeconomics
We found 36 product mentions on r/badeconomics. We ranked the 301 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.
22. Mastering 'Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 2
Princeton University Press
Show Reddit reviews23. The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Show Reddit reviews24. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Sentiment score: 2
Number of reviews: 2
Show Reddit reviews25. Advanced Macroeconomics (The Mcgraw-hill Series in Economics)
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Show Reddit reviews26. After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Show Reddit reviews27. Economics of the Public Sector (Fourth Edition)
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Show Reddit reviews28. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Show Reddit reviews29. Modern Macroeconomics: Its Origins, Development and Current State
Sentiment score: 2
Number of reviews: 2
Show Reddit reviews
31. Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution (The Roundtable Series in Behavioral Economics)
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Show Reddit reviews32. Mathematical Statistics with Applications
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 2
Show Reddit reviews33. Asset Management: A Systematic Approach to Factor Investing (Financial Management Association Survey and Synthesis)
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
Oxford University Press UK
Show Reddit reviews34. Macroeconomics, Fifth Canadian Edtion (5th Edition)
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 1
Show Reddit reviews35. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
Used Book in Good Condition
Show Reddit reviews36. Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 1
Show Reddit reviews37. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 1
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS ACADEM
Show Reddit reviews
R1:
Today I bring you this WaPo Op-Ed on how the Carrier deal will return business norms back to ones that favor labor and community because firms will fear Trump’s wrath. Here the author offers a distorted view of America’s past, a dysfunctional view of how contracts and norms interact, and a wayward portrayal of economists as unable to fathom agents and systems which do not follow strict mathematical functional forms.
>There was a time in America when there was an unwritten pact in the business world — workers were loyal to their companies and successful companies returned that loyalty by sharing some of their profits with their workers in the form of higher wages, job security and support for the local community.
The author wistfully describes a past that did not exist when businesses and workers in long term marriages because it was what was right and good for the community.
At its heart this period existed because unionization (or more accurately worker bargaining power) made it possible. Certainly on the point of loyalty, unionization decline is the largest contributor to declining tenure (see Bidwell. As unionization fell, this loyalty also disappeared.
However, unionization's decline can largely be explained by the rule of law (right-to-work laws, unionization process etc.) though governing and business norms played a role (to be discussed).
With bargaining power largely reduce, workers had additional difficulty (for better or worse) attempting to hold their jobs in the face of international pressures and especially technological change as countless economist (Autor just to name check one) have documented.
>modern day economists tend to ignore such shifts in social norms because they can’t quantify them in the same way they can quantify trade flows or technological innovation or changes in educational attainment. They assume that social norms change in response to economic fundamentals rather than the other way around.
This is the sort of things that can ruin my work day as a nominally institutionalist style economist. To begin, several Nobel prize winning economists have done significant work studying norms formation and effects such as North, Ostrom, Akerlof, Akerlof again!.
Beyond this, others have built off these works (Ostrom was focusing on the importance of norms, but not specifically addressing the problem) to try to model norm development in game theory example.
In fact, in Samuel Bowles’ Microeconomics, discusses in detail the way contracts influence the norms and institutions of exchange (Chapter 8, p. 265). The long and short of Bowles’ discussion is that norms are well understood, evolutionary, and in the absence of complete contracting have significant influence on the results of exchange.
Norms matter greatly to economists in the event that contracting is incomplete. One would hope, it seems in vain, that contracting between the federal government and American firms is more complete than most contractual situations.
>the new norm is not longer acceptable, and [Trump] intends to do whatever he can to shame and punish companies that abandon their workers.
>He may even have to make an example of a runaway company by sending in the tax auditors or the OSHA inspectors or cancelling a big government contract.
Many economists see the potential change of market norms that will result from government contracts suddenly being less than 100% enforceable as a problem. Coming back to Bowles, he notes that said norms “are sustained by the structure of the market and other social interactions in which traders routinely engage.” If having government contracts and enforcement become less predictable is to be the new norm of enforcement, surely the market response will be to ask government from some premia in contracting to account for uncertainty. New firms may avoid starting their business under the supervision of this government altogether.
Tyler Cowen points out that the new norms that would arise likely involve more complex contractual agreements to skirt restrictions, degradation of U.S. tech advancement, a ramping of favoritism to levels not seen since the Harding administration, potential de facto capital controls, or at best a politicization of the economy with no real rule of law effects.
>Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt understood that. So did Ronald Reagan when he fired thousands of striking air traffic controllers and set back the union movement for several decades.
Perhaps most crucially, the author here references a variety of Presidents who enforced their support (or lack therefore) for labor, but did so through the rule of law via various anti-trust acts, the championing and enactment of a large set of labor relations legislation, and the decision to enforce laws enshrined in code 15 years prior that had been previously ignored. As opposed to potentially undermining the rule of law as Trump does by leveraging government contracts and regulation.
A bonus on this point is that—though Reagan’s actions may have signaled willingness from government to support changing business norms by supporting them through rule of law—unionization’s decline had already begun years prior to the changes in business norms Reagan’s ruling supposedly incited.
The study of economics is not one that lacks an understanding of how norms influence market interactions. Though I am not as well versed in studies accounting for changes in norms mathematically, I’d wager someone here could produce good examples of studies that do just this through the use of good instrumental variables.
The Carrier deal will likely change norms in business actions, but those are likely to be related to businesses’ certainty in contracting with government during the Trump presidency. Just as is seen in Trump’s cabinet, the only people left to provide work will be those certain they can take advantage of information asymmetry to get a better deal from U.S. governments. Any mass effort to enforce job retention on a scale much more massive than the Carrier deal will be enacted via law and will be just as harmful to business culture as Cowen and other economist predict, but it will be the changes to contractual enforcement that drive these results and not revolution in norms spurred on by backroom dealing.
I recommend reading Snowdon and Vane (2005), "Modern Macroeconomics: Its Origins, Development, and Current State." Very concise textbook that covers the history of modern economic thought, from the Classicals to Old Keynesians to Monetarists to New Classicals to New Keynesians and everywhere in between, including an entire chapter on Austrian Econ! In the mainstream econ world, devoting a textbook chapter to a fringe school of thought is rare, indeed, but the book is widely used and even appears on /u/Integrald's recommended reading list in /r/Economics, which you should also check out if you want to learn more about econ and are new to the discipline.
Note: This book is for the advanced undergraduate level, but it's not too mathematical at all and gives a good grounding if you're confused by all these schools. Rest assured, though, that a lot of these controversies have been resolved. On the internet, Austrians and Marxians and sometimes Post-Keynesians seem like they have a lot of influence, but when it comes to publishing in mainstream journals that's not the case.
The reason why you often see "funny maymays" about Austrians and Marxians on this sub is because Reddit Austrians and casual Marxists are often ignorant of the mainstream economic paradigm they are so critical of. In reality, praxeology and dialectics are not inherently bad, but have been used to make some pretty stupid arguments at least online.
While your overall point is correct, I wouldn't dismiss the commenter so quickly. You are correct that the pricing mechanism they describe is inaccurate, and that the firm's cost structure is hugely important. (Unless the firm had extremely effective price discrimination and a huge degree of market power). However, I believe that the cited comment is actually making (or could potentially make) two different arguments as its core claims:
First, arguing from a general "Keeping up with the Jones" principle. In particular,
> Because the more things people have, the more people expect you to have it.
While the nice things that people have surely provide utility in of themselves, part of the utility that these goods provide is in the signal of social status relative to those around you. Similar to the argument that Krugman puts forth, relative increases in wealth can matter more than absolute increases. In this case, the fact that people around you have nicer things exerts pressure on you to own those same goods. You can't extend this argument to say "people in the 90s aren't any better off than they were in the 50s", but dismissing OP out of hand seems unfair.
Secondly, we may imagine that some goods are zero-sum, or at least close to zero-sum. Elizabeth Warren makes this argument regarding dual-income families in The Two-Income Trap. While OP doesn't reference this specifically, a great example of this phenomenon might be access to high quality public schools. The best-quality public schools have a finite and relatively constant number of seats, such that they are accessible only to people in the top X% of income. If all families excepting yours begin sending both parents to work, and use that supplemental income to purchase property near these upper-tier school, the relative tier of school you attend will fall, even if your actual income remains unchanged. If everyone's income doubles, it may well be that the relative tier of school you attend is unchanged. The absolute quality of every school may increase, but ranking is often seen as more important. (Numerous thinkpieces describe this same phenomenon as being behind the increased competition in college applications, particularly for elite schools).
> (https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986) If post length were the basis for winning an argument, you'd win. However, you have little idea what you are talking about due to your neoliberal blinders. Try reading the book at the link, which exactly supports the point I made.
Why is your only source a book that supports your prior beliefs? Why is it that a huge majority of economists support free trade, and you choose to disagree based on one book?
Maybe "you have little idea what you are talking about due to your
neoliberal blinders" corporate shilling.>It seems to me that the gist of conservatism relies on two things, (1) mistrust of a priori (utopian) reasoning and revolutions, (2) and trust in incremental changes by past experiences and wisdom.
If you one day feel like challenging this conception of yours, i recommend taking a look at the book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin.
For textbooks, any recommendation would depend on your mathematics background. If you are just starting out (say, high school level calculus background), then this is the book I would suggest.
If you are familiar with more advanced calculus techniques and are decent at mathematics, then I would suggest you try this book.
This is a decent free macro textbook available online. I have only read a couple of chapters of this and its pretty decent for being free.
Here's the economics guide I typically recommend for newcomers:
Pirate a intermediate micro and macro textbook and do the math problems. Mankiw's macro and Krugman's micro are good for basic stuff. For intermediate+ macro textbooks we used blanchard and Sanjay Chugh's for advanced stuff. I forget what textbooks we used for intermediate and advanced micro but any textbook that has math for the models listed below should be good.
The recommended model order I would say is:
The last one doesn't really give you an overview of real-world institutional details as much, whereas Ang and Ilmanen both have really extensive introductions to this. Both Ang and Ilmanen spend some time on the economics of why this works -- utility-function-based explanations of why we should expect things to have positive expected returns anyway -- but they add a lot on how this looks IRL (how the relevant instruments and markets for them actually work, what classes of investors tend to buy them and why, what kinds of risk factors they're exposed to, etc)
Edit: I recommend against Ben Graham's book actually if you want a broad overview. I don't think he even touches factor investing, for example. Focuses on how to pick stocks by valuing the company on a fundamental basis which...shouldn't add value. Has little tie in to academic finance, unlike Ilmanen and Ang which both give you a good idea of what the seminal papers in various areas are and what's going on in the literature lately.
I've taken a course on public economics, we used this textbook by Stiglitz. You can find it online if you look around. It's pretty good but it's long so not exactly casual. Still, it doesn't get very technical so it's pretty accessible. The important chapters are the ones under welfare economics and the first few chapters on taxation, that might be a good starting point.
(https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986) If post length were the basis for winning an argument, you'd win. However, you have little idea what you are talking about due to your neoliberal blinders. Try reading the book at the link, which exactly supports the point I made.
I should note that the effects of automation on inequality are very concerning - even though I'm dismissive of the claims you made regarding jobs, specifically.
In making this next video, I strongly recommend incorporating the "Skills Biased Technological Change" literature. Goldin and Katz's The Race Between Education and Inequality, Autor's Skills Inequality and the 99% and Acemoglu's Technology and Inequality are good places to start.
I'd also recommend looking a bit into how inequality corrodes our political institutions. Acemoglu and Johnson's Why Nations Fail is the heavy hitter here.
Margin of Safety by Seth Klarman. The market has spoken and it's the best.
More seriously, I'd go with Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. It's a little more dense compared to Intelligent Investor, but definitely digestible with an undergrad understanding of econ.
*Oh, and the Hull text is the derivatives bible.
Snapshots:
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I found macroeconomic patterns and stories super helpful. It's more empiric than theory, but it's very readable.
The pure mechanics component consists of multivariable differential calculus, a little bit of multivariable integral calculus, and a bit of linear algebra; plus substantial comfort what might be called "systems of equations differential calculus." The fastest way to cover this material is to work through the first five or so chapters of Kaplan's advanced calculus book or something similar. Do the exercises. Your basic Stewart Calculus doesn't adequately cover the systems-of-equations part and Kreyszig's Advanced Engineering Mathematics book is at the right technical level but has all the wrong emphasis and coverage for economists. Kaplan's book isn't ideal, but it's about as close as you're going to get. (This is a hole in the textbook market...)
The theoretical portion mainly consists of basic point-set topology and elementary real analysis. The fastest way to cover this material is to chop through the first eight chapters of Rudin's undergraduate book.
Yale has a lovely set of Math Camp notes that you should also work through side-by-side with Kaplan and Rudin.
To see economic applications, read those two books side-by-side with Simon and Blume's book.
The first chapter of Debreu's Theory of Value covers all the math you need to know and is super slick, but is also far too terse and technical to realistically serve as your only resource. Similarly you should peek at the mathematical appendices in MWG but they will likely not be sufficient on their own.
In the most recent scifi novel of The Expanse series, Tiamat's Wrath, by James S. A. Corey the authors (it's 2 guys) try to teach us all about the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Advanced Macro
https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Macroeconomics-Mcgraw-Hill-Economics-David/dp/0073511374
If you want some more material you have got this 1000 page book which I believe uses some sort of Marxian econophysics with influences from other heterodox approaches.
I am really starting to think about switching to recommending this endlessly.
https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-Going/dp/0465090907
Never too late to learn, grasshopper.
This was mine.