/lit/ - Literature

Taleb is good at trolling academic economists, but if you attempt to parrot his arguments to someone who is knowledgeable about the topic you will probably get rolled. You can’t read one book and become a bigger expert in a field than someone who has dedicated years of his life to it.

Economics is literally the most worthless subject anyone could possibly study

buy high sell low. thats all the advice you'll ever need to know about economics.

>>18602279
They haven't. They're a midwit who spent a few months on it.

Now, reccs

>>18602347
Agreed

>>18602359
Unfruitful. I don't care about your quips.

>>18602347
>>18602492
I've never studied economics. Why is it considered useless?

Capital by Piketty is pretty good. The central idea is relatively easy to understand at a quick read, if that's what you're looking for.

Black Swan is okay, but it's a favorite of pseuds. Pseuds love to cherry pick ideas that let them argue something that invalidates all other ideas in a given field, so the idea of "economists can't predict anything due to black swan events" gets their contrarian boners hard.

Wealth of Nations is a good read, but what you want is to read it without going heavily into footnotes or annotations. Revisionists have put a spin on the book that the idea of the invisible hand is the key idea of the book, when in reality the concept is mentioned exactly once in relation to the deskilling of the labor force. The deskilling of the labor force and its consequences are a more important idea in the book, but you will not find it in most indexes and won't find it referenced by outside sources often. Actually read the book and you'll understand why.

I'm not going to recommend anything like Malthus or Marx/Engels.

I'm going to recommend against anything from the Mises institute. Not because the Austrians had bad ideas, they came up with some interesting concepts, but because the Mises Institute essentially claims that the Austrian School had all of the answers and we need nothing further. Saying that one is of the Austrian School of economics today is akin to saying that one is of the Newtonian School of physics today. It's a laughable statement if you understand enough to see through it as bullshit, but the Mises Institute caters the well-read equivalent of Dale Gribble.

>>18602639
Nigga capital is like 700 pages wtf
Also thanks for the effortposting

>>18602256
Ask that on /biz/, OP. Economics is not like a thing in here. People usually shill the same book over and over. That Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

>>18602588
The only people calling it worthless are people who have never studied it kek. Economics is psychology but on a much grander scale

>>18602256
Adam Smith Wealth of Nations
Surprisingly a great audiobook easy to follow
However if you zone out buy it on Amazon's Audible which allows you to do bookmarks and has chapter labels that allow you to add notes.

Otherwise
Hutt's Theory of Idle Resources will give you the road to walk back from because it is the ultimate winning of the eternal argument between economic schools. It's best in my experience to tackle a hard thing when there is a high chance of first time failure if it teaches you how to get it right after telling you what you were missing all along in the absolute most efficient way.

>>18602949
I had to take multiple economics courses for my degree. Microeconomics for the purposes of personal finance is useful. Macroeconomics for the purposes of attempting to predict the future is a joke. It’s a guessing game. Nobody actually knows what will happen. People like Paul Krugman are weathermen but with money

>>18602948
/biz/ degree from accredited Uni here
Fuck that casino shitposting beggar site and IRL school
Here is where I get good debates and cited arguments and sound recommendations
Here and Academic Agent on Youtube

>>18602347
Shit coins are my bitch after I got my business degree and made sense of my econ classes

Start with the LaRoucheans

>>18602256
>>18602639 is a fine list for someone very different from OP. If you're just trying to beat up your econ friend, you should read something short, annoying, and anti-econ. Steve Keen's Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis is probably really good for this; if you're willing to read ~4-500 pages, Debunking Economics would also be good.

>>18602359
That's finance, not economics.
>>18602256
Literally any textbook, though if you want to "win" debates, your best bet is adopting some sort of esoteric heterodoxy, and subsequently disregarding any objection or point that does not harmonize with that framework.

>>18602998
Holy based

>>18602359
How can you be so retarded and write with such confidence

>>18602639
>Capital by Piketty is pretty good
Skip this communist garbage OP, or at least follow it up with picrel. Also generally ignore this anon. He's clearly a useful pseud who's probably sunk thousands into an overpriced "education" in politically subsidized scientism cooked up by institutions designed to churn out unwittingly obedient little mouthpieces for the state and its ever-parasitic interests.

>>18602256
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/
https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/view/lang/English.date.html

>>18602256
>Yo. I want to get super primed on economics
Steve Keen "Debunking Economics" (2011)

>>18602967
Taleb hands typed this post

>>18603048
>That's finance, not economics.
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/09/04/stocks-are-up-wages-are-down-what-does-it-mean/

"Economists, Nitzan and Bichler argue, don’t understand capital. Whether neoclassical or Marxist, economists agree that capital is a duality. It’s both ‘money’ and ‘machines’. This duality, Nitzan and Bichler argue, is a mistake. Capital, they claim, is one thing only. Capital is finance.
At first, this view seems ultra modern. It’s only in the 21st century, after all, that hedge funds came to dominate society. But when Nitzan and Bichler use the word ‘finance’, they mean something more expansive than hedge funds and investment banks. They mean any quantification in money.
What’s important is that this expansive view of finance is not modern, but ancient. The monetary definition of ‘capital’ long predates the physical one"

"[‘Capital’] comes from the Latin caput, a word whose origin goes back to the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. In both Rome and Mesopotamia capital had a similar, unambiguous economic meaning: it was a monetary magnitude. There was no relation to produced means of production. Indeed, caput meant ‘head’, which fits well with another Babylonian invention — the human ‘work day’.
(Nitzan and Bichler in Capital as Power)"

"The idea that ‘capital’ reflects a stock of ‘real’ wealth came much later, during the industrial revolution. It was created, Nitzan and Bichler note, by political economists. The problem is that capitalists have never thought of capital as a duality. Their goal has always been singular — to accumulate money."

>>18602256
books are for nerds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

>>18602256
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsUS3ynhAKY

>>18602588
Economics is the most math-heavy social science, is classified as a STEM in many universities, is very flexible in the job market, and produces the third most millionaires (behind business and engineering degrees). It’s far from useless.

>>18605229
Only on /lit/

>>18605318
>Economics is the most math-heavy social science
So is astrology.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers

>It’s far from useless.
Astrology is far from useless?

>>18605344
>Astrology is far from useless?
>India's University Grants Commission and Ministry of Human Resource Development decided to introduce "Jyotir Vigyan" (i.e. jyotir vijñāna) or "Vedic astrology" as a discipline of study in Indian universities, stating that "vedic astrology is not only one of the main subjects of our traditional and classical knowledge but this is the discipline, which lets us know the events happening in human life and in universe on time scale"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_astrology#Astrology_as_a_(pseudo)science

Be more open-minded, fag. Just because someone tells you that its useless, doesn't mean that astrology doesn't work.

>>18605354
Are you a woman? Astrology is the most useless thing ever

>>18605354
It's math-heavy and taught in universities. Therefore, it's working.

>>18605415
see >>18605423

>>18602256

>Smith - Wealth of Nations
>Ricardo - On The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
>Marx - Value, Price and Profit & Wage Labour and Capital
These are some old-time classics of the field. Ricardo's Principles is pretty short, and VPP and WL&C are good Marxist explainers that are only pamphlet length so you can get a quick rundown without having to inhale Capital Vol I

>Samuelson (and Nordhaus) - "Economics".
Canonical text. In my view it's THE standard economics textbook, like SICP or Sedgewick in Comp. Sci. Kind of sums up the centrist view of economics

>Keynes - General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Very influential in the 1930s-1970s era, not really superseded, kind of got rolled into the neoclassical synthesis represented by Samuelson.

>Mitchell et al - Macroeconomics
The standard text on Modern Monetary Theory. Love it or hate it, it's a big deal right now and there's a lot of arguments that will flow more smoothly if you've read it.

>>18605427
You can't be serious. Did you even read the wikipedia article you posted? One country in the world teaches astrology, everyone is against this, they never managed to predict anything. I am fascinated how there are still people who believe in this crap, math won't help you if you are a real smooth brain.

>>18605462
It predicts because people believe, people like JP Morgan who said "millionaires don't study astrology. Billionaires do."
The age of Aquarius is coming up.
The end of the Great Reset will usher it in.
Right now Pisces, the age of distrust is at its peak.

Also mercury is retrograding my blue balls right now into Venus pussy because the spiral of our sun with the trinary Sirius A and Sirius B gave me like big dick energy last galaxy we spiral orbited by on our launch into the black hole Kronos center of the Milky Way. Well time to write another nonsense Femoid magazine!

>>18605453
Okay, finally a good /lit/ answer

>>18605489
>people like JP Morgan who said "millionaires don't study astrology. Billionaires do."
I will chime in, the "people like JP Morgan" are not subject to market rules as they rig the markets as they please. EVERY KIND of business can be profitable *for them* because they buy government regulations which decimate their competition in a blink of an aye. They may use Astrology because they need _some_ decision making process, but in *their case* it will really be exactly as effective as flipping the coin. That is, 100% effective.
OP - some anons here are recommending you books with purely contradictory information in a single breath. Economics is a _really_ complex science; you will get lost if you just "start with the Greeks". I recommend "Economics in one lesson" as an intro and _only then_ you may pursue further on if you feel the need - you should be much better equipped to filter the bullshit this way.

>another thread where clueles /lit/izens treat economics like a qualitative subject and reccomend the same few pop econ books and 19th century texts as last time
If your economics doesn't involve pages of calculations you're doing womans econ.

>>18605589
Ok then what do you recommend?

>>18605521
>finally a good /lit/ answer
Your only good answers were given >>18604866 >>18604871 >>18605055 here

1. Begin with "Capital as Power" by Nitzan and Bichler - first half of it explains why neoclassicism and marxism suck, why neither utility nor labor hours work, why Samuelson's "revealed preferences" is a sham, etc..
2. Proceed with "Rethinking Economic Growth Theory From a Biophysical Perspective" by Blair Fix - it explains why you can't sanely define GDP, rendering all the price measuring into some useless ritual.
3. Check "Debt as Power" and "An Anthropology of Money" by Richard H. Robbins and Tim Di Muzio
4. Read Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics"

>>18605602
Textbooks.

>>18605589
>>18605344

If your calculations involve Law of Demand, which doesn't work ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu_theorem ) you are doing a pseudo-science

>>18602256
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/a-reading-list-for-economic-heretics/

why does nobody know what economists do?

>>18605645
Because the mainstream ones are shamans whose mantras do not work >>18605247
And the rest are ignored, because heterodox

/lit/ used to recommend Ha-Joon Chang's economics survey. I read it it's pretty alright and has a couple pages that just summarize the key points and schools so if you're really really lazy you could try that.

>>18602998
>Academic Agent on Youtube
Just checked it on yt. Nice recommj2xmgendation anon

>>18606228
*recommendation
Kek