The Incidental Economist

One more thing. I don’t know why anybody with any interest in the practice of macroeconomics at it’s most fundamental would ignore the “The Great Debate” occurring now over the proper model for Modern Macro and its implications for policy. My gateway to it is Paul Krugman’s blog (NOT his columns), which is “Conscience of a Liberal.” He’s hard on his adversaries in comparing and contrasting. But he names names and you’re free to go your own way,

I haven’t read enough to make better-worser comparisons, but I can tell you what I’ve read (engineering/computer-science/mathematics background, married to organizational-behavior/sociologist background):

Dave Kreps, “A Course in Microeconomic Theory”.
I recall the mathematical treatment of some of the micro foundations, kinda important if you want to know the difference between faith-based and math-based. Otherwise can be tough slogging.

Robert Frank, The Winner-Take-All Society
Robert Frank, Luxury Fever
Both of these work with the observation that care about relative wealth, not just absolute wealth, and also with the observation that we suffer from the Lake Wobegon Effect, which causes us to overinvest in economic tournaments (and underinvest in health insurance, especially when we are young).

William Poundstone, The Prisoner’s Dilemma
Very helpful to think about how people behave in the absence of rules when they are only seeking self-advantage. Not a bad model for the behavior of profit-seeking corporations.

Robert Cialdini, Influence
This is how you get conned into making economically unfortunate decisions.

List of Cognitive Biases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
(Among these, the Lake Wobegon Effect looms large, so do Status Quo Bias and Just World Hypothesis.

There’s a cognitive bias I didn’t spot (might exist, I just didn’t spot it) having to do with “bad outcomes are okay if we can come up with a way to explain how the people they happen to deserve them anyway” — when we look at laws, rules, regulations, etc, we have to ask if they are designed to make things better, or if they are designed to help us regard the victims of bad outcomes as bad people, hence the bad outcomes don’t really matter and don’t need fixing after all.

Voltaire, Candide
Hah hah, silly Pangloss, to think that he lived in the best of all possible worlds when he so clearly did not. Good thing we’d never make that mistake.

Greg Mankiw’s principles textbooks are very good.

Also, while I’ve not read the book myself, The Economics Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) looks quite good. I recently purchased The Philosophy book from the same publisher and I’ve found it to cover a lot of material in a succinct and well-presented manner.

I should add the core monographs from the “Foundations” series:
Dorfman, Prices and Markets (micro)
Schultze, National Income Analysis (macro)

The entire Wealth Of Nations (Adam Smith) at link.

Steve

Have you looked at Khan Academy?
Free online at your own pace.

Coursera classes:

https://class.coursera.org/ucimicroeconomics-002

https://class.coursera.org/ucimacroeconomics-003

Economics in One Lesson _ Henry Hazlitt

PDF is free at:

Can be purchased in book form or Kindle.

On Brad Delong’s blog (delong.typepad.com), you can follow a couple of his courses, one going on now, and at least one old one.

That old one helped dissuade me from a crank belief (that free trade was going to inexorably race world living standards to the bottom) through working a couple of his midterm problems.

Though my interest is more macro than micro…

For understanding the basic landscape–all these books are old and generalist.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economcis in Perspective is a really good history of economic thinking. It does a good job of clarifying what questions each new theory was intended to answer.

Milton Friedman, Free to Choose is probably the best reference for “what’s the question here, anyway?”

John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State is one of the only popular books focusing on institutions as actors. Its ideas seem to be less widespread than any of the general left/right economcis arguments.

A good book on bubbles and crashes would be great, but I don’t have one to recommend.

David Andolfatto has a online macro book. I used it for an introductory macro class in a MA program.

http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/6403/