Classics

From time to time, an ambitious student will ask me where she can find one or another classic of economic literature that I may have referenced during a lecture. Of course, not wanting to dampen her fledgling curiosity, I recommend FREE sources of such information, like the following:

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Tax Reform

In The Benefit and the Burden, Bruce Bartlett explores the distributional, technical, and political advantages and costs of the various proposals and ideas that will come to dominate America’s political conversation in the years to come.

White House Burning

In White House Burning, Simon Johnson and James Kwak—authors of the national best seller 13 Bankers and cofounders of The Baseline Scenario, a widely cited blog on economics and public policy—demystify the national debt, explaining whence it came and, even more important, what it means to you and to future generations.

Foreign Aid is Bad

In his new book, “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality”, Angus Deaton, an expert’s expert on global poverty and foreign aid, puts his considerable reputation on the line and declares that foreign aid does more harm than good.

He argues that it corrupts governments and rarely reaches the poor. It is high time for the paternalistic West to step away and allow the developing world to solve its own problems.

Vampire Economics

Canadian author William Gairdner, co-founder of the Civitas think tank, estimates that in the current welfare state only one third of the population constitutes the producing sector; another one third is affiliated with government, either clerically or contractually, and the remaining third consists of government dependents. Thus two thirds of the modern “social democratic” state is dependent for its maintenance on a dwindling minority of economic generators.

Investing in Kids

In his latest book, Investing in Kids, Tim Bartik measures ratios of local economic development benefits to costs for both early childhood education and business incentives.

He shows that early childhood programs and the best-designed business incentives can provide local benefits that significantly exceed costs.

World Not On The Edge

The immense diversity of life on Earth is not spread evenly, but is concentrated in very special places. Nearly two-thirds of the Earth's plants occur on just 17% of the land, and protecting it would protect all of those plant species.

And according to Lester Brown in his latest book, World on the Edge, restoring the economy's natural support systems - reforesting the earth, protecting topsoil, restoring rangelands and fisheries, stabilizing water tables, and protecting biological diversity- would cost just $110 billion a year.

Pirates Aren't All Bad

The Invisible Hook takes a closeup look at legendary pirate captains like Blackbeard, Black Bart Roberts, and Calico Jack Rackam, and shows how their search for plunder led them to pioneer remarkable and forward-thinking practices.

Pirates understood the advantages of constitutional democracy, fifty years before the United States did so. Pirates also initiated an early system of workers' compensation, regulated drinking and smoking, and in some cases practiced racial tolerance and equality.

Professor Leeson contends that pirates exemplified the virtues of vice, their self-seeking interests generated socially desirable effects and their greedy criminality secured social order.

Father Free Enterprise

Robert Sirico's new book, Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy, argues that a free economy actually promotes charity, selflessness, and kindness. He further demonstrates why free-market capitalism is not only the best way to ensure individual success and national prosperity but is also the surest route to a moral and socially–just society.

By the way, Robert Sirico is a Roman Catholic priest.

The Father of Economics

On July 17, Adam Smith will have left us 223 years, but his legacy lives on in his works, among them: The Wealth of Nations.

To gain a deeper appreciation of the man and his ideas, explore:

• The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• The Wealth of Nations
• Scientific Treatment of Economic Facts
• The System of Natural Liberty: Free Trade

Policy Driven Recession

In his new book, Casey Mulligan focuses on how an expanded array of U.S. safety-net programs, such as food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and housing/mortgage assistance programs, raised effective marginal income-tax rates especially for poor families.

These diminished incentives to work contributed to the weakness of the U.S. economic recovery since the end of the recession in 2009 and also explain why Barack Obama is justifiably called the "Food-Stamp President".

Happy Money

Happy Money offers a tour of new research on the science of spending.

Most people recognize that they need professional advice on how to earn, save, and invest their money. But when it comes to spending money, those same people often just follow their intuition. And scientific research demonstrates, that when it comes to spending, intuition is often mistaken.

Powerful Medicines: Benefits, Risks, and Costs

If you believe that the latest blockbuster medication is worth a premium price over your generic brand, or that doctors have access to all the information they need about a drug’s safety and effectiveness each time they write a prescription, Dr. Jerry Avorn has some sobering news.

Drawing on more than twenty-five years of patient care, teaching, and research at Harvard Medical School, he shares his experience of the gap in our knowledge of the effectiveness of one medication compared to another. In Powerful Medicines, he reminds us that every pill we take represents a delicate compromise between the promise of healing, the risk of side effects, and daunting prices.

Power Inc.

The world’s largest company, Walmart, has revenues higher than the GDP of all but twenty-five countries.

The world’s largest asset manager, a secretive New York company called Black Rock, controls assets greater than the national reserves of any country.

A private philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, spends as much on health care as the World Health Organization. 

The rise of private power may be the most important and least understood trend of our time. In Power Inc., David Rothkopf takes a timely look at how we have reached a point where thousands of companies have greater power than all but a handful of states.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

With 1.5 million copies sold, Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street has long been established as the premiere book to purchase when starting a portfolio.

In addition to classic chapters explaining the folly of past investment epochs, it discusses the full range of investment opportunities and modalities, as well as new material on the Great Recession and the global credit crisis.

As a work on personal finance, it is first-rate. As a summer-time read, it is lively, engaging, and entertaining....adjectives seldom associated with works of this sort.

Austerity Kills

The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills and What We Can Do About It, written by David Stuckler, a political economist at the University of Oxford, and Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, examines how the daily lives of people affected by financial crises, including previous ones such as the Great Depression.

Stuckler and Basu conclude that the economic conditions alone are not a predictor of deteriorating health conditions. They target government austerity measures, which usually take the form of cutting support for vital health and social programs, as a contributing cause of a decline in the population’s overall state of well being.

Predicting Behavior

Predictive Analytics is the science that unleashes the power of data. With this technology, the computer literally learns from data how to predict the future behavior of individuals. Perfect prediction is not possible, but even lousy predictions can be extremely valuable.

In this rich, entertaining primer, former Columbia University professor and Predictive Analytics World co-founder Eric Siegel reveals the power and perils of prediction.

Dealing with Debt

It is easy to dismiss our federal budget-deficit and debt clashes as a passing fad, just a case of partisan politics. But there is a very real problem and it is we the voters. We can’t make the tough choices. We want government spending, but we don’t want to pay the taxes to fund it.

In Here's the Deal, David Leonhardt, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times economic columnist, explains lucidly the situation in which we find ourselves and how we can get out of it. And he does it in just 40,000 words (about 100 pages) and for a price of two dollars.

Basic Economics

Though it often seems that economists relish the obscure, there are those among us who are committed to clarity. And with that in mind, allow me to recommend two books on basic economics, one of which is a minor classic, the other of which may be destined to become so.

Thomas Sowell, long regarded as a fount of economic wit and wisdom, has revamped and reissued his popular Basic Economics, which covers a range of fundamental material without the use of a single graph...students will rejoice.

And next is The Little Book of Economics by Greg Ip, who has produced a layman's guide to economic concepts and trends written with simple language with many humorous analogies.

Aesop's Economics

Aesop's Fables were purportedly written by a single, talented individual who may have lived about 2,600 years ago. Of course, there are so few actual documents of repute or reliability from that era, that it is very hard to be sure such an individual ever existed or that all the tales attributed to him were his own.

In any event, what is certain is this: the fables themselves are pithy yet fecund with insight, and taken collectively, they constitute a classic of ancient antiquity.

To judge for yourself, sample The Grasshopper and the Ant, The Miser and His Gold, and The Fox and the Grapes. And if you find those to your taste, peruse a more comprehensive list of the fables at Bartleby.