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Now Reading
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Tag Archives: economics
The Conservative Nanny State / Dean Baker
8 July 2008 – 11:51 am
I’ve been reading Dean Baker’s stuff for a long time, first when he wrote Economic Reporting Review and Beat the Press since he moved to a blog format. He’s an economist with a liberal economics think tank. This book is less an economics treatise than a political polemic with an economic bent. (…)
Essays on the Great Depression / Ben S. Bernanke
28 December 2007 – 10:12 pm
Astute visitors will have noticed that I’ve had Ben Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression on my Now Reading list for over two months. I’ve been slowly working my way through this book, but with the new year fast approaching I think it’s time I gave up. This one not so much because the material isn’t interesting, but because I am not up to the material.
I picked up the book last year, before he was even appointed to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. (…)
A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market / John Allen Paulos
23 December 2007 – 11:08 am
Just as I was moving several weeks ago I got a call from my stock broker. He worked for a major brokerage and was leaving to form his own one-man investment advisory service. He wanted me to move my account with him. This scenario is fairly common in the investment world, at least in the so-call high net worth portfolios. I used to date a girl who worked for an investment advisory company as an assistant. (…)
The Communist Manifesto / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
18 October 2007 – 3:55 pm
The Communist Manifesto is another work of political science that the conservative HumanEvents.com placed on their list of the most harmful books written. However, HumanEvents.com never made clear exactly who these works harm. Marx and Engels argue in this polemic that their Communist plan harms only the bourgeois , that small portion of society (which they put at 1/10 of the population) which owns the means of production. (…)
Adam’s Fallacy / Duncan K. Foley
5 September 2007 – 11:31 pm
I’m extremely interested in economics. My interest lies primarily in the application of economics toward solving social and political problems. Problems like poverty, instability, health care, and the environment all intersect with economics to a great degree. Pretty much every problem these days has a component of economics involved.
I took a micro-economics course a couple of years ago, and worked through a macro-economics textbook on my own. (…)
On Liberty / John Stuart Mill
17 March 2007 – 8:09 pm
I read the Cambridge University Press book, which actually contains three of John Stuart Mill’s works: On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, and Chapters on Socialism. For brevity’s sake, the title of this review only lists the first.
John Stuart Mill is one of the leading thinkers of the utilitarian movement in philosophy. The central tenet of that movement is that morality of actions is determined by their overall utility. Utility being the goodness of the consequences. (…)
The Armchair Economist / Stephen E. Landsburg
17 January 2007 – 7:29 pm
I wrote the following review more or less as I read the book, logging my thoughts on chapters that particularly got me thinking.
Well, I’m only two chapters into this book so far, and I’ve already got a beef with the author. Landsburg seems to me to be one of those economists who don’t live enough in the real world. (…)
No Logo / Naomi Klein
17 November 2006 – 8:43 pm
Gah! I’ve been reading this polemic against… well… against everything since the middle of September on my cruise trip. It’s been my on break reading at work, so progress has been slow because I’ve been reading it in 15 minute chunks of time, and I’m not the swiftest reader anyway.
No Logo is a treatise in four parts: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, and No Logo. (…)
Principles of Macroeconomics: Third Edition / N. Gregory Mankiw
14 September 2006 – 11:18 am
Last year I took a microeconomics class and signed up for a macroeconomics class. After purchasing the textbook, Seattle Central cancelled the class. Still, I needed to learn more about macroeconomics as what I know is kind of random and lacks building blocks that would help that knowledge make more sense. So I started reading through the text and occasionally working the problems.
I liked this textbook much more than I did my microeconomics textbook. (…)
Microeconomics: The Economic Way of Thinking / Paul Heyne
15 October 2005 – 4:50 pm
I suppose I should put in something about my economics text, seeing as how I did read the whole thing for my class. Paul Heyne lectured at the University of Washington until his death in 2000. I’ve read that he was an excellent teacher, but at least this edition of his book is crap at least for learning well. Heyne presents concepts in a breezy, loosely structured manner. (…)
