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. Some economics writer listed the tome in a bibliography of a their own book. I can’t remember who specifically. I suspect it was N. Gregory Mankiw but I could be totally wrong and I don’t have that book handy to check.

This is not to say that I haven’t gotten anything from the book. I have. But this is not what I was expecting. I thought the book would be more essay-like. Instad, it is reprints of some of Bernanke’s academic papers. Very very heavy with graphs and tables and equations and jargon that is well beyond me.

The big thing I did get out of this is the correction of some misimpressions I had. I’d always thought that the Great Depression affected the United States primarily. Incorrect. The economic phenomenon occurred worldwide. I also thought that the public works projects initiated by Franklin Roosevelt hadn’t done much, but that our entry into World War II boosted us out of the economic slowdown. But according to Bernanke, the primary cause of the Depression was adherence to the gold standard by the U.S. and western European governments along with some poor policies by United States central bankers. As countries dropped off the gold standard between 1931 and 1936, they began recovering from the Depression. In other words, the key determinant of recovery was not World War II, but instead abandonment of the gold standard.

Title: Essays on the great depression
Author: Ben S. Bernanke
Imprint / publisher: Princeton University Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 310 p. (includes index)
Publication date: 2004
ISBN-10: 0-691-11820-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-11820-8
Subject: Depressions — 1929 — United States
Subject: Depressions — 1929
LC classification: HB3717 1929 .B365 2000

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. Mankiw explains things much better than Paul Heyne did. Terms are clearly defined. Mankiw focuses much better on topics. It has a much better focus on explaining the facts and theory than on making pronouncements that capitalist market economics is the pinnacle of economic thought. Heyne would get in subtle digs about how market regulation would lead to incorrect outcomes. Mankiw simply shows how to measure things like dead-weight loss from taxation and lets you draw your own conclusions about whether the dead-weight loss might be worth the gains from the programs funded. Considering he chaired Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (and is thus going to be on the conservative side of things) I’m quite surprised that he’s restrained himself from being a polemicist.

In addition to better knowledge on how taxes and other government policies affect the economy (theoretically at least), i learned a lot about how to calculate the G.D.P., how savings affects productivity, how the Fed manages the money supply, and how international trade works macro-economically. All in all, I learned a lot from the book, without ever once feeling preached at.

The latest edition is the 4th edition. For all I know the entire third edition was gutted and replaced with silly putty. But if you are looking for it, Amazon also has it.

Title: Principles of macroeconomics
Edition: 3rd
Author: N. Gregory Mankiw
Imprint / publisher: South-Western / Thomson
Format: Paperback
Length: xxxi, 546 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0-324-17189-7
Subject: Macroeconomics
LC classification: HB172.5 .M356 2004