A Reading List of Real Economics

I promised you a reading list. I don’t know which of them, if any, have been translated into Portuguese. They all should be, because they are the core of real economics.

I promised you a reading list. I don’t know which of them, if any, have been translated into Portuguese. They all should be, because they are the core of real economics.

I also recommend the old classics, such as The Wealth of Nations, translated into Portuguese and first published a few months before the U.S. Declaration of Independence, or anything by Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850), originally in French, or Carl Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (1871), or Philip Wicksteed’s The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), or Joan Robinson’s Exercises in Economic Analysis (1960) (brilliant, but a strange one; she devolved into a Maoist Marxist).

Suppose you want to learn to think like a real economist. I advise Mariana Mazzucato and Thomas Piketty and many others who call themselves economists to stop what they’re doing and study the modern classics in what we called at the University of Chicago “price theory.” Arranged from most elementary to most advanced, they are:

• Paul Heyne, The Economic Way of Thinking. Very elementary but entirely sound. Updated by Pete Boettke and David Prychitko.

• Armen Alchian and William Allen, edited by Jerry Jordan, Universal Economics. An updating of the undergraduate textbook by Alchian and Allen. It covers “macroeconomics,” too. Available free on the Liberty Fund website.

• Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics. Sowell is a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution.

• David Friedman, Price Theory: An Intermediate Text. David is Milton Friedman’s son, a Ph.D. physicist. It’s available free on his website.

• Steven Landsburg, Price Theory and Applications. Like Friedman, he also writes brilliant popular books on economics. His Ph.D. is in mathematics.

• “Donald” McCloskey, The Applied Theory of Price. A PDF is available at Deirdre McCloskey’s website. Deirdre is Donald’s smarter sister. The book has hundreds of problems, in the style of an engineering text.

• George Stigler, The Theory of Price, in four editions, not all the same. Amusingly written by a great economist.

• Milton Friedman, Price Theory. Soberly written by an even greater economist.

• Gary Becker, Economic Theory. Another sober and great one.

• Sonia Jaffe, Robert Minton, Casey B. Mulligan, and Kevin M. Murphy, Chicago Price Theory, Second Edition.

A somewhat different route to becoming a real economist is to read what is called “Austrian” economics, descended from Carl Menger. The Chicagoans tend to be more mathematical, the Austrians more philosophical. Taken together, they teach what is right about a liberal economy.

I don’t know my way around it as well as I do Chicago. I came to Austrian economics late. But start with Boettke and David Prychitko’s updating of Heyne, above. And then read anything by them, and Israel Kirzner, Don Lavoie, Walter Block, Donald Boudreaux, Ludwig Lachmann, and of course Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Mises, and back to Menger. Mises’ Human Action is good if you ignore his methodological ruminations. His books of the 1920s, Liberalism and Socialism, are brilliant.

Get to it. Become a real economist.

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Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.

Since 1776, there has been a 3,000% explosion in the average real income per person in the world.

Nothing earlier came remotely close.

It was caused not by the usual suspects of investment or exploitation, but by liberty inspiring a flowering of human creativity—in the arts and sciences, and in the economy.

Though Brazilians and many other Latin Americans are uneasily aware that their economies lag some, and sometimes a lot, the Great Enrichment is nonetheless evident everywhere from the Border to Tierra del Fuego, from Santiago in Chile to Recife in Brazil.

The Latin Lag can be overcome. Brazil, like much of Latin America, needs essential liberalism to do it.

Check out my new book, Liberdade: 100 Conversation Starters on Liberalism, Latin America, and Brazil