Books like Modern Economics — picked by fans

Mr. Lighthizer was, over the last decade, the only American author who warned of the damage that free trade with China was going to do and is now doing to our society.

I have great admiration for this man because, as a trade adviser during President Trump’s first presidency, he was courageous with his insight against all others who had different opinions.

This book and his articles showed me I am not alone in what I write, and this man encouraged me to continue.

Mr. Brzezinski was one of the very few who correctly described the power structures between the US and the rest of the world.

In my eyes, he had more wisdom than Henry Kissinger, and his view was a relief and a pleasure to read. I always thought: “Here is a wise man talking.”

My view of the damage that is being done by free trade with China seamlessly fits into Mr. Brzezinski’s worldview. He was a man I greatly admired.

This economist, who wrote “The Folly of Free Trade” article in the 1986 Harvard Business Review, wrote that free trade is not always good and scoffed at the religious-like belief that it is.

He is the only American thinker who wrote that clearly. Unfortunately, his writing was long-winded, which probably turned away readers. Although general opinion ignored his view, he was totally right, and we now sit with the problem of that ignorance.

I feel he deserves a statue, and I fervently hope the White House will one day have one erected for him, because, for a nation, it is right to honor its great thinkers, even if they were ignored in their lifetime and are no longer alive. 

Culbertson was right.

This book, so excellent in giving valid arguments and then predicting China’s supposed inevitable economic demise, is a clear example of how most American authors reason about China without taking into account the huge economic differences it has with our economy.

McMahon and all the others forget that a) in the year 2000 there were 600 million cheap laborers in the countryside, and there still are more than 200 million available now, b) the Beijing Communist dictatorship is cruelly keeping wages of production workers at less than half ours, and c) the existing free trade, started by Bill Clinton in 2000, provides a huge yearly income to China that erases all possible financial troubles they may have.

These three elements together make Mr. McMahon’s book an intellectual silliness. Most authors in our Western world make the same error. It is high time this be realized and corrected.

I am an academic economist, but even more interested in intellectual debates. I discovered this book when I was a PhD student, and it has remained a favorite of mine.

In the 1970s, macroeconomics (not my field) underwent a revolution. The old guard was “Keynesian,” the new Turks were “new classical”. This book is a series of conversations from the early 1980s with the protagonists of this epic period, many future Nobel laureates.

The interviewer, Arjo Klamer, was interested in the rhetoric and culture of economics, and he constructed the interviews in a way that nicely brought out these elements. The interlocutors are brilliant, acerbic, and funny. If you think economics is dry or boring, you won’t think so after seeing how passionate these people are.

This was required reading in my MBA program at Golden Gate University. In fact, the economics teacher, Joe Fuhrig, inspired me to go on for my PhD in Economics at New York University. The book explains how economics isn’t just about mathematical models: it is about how people think and behave. Once you learn to think like an economist, you will find investing (and even grocery shopping!) a completely different experience.

I enjoyed reading this book as it provided a deep, and engaging overview of economic theory.

The authors manage to strike a balance between providing a high-level theoretical discussion and making the content accessible to a wider audience. One thing that stood out to me was the authors' emphasis on the diversity of the various schools of economic thought.

In their work, they avoid the common pitfall of suggesting that the history of Economics has “ended”, and instead observe the evolution of economic theory over time. Also, I appreciate the fact that they do not believe that theories in fashion today necessarily provide an adequate explanation for the functioning of the economy.

Overall, I recommend this book to anyone interested in gaining insight into Economics’ controversial development.

This is a funny exploration of the popular TV series, showing how each episode is packed with microeconomics topics, including comparative advantage, demand and supply, costs, market imperfections, and government interventions.

It even includes several references to macroeconomics, including growth, labor markets, and inequality.

Readers can also consider other titles in this series, based on their taste of popular culture, including Superheroes and Economics, Seinfeld and Economics, and The Beatles and Economics, among others.

This book is more scientific, but very interesting if you like to dig more into the depth of money illusion backed by its experimental investigation.

The old concept of money illusion is updated and transformed into its modern version, which is built on the principle of strategic complementarity. In this case, even a negligible individual money illusion suffered by only few agents might multiply effects of money illusion at the aggregate level due to a well-known mainstream concept called coordination failure. Modern money illusion might be responsible for substantial effects at the aggregate level.

For me, this book is very appealing, since the non-neutrality of money in the short run is explained in an alternative way, but it does not deny standard rational expectations theory.

This eBook, developed by faculty members from top institutions, is available for free from the developers’ website, offers several online resources, it's frequently updated, translated to several languages, and has been widely adopted in several countries.

The book includes both the usual topics for courses on introduction to microeconomics and introduction to macroeconomics, using a similar writing style as other introductory textbooks (assumes no mathematical background), thus being accessible to a wide range of students.

Unlike similar books, however, it structures topics differently: instead of presenting chapters according to the main tool or concept being introduced, chapters are presented according to real-world problems.

While this can help motivate each chapter, it may require some adapting from the instructor’s teaching style.