Stats for nerds
4recommend
7mentions
6people
2015–2024years
57% recommend43% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- One of the most effective ways I know to do that is to read books written by people who have run technology companies, or about technology companies by insiders, or by venture capitalists, or biographies of important figures, or about the history of technology world, or books recommended or mentioned by any of the above. You get examples on a canvas you're familiar with.
I'll read books mentioned in interviews of people who have a track record. Even watching a video like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aW5gdRRn_U (check out the first comment and replies). It only lasted a few seconds, but we got the books in the background figured out. We recognized some by the spine.
There are a lot of things that are the way they are because someone did something at some point, and it's only reading a book where the author mentions an anecdote that you piece things together. There are entire deals that didn't happen because someone was a jerk to another years before that. These books also expose a situation, and the decisions made in a certain context, the tradeoffs, etc. How people went about the product, which strategies they used to find a market, how conflicts arose and were handled with.
But, back to your ask:
Wharton has a "Business Foundations"[0] series on Coursera which includes entire courses on marketing, accounting, finance.
Microeconomics (two or three books you find in every course: the ones by Pindyck, Perloff, and Mankiw. Either named "Microeconomics" and "Principles of Microeconomics").
You can checkout the MIT OCW courses on these.
[0]: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/wharton-business-fo...
- I'm not sure what you mean by "practical way", but for starters I'd recommend Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw's "Principles of Microeconomics" which is a standard university textbook translated to many languages (I am not associated with the book in any way). It's very accessable, colourful, well explained. He's also authored "Macroeconomics" if you're interested.
Back to learning the "practical way" - I would recommend reading the Mankiw book fast and then just start looking around your world and asking questions as if you were an economist.
I'll tell you how I did it.
My practical training in economics happened when I worked in a bottling plant at a conveyor belt. Dull phisical work, but leaves you with plenty of time to think. We were able to fill about 10000 bottles a day. Whenever a bottle broke on the belt or someone was late for work we had to stop the machinery. Every minute when we did not work calculated to specific loss expressed in concrete money. We were paid by hours, if we had to stay longer at work the company made less money (because they had to pay us more).
The bottles were bought in Italy and travelled about 2000 kilometers to our plant. The product was made in North America and was imported by bulk to the plant in huge 1-ton plastic containers. While the final product costs about 5-7 euros in Germany or Austria, the cost of the liquid itself was just a tiny fraction of the final price. Even the bottles (including transport) were more expensive than the product itself.
Now start asking questions:
- Why it pays off to have a world wide operation from a country with very high labour cost, import the materials coming from thousands of kilometers away and then sell it with profit to countries such as South Africa and Argentina? If you were to invest in a new machine that would make my job at a conveyor belt redundant, how much it would have to cost to make the investment profitable? Would it enable the company to lower the final cost (more efficiency, less interruptions, more reliable than a human)? Would the quality increase? Would your investment enable you to invest even more in expanding to new markets? And if you kept me at the company, what other useful work could I perform?
If you were to build your own bottling plant like this one, how much would you have to invest? Who would buy your product? What would be your price? What would be the additional cost for you if you wanted to increase the production by 10% (i.e. what are your margin costs). What can you do with your staff and machines when you are using only a fraction of your production potential, i.e. what else could you produce and sell with profit based on your fixed costs?
Who buys a luxury product like that, how is it affected buy the seasons (holidays? vacations?)? In time of economic crisis would people still buy your luxury product or would they wait for better times? How to optimise you supply chain? Should you invest in storehouses so that your product is not waiting at the plant but rather closer to the clients (supermarket chains)?
Questions like this, when you have to make choices and predict the output are the essence of "applied" microeconomics. These questions go on and on and I believe that answering them is what you mean by "learning economics the practical way". Look around you and keep wondering.
===
p.s. in search for good questions to ask and training your economic thinking have a look at the famous S. Levitt's "Freakonomics".
===
p.s.2: I am not sure how to learn economics as an academical discipline the practical way. You would have to learn the modern models and assumptions from books and test them against the specific detailed data (tax office data would be nice or a supermarket sales stats), but those are very difficult to obtain if you are an outsider. Adam Smith was a very good observer, but nevertheless he was a moral philosopher rather than a big data analyst. But you can still test certain assertions asking yourself questions like: I pay 2 euros for a loaf of bread and I go to the same supermarket every day. How much would have the price of the bread to increase so that you would stop buying bread or change the store?
- I'd recommend textbooks or corsera rather than pop econ books.
Mostly Harmless Econometrics - Angrist and Krueger
Principles of microeconomics - Mankiw (beginner)
Intermediate microeconomics - Varian (intermediate)
You also want to cover finance and time series - I don't know what would be good there.
- > broad economical trends and projections
Any good Economics Text book will do: like Principles of Economics/ Principles of Microeconomics, Gregory Mankiw
You can also try, although, personally I have not taken these:
https://www.coursera.org/course/microecon
https://www.coursera.org/learn/principles-of-macroeconomics
> FT and all the stats that CNBC shows me
For Investment valuation and Corporate Finance Damodaran is one of the best sources:
http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/
Visit his blog, read his books. He has online classes as well
Also you can try, (I've not taken this course): https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets
For Value Investing, Benjamin Graham is a classic:
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Invest...
> For Technical Analysis and Futures Trading though, there are tonnes of books. May be you can start with these:
http://www.amazon.com/Technical-Analysis-Financial-Markets-C...
http://www.amazon.com/Options-Futures-Other-Derivatives-Edit...
And lastly,
> combine my CS background with Finance and do something interesting in it
- Whoops, I mixed up Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics and Cline (or Cechetti’s) Money, Banking and Financial Markets.
The 19th century source is Bagehot. But that won’t make sense without the above fundamentals. (Bernanke’s work on the Great Depression is also a good empirical study on deflation. But again, not worth tackling until after one of the Money & Bankings.)
- >> we would not have nearly as much innovation in medicine without a profit motive
> Most economists? That feels like a claim in need of a citation
The usual best place for finding out what economists think is the IGM Economics Experts Panel[1]. I mention it because it's a great resource to be aware of, but they haven't addressed this question, though it's covered in textbooks. I checked the Mankiw textbook on Principles of Microeconomics[2], which if I'm not mistaken is the world's most popular one. In the introduction, it says that people tend to supply things when the returns are high:
"Incentives are crucial to analyzing how markets work. For example, when the price of an apple rises, people decide to eat fewer apples. At the same time, apple orchards decide to hire more workers and harvest more apples. In other words, a higher price in a market provides an incentive for buyers to consume less and an incentive for sellers to produce more. As we will see, the influence of prices on the behavior of consumers and producers is crucial for how a market economy allocates scarce resources."
That becomes a background assumption for discussion of incentives in the rest of the book. For example, when talking about externalities, it notes that the patent system increases the incentive to innovate:
"Research into new technologies provides a positive externality because it creates knowledge that other people can use. Because inventors cannot capture the full benefits of their inventions, they tend to devote too few resources to research. The federal government addresses this problem partially through the patent system, which gives inventors exclusive use of their inventions for a limited time."
