Applied Economics

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1. smckkAug 2022
   Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One by economist Thomas Sowell[0] explores this in good detail, applying it to political and economic policies, in his book.

   Housing policies, medicare and today's problem of defund the police can be better analysed if the framework of second-order thinking is used to view the pros and cons of such policies and their subsequent ramifications.

   Second-order thinking is a great mental model to have and helps us address some of the cognitive biases that get in our way when making choices.

   To me this form of thinking is evident in chess, the evaluation necessary to make a single move gets us to look at the consequences after the third and fourth move before a final decision is made.

   I believe when the time allows for it we should really consider the future ramifications of our actions before making a move.

   [0] https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Economics-Thinking-Beyond-Sta...

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2. jiscariotAug 2022
   Agreed. And Applied Economics after that. These books change the way you think.
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3. brickmortAug 2020
   I've read six Thomas Sowell books in the past few years. His book Basic Economics is a classic, but my favorite of his is Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One. It covers the things that the former does but, as the title suggests, applies it to a real-life scenario. He then walks through the scenario as it plays out to demonstrate his point to the reader. For example, when a city artificially lowers the rent, it makes apartments more affordable, but what happens afterwards? he would then play the scenario out as it affects tenants, landlords, and the rental market. I highly recommend it!
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4. thr0waway1239Sep 2016
   Thomas Sowell [1], an almost-published novelist turned hard core economist (i.e. got his Ph.D. in Economics) is one of the best writers of economics books, many having a libertarian slant.

   I recommend the following books especially - 1. Basic Economics 2. Applied Economics and 3. Knowledge and decisions.

   He also produced a crazy detailed trilogy about culture and has written an autobiography which might read a bit like the written version of Mad Men. He often remarks that he is 1/3rd as old as America itself.

   And even if you end up completely disagreeing with his opinions, it is worth it to check out at least one of his works to see that it is possible to write economics books which are not utterly boring.

   [1] After 9/11, he turned into a slightly loony war hawk. But his best work was produced before that.

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5. thr0waway1239Sep 2016
   Thomas Sowell books which stay within the boundaries of economics are all excellent and very readable. I also recommend Applied Economics - which is more practical than Basic Economics.

   A funny and probably relevant piece from Joel Spolsky:

   "Super quick review if you haven't taken any economics courses: econ is one of those fields that starts off with a bang, with many useful theories and facts that make sense, can be proven in the field, etc., and then it's all downhill from there. The useful bang at the beginning is microeconomics, which is the foundation for literally every theory in business that matters. After that things start to deteriorate: you get into Macroeconomics (feel free to skip this if you want) with its interesting theories about things like the relationship of interest rates to unemployment which, er, seem to be disproven more often than they are proven, and after that it just gets worse and worse and a lot of econ majors switch out to Physics, which gets them better Wall Street jobs, anyway. But make sure you take Microeconomics, because you have to know about supply and demand, you have to know about competitive advantage, and you have to understand NPVs and discounting and marginal utility before you'll have any idea why business works the way it does."

   http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html

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6. ShmulkeyJun 2010
   Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt: http://jim.com/econ/, http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/Economics_in_one_lesson.pdf

   Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

   Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell

   Free to Choose by Milton Friedman (video series, too)

   Use of Knowledge in Society by Hayek (short, non-technical paper which is full of brilliant insights): http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

   Not a book, but the Econtalk podcast is fantastic: http://www.econtalk.org/

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