Hidden Order
Friedman covers "everything you need to know about economics to get through life without being eaten alive."
Stats for nerds
7recommend
19mentions
13people
2008–2025years
58% recommend37% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- David Friedman is an anarcho-capitalist, so of course markets are the solution. For marriage, fire brigades, national defence, everything.
But don‘t write him off so hastily. He has genuinely interesting articles [1], and his text book „Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life“ is a more rigourous version of Freakonomics, the Landsburg books etc. This book explained to me the little economic theory I know.
[1] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_sy...
- The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building one. Is the RIP routing protocol a complex adaptive system?
Part of our problem is the way we think. I am a person. I am not a complex adaptive system. And yet I am. I am made of entities. There is a messaging bus, the entities sense, act and interact. But I don't think of myself as a CAS or talk about We. Wecellfs?
Perhaps this a Sapir-Whorf thing. Our language limits what we can think. What is the difference between a pile of ants and an ant colony? A colony is collection of entities, but what do we call the entity that is the colony? Are the ants smart or is the colony smart.
- Wow. I am really stunned by this list. I took a look expecting the usual chorus of contrarian populist hardbacks, but this list is very conclusive and and covers a wide range of opinions and subjects. I have read about a quarter of them and can attest they are all excellent (although with varying degree of readability). This is the exact sort of list if you want to see multiple perspectives and challenge yourself.
I also want to shout out to Hidden Order, which I was really surprised to see here, but is really quite the gem. More than any other econ book, I have pulled off the shelf and gone through the much dog-eared pages. It does an amazing job of taking off-the-shelf economic ideas and framing them in such excellently written parables or examples. Disagree or whatever, but it's an excellent and often trite way to understand classic principles.
A couple books I would add to the list:
Why Nations Fail
Red Plenty
Who Gets What and Why
- And an economics book that actually made sense to me: Hidden Order.
I liked his way of defending free trade. „In America there are two ways to make cars. We build them and we grow them. The people in Detroit use steel and build them. And the people in Iowa put corn and wheat on big ships, sail them eastward, and sone time later they come back with cars.“
- "Lowering income taxes causes people to work more and in the end generates more revenue for the state".
Reducing taxes does cause people to work more. Whether it results in more revenue for the state depends on how much income tax was before and after the change. Elasticity of labour supply is not constant over all tax rates.
I know people like to crap on the Laffer curve but they crap on it because it's trivial if you have the barest knowledge of economics, not because it's false.
Macroeconomics is closer to the morass you describe but it still accumulates truth, if possibly depressingly slowly and with thirty year periods of regress. Microeconomics is on much firmer ground, in large part because they have more data and it's easier to accumulate it.
If you want a very readable introduction to price theory, which is a large part of microeconomics check out "Hidden Order" by David D. Friedman. It's based on his Price Theory textbook but rewritten for interest and readability. If you want something a bit more mathematically sophisticated, (basic calculus) look at Intermediate Microeconomics, Hal Varian.
- John Holland, "Hidden Order". Really. What is money? A message bus in a complex adaptive system. Lots of other stuff out there on complexity but this has a unique perspective. If you really want to go crazy find "Signs of Life, How complexity pervades biology" after you read "Hidden Order"
