Modern Principles of Economics

What Hacker News says

1. siesteAug 2022
   Among the few econ books I read I most enjoyed Modern Principles of Economics[1] by Tyler Cowen.

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6659172-modern-principle...

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2. edotJul 2026
   This article feels like LLM but I can't put my finger on it. It reads like LLM where a human asked an LLM to cover up the LLM-isms. It's odd because the byline of "Drawing on Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok’s Modern Principles of Economics and a century of empirical research." doesn't say who the author is, but the URL root is Alex Tabarrok's profile page.

   I feel as though someone (Alex Tabarrok?) said "here's reference material - turn it into an essay".

   The footer also feels how an LLM sounds when you tell it to follow specific instructions - they often seem to put too many details about how they did what they did (or how you should feel about it) into their output, kind of how a slimy salesman would explain some fancy shoes and how the cows lived before they were turned into leather: "Set in Newsreader. Layout and graphics after Edward Tufte — data-ink, direct labels, sidenotes. Colors after Sanzo Wada, A Dictionary of Color Combinations (1933). All charts are hand-drawn SVG; all numbers are from the sources above."

   Some other clues: "Rent control doesn’t repeal scarcity. It just deletes the signal that manages it." "A rent is not merely a bill. It is a message flashed between strangers." "The gap between those two curves is the shortage." (I find that LLMs often use this format with slightly-misused, yet fancy-sounding words). The X between the Y is the Z. And the best part is, the graph below (which is allegedly "hand-drawn SVG" - hand-drawn by who, I ask) is straight lines, not curves ... that same graph also has the m in market overlapping one of the lines, which is a sloppy mistake an LLM does because it can't see, but a human can and should have seen because it's "hand drawn". How do you hand-draw an SVG that updates with inputs, anyways? "“Chance and favoritism” was not a rhetorical flourish. It was a prediction about who gets housing when prices can’t decide" "every fix works by weakening the control, which is the quiet admission at the heart of the policy" - humans don't write like this. I've never heard of a quiet admission at the heart of anything. Woah, interesting, if you search for "quiet admission at the heart of" on Google, you'll get a bunch of other AI articles. Neat, I found another indicator!

   It's really quite an interesting topic and there probably is some real research behind it, but dude ... just put a little header at the top saying you used AI to help you write or do graphs and I'll trust you. Hiding it makes me question everything.

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3. esafakApr 2025
   Since he jokingly hypes it up, is his Modern Principles of Economics good?
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4. rvernFeb 2018
   Many are not, indeed. But if you care about the truth, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. You have to challenge the arguments in the chapter on international trade of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s Modern Principles of Economics, and you have to refute the central point. The New York Times and Hacker News do not require that much.
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