The Ordinary Business of Life

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1. huitzitziltzinJan 2024
   This is not at all a serious syllabus on this topic. I cannot understand the inclusion of ChatGPT.

   If you want a nice, single-volume history try Roger backhouse’s “the ordinary business of life”, soon to come in a second edition.

   There is a much older book by schumpeter but it’s extremely dated as well as overly long.

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2. jihadjihadNov 2021
   One to look into is Backhouse's The Ordinary Business of Life (2002). A good overview of the subject that incorporates ancient and modern perspectives.
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3. dredmorbiusJul 2012
   If you haven't read Debt, the first 5000 years, do. I've managed to misplace my copy -- aha! just found it -- but it's among the most fascinating books I've found in 25 years on economics. That, Niall Feguson's Ascent of Money (the guy is in many ways an ass, but this is a pretty good book), Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Rabini, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, The Ordinary Business of Life: A History of Economics from the Ancient World to the Twenty-First Century (Roger Backhous) -- hardly a page-turner, but a very good compendium of 3000 years of economic thought, and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Baroque Cycle have been very helpful to my understanding.

   One of the values in these online discussions isn't the ability to convince others nearly so much as it is to hone and refine your own arguments. I'm not sure I'm even partially cogent yet, but I'm starting to stumble in a direction I like.

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4. dredmorbiusSep 2011
   You're welcome. I'm not going to claim great insight (yet), I'm still stumbling through this stuff myself (and have been for 25 years).

   Other than Mancur Olsen, some of the more interesting reading I've found includes George Akerlof ("The Market for Lemons"), Garrett Hardin ("Lifeboat Ethics", "Tragedy of the Commons", and several books of essays), Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (a cunningly disguised treatise on the emergence of stock corporations, banking, and modern finance and capital), Niall Fergusson's The Ascent of Money (a less cunningly disguised version of same), and The Ordinary Business of Life which is dry as dust but still a wonderful exposition of 3000 years of economic thought.

   A book I've just heard of but haven't read is David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He's a radical anthropologist, but has some really keen insights and views on the formation of credit and money (guess which came first).

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5. dredmorbiusMar 2018
   Apologies for the late response, though I've been thinking this over.

   I'll stand by my earlier comment: read the classic economists themselves, directly, if at all possible. Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Mill (both John Stuart and David), Carlisle, Toynbee, Marshall.

   You don't need to read all of them or the works in full, but each of these addresses at least in some depth and detail the question of goods and their pricing behaviours, in ways that are not generally addressed today.

   There are overviews and histories of economic thought and its development which should be useful. I've read Heilbroner (The Worldly Philosophers) and Backhouse (The Ordinary Business of Life), both of which provide a broad overview. Ha-Joon Chang has Economics: The User's Guide, which is a pretty good overview of various schools of thought.

   I'm particularly impressed currently by Steve Keen, whose most recent book is Debunking Economics. He's been developing his ideas at a rapid pace and to an extent has overrun what's in the book. He's good to watch though.

   John Kenneth Galbraith tends generally to discuss economics more-or-less in the terms I've been mentioning here, with The Affluent Society and Age of Uncertainty probably being good starting points.

   I'm not much impressed by and generally strongly discount most Libertarian thinking, though if you'd like a sense of what I consider to be bad/poor economic theory, Howard Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson and Murray Rothbard's Libertarian Manifesto might be considerations.

   Hope that helps.

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6. dredmorbiusNov 2017
   Conflated, or used the shibboleth of "free-market capitalism" as a cover for monopoly mercantilistic rent-extraction.

   Having put a fairly considerable amount of study into the history of economic thought, back to Greek and Roman times (see Backhouse's The Ordinary Business of Life for a comprehensive, if dry, overview of mainstream economic thought), and with a strong focus on Smith to present, this problem is a pervasive one.

   The irony is that it's practiced quite ardently by many of the loudest "defenders" of free-market systems. (Not always -- there are straight-up monopolists who have given up all pretense. Most, though, preach and act inconsistently.)

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