Ask PG and HN: What is your recommended reading list for economic history? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG and HN: What is your recommended reading list for economic history?

10 pointscsa3 comments

I have a vague memory of you saying in an interview that you have done quite a bit of reading in economic history. Furthermore, you often seem to provide some very good historical examples of economic phenomenon when you write and speak. I would like to do some focused reading on this topic, and I would appreciate input from you and HN.

What is your recommended reading list for economic history?

I am open to books, articles, sections of books, or just general reading that happens to have some economic ideas woven in.

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Some ideas from scanning Amazon and looking through HN:

- A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

- This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

- Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction

- Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250-1650

- The Roman Market Economy

- Economic history: What can we learn from the Depression? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6715879

- A history of American economic growth https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=727172

- Economic history ignored leads to the inevitable https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955219

- (Review) A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=298446

Working link at: http://www.cis.org.au/images/stories/policy-magazine/2008-wi...

- The Economic History of the Last 2,000 Years in 1 Little Graph https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135400

Not quite what you asked for, but in case you were looking for some economic theory...

The Real Price of Everything is an anthology compiled by Mcihael Lewis, and available quite cheaply considering it's literally the size of a brick at 1472 pags. It includes The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (this is about half the book). Malthus' essay on Population, Ricardo on Political Economy, Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class and Keynes' General theory. It's a weighty but great read; Adam Smith in particular is surprisingly easy to read despite having written over 200 years ago, though you could safely skip a few parts like his digressionary chapter on the price of silver, which is an important contribution to the history of monetary theory but otherwise doesn't really go anywhere.

If you want something shorter and punchier, try New Ideas from dead economists by Todd Buckholz, which is a somewhat shallow but still quite engaging tour through the history of economic theory and a good introduction to the basic concepts.

Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy by William Janeway (http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Capitalism-Innovation-Economy-Sp...) is not a history book per se, but it does contain a pretty thorough survey of bubbles and busts over the past several hundred years. It also contains a lot of history on the investment sector of the economy over the 20th century, and the rise of venture capital over the past 40 years. It's a challenging read, but very rewarding.

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