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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

This textbook is free on line, and as far as I can tell is fairly "standard" economics:

http://www.introecon.com/

One that is very relevant to our field is "Information Rules" by Varian and Shapiro. I can't recommend it enough.

Definitely look for standard stuff and get that figured out before you go looking at mises.org or marxist.org or whatever. Those guys definitely have an Agenda with a capital A. It's difficult to separate economics and politics completely (which is why I flagged this too), and it's a guarantee that someone will start hauling out all the mises and Austrian links on any given thread on the subject here.

In other words, learn enough to reason on the subject for yourself, rather than joining some sort of echo chamber. The best place to do that is with what's considered the "state of the art" by mainstream practitioners. Maybe they're wrong, and Marx or Mises is right, but it's certainly the best starting point.

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You're basically suggesting that people learn the current fashions. Which is fine, as far as it goes, just stay skeptical, because unlearning falsehoods is extremely difficult for most people. Empirically speaking, it seems almost (but not absolutely) impossible for humans.

People should learn economics like you learn physics [1]. You don't start out with string theory (fortunately). You start with the Greeks, then move to Galileo, Euler, Newton, Laplace, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, etc.

In macro economics, that might read: Bastiat, Locke, Smith, Mill, Malthus, Marx, Engels, Mussolini (who would typically be expunged, despite his continuing relevance, for obvious political reasons), Mises, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard.

[1] There are obvious differences, of course. Economics has more forks and fewer merges in the tree of thought (which makes knowing the history all the more important). And unlike physics, old, discredited theories get dug back up, polished, and repeated for a new generation (how many times do we have to endure CNN talking about how a hurricane will help the economy before people understand the broken window fallacy that Bastiat articulated in 1850?). And economics also overlaps with both politics and morality. Value-free economics exists only if you consider "you could do X, but more people will starve" to be a value-free argument.

I took some intro physics courses in college. We didn't take a historical approach: we just started with the most recently well-understood Newtonian framework, and then moved onto EM where we worked our way up to Maxwell's equations. We never touched the Greeks--in fact, there's no point studying any pre-Newtonian physics unless you're a scientific historian, because Newton had the first usable theory. And even then you learn it using a jumble of Newtonian and Leibnizian calculus!

In economics, we started with things everyone agreed on (supply and demand curves) and moved onto some facts about how centrally-banked currencies work (what the FED does, what M1, M2, and M3 are, what fractional reserve banking is). It's the upper level classes in econ, and the graduate classes in physics, where you really get into the controversial bits. But there's a lot of econ to learn before you get into anything that's controversial among economists (though the common beliefs of economists may be quite controversial among laypeople!)

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