
A New Way to Learn Economics - mxschumacher
https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/a-new-way-to-learn-economics
======
davidp
Thomas Sowell's _Basic Economics_ [1] is a superb book on the subject. It's
lengthy but very readable, especially for its real-world examples.
Particularly excellent are the explanations for the unintended consequences
from price controls.

The first edition came out many years ago. Since then, the world has provided
a few case studies on the matter. For example we've been been watching the
slow-motion train wreck that is Venezuela's economy, as first Chavez and then
Maduro gripped prices tighter and tighter. The horrible consequences Sowell
describes have shown up inexorably, predictably, just like clockwork. It's
grim to watch; but my point is that his book and other writings give a real
intuition about economic fundamentals that you can see every day.

[1]:
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Basic_Economics_(Thomas_Sowell...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Basic_Economics_\(Thomas_Sowell\))

~~~
djrobstep
Sowell's book is ideological right wing garbage disguised as Econ 101.

~~~
nkarpov
To borrow the spirit of your impassioned comment - could someone point to a
criticism of Sowell's work/ideas?

~~~
grzm
I find Wikipedia a useful jumping off point in general to get a sense of
common criticisms on a variety of topics. In this case, I'd start in the
Reception section of Sowell's:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell#Reception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell#Reception)

~~~
jnordwick
I didn't see anything referring to EIOL. Can you point to something more
specific than just a general critique of Sowell?

~~~
grzm
Are you referring to _Economics in One Lesson_? It looks like that's Henry
Hazlitt, not Sowell. (Am I missing something?) It looks like DeLong has some
criticism of that.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson#Critic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson#Criticism)

Just to be clear, I'm not an expert on any of this. I just popped in to
provide a pointer I've found useful in learning about a topic when I'm not
sure where to start. Similarly here, I just applied a bit of search-fu.

------
rtpg
>But it treats perfectly competitive markets as special cases rather than the
norm, trying to incorporate from the very beginning the progress economists
have made during the past forty years or so in analyzing more complex
situations: when firms have some monopoly power; people aren’t fully rational;
a lot of key information is privately held; and the gains generated by trade,
innovation, and finance are distributed very unevenly. The CORE curriculum
also takes economic history seriously.

This sounds excellent.

I think "free market" is the worst-named concept ever, and has caused lasting
damage since it sounds too much like "unregulated market".

Acknowledging the spectrum of properties, and how unregulated markets don't
end up free in a lot of important cases from the get-go will help to fight
this damage.

~~~
quadrangle
Don't you presume that "free market" is a term pushed mainly for propaganda
reasons? It seems likely to me that the term is promoted specifically to
promote anti-regulation politics.

Think about it: if we're accepting the need for regulations, aren't we just
talking about "market" rather than "free market"? The basic nature of "market"
on its own already captures the idea that people are coming together and
engaging in some sort of voluntary trade and competition etc.

All the good stuff we care about is present in just "market" and the "free"
part is the propaganda term.

~~~
crdoconnor
Most economic assumptions are pushed for propaganda reasons. In physics you
can assume the non-existence of friction and build a functioning model that
approximates reality in certain situations. In economics, the existence of
"perfect competition" or "perfect information" is simply fantastical, yet even
at graduate level there are students building elaborate mathematical models
with assumptions like these built in.

The reason these things are 'assumed' is clearly not because it builds simple
models that approximate reality in any situation. There are no markets with
perfect information nor competition. It does function to conceal sources of
profit, though.

~~~
al452
The reason people build those models with those assumptions isn't some great
conspiracy, it's merely because under those assumptions it's actually feasible
to build models. Building working mathematical models with imperfect
information and imperfect competition and so on is a _hell_ of a lot harder,
mostly we don't know how to do it. Conspiracy theory is intellectually lazy.

~~~
js8
> merely because under those assumptions it's actually feasible to build
> models

I think it's a really bad excuse in age of computer modelling and when we have
mathematical tools to deal with dynamical systems.

~~~
notahacker
Not really. Computers have been used in economics for decades and tradeoffs
between number of assumptions made and the tractability of their effects still
exists if you have a machine doing the grunt work.

I mean, "rational expectations" is nothing to do with the relative simplicity
of the mathematics (the models it largely replaced were worked out with pen
and paper) and everything to do with the argument that economic models
shouldn't rely on people making a particular type of systematic error to show
a desired outcome (e.g. if policy changes required economic actors to ignore
the implications of the policy change to work, they probably wouldn't actually
work that well). Essentially it's the _absence_ of an assumption about human
behaviour, and there's entire classes of economic models devoted to saying
"even if people on average anticipate the future and economies function
perfectly smoothly, simply introducing X into the model means that you _still_
get recessions and _still_ get a benefit from a policy response to it", which
is a more powerful argument than "if I've calibrated all these parameters and
specified all these functions about all these hundreds of different types of
agents' planning correctly, this policy will work", especially if you're
trying to _disprove_ arguments that the economy will sort itself out
eventually.

That doesn't mean there isn't a place for complex computational models and
even throwing data at ML algorithms to see what sticks, or that a general
equilibrium model to predict actual changes in an economy isn't fairly
unlikely yield accurate results over the long term, but they're performing an
entirely different function from reasoning that X will [not] affect Y _even if
or only if_ all else is held constant or assumed to respond logically.

~~~
js8
I disagree - by coincidence, the Blatt's book I mentioned elsewhere has a nice
model of decision-making under uncertainty that is different from rational
expectations. It's not more complicated.

Same goes for Keen's models, they are dynamic and pretty simple. He even
writes in his books, to paraphrase, "equilibrium is feasible" was a good
excuse at the beginning of 20th century, when Marshall came up with
supply/demand model, but it's not today, when we can actually analyze
dynamical systems mathematically.

~~~
obastani
The GP is saying that rational expectations is used not because it's simple,
but because it makes the weakest assumptions about human behavior. However,
I'm not sure this is entirely accurate since if some agents deviate from the
equilibrium, there is no reason you couldn't end up with totally different
outcomes (either better or worse).

~~~
js8
> but because it makes the weakest assumptions about human behavior

My memory on that is little hazy (it's been maybe 15 years ago I read about
it), but as I remember this was the case about Blatt's model as well. And IIRC
it's based on earlier ideas by Keynes (uncertainty is a different thing than
risk).

I also recall nice idea from Paul Ormerod (but it could have been somebody
else or folklore) who had an interesting model of economic agents - do either
one of the 3 things:

\- the thing that you always did

\- the thing that others are doing

\- another thing that you think might work

This also leads to an interesting class of models (different from rational
expectations) and it's not making too much assumptions about humans.

Again, this shows that Blatt and Keen (and other post-keynesians) are woefully
underappreciated in economics.

~~~
notahacker
I'm unfamiliar with Blatt's book (sounds interesting) but assumptions about
humans attempting to predict the future don't really get any simpler than
_human misjudgements of the future don 't follow a pattern an economist can
predict_ (and to a lesser extent, _companies try to make more profit where
possible_ is also a pretty weak assumption). Especially when the whole reason
this came to be popular was the analytical tearing apart of theories which
used reasonable sounding alternatives _people will base their expectations on
what happened last time_ by pointing out that some people - even a minority -
would make enormous amounts of money if chose to behave differently from how
the economist said people would would behave, or that "I would like my wages
to be the same as last year" would be a really stupid thing for workers to
bargain for if the government has stated they're trying to boost the economy
by purposely creating inflation. The other side of that argument is there are
some conclusions drawn from _some_ rational expectations models which are a
bit too dependent on the assumption that people [on average] won't make
prediction errors at all.

I've got plenty of time for the post-Keynesians but most of them (particularly
in the Keen Godley/Lavoie Social Accounting Matrix style) really aren't doing
more complicated mathematics so much as choosing to have models far more
sensitive to specified lag structures and/or using different assumptions about
human behaviour (The flip side is that Keen's hypersensitive-to-how-
it's-specified banking system is better in many respects than a macro model
with no banking system or credit constraints) For much of the last century the
Cambridge post Keynesians distinguished themselves by doing a lot _less_
modelling than their neoclassical counterparts.

------
thedevil
> issues like inequality, globalization, and the most efficient ways to tackle
> climate change...

> groups of students demanded an overhaul in how economics was taught, with
> less emphasis on free-market doctrines and more emphasis on real-world
> problems.

> in many cases this material comes after lengthy explanations of more
> traditional topics: supply-and-demand curves, consumer preferences, the
> theory of the firm, gains from trade, and the efficiency properties of
> atomized, competitive markets

This is very concerning. If you don't understand things like supply and demand
curves and relative advantage, you can't understand economics. There's very
good reason Mankiw starts with these basics.

If the math gets thrown out for ideological reasons, then economics will
become the next sociology.

~~~
js8
> If you don't understand things like supply and demand curves

I am not an economist, but I disagree strongly. The concept of supply and
demand is a _plague_ of economics theory, especially in the aggregate. It's a
terrible idea, which should have been obsoleted years ago, and has much nicer
alternatives. The basic (but not only) problem with it is that you're looking
at one side of equation at a time.

There is a much nicer alternative treatment in J.M.Blatt: Dynamic Economic
Systems, which uses Leontief matrices. Also, if you want to know where my
criticism is coming from, read Steve Keen's Debunking Economics. And even he
doesn't list all the issues with supply/demand analysis, although he hints at
them in other chapters.

~~~
js8
In particular, one big issue I personally have with supply/demand model is
that I don't know how to take two markets and their respective supply/demand
curves and equilibria and combine them into supply/demand curves and
equilibrium for the common market, under whatever additional assumptions you
want to have. And I tried, it was one of the first things I tried to do when
learning economics (it's tricky, because the equilibrium has to match).

And I have never seen an economic textbook do that, either. But they all
magically jump to aggregate demand and supply, where you have millions of
products. They cannot even aggregate two!

Someone mentioned physics here. So that's what you do in physics, you analyze
one thing first, then two things, then millions of things in aggregate. With
supply and demand model, the 2nd step is simply not done, and for a good
reason - the model will fall apart (as far as I can tell) at that point.

~~~
pzone
That's because of the nontrivial math. It will be found in general equilibrium
section toward the end of introductory microeconomics, or at the beginning of
a graduate course in macroeconomics.

Page 182 of this excerpt from Acemoglu's Economic Growth discusses aggregation
and the possibility of a representative household.
[http://users.econ.umn.edu/~guvenen/DaronBook1.pdf](http://users.econ.umn.edu/~guvenen/DaronBook1.pdf)

Aggregation of firms (and production functions) works quite nicely
theoretically. Unfortunately, the same is not true for household / demand
aggregation. The Debreu-Mantel-Sonnenschein Theorem aka. the "anything-goes"
theorem gives a stark negative result. Utility functions are just too
idiosyncratic to aggregate in every possible case.

However macroeconomists still do this for purposes of tractability. We know
that sometimes aggregation is possible, if utility functions take certain
forms. This is only one of many dimensions modern macroeconomic models are far
from realistic. This is no secret to anyone.

~~~
js8
This is a big problem, which is enough to kill the model, in my view, but not
the only problem, and not the one I alluded to. (And IMHO it affects supply as
well.) The problem I alluded to is that how you aggregate supply and demand
curves so that the equilibriums (the points where they intersect) match in
some reasonable way.

Supply and demand curves are such an unsalvagable mess, in my opinion.
Economists should just stop drawing them.

------
gshulegaard
I don't understand statements like this:

> But it treats perfectly competitive markets as special cases rather than the
> norm

In the context of this article's verbiage, I learned Economics the "old way"
and at no point was I under any illusion that Perfect Competition was "the
norm" or even common. I seem to recall phrases akin to, "There is no such
thing as a Perfectly Competitive market," oft-repeated.

~~~
jjoonathan
Sure, but if your econ class was like mine, highly competitive markets
received the most examination, discussion, and general attention, while low-
competition markets were relegated to a paragraph or perhaps even a footnote.
The relative prevalence of the two in the real world suggests a different
allocation of attention.

~~~
jstrom
Isn't that the logical approach to teaching it though? Start with the base
case, analyze how it functions, then start looking it how it changes when you
remove an assumption.

Similar to how physics starts with perfectly elastic point-masses in vacuum on
a friction-less plane.

~~~
js8
The problem is Physics 101 is a good approximation to reality, and you know
where. The free markets are not a good approximation of normal markets,
because the strategies of the actors are completely different.

The problem is with game theory - the limit of optimal strategies for some
games is not always the same as the optimal strategy for the limit game. This
breaks the ability to approximate.

So, for example, you cannot make conclusion from a game with infinite number
of actors ("free market") to a game with finite number of actors.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _The free markets are not a good approximation of normal markets, because
> the strategies of the actors are completely different_

You can use freshman economics to predict the average oil price in a given
year, from tables of quantities supplied and demanded. Where one finds
deviation, _e.g._ when OPEC was founded, meaningful new information arrived.

Most markets don't follow freshman economics which is why there is lots of
interest in developing better models. But we don't start physics with CFD.

~~~
js8
> You can use freshman economics to predict the average oil price in a given
> year, from tables of quantities supplied and demanded.

Not sure if I completely understand what you want to do, but if I do, this is
not drawing supply/demand curves, this is just predicting the prices based on
history of supply and demand. The supply/demand curves (that is, the model) is
what I am criticizing.

~~~
icebraining
You can't predict based on history without having a model that tells you how
to extrapolate that history.

~~~
js8
You could have a statistical model. You record supply, demand and price over
time period and then you can predict price by matching it to supply and
demand. No knowledge of supply/demand curves is needed.

But I am not clear if this is what parent wants to do.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _You record supply, demand and price over time period and then you can
> predict price by matching it to supply and demand_

That's what the damn curves are! Even calling them curves is misleading.
Freshman economics looks at linear systems. You take data, draw a regression
and then predict a price.

Supply and demand isn't voodoo. Early economics courses are inaccurate because
they start with linear models a general population of freshmen without strong
mathematics training can grasp.

~~~
js8
> That's what the damn curves are!

No, they are not. The curves are drawn at a given point in time, what you're
doing here is recording supply/demand over time. You would have to assume in
addition that the curves didn't change over the time period so you could say
this data are the demand/supply curves.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _The curves are drawn at a given point in time, what you 're doing here is
> recording supply/demand over time_

Supply tables show producer activity at a point in time. Linear models don't
model elasticity or endogeneity. Taking activity across a period in time is
perfectly fine for this kind of a model.

By the way, we discovered and characterized elasticity and endogeneity by
measuring deviations from said linear model. In some cases, the deviations
were predictable. That expanded the box of situations in which the model was
broadly useful.

Of course the introductory model isn't useful in most cases. But it (a) can be
empirically validated in a predictable set of markets _and_ (b) naturally
extends itself to cover more ground, _e.g._ non-linear, endogenous and failure
effects.

> _You would have to assume in addition that the curves didn 't change over
> the time period so you could say this data are the demand/supply curves_

This is a fine assumption for a bare-bones model. If someone wants to shrink
the box of uncertainty around their predictions they can learn more finance
and economics.

TL; DR these models work well enough that people who understand them, and
their limitations, will be able to make better predictions than those who
don't.

------
philipps
While the content of the book is one interesting aspect, the way it was
created and is being disseminated is also fascinating. It was a collective
effort of econ professors from around the world, who all teach a localized
version of the materials. They hired a company from south africa, to develop
an open publishing platform. The goal is to turn markdown content into a
number of outputs, ranging from a Oxford University Press textbook to a
responsive static web site. Most of the tools are open source and all of the
core content is on github. (Disclosure: I provided some input to the CORE
leadership when they were starting to think about an open platform).

~~~
Iv
It is both very rejoicing to see this happen and a bit depressing that this is
not already the norm for textbooks over all subjects.

------
daniloassis
One "Old" Book to Learn Economics: Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and
Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics [1]

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-
Underst...](https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-
Understand/dp/0517548232/)

~~~
acdanger
Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics book was a great introduction, too, though I
didn't always agree with some of the politics.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-
Sowell/dp/0465...](https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-
Sowell/dp/0465060730/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1505177554&sr=8-3&keywords=thomas+sowell)

------
clarkmoody
I recommend _Choice_ [1] by Robert Murphy as a way to learn basic economics.
The book is a distillation of _Human Action_ by Mises and derives economic
theory from the axiom of action.

[1]
[http://www.independent.org/publications/books/summary.asp?id...](http://www.independent.org/publications/books/summary.asp?id=116)

~~~
JamesBarney
Just a heads up to those who aren't familiar with Austrian economics. It has
very different ideas about how the world works from standard economics, and is
much closer to philosophy than science.

(They don't really use the scientific method or much empirical work. This is
why he used the word derive.)

~~~
clarkmoody
Indeed, the book explains how Austrian economics does not use the scientific
method at all, since the conclusions are derived from fundamental axioms.

~~~
arethuza
So Austrian economics is just like communism in that it doesn't let facts get
in the way of a good ideology.

~~~
IslaDeEncanta
Actually, communism is a materialist tradition, meaning that most of Marx's
works were critiques of idealist nonsense like Austrian Economics.

------
chrismealy
I've read the first eight chapters and it is excellent. It's up to date with
current empirical developments (Intro texts have hardly changed since Alfred
Marshall) and has a much broader scope. Overall it's much more in tune with
the real world.

------
unlmtd1
Interpersonal valuation is a logical impossibility. Those guys are selling
snake oil. I could easily make the point that 'standards of living'
(interpersonal valuation assumption) have gone _down_. We have less clean air,
less clean water, less forest, less cultivable land, less sea-life, etc, than
ever in our history. Does anyone really think the Nile delta is now more
beautiful than 100 yrs ago? Big-mouthed delusional priests, all of them.

~~~
nindalf
Today in 2017, how likely are you to die

1\. Because you can't afford food? Or because the harvest failed or was
stolen?

2\. Because you're infected by a disease that can't be treated?

3\. Because an army invaded your city/town and killed all able-bodied men and
sold everyone else into slavery?

4\. Because a natural disaster occurred - a hurricane/earthquake/tsunami and
you no longer have a roof above your head?

You show an appalling ignorance of history if you don't know that for all of
recorded human history, death was always around the corner, even if you were
one of the few people who were wealthy. Today the vast majority of humans
simply do not have to worry about death _all the time_, like humans always
have.

All of the problems you mentioned are totally legitimate and we should be
using all of our resources in solving these problems. But please don't imply
that quality of life isn't better than it was 100 years ago for most people.

> Big-mouthed delusional priests

And keep abuse to a minimum, especially when your comment is so low quality.

------
xiaoma
It's surprising the article didn't even mention the leader in online economics
education, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's Marginal Revolution:
[https://www.mruniversity.com/](https://www.mruniversity.com/)

It's been going since 2012, has nearly 1,000 videos and is completely free.

------
listentojohan
And a link to the site/book: [http://www.core-econ.org/](http://www.core-
econ.org/) \- seems like it is getting the hug of death.

------
choward
I'm trying to download the e-book and it links to a web site of the book
content. Is there a way to consume this is a sane way on a mobile device?

~~~
Dowwie
Sign up. Then, you can download a beta of the book

~~~
pmontra
But beware, not only it's a beta from September 2016 vs v1.0 as HTML on the
site but it's a PDF and not an epub. Not exactly the best thing on the screen
of a phone.

Funny thing about the registration, passwords must be between 8 (ok) and 16
characters. Why in 2017 do we still have developers thinking that there must
be an upper limit on password length? First it's bad for security, second even
a one megabyte password gets stored as a few bytes hash. Are they concerned
with scrypt/bcrypt performance?

~~~
e12e
> Funny thing about the registration, passwords must be between 8 (ok) and 16
> characters. Why in 2017 do we still have developers thinking that there must
> be an upper limit on password length?

Sorry to be pedantic - but having _an_ upper limit makes sense - how many 10gb
passwords would you want to store/run through a hash? 16 does seem a bit low
though.

------
ThomPete
This sounds great.

I am especially hopeful that it will cover what is normally considered an
externality in economics and which I consider it's most fatal blind-spot:
"technological progress"

Another book I really enjoyed was "The end of Alchemy" which took a very un-
political view of the financial crisis.

We need more of these kind of books and perspectives.

------
adamzerner
As the article mentions, The CORE Project seems to cover a lot of material. I
wonder if this means it won't fit well into a traditional college semester,
and thus it not being used in college classes too frequently.

The main website of The CORE Project does mention a bunch of colleges using
it. This points to the fact that colleges are willing to adopt it, but not
necessarily to the fact that many colleges will be willing to adopt it.

When colleges do choose to adopt it, I wonder if they'll just pick and choose
material that covers more traditional curriculums as opposed to the more
modern topics this book covers. If so, the mission of the project will really
take a punch.

~~~
chrismealy
I'm pretty sure it's meant to be used over two semesters.

~~~
adamzerner
Do you think it'd fit will into two semesters?

Currently, you usually take one semester of microeconomics, and another of
macroeconomics. This book seems like it covers both micro and macro. But this
book also seems to introduce new material on top of the things typically
taught in micro and macro classes today. So then it seems like full coverage
of the book wouldn't fit into two semesters.

(I intended to make this point in the original post but completely failed to,
sorry.)

~~~
foota
For a different perspective, I studied economics at a quarter school with 4
classes on micro and macro that all were expected to take, two intro and two
intermediate.

------
zaptheimpaler
I'm so happy to see a more realistic model of economics being taught!!

People will STILL call you a marxist/communist if you point out that current
economics is wrong sometimes.. very wrong.

Like obvious-fucking-ly when we model chickens as "perfect spheres" in physics
we know its only a model and not reality - the model is good enough for some
uses, not accurate enough for others.

Point out that a "perfectly rational" consumer and "perfectly efficient"
markets are models - that no market is perfect just as no ball is perfectly
round.. people lose their shit.

The dogma of the day is Free market/capitalism GOOD , all other systems EVIL!
Never mind understanding what precisely any of those words mean or correlating
taught concepts to real world business to see how well they hold up.

To me it points to a huge failure in education really - these people were
never taught the world is complex and economics is a highly simplified model
that can't hope to capture everything. No model can. They were indoctrinated
in a religion called economics, distinct from a science called economics.

~~~
stupidcar
Do any actual respectable, academic or working economists make these arguments
though? I've always thought that the problem isn't that economists work with
simplified models — that's part of science, and unavoidable in the days before
big data and cheap computing power — but that non—economists, politicians and
ideological zealots, take their research and think it's directly applicable to
the real world.

Improving Economics as a discipline, making it more evidence driven and
predictive, is a good thing. But sadly there will likely always be people who
distort and misrepresent its theories in order to fit their own agenda. We see
that in pretty much every scientific field, even ones far harder than
Economics.

~~~
_h_o_d_
There are many unrespectable economists in professorial positions and used to
advise government policy (see those of Reagan, Thatcher et al), so sadly yes.
Furthermore, the politicians or political advisers who ultimately make
government economic policy tend to have at most a BA in economics, hence have
been indoctrinated in the most simplistic of these dismal ideas without the
benefit of more sophisticated epistemological thinking.

~~~
0x27081990
So Milton Friedman is unrespectable?

~~~
IslaDeEncanta
Yes he is. The S&L crisis and the global financial crisis are both largely the
product of his ideas.

------
novalis78
Now obviously this has a libertarian angle to it but it's IMHO a brilliant
little gem to explain a lot of basic concepts extremely well - and in such
away that it works even for very young people [https://freedom-
school.com/money/how-an-economy-grows.pdf](https://freedom-
school.com/money/how-an-economy-grows.pdf)

~~~
mattmanser
That seems like pretty extreme propaganda to me. It's long, but even the
opening section is massively biased (ohhh, huge risks for the capital owning
man), so I did a quick scan.

Later on it raises a load of objections to minimum wages which turned out to
be utterly wrong.

------
djhworld
Is there a way to get this as a PDF?

------
taw55
The majority of commenters here seem to be beyond repair after going through
their fairytale economics courses. May I humbly suggest they read Debunking
Economics by Steve Keen if they are at all interested in the real world. Be
warned however that it also trashes Marxian, New-Keynesian and Austrian views.

Anyone who thinks the simplified and unrealistic models "are still useful"
does not understand just how bad these approaches are.

This course seems like a step up, but honestly anything still teaching
equilibrium models in 2017 should be burnt for electricity.

~~~
mentallimits
to be able to criticize modern economics, you need to first have a sound
technical understanding of the subject. steve keen doesn't.[1]

[1] [http://chrisauld.com/2012/12/06/steve-keen-still-
butchering-...](http://chrisauld.com/2012/12/06/steve-keen-still-butchering-
basic-microeconomics/)

~~~
taq33
Where's the counterproofs for the 17 other chapters? Many of his criticisms
originate from "own goals" made by those same modern economists he apparently
doesn't understand.

Is Perfect Competition is an even remotely realistic approximation?

------
gbacon
Something like the New Economy stocks from the late 1990s?

------
saiprashanth93
Is the core-econ website loading for anyone?

------
leifaffles
TLDR: less rigor, more dogma

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quadrangle
Is that a TLDR for others after you read it or your own statement that for you
it was TLDR and so here's your superficial impression?

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fgjjgutjvnu
" In his highly popular “Principles of Economics,” Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw
begins by listing a set of ten basic principles, which include “Rational
people think at the margin,” “Trade can make everybody better off,” and
“Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity.”"

That was and is a fine approach, nothing wrong with it. I think one of the
principles was "people react to incentives" or something along the line. I
think about it often. I think Mankiw's book is great (I have only read the
German version, which might differ in details from the US version - for
example it uses examples from Germany).

How do I know I can trust this "new economics" textbook? What if it was
written by communists or some other ideological group?

I also don't agree that economics did a bad job explaining the 2008 crisis.
It's just that people don't want to hear certain economic truths. Also,
economists disagree on some things, so it seems odd to say "economics doesn't
explain x" \- some economists do, others don't.

I am skeptic of anybody whose approach to criticizing modern economics is the
rational actor model. Economists know that it is just a model. It is still
very useful, and even if real world actors are not rational in the short term,
evolution ensures that actions are rational in the long term, for the most
part.

All that said, in general of course it is great to make a free economics text
book available.

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jnordwick
It basically sounds like a left wing text book. A way to introduce socialist
economic thought before introducing the basics so students will be less
capable of questioning socialist orthodoxy.

The way it jumps into complex topics without providing much base material,
such as its immediate dive into income distributing, seems like it is more
about indoctrination.

This overview of complex topics instead of foundational ideas seems more
appropriate for Econ For Non Econ Majors.

~~~
quadrangle
For perspective, I teach music (quite distinct topic). So, keep in mind that
the following points have nothing to do with political perspectives.

I used to focus on "basics" and "first principles" and over time I've come to
realize that it's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music
that doesn't sound like exercises. I just do a large _quantity_ instead of
perfecting a small number of pieces. Students learn the common patterns
through statistical learning (and some explicit instruction about the
fundamentals).

The idea that you should first be taught the principles is itself probably the
MORE indoctrinating approach. It sets the assumptions in place and then gets
the student to force all examples into the box created by the assumptions.
Starting from complex topics can actually be better and far more neutral,
letting students make sense of things without preconceptions — if it's done
well.

The only principles that should be taught at the beginning are the ones that
are absolutely 100% certainly true. In music, that's stuff like basic physics
(strings vibrate at different speeds). Certainly we should avoid implying that
any cultural and/or debatable stuff is fundamental (in music, that would be
stuff like chord patterns or common scales or rhythm patterns etc). When we
teach these cultural or otherwise general (but not universal) things, it's
best to do so via examples and take care not to overemphasize them.

~~~
falsedan
> _it 's better to teach all sorts of complex actual real-world music that
> doesn't sound like exercises_

This works for language too: babies get exposed to simple sound-making
exercises, some vocab building, then dumped into an environment full of
complex phrases. Years later they might learn the grammar of the language and
the basics of nouns and verbs.

~~~
quadrangle
To be totally clear: kids learn all the grammar on their own from the
examples. This whole concept is called "exemplar theory"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exemplar_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exemplar_theory)

Before the kids are taught to explicitly discuss linguistic concepts like
grammar, they already have the full grammar learned in their head.
Furthermore, some of what they are taught is actually _wrong_ because it's
basically invalid hypotheses that people came up with when trying to describe
the grammar.

This is not to say that explicit study of grammar isn't interesting or useful.
But it's not how you best learn language, and it's certainly far more biased
to teach from a grammar-principles-first approach than to teach by just
learning examples and letting your brain do its natural statistical learning
process.

