Or just read Samuelson's or Mankiw's Intro Econ textbook. There's a reason those 2 are used everywhere from AP Econ all the way to intro Econ classes at MIT and Harvard.
Sure those are great textbooks. If you want the history of economic thought though you might be more interested in the people and times which led to the ideas in the book. You won’t get enough of that in mankiw.
As to why the mankiw book is used at Harvard… maybe we should have a talk about monopolies… ;)
That’s just a joke it’s a good textbook but its status as the standard at Harvard is only partially related to its quality.
Perplexity is actually pretty good. The main one was probably first to access internet in the responses. Even better, the labs site gives access to models with uncensored versions of models with zero guardrails. Has some pretty good quality models to select from, too, including Mixtral 8x7B. You ever wonder how to make crack? Just ask Perplexity Labs.
Profs should be required to justify each reading list item, with an expected learning outcome, and the student should be free to seek that outcome however he sees fit. This would also create real world skills in ingenuity, etc.
I suspect he meant it as a pairing to his GOAT book, which he proudly claims is the first book simultaneously released through GPT-4. He encourages readers to engage with the book through ChatGPT 4 where you can give it prompts such as "list three amusing anecdotes about Keynes that I can share at a cocktail party"
He links to his book "GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?" which is freely available online, it contains several mentions of Marx. An example:
"My first standard is how an economist analyzes a more or less new problem shown to him, and thus how well that economist can think. That sounds simple, but as we’ll see it rules out many folks right off the bat, most notably Karl Marx."
Sounds like it might not be the most appropriate course for Marx fans.
Spoiler alert: he doesn't come out and say that Milton Friedman is the GOAT, but he pretty much says that Milton Friedman is the GOAT.
I mean, Graeber and Marx aren't really taught in Econ degrees either. Nor is Adam Smith for that matter.
They're all basically dealing with the philosophy of economics, but economics has transitioned away from being a qualitative field to a quantitative one.
Now Econ majors are expected to read Baby Rudin by their first year in top undergrad programs.
Source: attempted to become an Econ major in first year. Realized I don't have it in me to do analysis, so became a CS and PoliSci double instead, still got the Econ minor though.
needing to move economics’ goalposts to the extent Marx is now considered irrelevant to the field of economics only goes to show how influential he’s been. The current practitioners disagree with him? Sure, fine, but to say he’s irrelevant is absurd. He’s easily one of the most influential thinkers in the space.
A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, Glyn Davies 3rd edition 2002
https://archive.org/stream/A_History_of_Money-From_Ancient_T...