[marginalcodex]

There is no must-read books for economics (or almost any other field of study). Non-fiction economics books are meant to teach the reader something new. As Economics represents a set of ideas owned by no one individual, the best overview of economics will contain all of the important, integral ideas of the subject.

Any summary of economics that introduces the core concepts will be great and serve its purpose.

[tomrod]

Economist here.

I disagree that if someone wants a broad introduction that by picking up Samuelson or MWG will be able to figure out the field from first (mathematical) principles.

New Ideas from Dead Economists is a fantastic, broad introduction into the philosophy of economics that you appears interested in.

Works by Keynes, Smith, Marx, Robinson, Hayek, and Ricardo do a fantastic job laying the groundwork for modern economic theory.

If you're looking for the quantitative side of economics, Mostly Harmless Econometrics, Freakonomics, and (on the very theoretical side) Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics are must reads.

Capital by Picketty is currently being debated, as the underlying evidence towards his theories are compelling but not necessarily testable.

Game theory is also a fun field within economics, and has overlap in CS and (occasionally) statistics.

[Dowwie]

I thought that Piketty released or references sources for the underlying data supporting his work from "Capital..." so why are you considering it not necessarily testable? I don't understand what you mean by that phrase.

[tomrod]

For example, colonialism, which Picketty and Acemoglu base a lot of their work on, would be hard to reimplement for experimentation. Hence the debate. The data and conclusions are interesting and compelling, but not yet decisive.