[ctchocula]

For a solid intro to economics, I found a real gem of a suggestion by an econ professor at UC Berkeley [1], so I'll share with you. His advice is to start from the father of economics himself, Adam Smith. Then follow that up with Das Kapital (which I know is an unpopular stance here on HN) and some Keynes (who is credited with coming up with the economic theory that helped bring the UK and US out of the Great Depression). Here's a snippet of Prof. DeLong's advice:

> We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:

1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.

2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.

3. Read through the book actively, taking notes.

4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.

5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.

6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading.

7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.

8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?

9. Decide what you think of the whole.

10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.

> Follow this process, and your reading becomes active. Then you have the greatest possible chance of learning the books—of thereafter being able to summon up sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes and then running them on your wetware. If you can do that, you can be closer to being as smart as they were. And at the same time you will be aware enough of their weak points and blindnesses that you can be wiser than they were.

[1] https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/a-note-on-reading-bi...

[prox]

I recently started in the book “The value of everything” , and it’s the first book to give me a solid understanding from the early theories and it’s working its way to today. Especially the decomposition of where the theories differ is enlightening. I just arrived at marginal utility theory. It explains it far better than all the classes I had in economics.

[notahacker]

I'd suggest Adam Smith and Marx were terrible starting points tbh, since both were writing long before anything resembling the theories and methods of modern economics - or actual modern economies - actually existed and the one thing they had in common (a labour theory of value, though Marx's is more sophisticated and fundamental to his theories) is something essentially no modern economist believes. Not that they're not interesting reads and influential on what came after, but it's like trying to get a grounding in computer science from reading Ada Lovelace.

Arguably even the bad theories are better understood in the context of modern economics (Marx's "Iron Law of Wages" which proposes that wages inevitably fall to subsistence levels makes much more sense as a special case of there being more supply than demand for that type of labour; one prevalent in the middle of an Industrial Revolution which made many craftsmen obsolete but less evidently a universal truth after a century of most people in the West earning well above the minimum necessary to keep them alive)_