☆ “Read this one first”: Local profs give elevator pitches for their top economics texts (part 3)
Now it's official: school's back in session. Restarting our exclusive Opp Now series, three more econ professors (teaching in local cities including SJ) went all out to sell the Opp Now community on their discipline's best books—interesting, foundational, applicable, and, yep, no degree required.
Darwyyn Deyo, San Jose State University economics associate professor:
For readers interested in understanding economics, learning about the causes and consequences of economic growth is a good place to start. I would recommend “How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth” by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin, which provides a good foundation for why economic growth matters and theories about how it works. It also covers the literature with respect to demography, geography, and institutions.
Adam Smith started us off with “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” over 200 years ago, but Koyama and Rubin provide a useful contemporary resource for folks interested in what we know today without requiring that readers already have a degree in economics.
David Henderson, Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA) economics professor:
I have trouble narrowing it down to one. But I have narrowed it down to two.
The first one is Henry Hazlitt's “Economics in One Lesson.” Although the book was written in 1946, much of it, except for the numbers, reads as if it were written yesterday. Read this one first. In it, you’ll learn to think about the seen and the unseen, the short run versus the long run, and why rent controls and price controls generally do harm, to name three.
The second one is a textbook by Paul Heyne, Peter Boettke, and David Prychitko, “The Economic Way of Thinking.” Unlike most introductory textbooks, it doesn’t get bogged down in details. It does a nice job of explaining opportunity costs, how exchange benefits both buyer and seller, the essence of competition, the harm caused by price controls, and numerous other important and fundamental topics.
Derek Stimel, UC Davis economics associate professor:
I don’t know if there is a best book, but I use N. Gregory Mankiw’s “Principles of Economics” in my introductory courses. I would say introductory textbooks are very similar to each other, so it’s hard to go wrong no matter which one you choose, but Mankiw’s text is the most readable in my opinion.
I’d add “The Cartoon Introduction to Economics” (Volume 1: Microeconomics and Volume 2: Macroeconomics) by Yoram Bauman and Grady Klein because these texts are fun and highly readable as well.
Finally, Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics” or Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” are both very concise and very readable introductions to the economic way of thinking.
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