My sense of economics is that many concepts are important, but the frameworks are systematically obscuring a lot of what’s important to see.
Can you expand on this? How are the frameworks systematically obscuring a lot of what’s important to see?
in nonideological terms
Economics doesn’t seem very ideological to me, or maybe I’m just too brainwashed to see it. Can you explain more?
Most comments I see of the type “you should engage more with economics” don’t really seem to be thinking about costs clearly
Ah, yeah I wasn’t thinking in terms of “costs of learning economics”, because learning it was a lot of fun for me. Kind of curious why people who otherwise seem very similar to myself (such as Jessica) don’t find it fun.
Why should I think better of academic economics?
Economics (as a real world phenomena) is really complex and often counter-intuitive. It’s very easy to make mistakes when thinking about it and academia has already made and fixed a lot of those mistakes. Studying academic economics gave me intuitions and formal tools that make it much easier to see such mistakes in myself and others. See this recent thread as an example.
It’s true though that I haven’t been thinking that others might find it very costly to learn, in which case learning some detached concepts and simplified models might be better than nothing, unless it makes one feel overconfident instead of just confused. So I’d prefer to see some disclaimers on such posts like “Please try to learn academic economics, but if that’s not fun for you or you don’t have enough time, these simplified concepts/models/frameworks might help. Keep in mind that real world economics is really complex and often counterintuitive, and these concepts/models/frameworks haven’t been as widely vetted or extensively tested as concepts/models/frameworks in academic economics.”
Sorry, of the economics textbooks I’ve read, I’ve either forgotten which ones I used, or they haven’t been updated since the 90s. And a lot of what I learned were from things like lectures, articles, and papers, instead of textbooks. I can only suggest some subfields in economics that seem especially interesting to me, and recommend that you start directly with graduate level textbooks (or review papers if textbooks don’t exist yet), because the undergraduate ones tend to oversimplify a lot of things.
game theory (both cooperative and non-cooperative, ETA: but see this comment for why cooperative game theory isn’t very widely known)
industrial organization
public choice theory
economics of property rights
theory of the firm
family economics
information economics
market/mechanism design
finance
microeconomics (for general concepts like comparative advantage, transaction costs, and deadweight loss)
Can you expand on this? How are the frameworks systematically obscuring a lot of what’s important to see?
Economics doesn’t seem very ideological to me, or maybe I’m just too brainwashed to see it. Can you explain more?
Ah, yeah I wasn’t thinking in terms of “costs of learning economics”, because learning it was a lot of fun for me. Kind of curious why people who otherwise seem very similar to myself (such as Jessica) don’t find it fun.
Economics (as a real world phenomena) is really complex and often counter-intuitive. It’s very easy to make mistakes when thinking about it and academia has already made and fixed a lot of those mistakes. Studying academic economics gave me intuitions and formal tools that make it much easier to see such mistakes in myself and others. See this recent thread as an example.
It’s true though that I haven’t been thinking that others might find it very costly to learn, in which case learning some detached concepts and simplified models might be better than nothing, unless it makes one feel overconfident instead of just confused. So I’d prefer to see some disclaimers on such posts like “Please try to learn academic economics, but if that’s not fun for you or you don’t have enough time, these simplified concepts/models/frameworks might help. Keep in mind that real world economics is really complex and often counterintuitive, and these concepts/models/frameworks haven’t been as widely vetted or extensively tested as concepts/models/frameworks in academic economics.”
Are there any economics textbooks you’d recommend?
Sorry, of the economics textbooks I’ve read, I’ve either forgotten which ones I used, or they haven’t been updated since the 90s. And a lot of what I learned were from things like lectures, articles, and papers, instead of textbooks. I can only suggest some subfields in economics that seem especially interesting to me, and recommend that you start directly with graduate level textbooks (or review papers if textbooks don’t exist yet), because the undergraduate ones tend to oversimplify a lot of things.
game theory (both cooperative and non-cooperative, ETA: but see this comment for why cooperative game theory isn’t very widely known)
industrial organization
public choice theory
economics of property rights
theory of the firm
family economics
information economics
market/mechanism design
finance
microeconomics (for general concepts like comparative advantage, transaction costs, and deadweight loss)
macroeconomics
micro foundations of macroeconomics
monetary theory
This is helpful, thanks!