/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15798066]

Whats a good read for someone who is clueless about how money and an economy works?

I tried reading Basic Economy, but its basically about a price coordinate economy and its page after page about how capitalism is better than socialism. I want a practical guide, for instance I have no grasp on how GDP is calculated.

[Anonymous No.15798179]

Read a textbook

[Anonymous No.15798298]

>>15798066
>its page after page about how capitalism is better than socialism
well Sowell is talking about efficiency of resources so obviously that is what you would get

[Anonymous No.15798360]

>>15798066
>on how GDP is calculated.
what's the problem with Wikipedia?
Read the full articles.

[Anonymous No.15798390]

GDP is a meaningless data point used by central planners to justify whatever they were already doing

[Anonymous No.15798395]

the Origin of Wealth

[Anonymous No.15798781]

>>15798066
Most academic economics is extremely detached from reality and of no relevance to anyone. In most mainstream models basically it's all barter with banks functioning as simple intermediaries... look into MMT for the best empirical technical description of the mechanics of modern finance.
Over 100 years ago Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of Business Enterprise) got probably the closest to understanding how things work. A modern economy is basically just about credit and manipulating perceptions of future returns to maximize pecuniary claims on future wealth ("animal spirits" as Keynes said) by means of strategic sabotage.

>>15798390
It's not "meaningless" but doesn't necessarily say much. In a capitalist economy if people are buying and selling more things that's generally going to be correlating with something "good" going on and if people are cutting back on their spending something "bad"... of course there's the issue of "negative" costs (having to pay for extra security/cleaning up from disasters/etc) and issues of double accounting.
If everything was free there would be no GDP and maybe everyone would be better off in some non-monetary sense and if everything was commoditized and a lot more necessary buying and selling going on maybe people would be worst off. Maximizing GDP is a very stupid target for a central planner, you'd want to maximize the amount of free goods while finding ways to demonetize things.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.15798925]

>>15798066

[Anonymous No.15799404]

>>15798066
i don't know how you could read a book with this title and not already expect a capitalist apologia

[Anonymous No.15799513]

>>15798925

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.15799529]

>>15799513
>How can I complain about it if I understand it!?

[Anonymous No.15799592]

>>15799529

[Anonymous No.15799614]

>>15798925
>representing overweight ugly people as slim and aesthetic
Something like a habit for you beeple innit?

[Anonymous No.15799624]

Economics is just a social construct and you'd be better off learning about astrology

[Anonymous No.15799704]

>>15799624
I told him, red and green are just social constructs, but the cop have me a ticket anyway.

[Anonymous No.15799745]

>>15798925
>Capitalism is superseded when the workplace relationship designated by the term exploitation ends. That happens when productive laborers no longer deliver the surpluses they produce into the hands of others who appropriate and distribute them and make all the key decisions about those distributions.
why don't socialists understand this?

[Anonymous No.15799748]

>>15798066
GDP and national accounts are studied in macro economics.

Bernake has an old textbook that is pretty good. Used old editions are fine.

Honestly any micro textbook teaches the same shit but some incorporate more insights from behavioral economics. Case, Fair, Oster is fine.

Rosen Gayer is good for public finance if you're in the US but really textbooks are surface level shit. If you ever want to truly understand public finance.

[Anonymous No.15799815]

Start with the Greeks

[Anonymous No.15799826]

>>15798781
based

[Anonymous No.15799881]

>>15799624
Exactly, "economics" has no intrinsic meaning. All of us would agree that something like "societies" exist, but that doesn't mean we necessarily give a shit about what some guy calling himself a Sociologist thinks about what HE defines as "societies."

We might very well listen to the disciplinary sociologist, we might even tell him that we're glad he has a whole institutional and funding structure set up to allow him and like-minded people to continue doing that kind of work. But we do have to make that determination ourselves. We can't just walk into the nearest building labelled Sociology Department and go "welp, guess this is what 'the study of society' is, and by extension what 'society' is, then."

Economics is this same problem but ten times worse, because economists are not even social scientists (who at least claim to be scientifically neutral), they are professional managers and accountants. A sociologist will generally admit that he's doing his best to study "society" with the tools and traditions at his disposal, but that the study itself has a history, and many of its concepts and categories could theoretically be bullshit. That is part of being a good scientist, acknowledging that your models and theories are provisional.

Economists don't do this, they try to hustle you into believing they are the priests of "economic" knowledge and their high school-tier mathematical models are the essence of pure science. And unlike the sociologist once again, they are not interested in updating or critiquing their knowledge or their models, just in applying them, for pay. It is in their economic interest, not in the interest of science, to insist on the reality of their reductive and simplifying models of human society and behaviour. So that's what they do. Economics departments are the laughingstock of the social sciences.

Economics in the modern departmental didn't exist until mid-century. Before that economics was a subset of social science, simply the study of loosely-defined "economies" (production and consumption relations, prices, and so forth), and theories about their structural-functional nature. That can be rewarding to read, but modern economists are more like failed math majors combined with failed sociology majors combined with business majors.

[Anonymous No.15800052]

>>15799881
seethingly wrong

[Anonymous No.15800160]

>>15799704
True, I guess my recommendation to Op is to read a book on the history of economics and learn about the competing schools of thought. Any textbook recommendation is likely to be heavily centered in neoliberal political discourse. That is at least my experience.

I don't have any recommendations.

[Anonymous No.15800190]

>>15798066

[Anonymous No.15800271]

>>15798066
The Wealth of Nations and then Das Kapital
Both are very long so good luck

[Anonymous No.15800292]

[Anonymous No.15800305]

>>15800160
>Any textbook recommendation is likely to be heavily centered in neoliberal political discourse
And how many econ courses have you taken to conclude this? Zero. Macroeconomics textbooks are mostly filled with (neo-)Keynesian models.

[Anonymous No.15800384]

>>15800292
>ayn rand
>nick land
wtf

[Anonymous No.15800402]

>>15798066
Petty, Smith, Ricardo and Marx

[Anonymous No.15800496]

>>15800402
>bro read these dinosaurs that have all been conclusively proven wrong in the late 19th century and don't read those who corrected them
ook for dusty old tomes by Euclid to get yourself started with mathematics uhh man just read The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man and you'll be an evolutionary biologist it's easy dude

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.15800915]

>>15800496
Capitalism is a dinosaur. A monstrous old beast that needs put down

[Anonymous No.15801240]

>>15800496
Imagine legitimately thinking that Marx has been largely proven wrong
delulu overload

[Anonymous No.15801262]

https://voca.ro/8eRDtXZ8MC9

[Anonymous No.15801274]

>>15801240
the stateless classless society will emerge any day comrade

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.15801305]

>>15801274
Only if we want it.

[Anonymous No.15801543]

>>15798298
There is nothing obvious about this though. Capitalism is massively redundant in ways that commumism wouldn't have to be, while it conversely mainly takes advantage of the massive information available by using it to give advantages to marketers and advertisers, instead of enabling greater co-ordination of he economy.

[Anonymous No.15801565]

>>15799404
Becasue people are confinced that Marxism "has been refuted" and that "if you just read a book on basic economics you'd understand why".

[Anonymous No.15801603]

>>15800496
>ook for dusty old tomes by Euclid to get yourself started with mathematics

Legitimately what should I do instead? People studied Euclid for millennia, and while I'd be interested in modern takes on geometry, I've never seen anyone give a concrete recommendation of something that replaces Euclid's approach to teaching geometry through proofs based on physical intuitions with something similar but 'more rigorous'.

[Anonymous No.15803116]

>>15798179
I'd rec Mankiw as well. Or just look up a university syllabus for intro/intermediate micro/macro. You don't have to do all the little exercises but figure out the major concepts for each chapter.

[Anonymous No.15803126]

>>15801543
Very obvious to one who has studied economics. But Marxists don't typically engage with economics with respect to efficiency, rather they make moral arguments.

[Anonymous No.15804413]

>>15803126
>marxists make moral arguments
lmao

[Anonymous No.15804820]

>>15798066
Bachelor degree in econ and finance
Basic Economics is shit, read Joseph Schumpeter and Irving Fisher instead.
A good recent book was Narrative Economics by Robert Shiller, particularly relevant now and very easy to read for retards.
My favourite economics comes from the Scholastics.
>>15798390
GDP is bad because it pretends that debt is wealth, which is obviously fucking stupid, among other things.
GNP was a much better model of wealth.
Another way of getting an idea what an economy is doing is subtracting CPI from nominal GDP.
>>15799748
Helicopter Ben is a Jewish economist. Never trust Jewish economists, they're trying to scam you.

[Anonymous No.15805143]

>>15801565
because that is true. I study Business Management and have Economics as a part of my course. Marxism is an irrelevant ideology that remains popular due to uneducated art students and wilfully ignorant academics perpetuating that a communist state would do anything other than become a fascistic nightmare over time.
Read F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom
Read Thomas Sowell's Marxism: Critiques and Analysis

If you still have your current opinion then props, but I highly doubt it.

[Anonymous No.15805356]

>>15804820
Debt is asset, you can use it as collateral.

[Anonymous No.15805397]

>>15805143
>I study Business Management and have Economics as a part of my course.
Of course you do.

>a communist state
Exactly the level of understanding I expected.

Good night.

[Anonymous No.15805449]

>>15805397
WOW you blew him the f*ck out bro!

[Anonymous No.15805460]

>>15805449
I actually did.

[Anonymous No.15805474]

>>15805460
that's literally what I said haahaaa cool :)

[Anonymous No.15805532]

>>15805460
You blew Marx himself in a go because he insisted that first must be the state.

[Anonymous No.15805536]

>>15805397
it literally doesn't matter what true coomunism means to you, when the overwhelming majority of people who claim to be communists are seeking to implement a communist state. you don't get to control the language. they do.

[Anonymous No.15805759]

>>15805397
name one example of communism existing in the real world that wasn't statist?

[Anonymous No.15806854]

>>15805143
>communist state
That is an oxymoron, moron

[Anonymous No.15806872]

>>15805759
What about social democracies like Finland?

[Anonymous No.15806889]

>>15806872
they're capitalist

[Anonymous No.15806911]

Pick one or more and read any work really:
Böhm-Bawerk
Mises
Menger
Schumpeter
Rothbard
Sowell
Friedman
Hoppe
Smith

[Anonymous No.15807024]

Open Yale Shiller

[Anonymous No.15807043]

>>15806889
How so? Yeah they're not pure communist juntas but they've adopted policies that run exactly counter to what Sowell talks about in his book. Universal healthcare, high taxes, free education etc. yet they have one of the highest standards of living and citizen happiness in the world.

[Anonymous No.15807049]

>>15798066
honestly, just read Capital. if you hate marxists, read Human Action. if it's too hard, read Man, Economy, and State.

[Anonymous No.15807051]

>>15807043
They have capitalist enterprise, the taxes for the social programs you're talking about are taken from a capitalist economy.

[Anonymous No.15807119]

>>15807051
Yes, the grocery store has fifteen different brands of cereal and toothpaste but my point stands that Finland has adopted very socialist policies yet all the effects which Sowell claims should happen, in terms of decrease in standard of living, simply doesn't. Why? Doesn't that put his ideas in doubt?

[Anonymous No.15807132]

>>15807119
I'm not arguing in favor of Sowell, I just saw someone calling Finland communist, and this is egregiously wrong. In the sort of conditions that exist in Finland their policies clearly work well, although they share many of the longterm issues facing other western countries.

[Anonymous No.15807146]

>>15807132
What conditions and what longterm issues are you referring to?

[Anonymous No.15807166]

>>15807146
they have 1.5 births per woman for one thing.

[Anonymous No.15807215]

>>15798066
Do you have specific questions?
If not, if you really are starting at the ground floor (great, btw!) then it's not a bad idea simply to use a 100-level college textbook on micro/macro economics. From there you can get more specific.
Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith is actually quite readable and a fine place to start if you haven't yet chosen an ideological horse in the race (Marx is fine but his major work, Capital, is billed really as a critique of political economy more than anything else... more on this later but tldr if you want a Marxist perspective youre better off reading someone who identifies as such rather than Marx himself...)

Foundations of Economics: A Beginner's Companion by Yanis Varoufakis published by Routledge is instrumental. I think it's a great place to start. He also has a book called The Global Minotaur which is a solid read on the 2008 financial crisis...

[Anonymous No.15807229]

>>15807215
Oh and I forgot to mention, if you have a penchant for a theoretical journey, Timothy Mitchell has fantastic writings on the germination of economics as a discipline and a genealogy of this thing we call the economy.

[Anonymous No.15807255]

>>15798066
READ. FUCKING. MARX. YOU. FUCKING. NAZI.
literally why the fuck does anyone waste time with any other thing but communism? literally just read fucking theory or pay the fucking price.

[Anonymous No.15807853]

>>15806872
so your best example is a capitalist country with socialist institutions which are artificially kept afloat by said capitalist funding?

[Anonymous No.15807889]

>>15798066

IGNORE ALL LARPING RETARDS ITT

Read pic related for a very in-depth yet concise picture of different ways of looking at economics

[Anonymous No.15807897]

>>15807255
>someone who is clueless about how money and an economy works
>is told to read Marx
not very helpful, anon

[Anonymous No.15807919]

>>15807897
to be fair, most people who claim to support Marxism are clueless as to how money and the economy works.