My list of five of the best introductions to economics wasn’t exactly the usual suspects, but I wanted to stray a little further off the obvious territory and recommend six books you might want to read to give you an unusual introduction to economics.
A couple of years after the financial crisis I came across Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents (UK) (US). Perrow is a sociologist who became fascinated by particular kinds of system, ones which were “complex” (meaning that consequences of error are unpredictable) and “tightly coupled” (meaning that the consequences unfold quickly and irreversibly). His case studies include terrible accidents such as the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl – hauntingly described – but I increasingly came to realise that economic and financial systems could and should be studied with the same eye. (For the same reason, I’d also recommend anything by James Reason. (UK) (US).)
Yoram Bauman and Grady Klein’s Cartoon Introduction To Economics (UK) (US) is perfectly conventional in many ways – except that it’s a cartoon, and also pretty funny, as you might expect from Bauman, a stand-up comedian. Good stuff.
Cory Doctorow’s For The Win (UK) (US) made me question whether I shouldn’t be trying to write about economics through fiction. My conclusion so far has been “no”, partly because Doctorow already does it so well. For The Win describes a a struggle between the young protagonists who work inside multiplayer computer games, and Big Business trying to run a cartel. Learn about globalisation, unionisation, virtual gold mining, and enjoy the thrill of the chase too.
James Owen Weatherall’s Physics of Wall Street (UK) (US) is a fine tour of how physicists and mathematicians from Bachelier to Mandelbrot to Jim Simons have tried to understand how markets work – and profit from their understanding. In the dock: economists, for not getting it. Harsh, I feel – but a very interesting and readable book anyway.
If you want to read an account with novelistic qualities that’s a true story, pick up Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (UK) (US). You’ve probably read it anyway, but read it again. He’s a superb writer and he really understands Wall Street.
Finally, I found Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science (UK) (US) simply revolutionised the way I thought about numbers, evidence, and the newspapers. Like Lewis’s book this will be familiar to many of you, but it bears reading again and again.
And one more suggestion; my freewheeling history of technology tells the story of particular inventions or ideas, and uses each one to teach us a lesson about how the economy works. In the US it’s Fifty Inventions that Shaped the Modern Economy and in the UK, Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy. Enjoy!