🧭 After the course

There are two books that might be a nice complement to what you’ve learned in this class. Whereas Bruce focused on providing foundations for economic thinking, these books focus on applications and are therefore much lighter! Neither has a single equation or graph, but both epitomize the best of economic thinking. The two books are named The Undercover Economist and Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science. I will put more information about them below.

If you are considering getting one and aren’t sure which book to get, I’d recommend Wheelan’s. It is a bit lighter, and my wife used to regularly read his column for fun (she has no tolerance for technical or boring writing). As of this writing, it is listed by Amazon as the #1 seller in Business Finance.

I’ll paste the last two paragraphs to Wheelan’s introduction to Naked Economics below:

This book walks through some of the most powerful concepts in economics while simplifying the building blocks or skipping them entirely. Each chapter covers subjects that could be made into an entire book. Indeed, there are minor points in every chapter that have launched and sustained entire academic careers. I have glossed over or skipped much of the technical structure that forms the backbone of the discipline. And that is exactly the point: One need not know where to place a load-bearing wall in order to appreciate the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright. This book is not economics for dummies; it is economics for smart people who never studied economics (or have only a vague recollection of doing so). Most of the great ideas in economics are intuitive when the dressings of complexity are peeled away. That is naked economics.

Economics should not be accessible only to the experts. The ideas are too important and too interesting. Indeed, naked economics can even be fun.

My hope is that some of the lighter works will complement the more rigorous methods you are learning in class and help show how applicable and interesting economics can be.

Another book you might consider is the always entertaining Freakonomics series. Good economics starts with economic theory (like what we’ve been covering) and then tests it with data. The Freakonomics books are a collaboration between a journalist (who can write entertainingly) and a brilliant economist who is very good at coming up with clever ways to test economic theories.
https://freakonomics.com/books/

One students wrote, “Also, I was listening into the section but couldn’t respond to your question who is reading the books you recommended. Just wanted to share that I am listening to Freakonomics on audible and reading The Undercover Economist. I really enjoy both books and love when I can name the concepts as they are introduced in the books (price discrimination in supermarkets, moral hazard or asymmetric information problems). One topic that is particularly relevant to me personally is the Principle-Agent Problem with real estate agents and the kind of vocabulary they use to describe different quality houses in Freakonomics. So many great ways to change our perspective on how to interpret data sets and how that impacts our decisions on our risk assessments (ie. gun danger vs. not fenced in pools). Really exciting to see the concepts we learned come to life. ”