September 2022

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30  
Blog powered by Typepad

« Can Growth Be Explained Without The Entrepreneurial Process? | Main | Is It Reasonable for a PhD Student to Worry about being caught in the academic version of a 'Roach Motel'? »

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Modesty forbids Prof. Boettke from suggesting his own co-authored book, The Economic Way of Thinking, which embodies a delightful marriage of deep ideas and crystal clear writing. For undergrads, I recommend it ahead of almost everything else, even the worthy Friedman works that he lists above.

No more English, no more French!
No more sitting on a hard board bench!

Anon

You recommended undergraduates reading mathematics texts. Anything in particular? If Marshall, what texts?

Jake asks what mathematical texts. It depends on what you want to learn and how to read through mathematical reasoning. I find biographies of people and ideas fasinating, so I enjoy tremendously works like Morris Kline's Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty . If you would like to learn about game theory, for example, I really like the following order of progression --- Nalbeuf and Dixit, Thinking Strategically, Poundstone, Prisoners' Dilemma, and then Gibons, Game Theory for Applied Economists. That would be the general pattern I find useful for that way I learn --- a nice book talking about the usefulness of the concepts, then a nice summary of how the ideas came about historically, and then a work trying to show how to work with the concepts in a technically competent way.

You can do this with statistics as well. Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein is a great read on the history of probability theory and its practical relevance. Follow that up with other works about the development of probabiity and statistics and then look at Peter Kennedy's book A Guide to Econometrics.

I don't recommend that everyone learn this way, but it is the way that I learn.

As for just pure preparation for graduate study as opposed to exploring the adventure of the evolution of ideas and concept, the Schaum's outline series is probably the best place to start ... but be prepared there is nothing adventurist in these book, just straightforward learning of the technique without any attempt to sell you on the power of the techniques to understand the world.

With regard to your quesiton on Marshall --- he advice on mathematical economics was in a letter he wrote. There is no better introduction to Marshall than his principles book however. Good luck with your studies.

The comments to this entry are closed.

Our Books