Category Books
Stag Hunt and The Money Problem
If I were any good at writing book reviews, this post would tell you all about Morgan Ricks' new book "The Money Problem", and would explain why I think it's a very good book. [Disclaimer: I was paid to fly down to Nashville for a couple of days to help Morgan with his first draft.] […]
Maybe profs should haggle over textbook prices?
Mark Perry shows that textbook prices have been increasing, a lot. I don't know why that is. But maybe there's something that profs could do about it. The publisher's rep drops by your office. She asks which book you will be adopting for your course. She really wants the sale. You say:
Books for budding economists
"Magrathea is a myth, a fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to be economists, it's…" Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What books should you give your children (nieces, nephews, friends) if you want them to grow up to become economists?
Literary You-genics
In days of old, literature was subject to strict population controls. As John A Hobson put it back in 1910: "Before the arts of printing and of reading became common, most of the great deeds of man, his finest thoughts, his noblest feelings, perished for lack of enduring record and easy accurate communication…. Almost all that […]
Book review: Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble”
Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen is one of my very favourite journalists. I first came across his work during the 2008 election campaign, in which he distinguished himself by writing what turned out to be the only article on carbon taxes that made no reference to Stéphane Dion's accent. His piece was a beacon […]
The Rise and Fall of Marxism?
My latest time wasting tech toy is Google Ngram Viewer. What's an ngram? A one word phrase, like "Marx" is a one-gram. "Karl Marx" is a two-gram. "K. Marx" is a three-gram (the period counts as a gram too). A phrase of indefinite length is an ngram. The Ngram viewer is based on Google Books. […]
Why economics textbooks are (sometimes) ideological
In a recent comment on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative Tom Slee shared this experience: …{W]hen my son comes back from an Economics 101 course at an Ontario university and shows me bald statements like these from his textbook (Parkin and Bade) then I have no problem with using a broad brush to criticize the profession:… "Arguments […]
A rambling post on Joseph Heath’s “Filthy Lucre”
This was supposed to be a review of Joseph Heath's new book "Filthy Lucre: Economics for People who hate Capitalism". But I'm not used to doing book reviews, so it's going to turn into a ramble on the teaching of economics, and economics in the political spectrum. I got the call to act as "host" […]
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