50 Economics Classics

Although one of my favourite genres is intellectual history, books about the history of economic ideas or of political philosophy tend to be somewhat boring – it’s as if the requirement to be comprehensive robs the author of his/her passion. I’m thinking, for example, of Roger Backhouse’s  Penguin “History of Economics” (2002) 

But – as I noted a year or so ago – the last decade has seen significant improvements 

The academic community has always taken a dim view of popularisation – the eminent economist JK Galbraith who wrote “The Affluent Society” in 1958 suffered very much from academic jealousy as did the historian AJP Taylor in the same period – so it is great that some writers and journalists have turned increasingly to the world of science and ideas.

Grand Pursuit; the story of economic genius (2011) is a good example.  Written by Sylvia Nasar, a Professor of journalism (who also produced “A Beautiful Mind” about game theorist John Nash), it attracted a rather sniffy review from one of the doyens of Economics - Robert Solow..  

Not, however, that I want to discourage academics from writing well and for the general public! I was delighted to discover recently a “popular” book by academic philosopher James Miller Examined Lives – from Socrates to Nietzsche with a nice interview here. Alan Ryan is another academic who writes well although his On Politics is just a bit too voluminous a history of political thought for me. These extensive notes give a useful sense of what would be in store for any brave reader

And a foray into my favourite Bucharest (remaindered English) bookshop duly unearthed “50 Economics Classics – your shortcut to the most important ideas about capitalism, finance and the global economy” by Tom Butler-Bowden (2017) - one of a series I had never heard of but which promises to top the amended list of my next “Most Accessible Reads on Economics”.

His approach is to select and summarise (in a few pages) 50 books whose focus span the key issues tackled by economics - over a 200-year period. Included are both old and new “classics” – Pikety and Graeber as well as Marx and Hayek.

Most such books go for the chronological approach – with the result that readers tend to flick the opening pages and pick up interest only toward the book’s middle. Perhaps it’s the influence of post-modernism, but it’s pure genius that this author goes instead for what might be called the “fatalistic” approach and selects his books instead alphabetically    

As a result, for example, Milton Friedmann rubs shoulders with JK Galbraith; Naomi Klein with Keynes; Adam Smith with Hernando de Soto etc

And, naturally, there are as many historians and journalists in the list as pure economists…..he even lists for each entry the books with which it can be compared…..

I’ve developed one of my famous tables as a tribute – with my final column amending in some cases what some might fault as a generous attitude to the market…

I’ll start with the first dozen…… 

Book/Author	Year	Issue	Argument
“Lords of Finance” L Ahamed	2009	The gold standard and the 1920s	Fixed ideas in economics can have disastrous results
“The microtheory of innovation” WJBaumol	2010	Entrepreneurship	We neglect those to take risks at our peril
“Human Capital” Garry Becker	1964	Unfortunately the book spawned the dreadful notion of human resources	The most important investment we make is in ourselves
The Second Machine Age	2014	Probably the most famous of the techno-optimist books about IT	“Techno revolutions have to allow for the advance of everyone”
“23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism” Ha-Joon Chang	2011	An early mass book questioning economic orthodoxy	Many nations advanced by breaking the rules of orthodox economics
“The Firm, the market and the Law” Ronald Coase	1988	One of the most famous articles in the history of the subject	Why firms exist – the role of transaction costs
“GDP; a brief but affectionate history” Diane Coyle	2014	This index of economic success (like economics) rests on some very questionable assumptions	How we measure inputs and outputs has significant effects on people and nations
“Innovation and Entrepreneurship” Peter Drucker	1985	It’s as important as the traditional factors of land, labour and capital
“The Ascent of Money” Niall Ferguson	2008	A british historian who likes to provoke and scandalize – but writes well	Finance has been the crucial ladder in the making of the modern world
“Capitalism and Freedom” Milton Friedman	1962	Funded by “The Reader’s Digest” and dodgy billionaires to pull the wool over our eyes	A hymn to the free market
“The Great Crash” JK Galbraith	1955	One of the classic analyses of the Great Depression	It’s apparently government’s job to stop speculative frenzies
“Progress and Poverty” Henry George	1879	His ideas still live	When land – rather than people and production – is taxed, prosperity increases