Jeff Berkowitz
Jul 24, 2017 · 1 min read

I’ve read several of the books you recommend, in addition to a number of others. My personal recommendation is The Economics Anti-Textbook by Hill and Myatt. My amateur’s two cents are that the formal academic discipline deserves serious criticism for its treatment of the introductory material that is typically fed to undergrads in their “Econ 101”-type courses. These books are stuffed with models that are poor fits to real world behavior. These models, like the traditional “theory of the firm”, are not just simplified, the way we might water down mechanics or calculus; they’re often not even generally predictive of reality, or carry difficult-to-identify political biases that have no objective basis. And on the macro side, introductory material typically includes equilibrium models that are arguably flat wrong (e.g. the “multiple equilibrium” problem) or worse, don’t even incorporate the possibility of panics or crashes, which are obviously real things that matter to lots of people. Bottom line, while I appreciate the inclusive tone of your posting, and I acknowledge that the discipline overall includes lots of smart people with disparate viewpoints who are seriously trying to get the right answers, I feel that those of us who have taken some time to dig into this need to apply pressure to correct the bogus pablum that most universities are providing for introductory material.

    Jeff Berkowitz

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