William J. Luther (Ph.D., George Mason University) is assistant professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University, and director of the American Institute for Economic Research’s Sound Money Project. He has written extensively on Bitcoin.
What single book should every economics major be required to read, and why?
I think the history of ideas is important, so I hope that every economics major would read Larry White’s The Clash of Economic Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
In your opinion, who is the most important economist that most people have never heard of?
I think more people should be familiar with George Selgin’s work. His monograph, Less than Zero (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1997) was recently republished and contains an excellent defense of nominal income targeting. His newest book, Floored! (Cato, 2018) is the single best book on the Fed’s new operating regime. Highly recommend.
Marie T. Mora (Ph.D., Texas A&M) is Professor of Economics at
the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her books include Population,
Migration, and Socioeconomic Outcomes of Island and Mainland Puerto Ricans
(Lexington, 2017), co-authored with A. Dávila
and H. Rodríguez, and the award-winning Hispanic Entrepreneurs in the 2000s (Stanford University Press,
2013), co-authored with A. Dávila.
What’s
the best (or worst) advice you ever received when it comes to being an
economist?
Some of the best advice was given to me when I was in my Ph.D. Program at Texas
A&M University. My major professor, Dr. Finis Welch, encouraged me to take
more graduate-level statistics courses, not only more econometrics but also
statistics courses taught by faculty in the Department of Statistics. (Note
that Professor Welch, one of the founders of Stata, is known for saying he has
probably run more regressions than anyone else who’s ever lived.) He also
encouraged me to take other classes and read studies that were technically in
fields outside of economics if I thought they would be interesting and helpful
for my own research. In fact, I took some Ph.D. courses in Sociology, including
an excellent Sociology of Education class that resulted in my first scholarly
publication—a book chapter in an edited volume by Gail Thomas (the professor
who taught the class).
Another piece of excellent advice was also given to me when I was in my Ph.D.
Program by Dr. Alberto Dávila. While some of the classes were technical and
uninspiring, I was reminded that once I finished my coursework and passed all
the prelims (comprehensive exams), I would be able to delve into the most
interesting part of the Program – doing research on topics of my own choice.
That was an incentive that helped me get through that part of my program. I
think almost everyone goes through a period of doubt in a Ph.D. Program; it was
very much worthwhile for me to hang in there.
What’s
the biggest misconception your students have about economics and economists?
I would say it has to do with not having a basic understanding of what
economics is before they take college-level Econ classes. (I certainly didn’t
when I started as an undergraduate.) Some think it is only about business, and
others think it is only about math…but it is so much broader. I tell my
students that economics is a very broad umbrella, and there is something in it
for everyone.
On a related point, many people (not just students) are unaware that economics
is considered to be part of STEM. It is a social science (which the “S”
includes). In fact, the National Science Foundation has an Econ Directorate and
funds research in economics.
Stephen H. Wright teaches in the Department of Economics at Birkbeck College, University of London. Previously he has taught at Cambridge and has served as staff economist for the Bank of England. He is the author, with Andrew Smithers, of Valuing Wall Street (McGraw-Hill, 2000).
If you were king for a day and could require all students to read one book in the field of economics, what would it be and why?
If
I were King? What a strange hypothetical, especially for a US citizen!
I’ll interpret your question as being “If I were a benign dictator”
(the
correlation between Kingship and Benign Dictatorship is I think pretty
close to zero empirically). But my answer is straightforward, if highly biased: obviously students should read The Economy, the e-book produced by, and available from, www.core-econ.org. It is brand new and takes a very different approach to introducing economics. This recommendation is highly biased because I was involved in producing it; but I still think it is about the best thing you can read these days to get you started in economics.
What textbook did you use when you first studied economics, and would you still use it today as a professor?
I think I started with Samuelson, supplemented by Lipsey. I’ve never looked at Samuelson since but I suspect it is still pretty good – he was one of the greatest minds ever in economics.
Arnold Kling (Ph.D., M.I.T.) blogs at askblog. He previously blogged at EconLog, worked as an economist for the Federal Reserve System, and was a senior economist for Freddie Mac. He is the author of many books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care (Cato Institute, 2006)
What's the biggest or most interesting mistake you have ever made as an economist (that you'd care to share), and was there a way to fix it?
I have changed my mind on some important issues. Whether I was mistaken before or now, or both, is to be determined. In graduate school, I believed sticky-price Keynesian economics. Now, I do not believe that any aggregate view of the economy is right. Industries expand and contract all the time, and every once in a while not enough industries are expanding to make up for the contracting ones. The probability that instead I was right before to be a Keynesian is certainly greater than zero.
I also once doubted that real trade took place among ancient people. I speculated instead that goods changed location because of marauding. But most archaeologists believe that there really was trade, so I was probably wrong on that.
In your opinion, who is the most important economist that most people have never heard of?
My first thought is Fischer Black. You absolutely must read Perry Mehrling's biography of him. If nothing else, you get a sense of what the 1970s felt like, both in the culture at large and in the economics profession. I have learned a surprising amount from biographies of economists. Skidelsky's three-volume biography of Keynes (not the abridged version) helped me to see Keynes as rebelling against Victorianism. That explains why Keynes came to see saving as pathological. David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (Norton, 2006) is insightful on Romer and Krugman.
Most people have not heard of James Buchanan, even though he won a Nobel. And even most economists think of him as a one-trick pony, namely Public Choice theory. But his book Cost and Choice (University of Chicago Press, 1969) demonstrates that he thought very deeply about economics. That is a tough book, to put on your list to read someday, but probably not soon.
Charles Kindleberger is important, in my opinion. In Manias, Panics, and Crashes (Basic Books, 1978) he does two important things. One is he explains Minsky, who was too confused to explain himself. Second, he extends Minsky in an important way, by emphasizing "displacement" as a trigger for movements in the Minsky cycle.
Have enough people heard of Hal Varian? He explained more about the economics of the Internet, from its communications architecture (lots of switches, economizing on lines) to the nature of information goods, than anyone else.
