Prof. Stephen Wright

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.