Reddit reviews Principles of Economics, 7th Edition
We found 18 Reddit comments about Principles of Economics, 7th Edition. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Access Code included
Here's a source you whiny baby:
Mankiw:
> But why would we expect rents and estate values to be at parity with construction costs?
Take a look at the article, or at Principles of Economics; in open real estate markets (or commodity markets), prices tend to decline to near the marginal cost of construction.
That's what happened in most of the U.S. until the 1970s, when parochial land-use controls became common. People today seem to treat rising prices as a law of nature or a positive thing, when in fact relentlessly rising prices is a relatively unusual phenomenon, and even it is not universal.
Principles of Economics by Mankiw is what you are looking for.
/u/papermarioguy02's reading list outline:
Several people have asked me about what things to read to get initiated in the stuff I'm interested in. I don't really think that I'm the best teaching resource, but I can at least list off the pieces of media that have influenced my thoughts to a certain extent. This is just an outline, and you should probably use /u/integralds' list as a more authoritative resource, he's not 14, but this is how I got where I am (I also don't 100% agree with all of the arguments presented on the reading list, but they have influenced me).
Articles
In Praise of Cheap Labor - Paul Krugman
The Obama Doctrine - Jeffery Goldberg
The Case for Reparations - Ta-Nehisi Coates
How Politics Makes us Stupid - Ezra Klein
What the Fox Knows - Nate Silver
Books
Principles of Economics - Greg Mankiw
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
International Economics: Theory and Policy - Paul Krugman and Maurice Obstfeld (READING STILL IN PROGRESS, and reading Princples of Economics or some other 101 textbook is probably a prerequisite here)
Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman (READING IN PROGRESS, and again, you should probably read the 101 textbook before this one)
Non Print Stuff
Any of the Crash Course series hosted by John Green. They aren't anywhere near perfect, but they do a good job of introducing you to subjects, and giving some insight on how to think about some topics.
Any of Khan Academy's math stuff. All very good explanations of many different ideas
Grant Sanderson's Essence of Calculus series, a way of getting a good visual intuition for how some really important math works.
____
Again, this is just one 14 year old's list. I do not pretend to be authoritative or that anything here is perfect, but they are things that have influenced the way I've thought about things. This is still an outline, so I might add things here in the future.
/u/Devjorcra, /u/Shawshank_Fanatic
Principles of Economics by Mankiw is probably sufficient. It’s the standard book used for intro/principles classes in undergrad. You can also find older editions for cheap.
I would not recommend that book, though I've never really heard of it, to be honest.
In my high school economics class we used the following (https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-7th-Mankiws/dp/128516587X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485981589&sr=8-1&keywords=mankiw+economics). The good thing is, you'll possibly use that book in your intro economics class in college, too, so you get a head start.
Here's a good starting place for you.
Any introductory textbook will cover this stuff. The gold standard is Mankiw's Principles (micro & macro), though I've recently been using Mateer and Coppock (micro & macro).
Your library might have copies, and old editions of Mankiw can be found online for less than $10.
I imagine many university students who've only taken an Intro to Economics, probably using this book by Mankiw, might come away feeling economics has a conservative basis.
Introductory economics tends to simplify phenomenon so they are amenable to analysis by the basic tools taught in the text. In the end students are told a number of 'liberal' positions are comparatively inefficient (e.g. minimum wage, or progressive taxation), and the analysis just sort of ends there.
> Why exactly do you think that North America, Europe and Asia have so much more cropland than Africa and South America? What do you think people do when they are more fertile land which requires fewer farmers to keep them alive? They become more educated, develop more advanced infrastructure, create technology at a much faster pace, etc. Just as an example, about 2% of the US population works in agriculture, 15% of Brazilians do the same.
You have a good point and I won't deny that croplands play no role but they definitely don't play a significant one. Iceland, and other Nordic countries are doing just fine. The reason poorer countries have more people working in agriculture is because the countries are less industrialized/automated and the people are less skilled so they have to work in menial jobs. In South America it has nothing to do with an inability to produce adequate crops. A good portion of what they produce will be exported anyways.
> And since you seem to like books so much (despite not even linking one that backs up your statments
This is my textbook from macroeconomics 101. Where the majority of my knowledge on the subject comes from.
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-7th-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/128516587X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466409272&sr=8-1&keywords=principles+of+economics
I'm also aware of Guns Germs and Steel. It has decent points about the long term development of large population groups of humans. Such as how the shape of the continents and domesticatable animals attributed to the Asian/European domination of the world.
However, when talking about things like why the British eventually overcame the Chinese in a period of a few hundred years it has more to do with principles of macroeconomics than it does with climate.
> but you should not ignore the fact that certain parts of the world (such as Europe and North America) have climates and natural resources that are much more conducive to economic development.
It has a small effect over thousands upon thousands of years. However the reasons why North America is more developed than South America in the modern world has very little or almost nothing to do with food. More to do with stable governments as a result of culture, education, and wealth.
> Our whole wealthy developed country existence can only exist when there are poor developing countries to be exploited.
You failed basic economics.
Good places to start learning:
If you believe that capitalism can't possibly work because it uses local optimization instead of global optimization then I'll grant you that it does sound unintuitive. There are good reasons, though: game theory, control theory, and stochastic distributed algorithms.
While on the subject of things you probably don't believe but should -- intelligence is real, IQ is a good measure of it, it is not just about doing good on an unimportant test, it actually predicts real life outcomes rather well, there are NOT 7 (or 8 or 11) intelligences, people have wildly varying IQs, IQ is extremely heritable, and it can to a certain extent already be predicted from DNA (and vice versa). The Flynn effect is also real and we don't quite know the full explanation for it yet but it is clear that better nutrition and fewer childhood diseases account for some of it. Cousin marriage is a known way of depressing IQ, especially repeated cousin marriage. Heritability of socioeconomic status is to a large extent really about the heritability of IQ. And now for something really controversial: the well off are generally more intelligent and the poor are generally (much) less intelligent, people from different places are not equally bright (and NOT just due to malnourishment, diseases, or cousing marriage), high caste Indians are more intelligent than low caste Indians, Ashkenazi jews tend to be bright, Blacks tend not to, especially those who live in Africa, Arabs tend to be dumber than Europeans and not all Asians are as intelligent as the (coastal) Chinese, the Koreans, or the Japanese.
This has consequences for what a sensible immigration policy should look like. It for sure should look nothing like current European practices!
It's at this point I have to point you toward a standard ECON 101 text. Productivity is commonly defined as "output per unit of input" (for example output per labor-hour). There is nothing vague about it. Some countries are poor... others rich... how do you explain it? Almost all variation in living standards is attributable to a countries' productivity.
ECON 101 by Paul Krugman
Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning economist... a left-wing one at that. But you'll find this answer here.
ECON 101 by Greg Mankiw
If you don't like a left-wing economist, here is a right wing one. It's the same story though. Mankiw is a Harvard economist that has served as a presidential advisor. Read this text and you'll find the same thing.
ECON 101 by Hall & Lieberman
Bob Hall has sat on the NBER board... just the institution that officially declares if the US is in a recession or not.
I guess these guys are ignorant and vague as well.
Harvard professor's intro textbook. It's a pretty entertaining read and is very widely used. Also, if you are looking for more of a crash course you could try this and this. They are the intro textbooks at Berkeley and cut out a lot of the articles and examples that might be in a normal intro textbook.
> Just because you call the things you want "your rights" and your demand that others give them to you "their duty"
Human rights are usually construed as something every human wants, always. Food, shelter, health and with those freedom.
>doesn't change the fact that demanding something for nothing is enslavement.
It's quite the opposite: You demand that from everyone equally and you get the same. "I don't kill you, you don't kill me" isn't enslavement, it's the protection of everyones interest.
Enslavement on the other hand is coercion. Can be force or can be withholding food so he doesn't have any choice but to do your bidding. Funnily enough, if your entitled ass was on the street you would reverse your position in a second. Just because you got lucky with your station in life doesn't mean you deserve it.
>If you're going to argue this from a utilitarian base
Utilitarianism is quite contrary to the argument I am making. You are looking for duty ethics or contractualism. Statistics are also only tangentially related to utilitarianism, at least until you've specified what sub-branch you mean. I'd love to see some stats for preference utilitarianism if you had any...
> blah blah middle class blah shame blah incentive blah
How many subjects do you want to drag into your argument? You have a tentative grasp on what constitutes a "right", which I wanted to argue with you about in the original post and you keep trying to drag you superficial understanding of economics and policy into this? I don't want to argue about that with you. You show little understanding of either apart from the talking points you get from conservative blogs and that discussion would just not be interesting to me.
What any of this has to do with post-modernism completely escapes me. I might even be offended if you had shown any understanding of the subject matters. Especially funny as I consider myself an institutional capitalist and prefer the analytic tradition of philosophy.
To do my duty: please get Mankiw's into to econ and read the SEP on rights
Actually, if you look at all the evidence on the whole, you'll see standards of livings go up with a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The reasons are several. For one, if pollution is priced, businesses have an incentive to reduce their pollution, and because businesses are pretty good at finding efficient ways to do things, their costs will go up by less than the amount of the tax (even if less than 100% of businesses become more efficient, because the price of a good is related to the demand for that good--if the demand goes down because some businesses become more efficient, the price will go down, too). This is Econ 101, in Mankiw's textbook.
Secondly, pollution has well-described externalities, whose costs are no less real because they're not currently in the price. For example, air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels leads to increases in morbidity and mortality, which leads to higher health care premiums. So you may be paying for more pollution-intensive goods, but you'll probably pay less for healthcare.
Thirdly, the legislation George Shultz is currently advocating for returns the revenue generated from the tax as an equitable dividend to citizens, which actually puts 60% of households coming out ahead financially, and that's even before savings from externalities are taken into account.
Lastly, the costs of climate change can't be ignored. Current estimates are that costs of methane release from arctic melting alone are estimated in the trillions. Any costs of mitigation have to be compared to the costs of inaction.
So it may seem counter-intuitive at first, but enacting a carbon tax actually increases overall standards of living.
I think you need to pick up an economics book. Try this one.
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-7th-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/128516587X
> Mankiw
Are you referring to "Principles of Economics"? And is it really almost $300 for this book?
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-7th-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/128516587X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411622089&sr=1-2&keywords=mankiw
>Saving is by no means bad, but it doesn't grow the economy like spending does.
Saving is, in fact, the only thing that grows the economy. If no one saves, you quickly run down your capital and everyone starves to death.
>Money spent on luxuries goes to people who are more likely to save,
No, it doesn't. money spent on luxuries goes to the people who make luxuries.
>actual value of the produc
The value of a product is the price people are willing to pay for it. No more, no less.
>That extra money doesn't go to the employees who make the good(low or middle class members who spend) but go as profits to the company or the wealthy members of it,
this is even more ignorant than talking about actual value.
>Unless I'm totally missing something. What along here is wrong in terms of economic principles?
You're missing a lot of things, starting with econ 101. to start with "luxuries" and "middle class" are not meaningful concepts in economics. YOur idea that companies that make luxuries have a higher rate of profit is simply wrong. You are, in sum, kicking around a few buzzwords with zero understanding of what they actually mean. don't start with NPR, start here. You have a lot to learn.