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10/25/2009 给Ed Clarke推荐经济学读物Edmund Clarke (2007年图灵奖得主)及其夫人Martha来上海了。现在已经回去了。Ed来之前就听说纳拓软件有个经济学家。这次来了，正好我给老先生、老太太作车夫，老先生得着机会就问我对中美两国的医保体系有什么看法。以我的口语水平，估计老先生也没什么收获。老先生要我推荐些经济学的读物，还说不白推荐，他拿Model Checking的论文来换。临走在机场还提醒我别忘了。所以周末捣鼓了两天，整了一份书单出来。写完和前些年的推荐对比了一下，差别还是挺大的。看来三年来没少读书。我很欣慰。
email如下：
Hi Prof. Clarke,
This is Yunfeng Tao (aka. TaoDa) from nextop software. It is my honor to meet you and Martha in Shanghai. And I am very glad to know you are interested in economics. I started my tour in economics from "Principles of Economics" by Gregory Mankiw. This is a popular text-book. I now prefer very much "Price Theory and Applications: Decisions, Markets and Information" by Jack Hirshleifer, Amihai Glazer and David Hirshleifer. Price theory makes economics an empirical science. And this book is a good entrance to price theory. For advanced reading, I like "Economic Explanation" by Steven Cheung. But it is a book in Chinese. What a pity! In the area of monetary study, "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867 - 1960" by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz is an excellent book as far as I know. If you are looking for a short introduction to pick up basic ideas about currency and inflation, "Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History" by Milton Friedman is just what you want. Advanced price theory, which are usually called by firm theory, is an important progress of economic science in the past half century. At least 4 Nobel prize laureates (Milton Friedman (1976), George J. Stigler (1982), Ronald H. Coase (1991), and Oliver E. Williamson (2009)) did great works in that theory. Among books on this topic, I recommend "Antitrust Economics" by Oliver Williamson. I also recommend "A Treatise on the Family" by Gary Becker (1992 Nobel prize laureate) because family study is also my interest. In my opinion, this book is actually talking about theories on productive organizations and international trading. By applying prize theory on governors, bureaucrats and voters, Virginia school exposes a lot of interesting facts. I am reading "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies" by Bryan Caplan. As the title shows, economics has put its hands on politics as well as sociology. Finally, I am glad to introduce Austrian school. Some ideas from Austrian school, e.g., those about minimal-wage, tariff, saving and inflation, are not widely-accepted by academia. But I like them. I think they are concise and clear, although they are imprecise and lacking mathematics. After all, imprecise correctness is much better than precise wrong. I recommend "Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics" by Henry Hazlitt. The subtitle, as well as the entire book, is just true. And also "America's Great Depression" by Murray Rothbard. The great depression in 1930's is one of the most important events in history. Lord Keynes gave an answer right in that depression, Milton Friedman gave an answer, and Murray Rothbard also gave his answer. Who's right? The academia is still arguing. I have not finished reading this book yet. Besides these monographs, there are two essays worth reading. First is "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read" by Leonard E. Read. This essay shows how a large-scale system with highly-distributed autonomy individuals, i.e., the free market, just works. Second is "Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory" by Armen Alchian (The Journal of Political Economy, Vol 58, Issue 3 (Jun., 1950), 211-221). Economists always talk about rationality: rational behaviours, rational participants, rational this and rational that. This fact gives people an impression that economic theories can only be applied on wise people who have powerful computation ability as well. This is not real. Armen Alchian replanted economics on Darwin's evolution theory in this paper. BTW, Armen Alchian is one of my favourite economists. I hope he will win a Nobel prize. But the Swedish keep disappointing me every year. Yours, TaoDa |
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