I thought it would be fun to review a book on my blog, so here it is.
Discovery is a memoir by Vernon Smith, an American economist who taught at Purdue and Arizona State who won the Nobel Prize in 2002. You can preview a pretty good chunk of it here.
Dr. Smith does not spare any detail in discussing his family’s origins on a quiet Kansas farm, where engineering marvels of that time rapidly changed the landscape. This can make it a little bit of a drag, but some of the stories are engaging and worth reading. Here are a few examples:
Dr. Smith goes into great detail on making the perfect hamburger (never use ketchup) that is inherently economic: “[The] effect of minimum wage on hamburger mass production. By reducing min. wage labor costs, the substitution of machinery for labor causes unemployment.”
He also talks about dodging the draft, “To test your hearing for 4F classification, someone across the room would whisper, ‘Did you ever shit in your grandmother’s hat?’ and look for a smile.”
Distinctions between the brain and the mind: ““What exist are infinite variations on the mental theme of being human… its called individuality, the most important feature of humanity.”
He mentions his mother’s suicide, where she hanged herself in the garage: “Mother had systematically turned over, face down, every photograph in which her own image appeared.”
I was most interested in his chapters on college and economics in general.
“If goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” -Bastiat
“Public schools are not set up to produce achievement in their student’s lifetime performance; they are set up to yield achievement by students who do not drop out and produce good scores.”
“What is utility theory good for? It’s good for teaching.”
“Graduate school is an endurance test coupled with the belief that it is worth enduring, but it was not that demanding for me after surviving Caltech’s undergraduate meat grinder.”
Here are a list of the economic related books he plugs:
Economic Philosophy:
A.N. Whitehead, “Process and Reality”
Bertrand Russell, “History of Western Philosophy” & “Human Knowledge”
Sir Arthur Eddington, “The Nature of the Physical World”
Sir James Jeans “Physics and Philosophy”
Dick Howey
Economics
Samuelson, “Foundations of Economic Analysis”
Von Mises, “Human Action”
Lord Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society
JMK, The Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Girard Debreu, Theory of Value
Mathematical Economics
R.G.D Allen, Jacob Marschak, J.R. Hicks
Imperfect Competition: Joan Robinson, Edward Chamberlin
F.A. Hayek, David Hume, Sidney Sigel, Amos Tversky, Martin Shubik, Charles Plot, Alvin Hansen, Keynes, Foster and Catchings, Hayek, Hicks, Samuelson, Metzler, Friedman, Leontief, Daniel Kahneman.
Bottom Line: Worth reading if you’re interested in economics.
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