My freshman seminar starts today. Here are the books we are reading this year (in this order):Take a look at this list, does Mankiw put his finger in the air before he puts his list together? I wonder if Hayek's Road to Serfdom would have made the list if it didn't recently make the NYT best seller list.
•The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbronr
•Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, by John McMillan
•Thinking Strategically, by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff
•Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman
•Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, by Arthur Okun
•Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
•How the Economy Works, by Roger E.A. Farmer
•The Return of Depression Economics, by Paul Krugman
•The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek
•The Myth of the Rational Voter, by Bryan Caplan
•The Big Questions, by Steven Landsburg
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Hayek Makes the Mankiw Cut
Greg Mankiw has Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom on the reading list for his freshman seminar, but no Mises. Mankiw writes:
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I'm re-reading Road to Serfdom right now. I had read it in college but I wanted to review it again ~15 years later. Hayek certainly makes a good case for economic freedom. However I feel like he leaves some significant wiggle room for justification of government intervention and regulation in Road to Serfdom. I suppose it's probably indicative of the political climate and state of economic thought at the time the book was written though. Still, I can totally see why a statist like Mankiw would choose Hayek over Mises. Mises was unequivocal in his defense of laissez faire, free markets and capitalism.
ReplyDeleteI was recently asked by a former professor to provide a list of the top 3-5 books that every B-school student should read before being graduated. The professor is going to teach a seminar where everybody has to pick 3 books from the list and report back to the class. Here's my list:
Human Action
Economics in One Lesson
A History of Money and Banking in the United States
America's Great Depression
The Law