5 recommended Economics books, 2025

1. Truman Bewley, Price Setting

This book is a bookend to Bewley's 1999 Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession. Together, these books contain invaluable interview-based information on price determination. Remarkable work from one of the leading figures in mathematical economics for decades. 2. Diane Coyle @DianeCoyle1859 , The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters

A superbly written diagnosis of the limits to standard economic measurements, in particular GDP, with important recommendation on how to use asset valuation to capture the value of time and the environment.

December 8 is the anniversary of the Belovezha Accords, in which Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared the Soviet Union replaced with the Commonwealth of Independent States.

I increasingly have come to think the question of why the Soviet Union ended should be replaced with the question of how the Soviet Union endured for as long as it did in light of the horrors of Stalinism, the defects of the economic system, its ideological and moral failures which were manifest from the start of Bolshevik rule (here Emma Goldman's My Disillusionment with Russia is of timeless value.)

Here are some books I have found most valuable in trying to understand this world historical event. Any such event does not reduce to a single cause. That said, I think that ideological failure/exhaustion/disillusionment in both elites and broader public are essential components of the story. 1. Martin Malia's The Soviet Tragedy, is a modern classic and remains the most powerful indictment I have read on the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology as the source of Soviet evils and demise. While there is much to dispute, Malia's arguments have to be addressed by anyone trying to understand the Soviet experience or, for that matter, what is means for socialism to have a future.

9 Favorite history books of 2025

1. Capitalism: A Global History, by Sven Beckert 2. Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, by Kim Bowes

This very important paper by Tim Conley and Morgan Kelly is now forthcoming. The paper addresses a fundamental problem of cross country/region/city regressions: how to account for dependence in unobserved heterogeneity across units.

https://twitter.com/JIntlEcon/status/1863975130868715644

2/ The paper uses state of the art methods to show that the strength of regression evidence in a set of prominent studies is weaker (and in important cases, much weaker) than stated and construcitively proposes useful diagnostics for sturdier deep roots inference.

1/Latest example of "realist" analysis w/tenuous connections to facts or logic. (I have long given up an expecting any authentic engagement by realists with ethics.)

foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukrai… 2/The absence of serious empirical engagement is evident in nonsensical analogies (comparison of Ukrainian prospects to Battle of the Bulge) and repeated assertions of what is likely versus unlikely.

1/@DylanPrimakoff is 100% to be appalled at this interview and to argue that Mearsheimer's blindness to facts on ground wrt Russian atrocities is discrediting to broader claims about the crisis

https://twitter.com/DylanPrimakoff/status/1513501675922677762

2/To dismiss civilian killings on grounds that US has pressured Ukraine to arm civilians is ridiculous on its face given killings that have been documented and is an insult to Ukraine. Ukrainians are fighting out of belief in their country, US irrelevant to their heroic actions.

Thoughts, incl. wild speculation.

1. Russia is dying in the way France was dying in the middle 1780s. Economy failing, injustice universal, no ideals to produce unity. Never a normal country post-1991 even if there were hopeful moments. Ukraine catastrophe will accelerate end.

https://twitter.com/Mylovanov/status/1512906047937302534

2. Support for regime and matter war relies on exhaustion, cynicism, self delusion with a mix of reactionary vision of Slavdom and pretenses of distinct civilization from the West. This support will disintegrate as Russia's moral, economic, political failures accumulate.

1/John Mearsheimer is free to air his views of course, but I, admittedly a nonexpert, feel obliged as a U Chicago faculty member to say this interview is morally offensive and substantively vacuous.

https://twitter.com/IChotiner/status/1498808486955663360

2/Words such as fault and responsibility for a reaction have normative dimensions, realists' semantic games notwithstanding. They imply some legitimacy to the response. There is none in this case. Russia has committed a world historical crime.

1/The "study" is without merit. It would receive a failing grade were it submitted as research paper for a graduate course in any decent doctoral program in economics. (Certainly the same is true for the political scientists and sociologists with whom I interact.) 2/By conditioning on a county where Trump did poorly/fraud was alleged, the paper in essence interprets the unpredictable part of that poor performance as fraud. This is conditioning on unobserved heterogeneity that affects Trump support and raises classic selection problems.