A Rare Ol’ Treasure Trove

After yesterday’s post, I asked some folks for their choice of textbooks that undergraduate students should definitely be reading before getting their BSc/BA degree in economics. And what a list we have, already!

If you are an undergraduate student, please bookmark this post, and keep coming back to it when you want book recommendations. And I would argue that even if you are not an undergrad student of economics, you might still want to keep checking on this post, because I will be updating it regularly.

In what follows, I have not mentioned who has recommended what. That’s simply because I’m writing this post out on the fly, and haven’t had time to format it, add hyperlinks or even figure out how I want to tabulate this data. More than one person has recommended some of the books on the list too, and that’s an additional complicating factor. Note that not all of them are textbooks, and some aren’t even books (they’re essays), but hey, when it comes to reading, there’s no bureaucratic stuffiness in these parts.

Folks who have read some of these books might wonder at the very broad political and economic ideology spectrum over here, but surely this is a plus and not a minus. As an undergrad student, read far and wide, and figure out over time what resonates and what does not (and why).

Finally, to everybody who took time out of their busy schedules to reply, thank you very much!

Here is this most magnificent list, in no order whatsoever:

1. On the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
2. That Which We See and That Which We Do Not See, by Frederic Bastiat
3. (Bonus points if you saw this coming) Economics in One Lesson, by Hazlitt
4. Micro Motives and Macro Behavior, by Schelling
5. Free to Choose, by Milton Friedman
6. Both the Freakonomics books, by Levitt and Dubner
7. Road to Serfdom, by Hayek
8. Modern Principles of Economics, by Cowen and Tabbarok
9. Public Finance and Public Policy, by Jonathan Gruber
10. Economic Growth, by David Weil
11. The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality, Nick Huntington Smith
12. Economics Rules, by Dani Rodrik
13. An Uncertain Glory, by Amartya Sen
14. Everybody Loves a Good Drought, by P Sainath
15. In The Service of the Republic, by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah
16. Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Modi-Jaitley Economy, by Arvind Subramanian
17. In Spite of the Gods, by Edward Luce
18. The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, by Thomas Sowell
19. The Meaning of it All, by Richard Feynman
20. Delhi Rape: How India’s Other Half Lives
21. Principles of Economics, by Mankiw
22. Intermediate Microeconomics, by Hal Varian
23. Macroeconomics, by Dornbusch Fischer and Startz
24. International Economics, by Dominic Salvatore
25. Introduction to Econometrics, by Woolridge
26. Complete Business Statistics, by Aczel and Sounderpandian
27. Using Econometrics: A Practical Guide, by Studentmund
28. Introduction to Economics, by Richard Leftwich
29. Theory of Econometrics, by Koutsoyiannis
30. Principles of Economics, by Koutsoyiannis
31. The Worldly Philosophers, by Heilbronner
32. Macroeconomics, by Alex Thomas
33. Economic History of India, by Tirthankar Roy
34. India After Gandhi, by Ramchandra Guha
35. Macroeconomics, by Snowdon and Vane
36. Causal Inference Mixtape, by Scott Cunningham
37. International Economics, by Paul Krugman
38. Capital, Vol. 1, by Karl Marx
39. Classical Political Economy and the Rise to Dominance of Supply and Demand Theories, by Krishna Bharadwaj
40. Three Essays on the State of Economic Science, Koopmans
41. Universal/University Economics by Alchian and Allen
42. Introduction to Econometrics, by Cristopher Dougherty
43. Studies in Indian Public Finance, by M. Govinda Rao