Notes

• Capitalism = making money through ownership of capital rather than purely by labour.

• Desire is suffering. Advertising induces desire to generate economic activity, and so could be construed as a form of paid torture.

  • We're kept on the "hamster wheel" by a carrot, not a stick.

  • It is undeniably true that we don't need the overwhelming majority of things consume be happy. People have found happiness without being rampant consumers for thousands of years. Unfortunately, advertising has directly influenced people's ability to find happiness without consumption. The problem is not everyone can consume everything they believe is required to be happy. Furthermore, many people give up work/life balance or go into debt-slavery in order to try and consume their way to happiness. As a result, people who might otherwise be happy are made unhappy by in significant part by advertising.

    • Even worse, if you actually do reach your consumption quota, you find it doesn't make cause lasting happiness. Most people infer that the answer is to consume more, and they end up killing themselves on the hedonic treadmill.

• ​Math skills and familiarity with the intermediate micro/macro/metrics coursework are far more important for grad school admissions than the pop economics books on that reading list.​

Links

• ​Global Capitalism: A Looming Economic Crisis​

• ​Supply, Demand, and the Value of Markets (2019)​

• ​The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth (2019)​

• ​Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio Discusses the Impact of China’s Growth on the World Economy (2019)​

• ​Economic principles - How the economic machine works.

• ​Ray Dalio AMA (2019)​

• ​Some guidelines (not rules) for surviving a recession​

• ​The Economics of Kenneth J. Arrow: A Selective Review (2019) (HN)

• ​Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python (2019)​

• ​QuantEcon - Open source code for economic modeling.

• ​Against Economics (2019)​

• ​Money creation in the modern economy (2014)​

• ​Negative Interest Rates Are Going to Ruin Everything (2020) (Tweet) (HN)

• ​The Economy online book​

• ​EconDB - Economic overviews of countries.

• ​Economic Research at the St. Louis Fed - Expand the frontier of economic knowledge by producing high-quality original research in the areas of macroeconomics, money and banking, and applied microeconomics.

• ​Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy? (2020)​

• ​Stripe Press - Publishes books about economic and technological advancement.

• ​Explained | The Stock Market (2020)​

• ​The Stock Market vs. The Economy (2020)​

• ​Naked Capitalism - Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power.

• ​HN: The Fed Will Buy Bond ETFs Now (2020)​

• ​Understanding The Current Macroeconomic Situation with Scott Sumner (2020)​

• ​Georgism - Single tax system. (HN)

• ​Ask HN: Why do we pay taxes if the Fed can just print money? (2020)​

• ​What are the most useful concepts from linear algebra that are applied in graduate level economics? (2020)​

• ​Do illegal immigrants take more from a country than they contribute? (2020)​

• ​Why Isn't the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills (1987)​

• ​Is a trillion-dollar worth of programming lying on the ground (2020) (HN)

• ​Declining worker power versus rising monopoly power (2020) (HN)

• ​Long-run money neutrality explained (2020)​

• ​Notes on the Crises​

• ​Is there any reason to not expect hyperinflation in the US? (2020)​

• ​Meditations On Moloch (2014)​

• ​Just Too Efficient (2020) (HN)

• ​Why Do People Stay Poor? (2020) (HN)

• ​Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell (2003)​

• ​What harm do minimum wages do? (2020) (HN)

• ​Matt Levine Writing​

• ​Banks create money, but it's less impressive than it sounds (2020) (HN)