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For a while I had the idea of ​​listing the most influential texts for my econ and liberalism perspective.
But the point I’d make is that even when I have read great books, they haven’t shaped my view, but often crystallized ideas that I already had begun forming. A good example is Nozick's Anarchy, The State and Utopia.
Instead of a list of great books, here are some texts and writers that may have shaped my views. So I decided to include films, newspapers, magazines, etc.
When I finished, it was actually like an intellectual biography.
Microeconomics: My views of micro were influenced by all of the readings for the Chicago core and Hayek; books or papers by Stigler, Becker, Friedman, Hayek etc. This convinced me of how useful the competitive market model is, even in markets that aren’t perfectly competitive.
Actully I insist that people who have never been exposed to the full blast of a Chicago-style thinking don’t know how much they are missing. By contrast, I think George Mason University is New Chicago today. So I think it is absolutely essential to be educated from GMU.
Macro: My biggest influences were Fisher, Friedman and Scott Sumner. I read many books written by Fisher, such as Money Illusion, The Purchase Power of the Money and Stable Money.
From the interwar period I was also greatly influenced by Hayek(Prices and Production), Keynes(Tract), Cassel and Pearson. From the post-war period definitely Friedman was my biggest influence, mostly Monetary History, Optimum Quantity of Money and Money Mischief.
I like Friedman’s critiques of Keynesianism much more than his defenses of monetarism. I was also influenced by Lucas and McCallum. Both of them made me understand why rational expectations were so important, and why they are so misunderstood.
At the present time I must say that my biggest influence are Scott Sumner, David Beckworth and George Selgin. Sumner's Midas Paradox and Money Illusion: Market Monetarism and the Great Recession, The Case for NGDP Targeting gave my current market monetarist perspective.
Also I was very influenced by Beckworth's Facts, Fears and Functuonality of NGDP Targeting(which is my favorite paper on NGDPLT), Money Still Matters, Boom and Bust Banking. I've also influenced by Nelson&McCallum's Money and Inflation.
An often-forgot kinship is the relationship between the Market Monetarists and the Free Banking Theorists. In fact, the economists on the two sides were very influential and sympathetic to each other. MMists and FB theorists are closer to each other than any other thought.
Both tell the story about how basically a perfect competition Free Banking world will end up has having a fully elastic money supply and as a consequence effectively have Nominal GDP targeting.
I'm no an exception. I was tremendously influenced by George Selgin(The Theory of Free Banking, Floored, Money: Free and Unfree, Less Than Zero), Lawrence H. White(The Clash of Economic Ideas, Competition and Currency, The Theory of Monetary Institutions)+
,David Glasner(Free Banking and Monetary Reform) and Hayek(Denationalisation of Money).
Liberalism/Social Thought: My biggest influence on liberalism was naturally Friedrich Hayek. Especially The Use of Knowledge in Society, Constitution of Liberty, Law Legislation and Liberty, The Counter-Revolution of Science, The Politician Idea of Rule of Law, Studies in PPE.
I was also influenced by Hume, Burke, Acton, Menger, McCloskey, Huemer, Caplan, Ferguson, Boettke and Freiman. All of these shaped my core view of liberalism.
As the time went by, I become increasing skeptical of all knowledge claims, including my own. At the same time my ideas have grown and more complex, which is led me to conclude that we need to proceed as if certain well-established propositions are true.
Aaand the Economist magazine, which I've read almost for as long as i've known myself. 3 years ago, I understood that it was a global phenomenon and that it was a little bit bi-partisan. From The Economist I learned that you have to look at things cross-sectionally.
Culture and Economics: Sowell’s books convinced me that culture was very important in explaining economic inequality. And yet, I still find cultural theories of economic development to be unsatisfactory. The theories seem disturbing ad hoc.
Optimism/Environment: I was almost completely influenced by Ronald Bailey's book End of The Doom. And for sure there's other great books such as Edwin Dolan's Tanstaalf or Terry Landerson's books. Also The Population Bomb influenced me greatly.
Fiction: Actually, I can't say I read a lot of fiction books. I almost only read epic high fantasy books. So, I was only influenced by Wheel of Time(the best series ever), Dune, Malazan and Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere Universe books(which are the best books of modern fantasy).
These are the texts that comes to my mind for now. I can add more in the future.
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