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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3150 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 24, 2023

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Any good recommendations for an intermediate economics textbook or lecture series or something that I can use to get a running start at the field?

For background, I have a PhD in Mathematics, specifically studying mathematical models of game theory and agents and ecological competition and stuff. So I know a bunch of game theory, but mostly use it for fitness gradients and incremental behavior adjustments that head towards an equilibrium over time rather than rational agents solving explicit mathematical formulas. And I have very little experience with actual economic theory aside from what I've picked up here and there from being in tangential spaces. Supply and demand curves and basic stuff like that. I'm considering branching out and potentially moving towards jobs that involve actual economics, but feel somewhat underqualified at the moment given that I've never taken a single formal economics class in my life. Or at the very least it would be fun to learn more stuff about it and potentially learn ideas that I could use in my current research even if I'm still focusing mostly on biological organisms.

So I'd like to learn from a source that doesn't require specific background knowledge of words or formulas that econ students would already know as prerequesites, but also respects my intelligence and mathematical skill so doesn't try to handhold me through easy stuff, fastforwarding or skipping the actual basics and starting me somewhere interesting where I can actually learn new stuff.

The almost universal graduate textbook for microeconomic theory is Mas-Collel, Whinston, and Green. It is very comprehensive. Despite being a graduate textbook, you don't need any prior economic training to understand it. However, it is dry and abstract and not strong in developing motivation or economic intuition. Hal Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics is a good undergrad textbook that does those things better but is much less rigorous and does more handholding on the math. (Don't confuse this with Varian's more advanced "Microeconomic Analysis.") I would start with a quick read of Varian's Intermediate Micro and move on to MWG if you want more.

What sort of jobs are you looking at?

Marginal revolution have free online courses, but I haven't taken them and can't vouch for them

https://mru.org/

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