The Apprentice Economist: Seven Steps to Mastery - Softcover

Palda, Filip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0987788043 ISBN 13: 9780987788047

Publisher: Cooper Wolfling, 2013

Synopsis

When faced with material crises governments do not call upon historians, anthropologists, political scholars, or psychologists. They call on economists. These have developed the most coherent and convincing description of how society organizes itself through a system of accounting amenable to precise analysis. Mastering this analysis is the challenge of the apprentice economist. Learn to become a master from Filip Palda, who earned his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago. Here is what Nobel Prize winners have said about Palda's previous books: "Interesting and well written." Gary S. Becker. Nobel Prize in economics 1992. "Palda offers a novel and interesting perspective." James M. Buchanan. Nobel Prize in economics 1987.

About this title

About the Author

Filip Palda earned his Ph.D in economics at the University of Chicago. He is the author of more than 20 articles in refereed economic journals and is a high-scoring author on the RepEc website of economic working papers. He is best known for his work on exposing the self-interest politicians hold in crafting election finance laws, for his discovery of the displacement deadweight loss of tax and regulation evasion, and for his recent book Pareto's Republic and the New Science of Peace, also available on Amazon.

Review

Economists have written any number of popular introductions to their field – Armchair Economist, Undercover Economist, Naked Economist, Economic Naturalist’s Field Guide,  Freakonomics, From Here to Economy and Tradeoffs all come to mind – but seldom do economists write about their own experience of the craft.
-- David Warsh and appeared in his webzine Economic Principals

That’s why, as an economic journalist with some familiarity with the profession, I so liked The Apprentice Economist: Seven Steps to Mastery, by Filip Palda.

This is economics as it is experienced by those entering the field: heavy on the latest technique; often non-existent on its history; perhaps with an emphasis on seeing how one concept is related to another.

 Palda’s special strength is that history is always present at the end. And so it goes throughout this short, occasionally breathless little book:  after substitution, there are three more chapters on various foundational treatments of time, chance and space; followed by three others on the concepts of equilibrium, games, and control.

There are clear explanations of key concepts in each case, with a few really good papers cited at the end.

Who will find Palda’s book useful? Graduate students in economics and related fields. Lay readers with a well-developed taste for understanding the current state of play. Not many others, I expect.

Palda describes the book as a means of “pumping economic iron.” The Cambridge University economist G.L.S. Shackle used to write this way about Austrian and Keynesian ideas.  Such books are all-too-rare specimens of what can be a surprisingly useful subspecialty of the explication business (see, for instance, Erwin Schrödinger’s celebrated 1944 book for lay readers, What Is Life?).

"The author explains many topics very well. I enjoyed reading his take on signaling, tied sales, the differences between adaptive and rational expectations and the implications of assuming one over the other, and many other topics. "

Rudolph G. Penner, Fellow of the Urban Institute, and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, review in Public Finance and Management, Volume 1, 2015, pages 88-90.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cooper Wolfling
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0987788043
• ISBN 13: 9780987788047
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 292