Undergraduate Program / Reading List
Eclectic Reading List for Undergraduates
These are Grace and Victor's suggestions for extracurricular readings to broaden your
knowledge. These range from books written for a general audience to graduate economics
texts.
Here is a link to the American Economic Association's resource page for undergraduate
economics students:
Literacy & Numeracy: Two essential references for undergraduates:
G. Polya. How to Solve It; A New Aspect of Mathematical Method 2nd ed. Princeton. 1988. (First issued 1945.) If abyone tells you "Gee, you need to learn how to write a proof." or "You should learn how to solve problems" GET THIS BOOK.Joseph M. Williams. Style; Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 5th ed. Addison-Wesley. 1997. Take Little Red School House and learn how to edit your writing. If you can't get in, or even if you do, GET THIS BOOK.
Classics: readings from the foundations in social and political thought. (If you missed any of these in SS Core, find these in Harper Library.)
Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan. edit by Richard Flathman & D. Johnston, Norton. New York 1997.John Locke. 2 Treatises on Government. ed. by Peter Laslett.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The First & Second Discourses. Ed. by Roger Masters.
John Stuart Mill. On Liberty, and other essays / John Stuart Mill ; edited with an introduction by John Gray. Oxford U. Press. 1991.
Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto. (Building utopia, predicated on somewhat different view of human nature than Hobbes....)
Some Classics in Economics:
Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.(original imprint 1776). See especially Book I & II.John R. Hicks. Value and Capital. (1st imprint 1939) Oxford U. Press. 1974. An elegant & lucid presentation of basic microeconomics.
Wider horizons:
William Cronon. Nature's Metropolis.William H. McNeill. Plagues and Peoples. Anchor Books. 1998.
Mark Kurlansky. Cod; A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World. � Penguin Books 1997. (Negative externalities on the Outer Banks....)
Ruth S.Cowan. More work for mother: the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave. New York : Basic Books, c1983. (Labor-saving technological change, but ever-expanding scope of household activities...). Read Cowan in conjunction with Gary Becker (see next section).
John McPhee. The Control of Nature. 1989 Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. For aeons, the lower Mississippi river has dropped slit in it's riverbed and moved sideways to lower ground. In case this hurricane season has anyone wondering why most of New Orleans is below sea level, this beautifully written 1989 book provides an excellent understanding of the forces of nature and the massive levy system created by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Stephen J Gould. The Mismeasure of Man. W. W. Norton & Company; Rev/Expd edition (June 1996). This is a very well-written book to learn about factor analysis, a statistical technique for attributing variation to multiple dimensions, in the context of the history of attempts to measure human intelligence.
Preview of graduate-level texts in economics:
Gary Becker. The Economics of Human Behavior.Geoffrey Jehle and Phillip Reny. Advanced Microeconomic Theory.
Nancy Stokey and Robert Lucas. Recursive Methods in Ecnomic Dynamics.
David M.Kreps.� Notes on the theory of choice. Westview Press 1988.
Campbell, Lo, and McKinley. The Econometrics of Financial Markets.
Darrell Duffie. Security Markets; Stochastic Models. Academic Press.
