Economics for beginners

Thirteen books, from the easiest to the hardest by ReadingRate’s difficulty score: from Nudge’s small experiments in choice to Keynes’s General Theory.

13 books · 125 hours at an average pace · difficulty 26 to 66

Easy

  1. Nudge by Richard H. Thaler (2008): difficulty 26 of 100, Easy, about 5 hours. How small changes to the way a choice is set out change what people choose.
  2. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (2005): difficulty 27 of 100, Easy, about 3.5 hours. Economic thinking turned on cheating teachers, sumo wrestlers and baby names.
  3. Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu (2012): difficulty 29 of 100, Easy, about 8.4 hours. Why some countries grow rich and others stay poor: institutions, told through history.

Moderate

  1. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007): difficulty 42 of 100, Moderate, about 6.9 hours. The rare events that models ignore and markets cannot price.
  2. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman (1962): difficulty 44 of 100, Moderate, about 3.8 hours. The case for markets as a guard of personal liberty.
  3. The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (1944): difficulty 44 of 100, Moderate, about 6.4 hours. How the market society was made, and why society always pushes back.
  4. Debt by David Graeber (2011): difficulty 44 of 100, Moderate, about 9.5 hours. An anthropologist’s five-thousand-year history of credit, money and obligation.
  5. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (1848): difficulty 47 of 100, Moderate, about 45 min, free to read on ReadingRate. The shortest book here: the case against capital in one sitting.
  6. Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (1999): difficulty 49 of 100, Moderate, about 8.8 hours. Growth measured by what people are free to do and be.
  7. The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek (1944): difficulty 53 of 100, Moderate, about 8.8 hours. The warning that a planned economy leads to the loss of freedom.

Challenging

  1. Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (2013): difficulty 56 of 100, Challenging, about 19 hours. Two centuries of data on why wealth grows faster than wages.
  2. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776): difficulty 63 of 100, Challenging, about 33 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Where economics starts: the division of labour, prices and the invisible hand.
  3. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes (1936): difficulty 66 of 100, Challenging, about 12 hours. The summit: why an economy can stay stuck, and what a government can do about it.

Questions

Where should a beginner start?
With Nudge by Richard H. Thaler, the easiest book on this list at difficulty 26 out of 100: about 5 hours at an average pace. Then Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (27) and Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu (29).
What is the hardest book on the list?
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes, at 66 out of 100 and about 12 hours at an average pace. It comes last, after the books that prepare for it.
How long does the whole list take?
About 125 hours at an average pace of 250 words a minute. The three longest books take 63 hours of them: The Wealth of Nations (33 hours), Capital in the Twenty-First Century (19 hours) and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (12 hours).
How is difficulty measured?
ReadingRate scores every book from 0 to 100 on how hard it is to read, from its prose and from what it asks of a reader. For a book of argument the score weighs how complex the argument is, what it assumes you already know, how opaque its terms are, how indirectly it makes its case and how much it tries to hold at once.

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