The truth about Apple's engineering [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8 <comment><USER2> The author is surprised that people defend Apple even though they "know that Apple has screwed them". That sounds odd to me. I know a lot of people who own Apple devices and a lot of them had problems. But no own ever said that "Apple screwed" them. In fact, many of them get their devices handled/repaired by Apple in a good manner.

No company is perfect. Apple makes mistakes. But in my perception they deal well with their mistakes and are not shy to admit.

<comment><USER3> Selection bias - he only sees the failures.

<comment><USER4> Although I think the video has a point for some cases, I think you're also right.

My selection bias, for example, is the opposite.

I had my iMac 27" repaired three times in 2013 for a SINGLE faulty pixel. Under Apple Care (which was less than 10% the cost of the machine when I bought it), a technician was coming to my place with a new screen and replace it on the spot. Amazing service. Unfortunately I kept on getting a screen replacement with faulty pixel (apparently not so rare in such a big screen, plus the replacement part was probably reconditioned) so the technician kept on coming from 200km away with a new part. In the end it took three shots to get the replacement right. I've read how much each intervention cost to Apple in the repair bills he technician would leave to me as a receipt: 700$ each (560€). Never paid a dime. Make it times three and you'll find out Apple spent almost as much as the cost of my iMac to get the repair right.

In 2016 my ex-gf the screen of my iPhone by dropping a mignon of vodka on it from the kitchen shelf. Screen was destroyed completely and I feared for the repairability of the phone itself. I brought it the Apple Store in Berlin for a regular paid screen or phone replacement. The Genius stopped me as I was telling him what happened and inspected the phone: "do you see this half-moon thing inside the front camera? It's an hardware problem and we have a replacement program for that. Your phone is eligible for free replcement". 10 minutes after I walked out with a brand new (reconditioned) iPhone, as If I chose the full replacement, without forking out a single dime. I told about the replacement program to all my friend with an iPhone 6s or 6. I think at least three of them got a new phone out of an old one, no matter how used or fucked up their phone was. One of them had dropped it and the phone screen was barely holdin together as well.

Does this make me an Apple shill?

<comment><USER5> I have never heard a single good case of Apple services in Japan or HK.

Most of those amazing services story are from US, few from EU.

<comment><USER4> First story was Italy, not exactly a Tier 1 country for Apple. Second story was Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The saddest part about this is that it's the opposite of what Apple originally stood for. With the Apple II line, Apple released schematics and extraordinarily detailed technical reference manuals. Everything about the inner workings of those computers was an open book. Their motherboards were covered in chip sockets so you could replace nearly every component, and peripheral cards could be slotted in at will. It was a hobbyist's dream computer.

Granted, computers have changed a lot in the intervening years, but it still makes me sad to compare what Apple was to what Apple became.

<comment><USER7> The Apple II was the Woz Apple. Woz basically has to threaten to walk out, and leave the company without a products, to get Jobs to allow the Apple II to have expansion ports.

The Mac etc is what Jobs wanted. A sealed beige box that only did what Jobs envisioned it to do (produce a GUI and look good).

And yet variants of the Apple II kept outselling the Mac all the way until the II was unceremoniously dropped.

<comment><USER8> Well Jobs was a complicated man and I don't want to make excuses for other parts of his life but...

He was also responsible for NeXT. That company was about trying to make the power of Unix more mainstream.

Modern Macs are far more decended for NeXT computers than they are from the original baige box >= system 9 Macs.

<comment><USER7> To me making use of _nix but writing their own UI layer suggests that the _nix side was just a convenient way to get the base layer of the OS basically for free.

This in much the same way as Linux use used just about everywhere these days, hiding behind a myriad of custom UIs.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure it's that simple.

When Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 there was no standard GUI layer for Unix. What you're referring to as the "base layer" was all of Unix.

X was only started in 1984 I believe and Sun also has a competing incompatible alternative at the time too.

It wasn't at all clear that the X Windowing System would win out as the dominant implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apple is a BMW or Mercedes of computing. And they definitely have their issues, but they definitely have their plus sides.

So far apple's engineering mistakes haven't annoyed me that much. The fragility of the butterfly keyboard is probably their worse one yet. Makes me scared of buying a new macbook at this point.

<comment><USER10> Coupling a user facing fragile device with rivets is still mindblowing to me. I gasped when I saw L.R. video about that.. couldn't believed it.

The market has fever, and is going full retard.

<comment><USER11> Honestly, I will never buy another Apple product again.

I hope my iPhone lasts for many years, because I don't like Android... :(

<comment><USER10> let's all go back to nokia 3310 2018 :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Repairs are such a small dent in Apple finances that thinking they engineer their replacement programs for profit is simply silly. I have heard that point many times. They engineer them to maximize the process efficiency, and there's always leeway. The real story here is this: Apple wants to control the product completely, and that includes getting rid of long terms loyal partners such Apple Authorized shops. They are all pretty disgruntled and disenchanted by the company for that. Zealots turned haters are usually the meanest haters.

<comment><USER12> I wish modern tech wasn't all about pushing the little mom and pop shops out of existence. But it is happening to more products than not - this isn't an Apple creation. If anything, it's a creation of wallstreets drive for profits at all costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The 2013 Macbook Air was the first and only Apple laptop I owned. It's still incredibly reliable and (the hardware) is a pleasure to use.

I needed a new laptop with more RAM/storage/CPU but I was utterly disappointed in their 2017 MBP lineup. Switched to Linux on the X1 Carbon and I haven't looked back since. I do miss things like the touchpad, Preview app and other Mac-only software, but not enough to put up with their product flaws.

</comment><comment><USER14> Couple things here. First, that isn't Louis Rossman's voice. That's either an employee or a paid voice actor. Second, I paid Rossman to try fixing a bad MBP board a couple of years ago because I watched his series and he seems like he would go the extra mile. The board ended up not being fixed.

I and my family have bought Apple products since I was a kid (over 30 years). I have always found their hardware to be extremely reliable and to age well. Yeah I pay a premium but only need to make those purchases every 3-4 years. Laptops, desktops, phones etc.

When my laptop board had a problem, it was already well out of warranty. The Apple store tech still took the time to run diagnostics on it tried to find a way to get it covered. But beer counts as water damage so that was the end of it.

I will complain that the price for a replacement board ($1200) was a bit steep for a machine from mid 2013 but I know it would have been well tested and reliable. I ended up buying a replacement board from OWC for about $700 that's worked fine.

Rossman constantly rants about Apple hardware for years. Take what he says with a huge grain of salt. Especially when he's paying someone else to say them.

<comment><USER15> I think that's Louis Rossman narating.

Also watch Linus' take on Rossman: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-NU7yOSElE&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-NU7yOSElE&feature=youtu.be&t=250)

<comment><USER16> Not the Linus I was expecting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would love to see a comparison against my beloved ThinkPad and see if there is legitimacy to my preference.

OS preferences aside, I much prefer the ruggedized plastics and exposed seams of the ThinkPad to the metal unibodies. I'm a function-should-define-form kind of guy, and am deeply skeptical of aesthetics-first designs.

As far as anecdotal evidence goes, I have talked to various sysadmins who all tell me that Macbooks on their networks have very high failure rates. They realistically cannot plan on a Macbook surviving 2-3 years. And when they do fail, they fail in unexpected, catastrophic ways.

<comment><USER8> Anecdotally, I've either bought Macs for my business or contracted with companies providing Macs since 2006 and until the current crop of MacBook Pros I've heard of very few issues and even fewer that weren't fixed quickly under warrantee.

My only issue was a faulty power supply on my 1,1 MacBook Pro and it was fixed, for free, after the warrantee had expired.

But that's anecdotes for you, not worth very much compared to actual stats.

I've heard more than a few stories from people about how they've repaired their own Thinkpad. When I hear them though I just think, your laptop failed and you had to repair it yourself.

My current MacBook Pro is a late 2013 model, it seems as good as the day I bought it bar a few scratches.

I don't want my laptop be easily repairable, I _need_ it have a bathtub graph of reliability and not go wrong in the first place.

As a counter point I know two people with emoji bar MacBook Pros and both had issues with dust in the keyboard so I haven't upgraded.

<comment><USER17> > When I hear them though I just think, your laptop failed and you had to > repair it yourself.

They could have gotten the laptops repaired via Lenovo. There was nothing stopping them from getting that done within the warranty period. Exactly like Apple.

> I _need_ it have a bathtub graph of reliability and not go wrong in the > first place

Cool. That's you. But electronics do go bad, including Apple devices. And sometimes people's requirements and abilities change, and they need larger storage. The sensible solution to that is not "buy whole new device".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The build quality of my late 2013 MacBook Pro is a lot better than that of my early 2018 MacBook Pro with touch bar. When I picked it up in cantilever with one hand it felt less flexy. The latter has seams that don't line up and such around the touch bar, and the fingerprint scanner seems to have seams from manufacture around the edge. Keyboard scrapes every now and then and the bottom of the laptop picks up dirt from the work area and makes an awful sound when you slide it around (with the old under-profile, I didn't notice this).

Nethertheless, the new machine feels a LOT lighter and, as such, I forgive the engineering team who had their focus elsewhere.

I just wish they'd redesign the speakers so that you can't tell when tiny skin flakes fall in the microscopic holes (which you can't get out .. at all). It's very obvious when a hole is missing due to the pattern of the holes.

</comment><comment><USER19> My theory is he is butthurt because he charges people for repairs, and Apple does such a good job (sometimes charging little or not charging anything) that it takes away business for him.

Yes some people get given huge quotes for repairs from Apple but the details matter. If you hear a horror story, ask whether there was AppleCare, ask whether the item was purchased from Apple either online at apple.com or at an Apple store, and ask whether there was accidental damage.

Little known thing I was told by a tech at an Apple store, that I doubt Rossmann would tell you: most Apple repairs have a per-model price cap for parts costs for repairs when repaired by Apple. Like around $400 max for a MBP, no matter how much hardware is being repaired at one time. This would not include repairs due to negligence, obviously (water, dropping, run over by a car, etc.) So third party shops can't compete... I guess Rossmann can't touch this kind of low price himself, as he would have to pay the full repair tech price for genuine Apple parts if he wants to use them, and this probably pisses him off no end. Labor charges do not have a cap, but Apple repair works quickly so these charges are low. And Apple treats you even better if you have AppleCare.

But, to get the best care from Apple, there are a few practices to follow:

1) Always buy direct from an Apple store -- this gives the techs there more leeway in their systems with what they can do for you, presumably because they have a full lifetime record of where exactly the hardware came from and what parts exactly it was made with (e.g. LG versus Samsung display, etc.), unlike when you buy from, say, Best Buy.

2) Avoid third party repairs, as afterward your device is basically tainted as far as Apple is concerned, and rightly so, because who knows WTF was done to it.

3) Buy AppleCare. You won't always use it, but the times you do, it often more than pays for itself and all the other AppleCare SKUs you paid for.

4) Get repairs done early. Apple stops repairing things after 5 years (even if you're willing to pay) in some states, and after 7 years in other states. Not sure if this difference is because of legal requirements, or proximity to Apple repair depots. In California, which has a repair depot, the limit is 7 years.

No company is perfect. You can look back into the past and find a long line of products that needed improvement. You can even look at current products and see that there are things that need improvement. That's just how things work.

<comment><USER9> Doesn't each major device come with a serial number, and from that they can determine which parts were used with it?

Some of this stuff is pretty bad. They could of fixed some issues with a few more pennies into putting in better capacitors, but they don't do it for future manufacturing runs? A lot of the issues seem to have a theme of power management issues for the most part.

<comment><USER19> >Doesn't each major device come with a serial number

Yes but that doesn't rule out the data and chain of delivery being better for store-sold devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would gladly switch from MacBooks if anyone came even close to the same touchpad experience.

I keep trying the latest Lenovo's and they still have garbage touch pads.

</comment><comment><USER21> Retina MacBook Pro 2012 is the worst laptop I've ever saw. Extremely bad quality, it had bad SSD from the start (no problems there except I had to wait a month for repair) and it started to fall apart after two years of usage. It's barely usage now. Thankfully I was smart enough to buy a PC for half a price and got twice of performance.

</comment><comment><USER22> Each new thing I learn about Apple paints a coherent picture. Not one of incompetence, but one of 'intentional obsolesce'. Whether this is in the hardware failure rates, inability or difficulty to upgrade or repair, or how each software update makes the device less functional. In the case of the self slowing battery dates didn't even require an OS update it was on a death slowdown timer. The leaked internal memos illustrate that these are not accidents.

Apple is great at something--just not quite what they portray.

</comment><comment><USER23> Louis Rossmann is one of the most underappreciated YouTubers

</comment><comment><USER24> I was talking about a month ago with a Mac consultant; he has been doing ONLY Macs for 20+ years.

Starting with the touchbar laptops, he noticed a decline in longevity. He had his clients that saw these problems, sell off all post-2015 MacBook Pros and buy only good refurb/used 2015 or so, MBP. No problems after he did that.

<comment><USER25> The recent new keyboard's keys are known to be easily rendered unusable due to a crumb getting into it. Repair is expensive (may require replacing the whole upper case?)

That may be part of what he's seeing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The BGA rework on those warranty serviced boards was pretty damning.

 _they BBQ it to a point where it 's only going to last 2-6 months and then fail again_

[https://youtu.be/AUaJ8pDlxi8?t=11m45s](https://youtu.be/AUaJ8pDlxi8?t=11m45s)

</comment><comment><USER27> At this point, I'll only use an Apple product if my work pays for it.</comment>


Solving Problems with MiniZinc - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/problem-solving-with-minizinc/ <comment><USER2> I attended a similar course and talked with other students about their solutions and what difficulties they encountered.

From what I've seen I had the impression that MiniZinc had some problems, i.e. it has some unexpected behavior, such as: \- reordering constraints changes performance \- reordering constraints may change results/feasibility of a problem

For quick prototyping it was nice though.

<comment><USER3> Reordering constraints changing performance is basically impossible to avoid for constraint systems, because we are very bad at predicting which constraints should be considered first -- well, you can always apply some normalisation pass which at least hides the problem from users.

Reording causing changes in feasibility of a problem is a MAJOR bug, and I hoped they reported it. The constraint system I work on (Minion and Essence', a competitor to MiniZinc), has (AFAIK) never had such a bug in any release (they come up occasionally during development, but we have serious tests specially designed to detect that kind of problem).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another great resource for learning constraint programming is CS294 "Programming Synthesis for Everyone" [1]. It focuses on using Racket and Rosette [2] to synthesize programs.

[1]: [https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bodik/ucb/cs294fa12.html](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bodik/ucb/cs294fa12.html)

[2]: [https://emina.github.io/rosette/](https://emina.github.io/rosette/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used MiniZinc on the capacitated vehicle routing problem in a combinatorial optimization project course a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it.

The sweet spot for MiniZinc is in investigating a problem and prototyping a solution. I would say it takes 10-20 hours to get a workable understanding of the language and paradigm, plus or minus your previous experience.

However, MiniZinc is built on backtracking, which scales poorly to real world instances of np-hard problems.

<comment><USER6> My understanding was that there are many solvers that you can use. Do they all backtrack?

<comment><USER7> The goal of a constraint solver is to bind (constrain) all of the defined variables to a single value which satisfies the constraints put upon that variable.

This is in essence traversing through a search tree (through DFS) and finding a valid end-node.

This means that when we find an invalid end-node (for example by running out of possible values for a variable) then we must in some way go back up the search tree.

There are several different ways of doing this.

Short answer: Yes, we must backtrack _somehow_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Constraint programming is a fascinating area that I loved at university. There have been a few times where I've thought it would be a useful way to solve a problem since, but brute force always won through. Is anyone out there using it in anger? If so, in what sort of spaces / companies?

<comment><USER9> Autolayout in iOS and Mac OS ([https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AutolayoutPG/index.html)) uses the Cassowary constraint solver ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_\(software\)) ) to layout GUI elements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does MiniZinc compare to other modelling languages, such as Pyomo? [http://www.pyomo.org/](http://www.pyomo.org/)

<comment><USER11> MiniZinc is a language for "constraint programming" with a focus on discrete decision problems, and supporting many "global constraints", such as "alldifferent".

Pyomo uses "algebraic notation" for so-called mathematical programming models. This starts out with continuous variables and linear constraints ("linear programming"), but nonlinear constraints and discrete variables are also supported.

Of course, there is a lot of overlap in functionality. Sorry for the specific vocab.</comment></comment>


The best, most inspiring, video about computer games I have ever seen. - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
On the site that I run we've posted an absolutely incredible Computer Games video.
If you want to view it via my site - http://getinspired365.com/20130820
Or, if you don't, via YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiePaAHK3jE
thanks <comment><AUTHOR> Clickables:

[http://getinspired365.com/20130820](http://getinspired365.com/20130820) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiePaAHK3jE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiePaAHK3jE)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is this really an amazing video? or you were just trying to plug your site. Nothing wrong with doing a ShowHN, your site looks great. I didn't get the video at all (but I'm not a gamer)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I genuinely think this is a great video - that is why I even included the YouTube link (I.E. I was more concerned with the video than my site, although I'd prefer it if people viewed the video on my site!).

But I get the video may not be appropriate if you are not a gamer. Basically it is saying don't give up, don't backtrack, continue to go forward, break down walls and smash through obstacles.

It's got over a million likes on YouTube so I do think it is popular but maybe not right for this audience.

Thanks for watching though, sorry it didn't appeal..</comment></comment>


I was wrong about the iPad - About 76,500 results - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?q=%22i+was+wrong+about+the+ipad%22

<comment><USER2> i dont think the number of results equates to the number of people who were unhappy with the iPad but are now supporters.

also, i think noteworthy is the converse of the searched statement - "i was right about the iPad" only produces 9 results</comment>


Crayola colors 1903 to 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwtwglxCv91qatw9oo1_1280.png?AWSAccessKeyId=0RYTHV9YYQ4W5Q3HQMG2&Expires=1264643941&Signature=jIxnyhkVV%2FLmZnH8YeVMhm0ijrk%3D

<comment><USER2> I find the topic of color dictionaries fascinating. I compiled some information while working on an app here: <http://colordictionary.info> and made my color dictionary data available for download as a Ruby hash here: <http://colordictionary.heroku.com/data.rb>

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's some more information on the origin of the picture - [http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/01/crayons_and_cho...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/01/crayons_and_choice_a_headache.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I was talking with someone the other day about web design and caught myself saying something about "the flesh color". Thanks, Crayola. (<http://contexts.org/socimages/files/2008/08/flesh-4.jpg>)

<comment><USER5> Heh, I grew up in the days after they renamed it "peach" but somehow independently figured out that was the closest they had to caucasian skin color so I used it. Or if I didn't have that crayon I'd just draw black people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember a moronic high school English teacher that didn't know what "umber" was and marking me down on a paper ... "burnt umber" of course being a Crayola color...

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.weathersealed.com/2010/01/15/color-me-a-dinosaur/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Cute, but I'd love it an order of magnitude more if it labelled them.

(I wonder why some of the colours were terminated....)

<comment><USER9> Not quite what you were looking for, but there is an amazing amount of info on Wikipedia.

List of colors: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors>

Crayola timeline: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Crayola>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what they have against real dark brown and real light blue? Ah, I see a second shade of blue they discontinued. Probably needed the names for some other shades...

</comment><comment><USER11> Inflation. ;)</comment>


H.B Jerry Seinfeld – Send Seinfeld SMS's - <AUTHOR> https://seinfeldtext.com <comment><AUTHOR> After watching Seinfeld reruns, we thought that this would be a fun way to reuse what we created for Kanyetext.com a few months ago. But for something that is timeless.

It also helps we are officially creating it on Jerry's Birthday.

It was built without a line of code, using off the shelf tools . Such as Stripe, Wordpress, Zapier, Twilio and Typeform.</comment>


The bible uses protocol buffers - <AUTHOR> http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/protobuf/google-protocol-buffers (As found on the comment thread of https://plus.google.com/113026104107031516488/posts/2RCyK3GbAzq ) <comment><AUTHOR> (as found on the comment thread of [https://plus.google.com/113026104107031516488/posts/2RCyK3Gb...](https://plus.google.com/113026104107031516488/posts/2RCyK3GbAzq) )</comment>


Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy? - <AUTHOR> With so much happening so suddenly, what are you reading to make sense of the Economy and markets. <comment><USER5> Making sense in what fashion, to what end? Investment opportunities? Proposed public policy changes? Where to look for a job?

To a large degree the economy is unknowable. That's why you can get two economists in a room and receive seven opinions. Don't get me wrong; there's good value there. It's just that economics is an odd mix of philosophy and math. On my more cranky days I call it astrology for people who know calculus.

If the economy were knowable to the degree that some economists claim to know it, they'd all be billionaires. So my advice is to scope down your question to something a bit more workable.

<comment><USER6> My favorite fight between two economists - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc)

<comment><USER7> This is actually a sequel to the first "Keynes vs Hayek rap battle"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo- Sk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk)

<comment><USER6> Yes it is ... I like the second video better but I should have mentioned the first as context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "All" you have to do is watch "How the economic machine works (in 30 minutes)" by Ray Dalio: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0)

Read his insights and watch his interviews. That's a good basic start. Everything more then that: Nobody really knows.

I have read countless of books, but one thing you have to know:

It is a market - period. Something has value just because another person wants to buy it (at a given price). That's basically all there is. If you think that some asset is worth more in 10 years then it is now - buy it.

The "markets" go heavily up and down currently. That's just because different people price in the current health crisis in different ways.

<comment><USER9> I wish there was a book (or even video lectures) that goes more in depth, but with the same style as that video.

<comment><USER10> Not in the same style, but this is the research that the video summary is based upon. [https://www.principles.com/big-debt- crises/](https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/)

It's free

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It helps to know what "making sense" means to you? If it means "Will my job be safe for the next 12 months", the reading will be different.

If it means "What 10-15 stocks are poised to give me great returns in the next 5 years", the reading will be different (this would be sector reports, 10-Ks etc)

If it means "how can I ensure that another economic shock won't destroy my wealth or plans for FIRE", the reading will be different.

FWIW, I am finishing up a book called "Contagion" [0] (not the fiction one ) and should start reading "Pale Rider" [1] about the 1918 pandemic. I've found that history offers guidance and opens your mind to possibilities thus offering solace.

[0] [https://www.amazon.in/Rules-Contagion-Outbreaks- Infectious-D...](https://www.amazon.in/Rules-Contagion-Outbreaks-Infectious- Diseases- ebook/dp/B07JLSHT7M/ref=sr_1_1?crid=130ZNCJX4G38D&dchild=1&keywords=the+rules+of+contagion+why+things+spread+-+and+why+they+stop&qid=1586859470&sprefix=contagion+why%2Caps%2C229&sr=8-1)

[1] [https://www.amazon.in/Pale-Rider-Spanish-Changed-World- ebook...](https://www.amazon.in/Pale-Rider-Spanish-Changed-World- ebook/dp/B01GH07CG6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=329SBG2GB38NH&dchild=1&keywords=1918+flu&qid=1586859519&sprefix=1918%2Caps%2C405&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER12> For a second I thought you were mentioning Pale Horse, Pale Rider

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not reading per se, but I've listened to Marketplace podcast [0] almost daily for years at this point, and I find it invaluable for economic news and interpretation -- especially now.

Also recommend Marketplace's podcast Make Me Smart [1], which is an informal deep dive on a single subject. It's nominally a weekly podcast, but they're now releasing a 10-minute daily version.

Finally, NPR's Planet Money [2] and their daily podcast The Indicator [3] are entertaining and education as well.

[0] [https://www.marketplace.org/](https://www.marketplace.org/) [1] [https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart-with-kai- and...](https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart-with-kai-and-molly/) [2] [https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet- money/](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money/) [3] [https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from- plane...](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money)

<comment><USER14> Honestly, I find Marketplace's obsession with politics annoying. IDK if they just have an easier time sourcing interviews from government officials because public radio or something, but it feels like even in times of non-distress they lean heavy on policy and lean on actual markets.

Look at the non-COVID Make Me Smart topics as an example:

\- Housing policy \- Corporate social responsibility \- food policy to fight global poverty \- the equal rights act \- facebook and US elections \- regulating the internet with section 230 \- an interview with a senior politico editor about the school-skills-jobs pipeline \- why private equity needs to be regulated

That said, I do appreciate the Marketplace interviews with 'regular small business owners' Marketplace has been doing lately. Ranchers, Mississippi freighters, factory operators, etc.

In terms of other podcasts, Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast[1] is a nice long form podcast with subject matter experts. Their guests also likely have a political agenda, but you at least get exposed to the inner workings of a market. A recent pair of podcasts provides a good example: a few months ago they talked with a guest about an unusual feature of Korean retail banking, the structured note. They provide investors--primarily retirees--a fixed 7.8 percent return if the market doesn't drop by a huge margin. Otherwise, investors are stuck with the return of the underlying benchmark (which is down a huge margin). Well, last month exactly that exact tail risk scenario triggered, and they brought the guest back on to further discuss how this compares with previous bank crisis episodes.

[1]: [https://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts/odd_lots](https://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts/odd_lots)

<comment><USER15> "I find Marketplace's obsession with politics annoying" Same - seems shallow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Consider a subscription to the British newspaper The Economist. It began publication in 1848 in protest against the British corn laws. The writing is superlative written with a rather sly sense of humor.

In particular, they collect and graph enormous amounts of data to augment their articles. It's much better than random posts found on the internet.

<comment><USER17> Very well written indeed, unfortunately owned by globalists since 2015 (check out the ownership change, if you are interested [1])

I had been an avid reader for 30 years, cancelled my subscription around 2015-2016, and I was not even aware of the new ownership at the time, I just sensed the change of their ideological orientation and did not like it one bit.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Group)

<comment><USER18> What? They bought up another company in 2015. Not the other way around. Why would that even be a bad thing?

<comment><USER17> Please read carefully.

The Agnelli family owns 43.4%, members of the Rothschild family own 21%, other big corporate/rich families interests own the rest. Lots of "Sirs", "Ladies" and "Baronesses" on the board of directors, as you can see below.

From the Wikipedia page:

Pearson PLC held a 50% shareholding via The Financial Times Limited until August 2015; at that time Pearson sold their share in the Economist. The Agnelli family's Exor paid £287m to raise their stake from 4.7% to 43.4%, while the Economist paid £182m for the balance of 5.04m shares which will be distributed to current shareholders.[2] Aside from the Agnelli family, smaller shareholders in the company include Cadbury, Rothschild (21%), Schroder, Layton and other family interests as well as a number of staff and former staff shareholders.[2][3]

The current members of the board of directors of The Economist Group are: Rupert Pennant-Rea (Chairman), Zanny Minton Beddoes (editor-in-chief of The Economist), Lady Suzanne Heywood, Brent Hoberman, Sir David Bell, John Elkann, Alex Karp, Sir Simon Robertson, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Chris Stibbs and Baroness Jowell.[12]

Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild publicly supports many politicians including Hillary Clinton.

<comment><USER19> Isn't your thesis that this situation changed in 2015? I don't know for sure, but I always assumed the Economist has always been run by a bunch of Sirs and Ladies... I have read and quite liked the magazine for a couple decades and they have seemed consistently elitist, pro-market, and globalist during that time. It is something I like, that they have a strong identifiable editorial perspective, unlike newspapers that have some claim to neutrality, which mostly makes their biases harder to delineate and more arguable.

<comment><USER17> Whether it is the Sirs/Ladies, or the Elkanns or the Rothschilds, they are interested in continuing the current status quo, enriching the 1% that they belong to, at the cost of everyone else.

The Economist used to be pro-small-business free market. At some point they started justifying outsourcing as "free trade", which benefited big companies like Apple, etc. and stagnated or starved small businesses (and the productivity/innovation that comes from it), not to mention labor providers (even highly educated ones, such as software engineers :-))

This has proven to be quite bad for the US and Europe (except the 1%, whose interests The Economist represents through ownership) - and it may get even worse when money-printing will stop working at some point.

<comment><USER19> You are missing my point: this has always been their editorial stance. It may have always been a reason not to read them if you're not into it, but it's not a _new_ reason.

<comment><USER17> As I mentioned I had been a subscriber for 30 years.

And no, I am not missing your point. There was a clear change in direction a few years ago - as I mentioned, I sensed it, but was not aware of the ownership change at the time.

You either did not notice or you just started reading them - good for you. Enjoy.

<comment><USER19> You may be right, but I don't see it. I have been reading since about 2005 and I don't recall seeing a strong stance against outsourcing at any point in that time. It would have struck me as surprising if I had, since they are broadly in favor of free trade, and outsourcing clearly fits the bill (even if you put it in scare quotes).

I don't really disagree with you about any of the points you're making, which means I often or usually don't agree with the Economist on these points, I just think it's a weird critique of the Economist to accuse them of being globalist, free trade, neoliberals; to me it's like, yeah, they are the Economist... It seems like accusing Jacobin of being socialist.

Maybe this change happened before 2005? I'd be interested in seeing some receipts. Are there some anti-outsourcing articles from way back that I've missed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Where to begin? I've been reading about economics for about 15 years, and I have to say that this crisis has brought a level of clarity about certain economic truths that I never would have seen otherwise.

First: accounting. I got an MBA five years ago and accounting was my favorite subject because it is behind everything that a business does. Accounting is the instrumentation that allows humans to organize their activity across tremendous scale and complexity and still be confident that they are producing value (making a profit). In the modern economy, accounting is everything. Try reading Jerome Levy's "Where Profits Come From" to check your accounting chops: [https://www.levyforecast.com/assets/Profits.pdf](https://www.levyforecast.com/assets/Profits.pdf)

<comment><USER21> Should be the top comment. Accounting is everything. It is the physics of the economy.

There is a common fiction to money matters that everyone has to share- whether or not they know it- and the language in which that fiction is written is accounting.

<comment><USER15> "There is a common fiction to money matters that everyone has to share- whether or not they know it- and the language in which that fiction is written is accounting."

Poetic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised no one has mentioned Basic Economics[1] by Thomas Sowell.

It's a fairly detailed book but it's worth the time. If you're too busy to read a whole book, you might want to take a look at "Economics in One Lesson" [2] by Herny Hazlitt.

The foundation for economic education[3] has some great articles too about economics and public choice.

[1][https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas- Sowel/dp/04650...](https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas- Sowel/dp/0465060730) [2] [https://fee.org/media/14946/economicsinonelesson.pdf](https://fee.org/media/14946/economicsinonelesson.pdf) [3] [https://fee.org](https://fee.org)

</comment><comment><USER23> Real Vision Finance by Raoul Pal and others. They are a subscription based macro-finance and economic analysis platform with some of the highest quality interviews I've ever seen on this subject. Raoul and his team are great synthesizers and do a great job at pulling in people from different disciplines and specialties. They release daily updates and have an interview catalog going back several years. They have many free videos on their YouTube channel but I pay for the subscription and it's been well worth it. Check out their YouTube channel:

[https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCBH5VZE_Y4F3CMcPIzPEB5A](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCBH5VZE_Y4F3CMcPIzPEB5A)

</comment><comment><USER24> The only school that has any explanation for this is the Austrian School of Economics. Their theory of the business cycle is the reason they successfully predict every crisis to the tee (except for timing, no one can do that), while other economists are just blown away in surprise that it even happened.

Mises and Hayek wrote big and hard to read books about it, but two that explain this to the layman are "Meltdown" by Tom Woods[0] and "How An Economy Grows And Why It Crashes" by Peter Schiff[1]. The first is an explanation using the 2008 crisis, and the second is a very amusing yet educating economy lesson told as a kids' story.

Another book that can help grasp this, although I wouldn't read it first, is "The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself" by James Grant.

If you're interested in the actual business cycle theory, Tom Woods explained it briefly while promoting Meltdown. Explanation starts 14:03:

[https://youtu.be/NBwJm68FkMc?t=844](https://youtu.be/NBwJm68FkMc?t=844)

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Economy-Tanked-Government- Ba...](https://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Economy-Tanked-Government- Bailouts/dp/B001UL7NY4)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/How-Economy-Grows-Why- Crashes/dp/B004...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Economy-Grows-Why- Crashes/dp/B0049MEXPS)

<comment><USER25> The Austrian School seems to have been wrong about the last 15 years' money printing causing inflation. In particular, the general Austrian school would have predicted a lot more inflation by now. The prediction on this has fared so poorly that the last 15 years has given rise to a school nearly diametrically opposite to the Austrian school: modern monetary theory. (My understanding of the Austrian response to this is some amount of semantic contorting: "well... let's define inflation this way and there is inflation... or will be... lots of it!")

Also, current consensus, of course among mainstream economists, is that countries that more believe the Austrian school, like Germany, has caused unneeded pain on themselves/their neighbors by advocating of austerity versus stimulus during downturns. If you want the mainstream steelman against the Austrian school, you can search Paul Krugman's take on them.

<comment><USER26> I think there is a lot of inflation if you measure it properly. We say inflation is low because we adjust for quality. So they say sure, a car costs more now than in 2000 but it has more features so if you adjust for quality it is cheaper. Same goes for other goods like computers, smartphones, etc. The problem is, the cheaper versions of these goods don't exist anymore, because the more expensive version is effectively required to not handicap yourself.

Similarly, things like housing, healthcare costs, schooling costs, etc. are not well captured by the inflation metric, but have grown wildly in the last few decades.

The purchasing power of the average person is probably worse now than it was in 2007 if you look at what people actually have to spend money on versus the artificial basket of quality adjusted goods used to measure inflation.

<comment><USER27> The government changed the way they measured inflation to purposefully downplay it. For example, if they were measuring the cost of Levi's jeans, and they went up too high, they would replace them in their index with cheaper non-name brand jeans to show that inflation didn't occur.

And same thing goes with groceries. When ice cream used to be a pint, it's now 14 oz. They have decreased the size of things like food packages over the last 15 years, and I don't think that's taken into consideration in the inflation index. Recently they decreased the size of orange juice by 15% but kept the price the same. That is the definition of inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Behavioral Economics - Thaler Kahneman Tversky et Al.

If you are referencing to the fallout from covid, it's essentially the effect of global commerce coming to screeching halt.

As CEO of GS said, no one has a clue on what's going to happen in Q2 and beyond, and if they say they do, they are BS'g.

It's a Black swan event. Most forecasting models are ineffective. Whether it would be a V, U, L recession is anyone's guess. As it all depends on how politicians react, ie. How late they are to lockdown and how long they will be in that state. Which perhaps is outside the realm of traditional economics. Hence my suggestion.

<comment><USER29> It's NOT a black swan event.

<comment><USER30> Not the OP but we've last had a pandemic of such proportions 100 years ago, and back then the world was not as inter-connected and inter-dependent as it is right now. Even during WW1 and WW2 industry and the economy itself were working (sometimes at full capacity), a fact that it is not happening right now. We've never had half of the planet's population in some sort of lockdown, that is the definition of a "black sawn event".

Yeah, one could say that things could have been better prepared (I'm in that camp), but one can never truly prepare for half of the working population being put on indeterminate leave on such great a scale.

<comment><USER31> Black Swan events are unknown unknowns. White swan events are known unknowns. Pandemics are White Swan events.

<comment><USER32> So by your reasoning, a large asteroid discovered to hit earth a month from now would be a white swan event, because we always knew it could happen.

<comment><USER33> An asteroid is definitionally a Grey Swan. Very unlikely to happen, and of great impact, but still considered possible. [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grey- swan.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grey-swan.asp)

COVID-19s impact wasn't nearly unpredictable or unprecedented enough to be defined as a Black Swan imo. I did know many people both in real life and online who were concerned about it before the impact, considerably different from e.g. 2008 financial crisis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Thomas Sowell - he has many great books about economical principles - "Basic Economics" itself is extremely educational, and is regularly updated with examples of recent History.

<comment><USER35> Haven't read his econ book, but really loved _Cosmic Justice_. The guy is brilliant.

Beyond that, if you want something kind of fringe but real time, ZeroHedge is interesting. Lots of chaff, but some of the wheat is insightful.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the recommendation of Cosmic Justice, I was not aware of that book of his. Will definitely have a look!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The markets and the economy move so fast now I prefer content which updates very regularly. A lot of material is simply outdated.

Real vision[0] has some really good content. It's not super easily digestable for someone not in professional finance but I think finance is just too complicated to simplify and not lose a lot of nuance. I'm trying to learn and have to look up a lot of stuff but it has been fun. I think they have 1 month trial for $1. I recommend Raoul Pal's recent video "The Unfolding" as a starting point.

I also think Macro Voices[1] podcasts are very solid. Again not very easy content but experts in various fields help to make sense of the bigger picture. You can choose a bit depending on what you're interested in (gold, bitcoin, bonds etc).

It's worth noting that NOBODY knows what is really going to happen, all you can do is try to get informed opinions and set probabilities. If you're looking for investment advice trying to time the market or sectors, I would stop looking. The uncertainty does not favour amateurs in my opinion.

[0][https://www.realvision.com/tv/home](https://www.realvision.com/tv/home)

[1][https://www.macrovoices.com/](https://www.macrovoices.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Nassim N. Taleb, author of BlackSwan books. His thinking about risk/probability is timeless. Frequently publishes links to his papers and debunks the BS-peddlers on his twitter: [https://twitter.com/nntaleb](https://twitter.com/nntaleb)

<comment><USER38> I liked Taleb's "The Black Swan" but find his Twitter persona grating. He displays an attitude of, "anyone who doesn't agree with me is dumb". I think the opposite is needed now. Complex and difficult issues are better approached with humility, and a frank and open discussion of uncertainty.

<comment><USER39> I don't mind arrogance on public personas[^] who are very good at what they do. Think Steve Jobs arrogance. Think José Mourinho "I'm the special one" in 2004. I read it as putting your (reputational) neck on the line. "I'm so sure of this assertion that I'm risking my reputation here.". Taleb is one such brilliant mind.

The downside to arrogance is that it will tank your reputation if you fail. This may be too early in History, and too politically charged to use as an example, but think Trump.

[^] on personal interactions, though, I find arrogance a repellent trait.

<comment><USER29> He's only arrogant to people covertly arrogant.

<comment><USER40> Sorry, are you referring to Kaleb or Trump? thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> After reading through the comments, I'd like to approach from a different angle.

Summary: you better of learning more about human behavior, and how we operate on a daily basis then reading every book on economy.

When I heard in 2008 as a kid, that the world is in a financial crisis because the investors are scared, I had no idea what is going in. I was like, those people are grown man, how come they fear something they do all the time? And why does investors mood correlates to financials? How can a grown man have a fear of investing as an investor, it was odd at a time for me. Then I went ahead and played outside like nothing is happening.

I've read a lot of books just about everything, like on every topics i could get my hands on. Some of em are: Thinking, Fast and Slow, The power of habbit, Deep Simplicity, Intelligent Investor and much more, not exclusively from hackernewsbooks.com.[0]

I always arrived at the conclusion of the market is eventually run by people(no shit). At some point in time people come up with the idea of having a stock exchange or whatever you want to call it. Without people it would be non-functional, non-existent. So if you want to know about the working of market, you better of reading about humans, human mind. What drives us, why we do things, fears, and so much more. And the best thing about this is that you can see for yourself, it feels I am doing a research, but on myself. There is not a single silver bullet in this topics of course, but one book I most often hear is Thinking, Fast and Slow, mentioned before, its really worth to read it!

Sometimes its driven by fear, like right now. In 2008 it was greed (yeah its usually not just one thing, but you get the idea). So at the why and how, I usually end up with human behavior. And since you cant determine what someone is going to do, feel or think, you cant really tell what is going to happened next, or in the future. But after reading more and more about humans, it gets a little bit clearer as you read more books and connect the dots. And you are going to experience everything for yourself. You can be your own research subject. The past couple of years I've been doing that and I really enjoying it.

[0]: [https://hackernewsbooks.com/book/thinking-fast-and- slow/8e66...](https://hackernewsbooks.com/book/thinking-fast-and- slow/8e66163f2bbc9e7ea1eb12ab7299a7d2)

</comment><comment><USER42> We will never agree in what makes sense explaining economy because it's a political question. The first thing to do, in my opinion, is to accept that.

For me, personally, after trying to make sense for a while using the mainstream narrative, the only thing that worked was Modern Monetary Theory. Their explanation of the banking system is based in how it really works (mainstream textbooks don't), the sectoral balances framework (1) gives you a tool to think in terms of aggregate demand and their theory explain things that mainstream have problems with (like public debt ratios and inflation and interest rates relationships). There is a textbook available(2).

1.- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances) 2.- [http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?page_id=33139](http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?page_id=33139)

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm keeping an eye on initial jobless claims and BLS unemployment statistics. I'm concerned that it's a cascading effort as fewer workers means less spending means less earnings means fewer workers and the cycle continues. Obviously the government has levers to try to ease the pain (lower interest rates, pass stimulus bills), but it's not yet clear how sufficient these levers will be.

<comment><USER44> Yeah, that's a recession. But we'll probably see a lot of helicopter money going forward, and some sort of global New Deal in many countries after the virus is gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Capital and Ideology - <USER3>

very approachable for an intimidatingly huge book

</comment><comment><USER46> You will see mentalities lean more towards a cell based distrubution system over a global one and by that, production spread more with many countries waking up to being dependant upon others and looking at it as if they are at war with a country that makes all the guns in the world style thinking will play out politicaly more.

So a shift away form outsourcing, at least outsourcing out of country in full as has been the case in many area's of production alone.

Equally, resource/asset stripping may well be rife in the fallout with the ability to buy up companies cheaper and be instances in which those value of assets changing quicker than the company values them. They may own some unused warehouses that on the books been almost written off and yet perfect venue for manufacturing boom.

But so many things so high up in the air, you can never see a true picture of tomorrow, but can get some idea's and those ideas will change and flesh out in the long-run. But it's the overall trends and psychology is probably as useful a skill in predicting the markets than maths in today's times. Which kinda shows how up in the air everything is.

Only thing for sure, soon as one company comes up with a cure, you will see a jump in that companies share price, even if they was to do it all for free.

<comment><USER47> This isn't an answer to the question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've only read the odd HN posts and AP news articles. That being said, there might be interesting things on these places that were part of an article about how more and more people were resorting to getting financial advice from online sources.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/](https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/](https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/](https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/)

Oh, this was the article [https://qz.com/1707479/reddit-has-become-a-guide-to- personal...](https://qz.com/1707479/reddit-has-become-a-guide-to-personal- finance/) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22478854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22478854)).

Then there are the recent HN posts to Lyn Alden's work: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lynalden.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lynalden.com) .

</comment><comment><USER49> Always read David Beckworth: [https://www.davidbeckworth.com/popular](https://www.davidbeckworth.com/popular) ,[https://twitter.com/DavidBeckworth](https://twitter.com/DavidBeckworth)

Nick Rowe: [https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/nic...](https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/nick- rowe/) , [https://twitter.com/MacRoweNick](https://twitter.com/MacRoweNick)

Scott Sumner: [https://www.econlib.org/author/ssumner/](https://www.econlib.org/author/ssumner/) [https://twitter.com/MoneyIllusion](https://twitter.com/MoneyIllusion)

Maybe, Antonios Fatas: [https://twitter.com/AntonioFatas](https://twitter.com/AntonioFatas)

And Also Maybe Sam Bell: [https://twitter.com/sam_a_bell](https://twitter.com/sam_a_bell)

<comment><USER50> Matt Levine's Money Stuff is also helpful and usually entertaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Not having much luck myself, I don't think anyone knows how to make sense of it. Its either going to be worse than the great depression or no big deal.

Have been scanning HN a lot for anything related to the economy and found little except for this post.

<comment><USER52> At this point I don't think anyone credible believes it will be no big deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> A big shout out for "Good Economics for Hard Times", by two MIT profs who recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Why did two academic Economists who specialize in the developing world write a book for the general public? From the book's preface: "We got tired of watching at a distance while the public conversation about core economic issues - immigration, trade, growth, inequality, or the environment - goes more and more out of kilter. ... Also ... as we thought about it, we realized the problems facing the rich countries in the world were actually eerily familiar to those we are used to studying in the developing world - people left behind by development, ballooning inequality, lack of faith in government, fractured societies and polity, and so on."

</comment><comment><USER54> Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson

</comment><comment><USER55> This website from Ray Dalio is excellent. [https://economicprinciples.org/](https://economicprinciples.org/)

Read Debt the first 5000 years from David Graeber.

Read Money in the Modern Economy from the Bank of England. [https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bankofengland.co.uk...](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly- bulletin/2014/q1/money-in-the-modern-economy-an- introduction&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwjd46nn6ufoAhUHvJ4KHSo- BjMQFjAAegQIChAB&usg=AOvVaw3dYvxxGs_C7rcXWYBjP3Cp)

Why these? You have to understand money and credit. Economics ignores money and credit which would be like physics ignoring atoms and gravity.

</comment><comment><USER56> I personally really like The Economist to get a good sense of what's going on globally.

<comment><USER52> I agree, though readers should be aware of their bias towards free-markets, liberal democracies and globalization.

<comment><USER57> What you said is broadly right, but it's always nuanced.

Yesterday they disavowed economists who are apologists for price-gouging on life-essential goods, such as masks, whose production cannot quickly respond to pricing signals.

<comment><USER58> I disagree that it's nuanced, it's very blatant. Listen to coverage involving Bernie Sanders before he dropped out to hear it. But as long as you realize it, it can still be informative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I've studied Economics. It took me a while to realize that it's far from a deterministic science despite all the fancy math and models (my first clue should have been that it's in the department of "Social Sciences", doh!). I wish more of my time was spent learning chaos theory, probability, and systems thinking, rather than solving Lagrange multipliers by hand. I have learned a lot more from reading Nassim Taleb's books than I ever did in those years in college. So if you want to make sense of the economy, start with learning how much of it _doesn't_ make sense. Start with Nassim Taleb's books (any book of The Incerto will suffice).

<comment><USER60> > _my first clue should have been that it's in the department of "Social > Sciences", doh!_

Because judging a subject based on it's faculty classification is oh-so- scientific. Economics is a scientific study of social phenomenon; where else would you like it to be placed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The Fed gets a lot of hate, and heck, even economists get a lot of hate, but a good place to start learning about macroeconomics is by understanding what the Fed is doing and why they are doing it. The Age of Turbulence and the Courage to Act are autobiographies written by two former Fed Chairmen, which is the highest rank in the Fed. Greenspan and Bernanke likely get negative publicity, but they wrote books for the layman to understand their decisions. The Courage to Act goes into detail about what Bernanke and co did during the Great Recession and at least gives you context for the decisions which can help you determine if what they did was for "Wall Street", "Main Street" or everyone.

You'll likely be surprised at what facilities are at the disposal of this pseudo public institution, and it's certainly interesting. The Fed collects inordinate amounts of data from each of its branches, and in times of crisis, as the books elaborate on, it seems they mostly go off the cuff with custom solutions to large scale solutions. Anyways, it helped me understand the US economy better. Greenspan's book has more info on global policies.

</comment><comment><USER62> Best discussions on the economy I have found are on Macrovoices[0] podcast and Realvison[1] TV Both are macro focused and take as a given the audience is trying to make money or at least preserve assets. It's been an amazing few years listening to all the interviews and working over the ideas in my own head then seeing things play out in the markets and economy.

[0] [https://www.macrovoices.com/](https://www.macrovoices.com/) [1] [https://www.realvision.com/](https://www.realvision.com/)

</comment><comment><USER63> Debt: the first 5000 years by David Graeber. It's a fantastic piece that takes a step back from the present moment and asks how the economic debt system developed and how other people in other times have done things.

<comment><USER64> +1 The first few chapters were eye opening

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> What were the ideologies that shaped the economic systems in which we live you ask? Welp do I have a book for you, friend:

Capital and Ideology by by Thomas Piketty

 __ _Spoiler alert_ __Since way back inequality was baked-in as a featue.

</comment><comment><USER66> These twitter accounts:

[https://twitter.com/LukeGromen](https://twitter.com/LukeGromen)

[https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact](https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact)

[https://twitter.com/darenpa72](https://twitter.com/darenpa72)

blog:

[https://www.lynalden.com/](https://www.lynalden.com/)

Common thread is topics around currency dynamics, and US Dollar reserve currency affecting..many things: trade, markets, geopolitics.

<comment><USER67> It's hard to under-emphasize the long term impacts of the Fed's actions to print (not literally print but buy assets (treasuries, corporate bonds, and even amazingly public EQUITY) in exchange for cash), and the impact it will have on the USD - the global reserve currency.

Anyone who claims to know for certain what the impact will be, is a fool or a liar. We are in unprecedented monetary policy times.

Maybe USD is cementing it's position as the global currency standard, maybe this will spell the demise of the USD and the US' economic collapse, or maybe not much will change at all. There are arguments for all three to be true.

<comment><USER60> > _Anyone who claims to know for certain what the impact will be, is a fool or > a liar._

Why do you need to know for certain?

If you're trying to make money, or even just "get by", you look at probabilities of possible outcomes and make your best guess on how to approach the problem. A mentality of "no one knows for sure, so it's pointless" is oddly unscientific. You only need to be "right" some of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I would go through these three videos : \- Ray Dalio for one view [https://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0](https://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0) \- Yanis Varoufakis for another [https://youtu.be/zi-dXc0bKUM](https://youtu.be/zi- dXc0bKUM) \- Charles Mackay for an ancient, wise and entertaining read : [https://youtu.be/FxgRbnh2ouE](https://youtu.be/FxgRbnh2ouE)

<comment><USER69> +1 for Varoufakis, he has a very deep understanding of the system, having seen its ugly details very close up in the eurocrisis, and he has an excellent clarity in explaining it all

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> [https://voxeu.org/](https://voxeu.org/) for "research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists".

</comment><comment><USER71> This is a bit of a self-promotional piece, but I put together a simple website that extracts sentences related to COVID-19 and economics/finance news: [https://chimerais.com/covid19](https://chimerais.com/covid19)

I try to write a blog post once or twice a week as well, but this is more for myself -- just to actually force myself to synthesize everything going on. Happy to share if anyone is interested.

</comment><comment><USER72> Perry Mehrling - The Money View. He has a course on coursera [1]. It's the best explanation I've seen of how the economy works. It's a bank centric view and focuses on balance sheets for analysis. Highly recommend it.

[1] [https://www.coursera.org/lecture/money-banking/a-money- view-...](https://www.coursera.org/lecture/money-banking/a-money-view-of- economics-and-finance-Dd4Lq)

</comment><comment><USER73> Wikipedia. Just yesterday I was explaining my layman's understanding of econ, namely that money itself is zero-sum, so the prices of goods and services float on the free market according to how much people are willing to pay for them.

Central banks inject money into the economy, inflating the economy, reducing costs across the board. This acts as a wealth transfer from wealth holders to wealth producers, by that I mean businesses.

Normal inflation happens in a healthy economy, in an unhealthy one like this one, they dust off the lever known as QE. In a QE environment, the central bank injects money directly into the economy by buying up government bonds and other financial instruments.

This coupled with fractional reserve banking means that the banks can make a whole lot more loans, flooding the system with liquidity so that money can start moving again.

I had implied that QE increases the money supply, and so was corrected and told that it was actually the money base that was increased. On to Wikipedia I went to upgrade my knowledge.

There I found out that the concept of money base is referring specifically to the amount of money banks can lend on using fractional reserve banking. So while nominally it's referring to the amount of hard currency in circulation, that 'in circulation' part is key, it's not just the amount of 'real' money out there.

Economics shouldn't be mysterious, one's first stop should be Wikipedia to understand the boring concepts. If you want to know how it got that way, the Wikipedia articles on the history of the banking system are pretty good.

It's dry, boring stuff. But you need to know it if you want to understand how the world works.

<comment><USER42> >>"This coupled with fractional reserve banking means that the banks can make a whole lot more loans, flooding the system with liquidity so that money can start moving again."

That's not how it works.

First, never mind how much money banks can lend, if there is nobody asking for credit. You can't create demand for credit by QE.

Second, private banks are not limited in their capacity for creating credit by the quantity of reserves available. If central banks are going to keep their interest rate target they have to facilitate any demand of reserves by private banks.

It's impossible for a Central Bank to control the quantity of money and the interest rate, they have to choose one, and they choose the interest rate.

As I said in another post, I was totally confused about how it works until I started to read the Modern Money Theory version of all this.

Here, explained by the Bank of England (pdf):

[https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly- bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Khan Academy's economics and finance videos are excellent for learning the fundamentals.

Ray Dalio's talks on YouTube, and his most recent TED talk are great for context around economic downturns.

Real Vision and Anthony Pompliano's podcast are good for deep dives into what's going on with a bit of an alternative take.

</comment><comment><USER52> Some podcast recommendations:

-Freakonomics ([https://freakonomics.com/](https://freakonomics.com/)) has been making some good episodes about different aspects of the current crisis. The latest episode is about the food supply market, the one before is about the $2 trillion aid package.

-Planet Money ([https://www.npr.org/sections/money/](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/)), which was created in 2008 to help make sense of the finantial crisis, is obviously focused on the crisis. Expect 20-30 minute episodes about economic topics in the news (some of the latest episodes include "The Big Small Business Rescue" and "The Economics Of Hospital Beds")

</comment><comment><USER75> Ray Dalio. Start with his articles on LinkedIn. He has a recent book if you really want to dig in.

Dalio runs the world's largest hedge fund and it's entirely focused on predicting what the macroeconomy will do, based on studying the last thousand years or so of economic history.

</comment><comment><USER76> Definitely Keynes. Much of the fundamentals hasn't made much sense earlier, but it does now.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes)

<comment><USER77> I'd argue the Keynesian response to the last crisis is what has left us so overleveraged and poorly prepared for this one.

<comment><USER42> What Keynesian response? A Keynesian response would be a fiscal response to a fall in aggregate demand by governments, not a monetary one by central banks.

<comment><USER78> That's the old problem that those who call themselves, and between them, keynesians ignore the first part of fiscal responsibility on good times.

According to tome better read than me it doesn't help that Keynes ideas floated during his writings so many contradictory ideas can be read and/or inferred from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> There's an excellent graphic novel (Economix) which gives a good broad overview of "the economy". It's very accessible.

[https://economixcomix.com/](https://economixcomix.com/)

</comment><comment><USER80> I'm interested in pointers on this in general, not just wrt the current climate.

</comment><comment><USER81> FWIW, if you're in New Zealand you can follow economic news updates from www.interest.co.nz.

It's an impressive aggregation of data and journalism. But boy could their site do with some improvement... Could be some work in it?

There's a comments section under every article, and a motley community of dedicated "common 'taters". Plenty of workers, business owners, property darklords, doomers, prospective first home buyers, trolls, and even a few wise farmers. I find it helpful to guage the vibe of what is happening on the ground. Deep down, I think what's really needed is a forum.

</comment><comment><USER82> Economics Explained on youtube [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ4AMrDcNrfy3X6nsU8-rPg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ4AMrDcNrfy3X6nsU8-rPg)

</comment><comment><USER83> I have really enjoyed simple economics texts.

I highly recommend Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. It is a very approachable book that can be read in one sitting.

It illustrates the seen and unseen effects of action from Frédéric Bastiat.

</comment><comment><USER84> I read many books and came to realization that I don't understand how economy around me is going to turnout. Yes, I know few things about economy but whatever I know has no predictive power.

So I kept it aside, I bought a piece of land and now I setup hydro and solar pvs, to generate my own power.

I am growing my own food (mostly potatoes, tomatoes, beans, raising few hens for eggs) and I've shelter, that's pretty much all I need.

So now I don't care about economy going down or smth, yes I might lose money which is in economy but it isn't going to affect my livelihood.

</comment><comment><USER85> You may want to have a look at five world-leading, freely available general references (from World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Merryll Lynch, United Nations and Deutsche Bank... look for their latest updates following this crisis), which I used as an intro for my recent booklet about Economy [https://www.tenproblems.com/2020/02/24/ten-problems-for- econ...](https://www.tenproblems.com/2020/02/24/ten-problems-for-economy-in- the-2020s/)

</comment><comment><USER86> Many are plugging books here, so I will plug: The Money Problem by Morgan Ricks

It provides a solid overview of different views of what is money, what is banking, and in what ways does the financial system impact the real economy? - These are all contested points in economics.

He goes on to lay out a different design to a monetary system, that he believes resolves the main fragility in our current system - panics on short term debt. It's a good read for someone who enjoys system design as much as they do financial/monetary economics.

</comment><comment><USER87> A very interesting one that's helped me understand a lot right now is Goliath by Matt Stoller. He frames todays economy in a similar light as the 1920s. Very compelling and interesting.

</comment><comment><USER44> Living in Argentina, the political landscape has far more impact on the economy than in most other countries.

What I read here are:

\- Newspaper titles (only read the content if something is really interesting)

\- Twitter, following a few key people, both with a political and economical background

\- Discuss with friends about economy topics

I know there's much noise in all that, but same as with politics, I don't think you'll be able to fully make sense of the economy unless you dive deep into it for many years, and even then you'll only get a partial view on many things.

</comment><comment><USER88> Capital - <USER3>

</comment><comment><USER89> For general principles, I recommend

[https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-7th-Gregory- Mank...](https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-7th-Gregory- Mankiw/dp/128516587X)

I started with vulgarisation but it didn't lead me very far. This is a reference textbook used by economics students around the world. It's surprisingly entertaining and teaches you the basic concepts of macro and micro economics.

</comment><comment><USER90> I have been reading A Farewell to Alms - Brief History of Economics [1]. Largely answers questions around why Industrial revolution happened when it did despite all the institutions existing well before that.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History- Prince...](https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History- Princeton/dp/0691141282)

</comment><comment><USER91> Right now I enjoy reading The Coming Plague [https://www.amazon.com/Coming- Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan...](https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague- Emerging-Diseases-Balance/dp/0140250913) Written 1995, but incredibly actual. Shows that most of epidemics are function of political will and economy and vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER92> I'm reading absolutely nothing. I'm staying away from the markets and my investment accounts. Right now we're down from the trump bump; atleast last week we were. My 401k and college fund (index fund) for my kid are all in the shitter.

Therefore, my best advice for you is to hoard cash (3-12 months expenses), cut expenses and try not to freak the fuck out right now

<comment><USER93> How can you suggest to be in cash when they are literally printing trillions with no sign it will slow down?

I know that a lot of it is supposedly not going to make it into the real economy. But if there is one thing for sure, it's that the government is going to behave recklessly and fuck it up.

<comment><USER94> The inflation target is still 2% despite the easing. I'm not aware of any indicators showing it'll exceed that, but it's easy to funnel your cash into TIPS or similar if needed. If the lockdown continues and the recession deepens the more valuable cash will be. If it ends soon and the economy rebounds you're out the opportunity cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Three things:

1\. Economics in one Lessons. One of the most powerful books I've read on the economy. Will help you rethink and see deeper 2\. Dao of Capital. Book by Mark Spitznagel -- goes into tail risk hedging, and his counter-intuitive investment thesis. He made 4000% over Covid 3\. Dalio's essays -- from "The changing world order" to "Debt Crises"

</comment><comment><USER96> John Ralston Saul's The Collapse of Globalism.

Published ~2005, it (arguably) makes sense of the previous several decades of western economics.

[https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/non-fiction-books/the- collap...](https://www.johnralstonsaul.com/non-fiction-books/the-collapse-of- globalism/)

<comment><USER50> I just read the blurb and summary on the page you linked to.

It might be an interesting read, but the main thesis seems false? Globalism has done just fine.

> Elsewhere, the world looks for answers to African debt. the AIDS epidemic, > the return of fundamentalism and terrorism. all of which perversely refuse > to disappear despite the theoretical rise in global prosperity.

Most of these don't look so intractable any more, even if we haven't solved them, yet.

<comment><USER97> > Most of these don't look so intractable any more, even if we haven't solved > them, yet.

who's we ?

<comment><USER50> Humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Currently nothing, ran out of books to read and amazon is taking forever to ship them, despite the hefty shipping fee I paid(currently two weeks from Austria to Bulgaria which is just over 1000 km away)... Rant aside, all of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books are a very good choice for anyone that hasn't read them.

<comment><USER99> Kindle?

<comment><USER98> Not available there I'm afraid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Start with some basic reading such as Mandelbrot's Misbehavior of Markets and Taleb's books, then move on to articles and recent video interviews with Nouriel Roubini, Raoul Pal, and Neil Howe, and finally be sure to take in some modern thinking from the likes of Venkatesh Rao at RibbonFarm.

</comment><comment><USER101> Everything Lyn Alden has written:

[https://www.lynalden.com](https://www.lynalden.com)

</comment><comment><USER102> The Normal Economy Is Never Coming Back - [https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/09/unemployment- coronaviru...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/09/unemployment-coronavirus- pandemic-normal-economy-is-never-coming-back/)

<comment><USER48> Posted on HN under [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22857491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22857491) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22839462](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22839462) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> I really enjoy reading Matt Levine on Bloomberg. [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew- s-levine)

</comment><comment><USER53> The Economy, a free, open access textbook crowdsourced from Econ professors all over the world, along with the Core Covid-19 collection of teaching materials:

[https://www.core-econ.org/](https://www.core-econ.org/)

</comment><comment><USER104> Macroeconomics by Bill Mitchell ([https://amzn.to/2XyoTrU](https://amzn.to/2XyoTrU))

The go to text book to understand the mechanisms and mechanics behind Modern Money Theory.

</comment><comment><USER105> Good blogs:

[https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/](https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/)

[https://wolfstreet.com/](https://wolfstreet.com/)

</comment><comment><USER106> [https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart- part-3-marke...](https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart- part-3-markets/)

This blog, and this post in particular.

</comment><comment><USER107> For US economy I like to track the FRED metrics. They have good visualization charts

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories)

</comment><comment><USER108> RealVision - [https://www.realvision.com/](https://www.realvision.com/)

not in any way affiliated with them, i just find their content sophisticated and interesting.

</comment><comment><USER109> Ha-Joon Chang's works

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Samaritans:_The_Myth_of_Fr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Samaritans:_The_Myth_of_Free_Trade_and_the_Secret_History_of_Capitalism) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU9DgfOMpmo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU9DgfOMpmo)

Economics: The User's Guide [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/29/economics- the-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/29/economics-the-users- guide-ha-joon-chang-review)

Jane Jacobs

Cities and the Wealth of Nations [https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-394-72911-0.htm...](https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-394-72911-0.html)

</comment><comment><USER110> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient- market_hypothesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient- market_hypothesis)

</comment><comment><USER111> Famous Financial Fiascos by John Train. It's short and entertaining. There are only a few chapters that deal with sovereign debt, but he gets the essence of the thing.

</comment><comment><USER81> Here ya go: [https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php](https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER112> Ray Dalio : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrxYhv2O3wU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrxYhv2O3wU)

</comment><comment><USER113> Geopolitical Futures [https://geopoliticalfutures.com/](https://geopoliticalfutures.com/)

</comment><comment><USER114> The fed used to provide a safe environment for someone to play the music for the game musical chairs. But now they just make their own music.

</comment><comment><USER115> Moby Dick might be a place to start. A popular reading is that it is an examination of the impossibility to understand large things.

</comment><comment><USER116> What I'd like to know is that is the middle class going to shrink further as a result of the current set of events?

</comment><comment><USER117> Try looking into political betting sites.

</comment><comment><USER118> Planet money and the indicator, both great podcasts that break economic data down into the macro/micro.

</comment><comment><USER17> One book NOT to read: "The Ant and the Grasshopper" by Aesop.

He got it completely wrong - for quite some time, Grasshoppers have been routinely bailed out with money stolen from the Ants (through interest rates way below inflation).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper)

</comment><comment><USER119> How are people reading timing and schedule for major institutions near their area?

</comment><comment><USER120> The blogs and articles of John Kay and Niall Ferguson. The Financial Times too.

</comment><comment><USER121> Big Debt Crisis by Dalio. Because a lot had been happening gradually also.

</comment><comment><USER122> _Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World_ by René Girard.

</comment><comment><USER123> Read Bloomberg? They have several excellent free e-mail newsletters.

</comment><comment><USER124> First, the usual disclaimers about 'do your own research' and all that. Also, people come into econ for different reasons, have different focuses, and expect different things from their news. Some people read news about the economy because they have specific decision making responsibilty, and some people read it because they're just curious. I'm somewhere in the middle depending on what is specifically being talked about.

Here are some random links that I check from time to time when I have the time.

[https://wallstreetonparade.com/](https://wallstreetonparade.com/)

[https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/)

[https://mattstoller.substack.com/](https://mattstoller.substack.com/)

And then many mainstream ones like newspaper sites and the like.

</comment><comment><USER125> I wouldn't look at economic theory to predict what will happen as economists haven't studied economies subject to pandemics, but you can look at the reality on the ground

1/ consumer confidence is extremely low as people are afraid of the virus and afraid of losing their jobs

2/ businesses have seen sudden and complete revenue destruction with revenue going down from 50% to 0% of pre-crisis; however their obligations (salaries, servicing debt, paying suppliers) obviously are still there. The natural instinct is to pause projects, new hiring, layoff people, stop buying things, postpone payments to suppliers and be more aggressive in collecting invoices.

This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle purging non-essential businesses or non- competitive businesses at a very high rate.

This will accelerate until normal people are no longer afraid to go out and then the supply chains will restart with the businesses managed to remain alive.

The best policy response would be to freeze the capitalist system altogether and allow any liability due in the future to be postponed by 3 months when entities can prove significant revenue shortfalls and implement an aggressive government-backed temporary unemployment system for those businesses as well.

To the extent that people haven't lost their job yet, it would fix the impulse of business owners to do this very aggressively in the necessity to balance inbound and outbound cash and post-crisis these businesses would have similar balance sheets as pre-crisis so life can resume quickly.

For normal people nothing would change much to the current situation (stay at home, temporary unemployment, being afraid).

The other good policy response I have seen is to force banks to give businesses a corona-credit and to guarantee those loans. It's less good because it does increase the debt-load of a company which alters their balance sheets and would have to be paid off post-crisis.

</comment><comment><USER126> 100% not anonymous public comments on the internet. Having waded into the waters of r/WallStBets and even some threads on here, there is so much disinformation and propaganda that it's actively harmful to read it.

</comment><comment><USER127> wanted to share an offbeat method a friend shared the other day. he started plotting the weight of the local newspaper. lesser weight meant lesser advertisers.

</comment><comment><USER128> Mancur Olson: Logic of Collective action.

<comment><USER129> Good book.

How so specifically?

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> I've followed the 'Calculated Risk' and 'Naked Capitalism' blogs since the last crisis. On twitter I follow @MkBlyth and @nntaleb.

Disclaimer: NC is fairly leftish, but I don't consider that a flaw. I'd be interested in learning about rightish blogs of the same depth and quality.

[0] [https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/](https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/)

[1] [https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/)

</comment><comment><USER131> Coursera and Edx courses. IBS Univ, Rice

</comment><comment><USER132> Back in 2007 I listen to Econlib podcast quite a lot. The host had some really great guests on and did a very nice job in digging into the issues.

[https://www.econlib.org/](https://www.econlib.org/)

Yes, the host is a libertarian, but I don't think he forces it on his listeners. He'll often have people on who aren't anything close to libertarian. He's also quite upfront about his own biases.

I learned a ton from that podcast.

</comment><comment><USER133> Right now I am reading _The Black Death in Egypt and England: a comparative study_ by Stuart Borsch. It compares the macroeconomic effects of the black death in England in Egypt. The relative power of the aristocracy to control or fail to control the supply and price of labor not only affected wages in the short term but agricultural productivity and eventually the foundation for industrialization and entrepreneurship.

I am only a third of the way through, but it so far seems thoroughly researched, without the dodgy understanding of economics in many (most?) historical nonfiction books. The only potential problem is that I _want_ to believe that the dystopian sounding world ruled by mamluks was an economic disaster waiting to happen, so I am wary of my reading being overly credulous. It could be that irrigation dependent agriculture was more brittle infrastructure, but I haven't yet had time to finish or digest the book yet.

From the introduction

England:

> In spite of the disputes over many significant issues, scholars agree about > certain aspects of the outcome in Western Europe, particularly northwestern > Europe. In many areas, urban and rural wages rose, land rents declined, > grain prices dropped, agricultural output became more diversified, and > unemployment levels decreased. Furthermore, the percentage decrease of > agrarian and total output was less than that of the population, and per > capita incomes rose. Overall economic recovery was largely completed by the > year 1500. Landholding systems were transformed, and the manorial system, > which was on the wane in some areas, collapsed in many parts of Western > Europe, and was replaced by tenant farming or small peasant landholdings. > Where these conclusions are accepted, they are often accepted as an > axiomatic response to the relative scarcity of labor and the abundance of > land that accompanied depopulation. The concessions that landlords made to > peasants also seem to be an obvious consequence of the relative scarcity of > rural labor.

Egypt:

> Wages dropped precipitously, land rents increased, grain prices rose, > agricultural output became less diversified, and unemployment levels > increased. The percentage decrease in agrarian and total output was greater > than that of the population, and per capita incomes plummeted. The > landholding system did not undergo a radical transformation, and the > aristocracy was able to successfully contest the demands of scarce rural > labor. Furthermore, economic recovery was nowhere in sight by 1500; the > agrarian system lay in ruins, and agricultural output had declined by > approximately sixty-eight percent.

[1] [https://smile.amazon.com/Black-Death-Egypt-England- Comparati...](https://smile.amazon.com/Black-Death-Egypt-England-Comparative- dp-0292706170/dp/0292706170)

</comment><comment><USER134> S&p500 five year chart

</comment><comment><USER135> The Economist magazine, they have a paywall but you get to read a handful of articles for free. Many of the Covid-19 relevant articles are publicly viewable and you can access more if you sign up for a newsletter.

[https://www.economist.com/](https://www.economist.com/)

</comment><comment><USER136> The writing on the wall

</comment><comment> rv-de reddit.com/r/collapse ... only half joking.

<comment><USER129> I'd recommend Collapsademic as far higher S/N.

Mod is a former /r/collapse mod. Pesimistic, but not a loon.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/collapsademic/](https://old.reddit.com/r/collapsademic/)

<comment> rv-de I'll check it out. But I must say that the crowd on collapse is actually on average surprisingly critical and will expose and discuss flawed information or unfounded theories. It's not a bunch of conspiracy nuts as one might expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> So there are a number of pretty funny responses in this thread, I decided to make a list:

Marx

the Bible

Bogleheads

Newspaper titles (you read that right, not the content, titles)

"nothing, I just bought a piece of land to grow potatoes and beans"

Comparative study of the black death

Raw St. Louis Fed data

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

</comment><comment><USER138> David Harvey's The Enigma of Capitalism has quite a bit of explanatory power, I think, and presents an ideology that is a bit different to the most book suggestions on hn.

</comment><comment><USER139> 1984

</comment><comment><USER140> Marx - <USER4>

</comment><comment><USER141> The entrails of birds.

</comment><comment><USER142> the bible

</comment><comment><USER143> The Bitcoin Whitepaper. [1]

[1] [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER144> 1\. How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes (2010) by Peter Schiff and Andrew Schiff

2\. A Template For Understanding Big Debt Crises (2018) by Ray Dalio

3\. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand

4\. Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell

</comment><comment><USER145> The boomers are retiring soon if not now. Many of them were in higher risk investments than they should be and if they all sold their high risk and went to low risk at once. The market crashes; that's what happened. Tons of people want to sell.

So the governments of the world have been the ones buying. [https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm)

The fed put 4 trillion on the books during the financial crisis and 10 years later they started normalization and barely made a dent. This number should be 0. Now in a few months they've spent 2 trillion buying what nobody on the market is buying.

How do you make sense of the market when the government is basically preventing the crash. It's not possible to make sense right now.

We aren't seeing real market numbers. We aren't seeing real tbill rates. We arent seeing real economic numbers like unemployment because the governments have been hiding % under participation rate.</comment>