In the first pages of Chapter 3 it is said how most Ph.D. Economists don't bother to read "A Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith. Most shortcuts and understanding is built off Smith's paper but little is actually learned nowadays from this famous article. Warsh suggests, that to understand economics we need to go back to the basics, hence, "A Wealth of Nations", to make it easier to understand the shortcuts taken by Ph.D Economists today.
So, if we need to go back to the basics and most of us are Economics majors then we should probably read this paper that started our whole field of study. Here is a link to the "A Wealth of Nations". Feel free to read it!
(Honestly, I haven't read it either but it's something we all should have a look at)
A for Sue, but I'll mark this down to a B next time for capitalization errors. The book capitalizes "economists" in the first sentence because it is using a decorative drop-caps format.
ReplyDeleteSmith didn't write an article, it's a book.
I haven't read Smith cover-to-cover either.
Buchanan's The Return to Increasing Returns is available through Google Books. The Romer article is tougher to come by.