I know there are books I should read, but what about the ones that are a wolf in sheep's clothing? Which ones should I stay away from? Which ones should I warn other newbies about? Just wondering,
I would actually stay away from warning people to stay away from any books. You can mention how a book is filled with nonsense, is a complete waste of time, or is even made up of dangerous ideas. But I think one of the most ineffective things you could do is go around telling people to stay away from certain books. That's a tactic of the wrong and fearful. Only those who are wrong have a reason to be fearful of people reading dissenting ideas. Case in point.
That's actually how some people found the right authors...I think it was Salerno who said he was turned on to reading Rothbard because professors told him not to.
What John James said. What you need to cultivate is a mental attitude toward everything you read or hear. Why did the author write this? How did he benefit? Why might he lie? What is the quality of the writer's own critical thinking skills? The more you practice this, the more it will become second-nature and the sharper your own mental razor will become in slicing through other people's bullshit. And what you'll find is that 99% of anything ever written is bullshit. What else you'll find is that each individual tends to have a relatively fixed bullshit-per-word ratio... so that if you read something by an author that is total bullshit, it is almost certainly the case that everything he ever wrote is bullshit. At least, that's my personal rule-of-thumb.
Clayton -
i cannot remember the originator of this quote, but "The worst thing you can do for your argument is write it down."
Eating Propaganda
What do you mean i don't care how your day was?!
I typically raise a skeptical guard whenever the word PhD is plastered on the front of a book in large font.
Read until you have something to write...Write until you have nothing to write...when you have nothing to write, read...read until you have something to write...Jeremiah
"I typically raise a skeptical guard whenever the word PhD is plastered on the front of a book in large font."
May I ask why?
Because it's an anti-mainstream thing to say.
@Loppu
It seems like placing your PhD in large print on the front of your book is an attempt to appeal to the superiority of your position/education vs. your argument. Not that this is the rule, simply it makes me skeptical.
Telling people to stay away from certain books is almost a guarantee to provide free publicity. For example everybody will warn you againt Hitler's Mein Kampf not because it's full of gibberish and unless you are writing a PhD thesis or are a serious scholar it's a complete waste of time but because "it's an evil book". End result: when I worked in a public library we stopped replacing our copy because people would steal it continously. I strongly suspect they didn't want it to show on their library records. The very few copies which survived the same ordeal in our provincial system were kept under lock and only lent to people with good borrowing history. This only reinforced the reputation of Mein Kampf as a "forbidden book". By contrast our vast collection of Marxist tomes, which didn't enjoy the same "forbidden" reputation didn't register a single loan in years, so much we transferred it in full to the warehouse to save precious shelf space.
An advice I would give is to start with the basis and avoid, at least for the time being, text which are too specific or too advanced for your level of knowledge. For example if you are just getting into chemistry you don't start out by reading a book detailing lipids metabolism. You start with general chemistry, the move over to organic chemistry, then biochemistry and only then you get to lipids metabolism. It's not because lipids metabolism is a "bad" subject, it's just because you would lack the basis to understand what the Hell the author is trying to tell you.
Clayton: And what you'll find is that 99% of anything ever written is bullshit.
And what you'll find is that 99% of anything ever written is bullshit.
Now.. I see this sentence and I am not quite sure it is bullshit or not..
(english is not my native language, sorry for grammar.)
Clayton: And what you'll find is that 99% of anything ever written is bullshit. Now.. I see this sentence and I am not quite sure it is bullshit or not..
Hehe, good point.
To be fair - if you are looking for the "plumbline view" of the LvMI to see what it is about - there are books to suggest to stay away from:
stuff like Reisman, Hayek, Lachmann etc - wether these people be right, wrong, or misunderstood some of their work probably aren't in the "mainstream" to what LvMI is trying to present.
In other words to get a "feel" for it Stick with Mises and Rothbard's MES
"As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." - Ludwig Lachmann
"When A Man Dies A World Goes Out of Existence" - GLS Shackle
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK, WHATEVER YOU DO, READING THIS BOOK SHOULD NOT BE IT.
http://www.vforvoluntary.com/young-economist/
“DO NOT READ THIS BOOK, WHATEVER YOU DO, READING THIS BOOK SHOULD NOT BE IT.
http://www.vforvoluntary.com/young-economist/”
I liked Murphy’s book better than Human Action and Man, Economy, and State. I did not need a study guide to understand his book whereas I had to rely on the Study Guide to "Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market," the "Human Action" Study Guide.
Two rules of thumb I use when looking for something to read are a) always give the author the benefit of the doubt, go into the book assuming that the person is dishonest or stupid and chances are you'll finish it thinking the person is even more stupid and even more dishonest and b) generally the more scrutiny a book comes under the more reliable it is.
So yeah, if you read you a book that has received a stellar review from a buddy of the author and nobody else or has a bibliography comprised of 90% of the guys own work then there's a good chance the guys a crank and you shouldn't attach much weight to the arguments contained within. That's the thing, as much as you guys may not like anything published in mainstream journals or by mainstream publishers you've still got a pretty good basis for thinking that it's withstood criticism for specialists in the area whose views will diverge somewhat from the authors.
John, it was more of a "I bought this book from Amazon so I could get the gist of whatever, but oh-no, it's not what it seems to be. Shit. Now I just paid for this book and the S&H. shiiiiit."
Not a problem, but if that's the case your question should have been "which books are a waste of money?" That's a big difference from "Which ones should I stay away from? Which ones should I warn other newbies about?". Even the title of this thread is "books to stay away from."
If you're interested in a particular book or books and would like some input before you spend your money and time, it would be a better idea to just ask what people think about those particular ones and get feedback that way. And if you're looking for recommendations on what you should read, check out this post and this list of recommendations.
""To be fair - if you are looking for the "plumbline view" of the LvMI to see what it is about - there are books to suggest to stay away from:
stuff like Reisman, Hayek, Lachmann etc - wether these people be right, wrong, or misunderstood some of their work probably aren't in the "mainstream" to what LvMI is trying to present.""
Riiight.
And obviously LvMI agrees with you, because otherwise they wouldn't carry these authors in their store or in the on-line literature collection.
OH! But they DO!!!
So much for your argument.