Economist Alternatives to Milton Friedman

I sincerely hope you don’t think the only alternative to Laissez-faire economists are Antifa rioters 😛

But for those interested in alternatives, here are some economists I think are worth a read:

• Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations. While often popular on the political right, he would likely have been branded a crazy liberal by the standards of the American Republican party today.
• Paul Krugman, noble prize winner of Economics and regular columnist in New York Times. He is a moderate economist and Keynesian.
• Thomas Picketty, a French economist who wrote best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Very useful reading for people on the left who want to understand inequality, how it develops and why it is bad.
• Joseph Stiglitz, another noble prize winner in economics. He has written many good books. A useful one for leftists to read is The Prize of Inequality.
• Richard D. Wolff, is something as unusual as an American Marxist economist. He has some quite interesting talks on youtube for people curious about socialism seen from the perspective of an actual professor of economics. His best known book is probably Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
• David Graeber, not an economist but an anthropologist. An interesting read because he often talks about economic issue but with far better understanding of human behavior in relation to economics than your typical economist. His book Debt: The First 5000 Years is a great counterpoint to a lot of assumptions made by economists of the Austrian school of economics. Bullshit Jobs is another heavy hitter criticizing the profound ways in which capitalism has screwed up the jobs market.

I will not go on, but I hope I have given anyone interested a starting point to learn more about the leftist view on economics, if you are so misguided as to think Antifa somehow is a representation of the left broadly speaking.

They are about as representative of the left as Proud Boys are of the right.