1. The founding fathers of economics: Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations & Theory of Moral Sentiments); David Ricardo; Karl Marx.

(Thought Robert Heilbroner had a very accessible version of Smith’s works too.)

2. John Maynard Keynes, for obvious reasons.

3. Hyman P. Minsky because his analysis of financial crises & ‘Big Government’ is dead on.

Perhaps if we require all graduate students to read these classic works, then the economics profession would not be going through another identity crisis as it is doing right now.

By the way, here is more praise for Baker from Krugman:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/hoocoodanode-part-a-zillion/

A piece in the NYT says today:

” ‘In hindsight, many economists say, the United States should have recognized that borrowing from abroad for consumption and deficit spending at home was not a formula for economic success.’ ”

Actually, a number of economists said this, not in hindsight, but as it was happening: people like Dean Baker, Calculated Risk, and yes, yours truly (I was reading Dean and CR). “These days,” I wrote in August 2005, “Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a sustainable lifestyle.””

“So it wasn’t that people failed to notice the problem. Instead, what happened was active — and often angry — denial. Conservatives, who didn’t want anything to interfere with their visions of a wonderful Bush Boom, denounced the likes of CR as bubbleheads. And Alan Greenspan, still viewed as a demigod — and probably unwilling to admit that anything was going wrong during his last years in office — declared that “a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely.””

@ Philip Mirowski — focuses now on history of economics, archivally-researched; the history of ideas of economics will change your view of economic orthodoxy much more profoundly than Robert Franks

@ Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen — dense, but ditto: much more profound critique than Franks’s

@ Stephen A. Marglin — The Dismal Science (2008) is less radical, even cites Franks a few times (plus a bit of a dry read), but again, a more foundational critique.

Best wishes for a happy New Year, and I hope you’ll resolve to read some of these folks, Mirowski especially, during 2009.