<story><title>Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?</title><text>I recently stumbled across a link in another thread to &amp;quot;Economics in One Lesson&amp;quot; and thought it was incredibly interesting.
https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mises.org&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;Economics%20in%20One%20Lesson_2.pdf&lt;p&gt;What are some other interesting reads—whether PDF, website, doc, etc—that are freely available?&lt;p&gt;One of my favorites that I find thought-provoking is the &amp;quot;Procedural Content Generation in Games&amp;quot; book (http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pcgbook.com&amp;#x2F;).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>anthony_romeo</author><text>Just a bit of caution. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is a group devoted to specifically advocating one branch of economics, Austrian Economics. Part of this branch is staunch Libertarianism, but they don&amp;#x27;t believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not here to debate the merits of the Austrian branch compared to other branches. I just think that it&amp;#x27;s important to have a general and unbiased understanding of the other branches of economics before reading a text which is effectively a criticism of those branches and an advocacy for one specific branch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindcrime</author><text>&lt;i&gt;but they don&amp;#x27;t believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean they are wrong.  Certainly we&amp;#x27;ve seen plenty of cases where people built incredibly complex, elegant and expressive models of economic systems, which turned out to be completely broken.&lt;p&gt;That said, I know of at least some Austrian economists who think the Austrian school should make some effort to better ground their ideas with mathematical formulations, but I haven&amp;#x27;t followed things closely enough to know if much, or any, work has actually been done in that regard.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?</title><text>I recently stumbled across a link in another thread to &amp;quot;Economics in One Lesson&amp;quot; and thought it was incredibly interesting.
https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mises.org&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;Economics%20in%20One%20Lesson_2.pdf&lt;p&gt;What are some other interesting reads—whether PDF, website, doc, etc—that are freely available?&lt;p&gt;One of my favorites that I find thought-provoking is the &amp;quot;Procedural Content Generation in Games&amp;quot; book (http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pcgbook.com&amp;#x2F;).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>anthony_romeo</author><text>Just a bit of caution. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is a group devoted to specifically advocating one branch of economics, Austrian Economics. Part of this branch is staunch Libertarianism, but they don&amp;#x27;t believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not here to debate the merits of the Austrian branch compared to other branches. I just think that it&amp;#x27;s important to have a general and unbiased understanding of the other branches of economics before reading a text which is effectively a criticism of those branches and an advocacy for one specific branch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hodwik</author><text>In a chaotic system, arriving at abstractions of the forces at play often gives a more illuminating picture than trying to model those systems from weakly-linked data points.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not that Austrian economists can&amp;#x27;t find their own data models to defend their positions, with an area like economics finding data to support your opinions is the easy part.&lt;p&gt;Rather, we&amp;#x27;ve found that obsessing over the data provides very little understanding of the underlying cause-and-effect of economics.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like neurology.  Yes, it&amp;#x27;s a terribly interesting field, but you&amp;#x27;ll learn more about the human mind from reading Proust.</text></comment>