Economics...Recommended Reading?

For example, while I think I know the pat answers, what exactly causes a recession...depression, etc.?

Thank you, Glenn F.

We had a group project of writing a meaningful two page review of a semi-annual report Alan Greenspan had presented to Congress. In his report, Greenspan basically took eleven single-spaced pages to tell Congress he hadn't a clue what was going on. And he was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Since then, I've studiously avoided trying to understand economics.

You can click on some of his articles toward the bottom of this link.

One thing I learned was that any text in economics will have a political bias. That's politics in the usual sense, and politics in taking sides to the question of whether it's science or not. They also tend to be behind the times.

And there is no answer. The economists that write the books will be a hundred years, and will win Nobel Prizes as they try to figure out how we got through the growth of the '90s without the inflation their traditional models would have predicted.

As far as current popular books, another thing I learned is that economists are great at theory, but very poor at practice.

WARNING If you are a liberal, You WILL be offended by the truth.

Top sellers in economics:
Link

Top sellers in finance:
Link

And, bravo to you Glenn for trying to learn more. I think a lot of times, people make things out to be more complex than they really are. Hell, I used to think that working on a Farmall M was a hugely diffucult task, and after reading the manual and the I&T guide, it's easy as pie. I would think that reading a couple of books would go along ways towards understanding the current mess.

Part of the reason for the current mess.
People thought they understood how it worked but did not.