Results for “Dissertation” 83 found
Assorted links
1. The culture that is Pankration? Exaggerated or not? Also from the world of tabloids, here is where the French seat ugly people.
2. What are some top cities for low rent? That is taken from a more general index of which are the best cities for Millenials. The cheapest marijuana seems to be out West.
3. The average length of dissertation across fields. Biostatistics has the shortest average dissertation, economics is third shortest.
4. …”a ship-shipping ship, shipping shipping ships.”
5. The rise and fall of InTrade. And RePec Fantasy League for economists.
6. Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever.
Eugene Fama Nobelist
As an undergraduate Fama worked for a stock forecasting service and he was tasked with coming up with rules to make money in the market. Time and time again he would find profitable rules only to find that they didn’t work in new data or out of sample. In graduate school he started talking to Merton Miller, Lester Telser, and Benoît Mandelbrot and finally hit on the idea that in an efficient market price changes would not be forecastable. The rest is history.
Fama’s dissertation and famous 1970 review article, Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work made efficient markets a touchstone for modern economists and finance theorists but practitioners hated and still hate the idea. Nevertheless, test after test showed that very few mutual fund managers beat the market and those that beat the market this year are not more likely to beat the market the next year. Chance and perhaps a few, very rare, geniuses explain the data. Eventually, hundreds of billions of dollars began to flow into index funds and today index funds manage over $7 trillion dollars worth of assets worldwide, making Fama the 7 trillion dollar man. Fama’s ideas have made an enormous contribution to how people invest, saving them billions in fees which generated beautiful homes for fortunate mutual fund managers but less than nothing for their customers.
The no free lunch principle is the most robust of the findings of the early Fama/efficient markets school. Other early findings such as non-forecastability of returns have been revised. The initial finding was that returns were not forecastable and that is true for short durations but it is now clear that returns can be forecastable over longer horizons! In particular, variables such as the dividend/price ratio can predict stock return variation years in advance! (Robert Shiller pioneered many of these kinds of studies as did Campbell and Cochrane). Fama, however, contrary to how he is sometimes represented did not reject these findings. Indeed, the less well known part of the story is that Fama working with French (e.g. Fama and French (1988a,1988b, 1993) has been among the pioneers in documenting and explaining these findings. What Fama’s later work has shown is that many of the anomalies such as time varying returns and the higher return to so-called value firms are real but they are not anomalies they are better explained as variations in risk premia tied to changes in the business cycle.
The CAPM (for which Markowtiz and Sharpe won the Nobel) suggested that the only source of true (priced) risk was risk that varied with the market return. That is one important source of risk but it’s not the only one, other types of macro risk which appear to vary with the business cycle are also priced and they are correlated with markers like the dividend/price ratio and the prospects for value and small-cap stocks. Thus, Fama showed that many of the seemingly anomalies (not all, however!) of the early efficient market tests can be better explained by a market model that incorporates more sources of risk. All of this work has really been a tour de force. It’s not often that the same person creates the theory and then participates in the first revolution overturning (some of) that theory.
Fama also pioneered the first event study! Fama, Fisher, Jensen, and Roll (1969) studied something a bit prosaic, stock splits, but the methodology, looking at how the stock market reacts to unexpected events, has seen been used to study what happens when Senators die unexpectedly (firms they support fall), what happens in close elections, which part was responsible for the Challenger space shuttle crash and many other events.
Assorted links
Private sector macro job opportunities
A long-time reader writes to me:
Maybe this request is too specific, but I think it has relevance for some of your readers: What are the private sector options for PhD macroeconomists? I think the options for micro people are fairly well known (market design, litigation consulting, etc.). But the options for macroeconomists are less so, in part because (as I understand it) private sector macro consulting firms use models that are far from the DSGE and even VAR models that PhD programs teach. Are these firms, as well as economist offices in banks, interested in new macro PhDs? Are other kinds of firms? What sort of coursework and dissertation choices should macro students with private sector goals select? What is the pay like? Will the application process be similar to the academic market, relying heavily on the job market paper, or will it be a different kind of interview?
I ask because it is difficult for PhD students to solicit this kind of advice from faculty due to fear that faculty don’t want to work with students who aren’t on an academic track (and, for this reason, I request anonymity). Those of us who are undecided have a difficult choice to make: information about the academic job market is abundant, but information about the private sector job market is harder to find without personal contacts.
I am far from expert on this topic, so I will turn this over to MR readers in the comments section…
Immaculate conception theories of real interest rate changes
David Glasner asks some very good questions about real rates of interest. Here is one bit:
…what we see is a steady decline in real interest rates from over 2% at the start of the initial QE program till real rates bottomed out in early 2012 at just over -1%. So, over a period of three years, there was a steady 3% decline in real interest rates. This was no temporary phenomenon; it was a sustained trend. I have yet to hear anyone explain how the Fed could have single-handedly produced a steady downward trend in real interest rates by way of monetary expansion over a period of three years. To claim that decline in real interest rates was caused by monetary expansion on the part of the Fed flatly contradicts everything that we think we know about the determination of real interest rates.
These days, Fed policy is more contractionary (if only verbally) and real and nominal rates are rising. The most plausible account of this process is that flows not stocks drive the market, and thus the Fed has enormous power over real rates, although like Krugman I find this tough to swallow. “Most plausible” does not equal “plausible.”
(By the way, the older literature does find liquidity effects on short-term real interest rates, but it is not unusual for them to disappear well within the space of a year; see for instance this John Cochrane piece (pdf). That said, Cochrane also finds a liquidity effect on the twenty-year note, which combined with the temporary nature of the short rate effect seems to suggest an unexploited profit opportunity. Note by the way that Cochrane did his dissertation on this topic. Or try this Grier and Perry paper (pdf). Evans and Marshall (pdf) find no significant liquidity effect on long rates and that is the same Charles Evans who is now president of the Chicago Fed.)
Another possibility is that we are seeing a recovery and real rates of return are rising. I don’t find that crazy per se, but it doesn’t explain why the rise in real rates marched in lockstep with Fedspeak. I don’t think “the Fed has private information about the recovery, so their announced contraction caused everyone to break out the champagne” is going to work, especially once we look at asset price movements.
Krugman yesterday argued that his earlier prediction was not wrong about interest rates, but he doesn’t commit to a mechanism for what is driving real interest rates up as of late and the plausible mechanisms do seem to contradict his (and my) earlier views. So what if the Fed backs off on QE over an extended period of time? That shouldn’t be significantly driving real rates ten years out unless of course one believes in the “primacy of flows” view, which Krugman does not. He’s already told us he doesn’t see a major recovery, or even much hope from the obsolescence of capital, so he can’t invoke rising returns from the real side of the economy either, even if we set aside the problems mentioned in the paragraph above.
Another “way out” is to claim we are mismeasuring inflation and also real interest rates, but I don’t see much promise in that. The most plausible CPI mismeasurements span very long time periods (say now vs. 1900), not now vs. ten years out. Alternatively, one might argue “inflation will be higher than we think in years 3-10 looking forward, so the ten year real rate isn’t actually up very much.” That will fail on numerous grounds, for one thing, money just got tighter.
So we have one implausible theory — the primacy of flows view — and a lot of worse contenders. The only people with a good predictive record on this particular issue are the Old Old Keynesians (e.g., money pushes around real interest rates more or less forever) and perhaps some of the cruder, pre-adaptive expectations Austrian views, although neither of those approaches has a good predictive record more generally.
Arnold Kling makes numerous good points here. He suggests that the profession’s understanding of real and nominal interest rates is extremely poor. He is right.
In the meantime, we should put more effort into thinking about how a version of the flows view could be made more plausible.
Micah Tillman defends Edmund Husserl
I allowed him three paragraphs, and he emails me the following:
Husserl was a mathematician whose desire to understand how (and why) mathematics actually works turned him into a philosopher of logic, science, language, and mind. Without the movement he inaugurated, Heidegger (and therefore everyone who followed Heidegger), Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, and Derrida (and even John Paul II) would not have become the philosophers we know them as today.
Husserl was inspired by Hume and Kant, but believed both made a fundamental mistake. Empiricists like Hume became skeptics after concluding that all we truly know are our own sensations; we never experience the “real things” we think we do. Idealists like Kant essentially agreed (we experience only phenomena, never noumena) but believed that at least we could discover the universal rules of the human mind.
Husserl argued that the “things themselves” actually show up for us through our experiences and therefore we can learn about the real world through a study of the structures (patterns, types, and forms) of human experience. In the process, he reconciled empiricism and idealism. The empiricist insistence on experience over speculation is central to phenomenology, as is the idealist claim that the study of the mind is the path to knowledge of ultimate reality. With the combination of the two, every area of the world, and every part of life, became a subject for philosophical investigation, and philosophy experienced a kind of second birth.
Earlier I had named Husserl as “the worst philosopher.” But of course I am delighted to present a contrasting view. Micah is a professional philosopher and an adherent of phenomenology, his web page is here. His recently completed dissertation was “Empty and Filled Intentions in Husserl’s Early Work.” He describes the “things themselves” — in less than 140 characters — here.
Assorted links
1. Appreciation of John Dunkley.
2. Confidence pays off for pundits.
3. What to do if you find a hedgehog (non-ironic, and indeed it is from the British Hedgehog Preservation Society. Furthermore the results apply even if you have not “found” a hedgehog but rather are “concerned” about one, the site recognizing appropriately that perhaps he or she has found you).
4. Chris Hughes and Google are giving away cash directly to the poor.
Catch-up splat
Having been traveling, I neglected some of the more controversial issues of the last week, but here are a few points of catch-up.
On the immigration study, I liked Reihan’s recent post very much. It is now the case that 23 student organizations at Harvard’s Kennedy School are protesting the fact that the dissertation was awarded, while nominally defending academic freedom of course.
For all of the brouhaha over Niall Ferguson, everyone is forgetting what Robert Skidelsky wrote in 1977, Skidelsky too it seems. I don’t agree with either the immigration study or with Ferguson (at all, in either instance), but the response has been a case study in…something or other. There is a glee and also a selectivity to it all which I am uncomfortable with, to say the least.
Within the span of a week, it is remarkable how rapidly the UK has moved toward a serious debate over leaving the EU, and that is after the UKIP election results were revealed (calling Timur Kuran!). Our London cabbie, on the drive to the airport, still calls it “the EEC.” With apologies to Thomas Friedman, I say this movement is for real.
The Novel Coronavirus seems to be human-to-human transmissible in a manner which is very worrying (more here). When your thought is “that one might be too deadly to be a real problem,” it isn’t actually good news. Fortunately the French health minister tells us that “Nothing is being left to chance,” including presumably which mutated strains of the virus will survive and spread.
What’s remarkable about the IRS tax scandal is that it was admitted, keep that in mind when revising your Bayesian priors. Don’t forget about Bloomberg too. Are all of our phone calls being recorded?
I do understand the back story, but still I become uneasy when the Secretary of HHS goes on a fundraising campaign from affected parties. In lieu of naming rights, you get…what? Can you say you “gave at the office”? The voting booth? Can they then rent out the mailing list of which companies gave?
The Republicans on Benghazi have learned from the Democrats on Mitt Romney and leveraged buyouts; define your opponent early in the public eye. It is working, if only because most media accounts, even sympathetic ones, do not include pictures of a radiant and smiling Hillary Clinton with the story.
A twelve-year-old stabbed his eight-year-old sister to death.
Might we have a budget surplus in two years’ time?
The WSJ reviews Knausgaard, and “Babs” Walters will be retiring.
“What have the old gods done for us lately?”
Could it be this pizza?
OK people, now you can go nuts in the comments, get it out of your system.
Richard McKenzie writes a tribute to James Buchanan
You will find it under the fold…
At a conference organized in the early 1990s to celebrate Professor James M. Buchanan’s Nobel Prize in Economics, the speakers were asked to tie their comments on economic education to Professor Buchanan’s prodigious works. My opening line crystallized the importance of my serendipitously coming within Professor Buchanan’s orbit of influence: “When I was in Professor James Buchanan’s microeconomics class in the fall of 1969, he taught me very little. I say that with pride here in this august setting because Professor Buchanan would be the first among you to realize that I could not offer a higher compliment. He understands, as he got me to see, that the measure of good teaching is not how much you teach, but how much is learned by students – and then how much students can do with what little is taught and learned. The first principle in economics should be economy in the principles covered,” a point rarely driven home for young economists today.
With his death at age 93, much will be written about Professor Buchanan’s prodigious scholarship that has changed the way people view political and government arenas. My perspective is more personal, that of a student who came to know an admirable side of Professor Buchanan that his critics and devoted readers will never know. Professor Buchanan was my dissertation director. Most dissertation directors take weeks, if not months, to return first drafts of their students’ dissertations. In my case, I vividly remember placing all 250 pages of my first draft on Professor Buchanan’s desk just before 5 PM one day, only to find a marked-up version, as well as an untold number of typed single-spaced pages of comments, the very next morning!
After graduating and taking an assistant professorship, I started churning out a stream of papers, anxious to move up the academic ladder. But I had an advantage that other young professors could only wish for. I had Professor Buchanan in my corner, giving generously of his time to review and comment on my work, and all with unbelievable promptness. I would send Professor Buchanan a paper, and he would have it back to me in no time at all, with pages of comments – long ago, when papers and messages traveled at the snail’s pace of the Post Office. He was so prompt and predictable on getting papers back that on occasion I would put a paper in an envelope and then go to one of my colleagues and say something to this effect: “Notice that I am putting this paper in the mail to Jim Buchanan today. I am willing to bet you a cup of coffee that I will get this paper back with one or more single-spaced pages of comments a week from now.” Without fail, I won the bets and had any number of cups of coffee off Professor Buchanan’s tireless generosity with his time and wisdom with a former student.
I once told Professor Buchanan’s longtime assistant Betty Tillman how remarkable it was that he would get my papers back so promptly and with obvious attention to detail. I was struck by her reaction, “Honey, I hate to tell you this, but he doesn’t just do it for you. He does it for everyone. There’s hardly a day that goes by that he doesn’t get at least one paper in for review, and he almost always has his comments written by the next morning.”
Professor Buchanan’s comments on my papers followed a somewhat predictable format. He would always start by saying something positive about the content, perhaps focusing on how well the paper was written, if lost for positive comments on content. He would then add his incisive comments, which sometimes forced me to set the paper aside. But on one paper I remember well that he didn’t start with his usual positive remarks. He wrote to this effect: “Dear Dick, we all write good papers and bad papers. With some papers we pursue publication. With others, we trash them. In the process of writing any number of papers, we acquire great wisdom in deciding which papers are which. You will acquire great wisdom in deciding what to do with this paper.” I didn’t need for him to say more, which he didn’t. I never tried to revise that paper.
Today, I am pleased to call James Buchanan my professor for pressing on me a remarkably simple but important point that escapes so many colleagues across the country: Being a professor is a privileged position. It demands scholarship, but it also demands that you give of yourself in ways that will never show up on your resume, or in your obituary.
Richard McKenzie is the Walter B. Gerken Professor of Economics and Management Emeritus in the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.
Ideas and Political Entrepreneurs: The Case of Airline Deregulation
Following up on my post from yesterday, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) regulated U.S. airline rates and routes from the 1930s through the 1970s. It also kept mountains of data. Aspiring Ph.D. candidates found worthy dissertation material from the agency’s files. The research lent support to an important idea—regulation was failing in this market—but no one listened to these young academic scribblers.
By the early 70s, an established academic produced a groundbreaking treatise arguing for sensible regulation. Alfred Kahn would soon make the jump from academic to regulator—of public utilities in the State of New York, not airlines.
By the mid-1970s, criticism of airline regulation had moved from academics to economists in think tanks (Brookings, AEI) and in government. At an economic conference on inflation convened by the Ford Administration, the delegates focused unexpectedly on a different idea: existing regulations were producing high prices. Yet as every economist in Washington knows, many reform ideas never become policy. Then came the political entrepreneurs.
First, Senator Ted Kennedy. An ambitious member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and chairman of the subcommittee on administrative procedure, Kennedy saw an opportunity to attack the over-regulated and under-competitive airline industry by critically examining the rules it played by.
Most judiciary subcommittee hearings were mind-numbingly boring, but airlines were sexy, and Kennedy turned the CAB hearings into high theatre, trotting out real but outrageous examples. A flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco (intrastate and thus not CAB-regulated) cost half as much as a flight from Washington to Boston (interstate and CAB-regulated). Even the dimmest reporter could connect the dots. The CAB looked bad. Kennedy looked good, as did the odds for reform.
Then the Carter Administration tapped Kahn to run the CAB. He allowed “experiments” in price flexibility (Super Saver fares). He approved new routes. Eventually, he questioned the agency’s purpose. The CAB had to go. This meant Kahn had to sell a very big idea to the madmen in authority, the decision-makers in Congress.
An accomplished economist who dabbled in theatre on the side, Kahn played his role perfectly. The former academic scribbler was funny, smart, patient and on point. He was a master communicator with press and politicians alike.
Kahn built on Kennedy, who built on the work of intellectuals in Washington’s think tanks and policy circles, who in turn built on good academic research. Importantly, he found allies across the political spectrum, from the American Conservative Union to Common Cause, from business interests to consumer groups. This odd mix prevented easy dismissal of reform as the pet project of the left, the right, or any special interest.
With passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Congress closed the CAB and left behind an unprecedented example of radical reform. A better idea had made its way from academic scribblers, through the intellectuals and on to madmen in authority, who were compelled to act. Yet so much of the story hinges on the actions of Kennedy and Kahn—two very different individuals, two very effective political entrepreneurs.
Why Does Government Spending Increase Under Term Limits?
Many thanks to Alex for introducing me yesterday. Having written several papers on term limits, I will use my first post of the week to raise a new question that has emerged from this aging policy intervention: Why does government spending increase under term limits?
Back in the 1990s, when about half the states’ voters slapped term limits on their state legislators, the idea was to rein in government spending and decrease the growth of government. Instead, spending per capita increased in those states relative to states without term limits. See this empirical paper, this survey article, or this book this book for details.
These results are counterintuitive insofar as we put stock in the intended mechanism, which was simple: As legislators spend more time in office, they tend to vote for more government spending – so if legislators are required by law to spend less time in office, they’ll spend less money.
There are two problems with this. First, the premise that tenure and spending positively correlate has not held up to empirical scrutiny. Most papers found no positive link between tenure and spending, although a few reported small effects.
Besides, even if there were a strong tenure-spending correlation without term limits, that correlation is not likely to hold up once term limits are imposed. This is due to a version of the Lucas Critique (or Goodhart’s Law), which in general argues that observed behavioral patterns are not invariant to policy interventions. In this case, term limits will change the dynamics between voters and politicians in ways that lead to greater spending. More specifically, three explanations seem plausible.
- Term limitation exacerbates fiscal commons problems within the legislature. Because term limits decrease the variance of tenure within a legislature, the relative power of party leaders and ranking committee members will decrease. As the distribution of power flattens, this increases the proportion of legislators who possess access rights to budget items, thus decreasing the control rights that a relatively few leaders and committee chairs would otherwise have. When everyone can get their pet project through, more projects get through.
- Term limits shorten legislators’ time horizons. If legislators use their time in office to advance their careers, and if the career-value of being in the statehouse increases with the support of more spending, then term limits can impart an incentive to spend more and sooner. For example, rank-and-file legislators support more spending to secure leadership positions, and leaders let more projects through in order to quickly build durable coalitions.
- Term limits might lure legislators into very wasteful forms of pork spending, according to this paper by Michael Herron and Kenneth Shotts:
Term limits can, in some cases, inhibit voters from selecting representatives who deliver particularistic benefits, and, in these cases, term limits reduce pork spending. On the other hand, when pork is extremely socially inefficient, representatives who want to deliver pork to their districts have incentives to refrain from doing so to reduce future pork in other districts. In this scenario, term limits actually prevent legislators from promoting future spending moderation and thus paradoxically increase pork spending.
These explanations can, of course, be mutually inclusive. I suspect there is more to #1 and #2, if only because they are more salient.
In general, term limits increase spending because voters and legislators rationally respond to changes in their institutional environment. As this question invites further study, good papers will unpack the specific mechanisms that drive those responses.
— Notes: Since most people seem surprised by the actual effects of term limits, here are pointers to similar findings: Gubernatorial term limits worsen fiscal volatility — this paper (co-authored by my co-author Pete Calcagno) and this paper (by my dissertation advisor Bob Tollison) — because governors invest less in reputation (this paper). States with legislative term limits might also have worse bond ratings (here). Here on MR, neither Alex nor Tyler have put much stock in term limits, though Alex is less skeptical.
Assorted links
1. Noah Smith’s dissertation, plus a mention of my most fundamental view: “”Larry Summer’s maxim,“It isn’t easy to understand how the world works.””
2. Spanish baby stealing as an approach toward social change, and an old argument for the minimum wage.
3. Henry’s music bleg, with lots of comments.
4. Arnold Kling on education, disruption, and Benjamin Lima.
5. China’s railway arteries, photographed.
6. Olympic runner to compete, without a passport or home country.
Questions from Nick_L
I believe he is a loyal MR reader:
1) What’s the most important economics question you ever asked? 2) How do economics professors negotiate their salaries? Do econ professors share notes on this? 3) Predictions for US economic policies if Obama is re-elected? 4) Where do you see the next boom/bubble/bust occurring? 5) Possible remedies for the continuing rise in Income inequality? 6) If you had to move overseas, which country would you most likely pick, and why?
My answers:
1) “What is the required type font for submitting this dissertation?”
2) Quietly. Angus adds comment.
3) Continued denial, no matter who wins.
4) We’re done with bubbles for a while, though I think Facebook may still be one.
5) Destroy American export capacity.
6) For living I think I would like Berlin, Singapore, and London, but the answer depends on my income and opportunities.
Who invented interchangeable parts?
This I had not known, but apparently it is old news:
The symbolic kingpin of interchangeable parts production fell in 1960 when Robert S. Woodbury published his essay “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts”…Woodbury convincingly argued that the parts of Whitney’s guns were not in fact constructed with interchangeable parts…
With Eli Whitney reinterpreted as a promoter rather than as a pioneer of machine-made interchangeable parts manufacture, it remained for Merritt Roe Smith to identify conclusively the personnel and the circumstances of this fundamental step in the development of mass production. Smith demonstrated that the United States Ordnance Department was the prime mover in bringing about machine-made interchangeable parts production of small arms. The national armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, played a major role in this process, especially in its efforts to coordinate its operations with those of the Harpers Ferry Armory and John Hall’s experimental rifle factory, also at Harpers Ferry.
That is from David A. Hounshell’s excellent From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932. Here is a related article, possibly gated, here is another.
Classical economics reading list
Joel, a loyal MR reader, asks me:
I am an undergraduate economics student curious about which of the classical economists and books you find most valuable. Classical not just meaning Ricardian but in terms of significant non purely quantitative works that influenced economics as a whole. If one were to put together a reading list of twenty or so of the most influential or important books, what would you recommend? The Wealth of Nations and General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money seem logical starting points, beyond them though it's hard to wade through the range of choices (Ricardo or Hayek? Schumpeter or Jean Baptiste Say?)
For now I'll stick with classical economics in the narrow sense, as it ends in 1871. If you can read only a few works, I recommend these:
1. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations. Duh.
2. David Hume, Economic essays. He lacks some of Smith's profundity as an economist, but he is more precise analytically and as always a beautiful writer.
3. David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy, the first six chapters. Rigor arrives, though at the expense of truth. Still there is something to it. Supplement with Mark Blaug on Ricardo, if you want the model spelt out mathematically.
4. The early marginalists: I'll recommend Samuel Bailey on value and Mountifort Longfield on price theory. Yet still it was a (temporary) dead end and you should read them with that puzzle in mind. At what level of technical sophistication do the contributions of marginalism suddenly seem impressive?
5. Thomas Robert Malthus, on population (don't ask which edition) and Principles of Political Economy. He understood supply and demand, elasticity, a version of the Keynesian model, and environmental economics, and yet he is mainly criticized for being wrong about population. He is one of the strongest and most profound and most underrated economists of all time. Also read Keynes's biographical essay on him.
6. Edinburgh Review. The econ blogosphere of its day. Read the economic essays published in that outlet, by Malthus and many others, especially on monetary theory. I don't know any easy way to track this stuff down, but if you do please tell us in the comments.
7. John Stuart Mill: Autobiography (yes, for economics) and his Some Essays on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy (Kindle edition is free). Mill has underrated depth as an economic thinker and he encompassed virtually all of the interesting trends of his time. That was both his greatest strength and his biggest weakness.
8. Marx: The 1844 manuscripts. More generally, read the Romantics as critics of classical political economy. Coleridge and Carlyle are good places to start.
What about the French?: I find Say boring, Bastiat fun, Cournot incredible but there is no reason to read the original. Try someone weird like Comte or LePlay to get a sense of what economic discourse actually was like back then.