Please do not look upon popular economics best sellers as a good way to get a rounded economics education. While many have value in critical insight and entertainment, they often offer only a narrow perspective on economics. Novice economists typically lack the ability to critically appraise them without a wider economic framework to work from.
An academic reading list (i.e. university course texts) will provide you a good theoretical foundation as to how economists interpret and model real economic issues. It's important to grasp the plethora of important economic concepts like diminishing returns, comparative advantage and concepts of market efficiency (among many others things) and how they apply within micro or macro economic issues.
With some foundational knowledge in place, a good economist then goes on to relax the underlying assumptions and look for analogues in the real world. This is where the popular reading list come in, often they take a deep dive in specific areas i.e. where traditional economic assumptions break down.
In short, the academic reading list gives you a framework to understand economics. The best seller list tempers that framework with real world exceptions, paradoxes and open questions.
It's a bit disappointing to see a real academic reading list so far down this comment page (I strongly recommend looking at oli5679 suggestions). I doubt HNers would suggest reading up on javascript as a good foundation for a computer science education. Yes, you can become a well rounded computer scientist by starting on javascript. But it's more important to have a grasp on core computer science ideas like algorithm design & analysis and automata.
Academic economics textbooks need to be read with a skeptical eye as they tend to be overly simplified. Think of it as a useful framework for future work and a shared language, not an explanation of what actually happens.
Much like how physics textbooks love frictionless surfaces.
Economics rather strongly deprecates both history and philosophy, often offering only a brief overview of the former and a highly digested form of the latter.
One windfall of the World Wide Web are the fundamental texts now online. Many legally, through the Internet Archive, or various libraries -- the Online Library of Liberty and Mises.org, as much as I disagree with their ideological bases, have quite good collections. More in the form of illicit copies. LibGen, BookXX.org, and Sci-Hub offer access to many books and articles. Wikipedia is strong in economics, in particular offering biographies of many particular authors and theorists.
Worldcat (https://www.worldcat.org/) will help you track down published books at libraries worldwide.
Having studied economics at Uni, I'm making up for many deficiencies of my curriculum.
I wasn't asking as a productivity question it was more wouldn't they want to read the history of thought leading to what they're doing just out of sheer curiosity?
Definitely, and I'm sure many do. And it is often very surprising how far ahead the older authors had thought. But while such reading is fun as a leisure activity, doing it seriously requires full-time dedication as a historian of thought because often even if the words are intelligible the concepts have drifted so much that they can be understood only by studying not only the famous works but their entire intellectual milieu. For example, to someone trained in contemporary economics even Keynes' 'General Theory' written in 1936 is very hard to make detailed sense of. So as a practical matter it comes down to a choice of studying either economics or the history of economics.
BTW, i get what you mean on detailed sense. I would imagine most economists know Keynes well enough yet have never cracked open General Theory. I'm an interested layman and god knows I wouldn't try to read it any more than I'd read Hegel right now if i wanted a deeper understanding of Marx. Hey, there're only so many hours in a day.
Yes, I agree a philosophy scholar would do that but what about economists? And is it leisure for economists to read even a few of the classics or is it work related? It could be both I suppose or maybe anything's leisure that doesn't move the ball forward on the current project they're working on. Fair enough if that's the case.
BTW, is a quant a practitioner of applied economics? I do know the trading related work they do at least the popular perception of of the work they do.
So classical liberal is where it's at foundation wise for the field of economics? In case it's not obvious I have limited knowledge of Econ. My formal training in economics consists of Intro to Micro, Intro to Macro, and a course in Political Economy.
For what it's worth, I really enjoyed Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan, even though it may be considered a popular economics best seller. I though it offered a great introduction to a field I knew very little about.
An academic reading list (i.e. university course texts) will provide you a good theoretical foundation as to how economists interpret and model real economic issues. It's important to grasp the plethora of important economic concepts like diminishing returns, comparative advantage and concepts of market efficiency (among many others things) and how they apply within micro or macro economic issues.
With some foundational knowledge in place, a good economist then goes on to relax the underlying assumptions and look for analogues in the real world. This is where the popular reading list come in, often they take a deep dive in specific areas i.e. where traditional economic assumptions break down.
In short, the academic reading list gives you a framework to understand economics. The best seller list tempers that framework with real world exceptions, paradoxes and open questions.
It's a bit disappointing to see a real academic reading list so far down this comment page (I strongly recommend looking at oli5679 suggestions). I doubt HNers would suggest reading up on javascript as a good foundation for a computer science education. Yes, you can become a well rounded computer scientist by starting on javascript. But it's more important to have a grasp on core computer science ideas like algorithm design & analysis and automata.