Basic List of Books to Prepare Freshies for NUS Economics

Basic List of Books to Prepare Freshies for NUS Economics 

OK, this is going to be a very strange post, because basically it's a response to a request by someone who is going to enter NUS FASS this year. 

It's a very basic list of books to prepare freshies for NUS Economics. 

I hope this helps you, but the reality is that nothing actually really prepares you for the real mental toughness and intellectual rigour of studying at NUS, and especially studying Economics - which in the immortal words of some people I respect - is a subject that has "physics-envy" (and thus has a lot of mathematics in it), and is a subject that is a load of abstraction in university.

So having given a nice disclaimer which basically states that nothing actually really prepares you, here is a list that could potentially help you prepare for NUS Economics (or any bachelor of social science Economics in almost any university). 

Good luck! Do please note that this is the list that I myself have studied, read, and ... well regurgitated at some point or other. Good luck once again!

Stock & Watson, Introduction to Econometrics. 

(Honest to goodness, if this does not scare you off studying Economics, then clearly you are made of stern stuff.)

Robert Barro, Macroeconomics 

Abel & Bernanke & Croushore, Macroeconomics

Krugman & Obstfeld, International Economics: Theory and Policy

Pindyck & Rubinfeld, Microeconomics

Roger Backhouse, The Penguin History of Economics

Prentice-Hall, Mathematical Economics (or basically any mathematical economics textbook)

Roger Backhouse is very famous in the field of Economic History, which is my favourite subject. Full of interesting twists and turns, this is one of the best introductory books to understanding Economics as a discipline. Suffice to say that this book is purely for enjoyment and intellectual pleasure. This is because post-modern Economics as we know it is basically a mathematics course. There's a joke in this regard... then again, discretion is the better part of valour!

Also, you should consider reading - other than my blog - Mankiw's blog, and Dr Wong WK's blog. Yes, I'm biased: http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ecswong/wongweikang.htm 

Good luck, and all the best for your academic journey!

Hope this helps :)

Anything that interests me!

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis...

As promised, here I am blogging once again. I'll take this as an opportunity to share some of the strange things floating around in my head, as well as some rare nuggets of information or knowledge that might be useful to you some day (then again, no, not really). Once in a while I will write about NUS, USP, and university stuff again because that's what most of my readers like, since I started this blog when I was at university. That seems like a really long time ago!

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis

is in the next post, not this one! :)