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The books you MUST read before applying as an Economics major and pursue the field:

1) Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”:

This is the base. But before you start reading it, I’d recommend you to pick a couple of principles of macroeconomics and microeconomics materials and get the foundation. Adam Smith, in this work, deals with the base of economics as we know it today, discussing concepts such as supply and demand, how they influence each other, specialization of labor, and inflation. The discussion is very enriched, thereby allowing you to perceive and not merely understand.

2) Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”:

This is the classic on behavioral economics. It explores how intuition (system 1 as he refers to it) and slow, analytical thinking (system to as he refers to it) influence our decision making. The book is backed up by explicit research and plentiful examples.

3) Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”:

This book, as I understand it, explores “causation and correlation”. It shows how seemingly insignificant events caused major success stories, but the causes of these successes are not usually attributed to those seemingly insignificant events because of their invisibility. It teaches you to look at problems through another lens.

4) Stephen Dubner’s “Freakonomics”:

It applies the same reasoning as the Outliers, but it deals more with socio-economic problems, and how they take roots in what is fairly hidden.

Once you read these and gain a basic understanding of economics as a science, you can move on to read more advanced literature such as Communist Manifesto, Why Nations Fail, the Republic, and the like. Yes, these works of literature deal more with politics, but there’s a fair amount of overlap with economics.

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