The day after I posted about pop economics books, I spotted a snippet in the Guardian Review about a new book on what's awful about economics. It's Economyths by David Orrell. Alongside the boom in pop economics publishing, there's an echoing wave of books about the failings of the subject. Another recent entrant is Yves Smith's Econned and apparently John Quiggin has a book called Zombie Economics coming out. It's only fair to point out that pop economics has its counterpart.

Like the pro-economics genre, this counterpart 'anti' genre is long-standing and has the good, the bad and the ugly. Under the 'good' heading I'd count Paul Ormerod's Butterfly Economics and The Death of Economics. He is a terrific economist who is heterodox rather than mainstream – but nevertheless a believer in modelling and the application of the scientific method to the economy. Also anything by Deirdre McCloskey but especially How to be Human, Though an Economist – a new one, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, is due out in the Fall and will be a must-read.  And Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan – Taleb just hates economics, full stop, but although he can't see any merits in us, it doesn't stop us seeing merit in his approach to probability.

In a somewhat different category but also worthy of respect are books which worry about the cultural and social effects of market economies – such as John Ruskin's Unto This Last, Kary Polanyi's The Great Transformation, or more recently Richard Sennett's work.

I haven't read any of these new books so can't comment on which category
they fall into. But there's a lot of 'bad' anti-economics around, bad because it almost always attacks a caricature version of the subject.  I'd list here titles like some of the books by Robert Heilbroner and George Brockway's The End of Economic Man.

As for the 'ugly', here I put heterodox economists with a chip on their shoulder and a writing style corrupted by over-exposure to critical theory and sociology. My least favourite ever is Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams, closely followed by Tony Lawson's Economics and Reality.

So economists should read the first group, dip into the second to see what myths about economics are currently doing the rounds, and ignore the third.