What's a good left leaning econ 101 book?

I am working on "Naked Economics" which is good but it's fairly right leaning. What's a good left leaning book to balance that out?

Thanks

Classic

Man was a genius.

The classic is by Adam Smith. I think Keynes classic is THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST AND MONEY

Keynes wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

Wealth of Nations is a Conservative (in the true sense, not GOP) Econ Classic

All thinkers err - just ask any computer!

The question should not be does a theory lean left or right, but is it supported by the facts.

is in general a politically-motivated pseudo-science, as are most "sciences" of human behavior, which is very poorly understood. Just the fact that the laughable Laffer curve would even be mentioned in respectable society says everything that needs to be said about the discipline.

And more to the point, in a field whose prescriptions are based on what we find to be most morally desirable (fairness, equality, economic growth, etc.), it's completely legitimate to ask for a left-leaning treatment, a treatment that shares our values. And it seems to me like the OP is asking for balance so that an independent judgement can be formed.

is bottom-up agent-based computer market simulation. Depending on the sophistication of the model, it does a pretty job of mimicking economic behavior at all levels. Even though physicists use this modeling approach all the time, economists don't like it because they prefer "clean mathematical theories", even though their clean mathematical theories are utterly useless in predicting anything about the behavior of the economy.

They prefer elegant but wrong to messy but right any day. That's why economists are among the stupidest humans on the planet.

by Samuel Bowles, Richard Edwards, and Frank Roosevelt was an OK intro-level left-leaning treatment of economics I read a few years ago. The version I pulled up on Amazon seems to be revised quite a bit, and I know Samuel Bowles (who considered himself a Marxian economist and a market socialist back in the day) has moved somewhat to the right over the years (though probably still to the left of the Democratic Party). So I don't know if this book would meet your requirements.

I thought it so nice, I read it twice.

http://www.amazon.com/Divine-Right-Capital-Dethroning-Aristocracy/dp/1576751252

...with Heilbronner's The Worldly Philosophers. I also recommend Kenneth Lux's Adam Smith's Mistake: How a Moral Philosopher Invented Economics and Ended Morality, or Lutz and Lux's Humanistic Economics: The New Challenge.

There are no really new ideas in economics, which is why returning to its roots is a good place to start.

As political economy goes it is an easy and thoughtful read.

Consider Marx' Labor Value Theory

Just curious.

Say I am a buggy whip maker. In fact, lets say I am a really good buggy whip maker. The time it takes me to make a buggy whip is 5 hours, lets just say. 5 hours x $10 per hour means I should charge $50 + materials.

Yet there is barely any demand for a buggy whip, and by Labor Value Theory, as a buggy whip maker I am entitled to that $50 + materials whether or not anyone buys the buggy whip.

Don't get me wrong, I think Karl Marx was a genius, and in many other ways (Conflict Theory, Dialectical Materialism) he was way ahead of the curve.

But to put Das Kapital into pracice means repeating the Great Leap Forward, which killed millions.

...you do a sound bite dismissal of Marx as wrong on "so many levels", you might want to try to understand him at the simplest and most fundamental level. Your example is completely wrong on "many levels", and this in the first 50 pages of Capital.

The basis of the labor theory of value is that the usefulness or the underlying demand for a commodity (its "use value") is completely abstracted away from its "exchange value", or the quantity in which it exchanges with other commodities. Use value only counts as a precondition for exchange. If there is no demand for your buggy whips, then they command no exchange value at all and cease to be commodities - much as reactionary 1970s economics textbooks or Dodge SUVs might cease to be sold in the present.

Next, whether you are a "really good" whip maker or not is entirely immaterial to Marx. The kind of labor which underlies exchange value is abstract labor considered as a social average. Finally, there is no "entitlement" anywhere in Capital. It is entirely about how things work and not about how things should work. The theory that workers should be paid the full value of what they produce is pre-Marxian.

Your "great leap" to the "Great Leap Forward" here is indecipherable. There is such a distance that it mirrors the butterfly in Central Park and the hurricane in the Gulf. It will take far greater explanation to establish connection, let alone, causality.

Instead, let's "leap" a much smaller distance. In what you are attempting to "refute", there is a near-perfect continuum between Karl Marx and David Ricardo, who in turn is a seamless continuation of Adam Smith. In a phrase, you are "refuting" Classical Economics. You picked the wrong year. This year, everyone from Paulson to Bush to Wall Street to Obama's Economic Team are Keynesians again. There is a reason why people like Hayek hated Keynes with a passion comparable to, and sometimes exceeding, Karl Marx. Keynes represents a return to classical economic theory (Smith, Ricardo, and yes, Karl Marx) and, quite aside from any of his policy preferences, it is in a fundamental way born of an understanding of "crisis" in a form nearly identical to old man Marx.

You had better call Paulson or Krugman fast... they obviously don't get the "many levels".

It's as good a basic survey of the evolution of modern economics as anyone's come up with yet. I don't think it leans left or right, though. More of a chronicle than a commentary, IIRC.

helpfully,
Bright

I haven't read it.