The Naked Economist clothes his agenda in a mildly clever way:

When I was a kid, I remember being captivated by The Book of Lists. The title was appropriate, because it was, well, a book of lists — the American presidents, the world's longest rivers, the oldest living humans, and so on. It was a fun book, and even instructive in some ways.

Since I occasionally get queries from people looking for more information on economics, I thought it would be interesting to create my own list for economics.

He is right. His list is interesting. But I take his list and offer my own, here:

• My Favorite Economist: Gary Becker . . . Carl Menger. Wheelan gives some good reasons to admire Becker, but I can't help but put Menger on the top of the heap. Carl Menger's careful analysis allowed me to understand the leading economic concepts. Without Menger, I would not have quite grasped marginal utility. And Menger did this without using the term marginal utility! The term, after all, is a translation of Grenznutzen, coined by Menger's follower Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser.

Further, Menger placed economics in a broad context, and did not narrow it down. Wheelan admires Becker for taking economics out for a spin, applying it to families and crime and racial discrimination. Menger provided just a basic analysis, and put that rather Aristotelian analysis in the context of an evolutionary framework. Further, his leading conceptions, such as his marginalism, were not tightly wedded to unrealistic assumptions, such as perfect knowledge. Most of the great mistakes of 20th century economics he thus bypassed; many of the neceessary innovations of 20th century economics (such as monopolistic competition) appear, in a Mengerian context, to be half-steps back to his fine first course. That is, they are corrections that only go halfway to solving the problems caused by the undue influence of Marshall and Walras (especially the latter).

Many admirers of Menger prefer Ludwig von Mises. I do not. Mises strikes me as having added an unnecessary rigid element to the theory of human choice and action. Menger had a more fluid approach . . . or, at least, a more fluid approach is compatible with his explanations.

Menger's writings were not perfect. And they did not go as far as some of his competitors' and followers' work. But, as far as they went, they started the reader on the right track, and ushered the reader to fewer dead ends than any of the other marginalist revolutionaries.

• The Best Economics Writer: Milton Friedman . . . David D. Friedman. As an admirer of Milton Friedman's writings about economics and policy, and public advocacy, the idea of striking him off the list does seem strange. Stranger yet may be choosing his son, David, as a replacement. David is nowhere near as famous. But since reading his charming and provocative little book Machinery of Freedom, I've been a fan. His subsequent books are even better.

There could be many alternatives. I greatly admire Thomas Sowell, and have learned a lot from him. But I disagree with him enough, especially in his columns — particularly regarding foreign policy, in which he usually impresses me as something of a simpleton — to take away the prize.

The authors of Freakonomics are popular these days, as are some of their imitators. Apparently, the popularity of this book has overshadowed its precursors. We should remember, this sort of book is quite old hat in the field. I have in my collection an earlier attempt to popularize economics this way: Abortion, Baseball, and Weed. There are many others. David Friedman's The Hidden Order is the best example, and much better than Freakonomics.

Going back over the years, a number of writers like Wicksteed and William Smart come to mind as very good writers on economic theory, who were also, mainly, popularizers.

But, here I am, choosing David Friedman over the towering giant in the field, Frédéric Bastiat! What can I say about that?

As Stigler and Becker might respond: De gustibus non est disputandum.

• My Greatest Economics Frustration: The tendency to swim in schools. I confess, freely, that my favorite economists tend to be of the so-called Austrian variety, so called because of the origin of their school in Vienna. But a lot of good work has been done in the main stream of the science, that the tendency of Austrians to reject huge rivers of thought, out of hand, vexes me.

The narrowness of the Austrian stream is particularly frustrating. Almost no good work has been done within the school on the subject of externalities. Menger did not extend his theoretics of the general theory of the good to public goods, and the Austrians are belatedly trying to catch up, now. Unfortunately, reverence for Mises strikes me as stumbling block. Mises was just simply wrongheaded on this theory, and Austrians need to go back to Menger and develop a refined, process-oriented version of externality theory.

Unfortunately, this is not the only area where Austrian theory is deficient.

Worse yet, the habits of economists in the main stream are as blind to their own faults as Austrians are bigoted towards theirs.

• My Favorite Economics Blogger: Gregory Mankiw . . . Bryan Caplan. He's a non-Austrian who argues with Austrians as well as pushes the envelope of theory and explanation. EconLog, which Caplan shares with Arnold Kling (whom I also much admire), is a great blog.

• My Favorite Obscure Economics Concept: Seignorage . . . This is a toughy, since my favorite economic concepts are pretty obvious and central. My favorite obscure economics term is marginal vendibility (or marginal marketability), but that's just simply the demand/supply schedule repackaged by F. W. Taussig . . . a terminological coinage that never caught on. I like it because, with it, you can explain the formation of prices so much easier, as flowing from individual valuations.

So, today I'll go for another Taussig term: the penumbra. In his fine, and, alas, neglected essay, Is Market Price Determinate?, Taussig took on the standard, neoclassical equilibrium theory of price and compared it actual prices in actual markets, which seem much more fluid and chaotic. He suggested that price determination, because of incomplete and dispersed information and the fallibility of human expectations, did not fix on any one price in real-world markets. To the extent that we can talk about determination, all that can be determined is a range of prices.

I'm actually not stating his position with complete accuracy. Hey: this is a blog. If you want Taussig's essay, ask me; I might be able to send you a copy.

I find the Taussig Penumbra fascinating because it is an alternative way of looking at the most basic theory set of economics: supply, demand, and price formation. Rather than abandon determination theory entirely, in favor of a more Austrian formation approach, Taussig suggested thinking in terms of ranges instead of points. And, the more you think about it, the more economic theory veers into fuzzy logic and vague sets and the like.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Economics may shine a great deal of light on our world, but that doesn't mean there aren't shadows. The very light itself casts shadows.

• My Favorite Economics Book: The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers" by Robert Heilbroner . . . can I just say that I am utterly dumbfounded by Wheelan's choice, here? Heilbroner? Really? Egads.

My favorite economics book? Well, I should choose one by Menger or Friedman, no? Otherwise my whole selection would seem contradictory, a good example of preference falsification, no? (Preference falsification would be another candidate for obscure economic concept, though I'm not at all sure how obscure it is.)

But obviously, in lists such as these, one goes for variety. I won't.

• The Biggest Economics Charlatans: The supply-siders . . . advocates of the expansive welfare state. Let's get real, here. I've never seen a decent economic justification for taking money from the bulk of the population, sending it through state and federal capitals to be strained by politicians and bureaucrats and others of the functionary class, and then given back to the people in trickles. Welfare state advocates are among the least honest and most dense theorists I know. Repeatedly they attack free-market policies and low-tax regimens as trickle-down economics, and yet they're the ones who are most addicted to trickle effects. They want to put as much of the population on a trickle diet, from the state, which they then direct.

It just don't see the sense of it.

Marxists used to be the most obnoxious economics charlatans. But Marxism is dead, except on college campuses. The welfare state, on the other hand, is very much alive in govenment and politics around the globe, as well as in the economics profession. Supply siders? Sure, they're wrong, usually. But they've done far less harm than the advocates of unrestrained spending on social programs and pork.

The economists who align themselves with the Democratic Party are especially pushing charlatanism. Rather than insist on a few limited social programs, they give aid and comfort to unlimited spending. That's just simply what they do, because that's what Democratic politicians want, and a huge chunk of modern constituencies think they want, given their political options (which have been rigged for them).

It's disgusting in its dishonesty.

I'm not saying their economics work proper is dishonest. i'm saying their economic policy work is, to some degree. I could be wrong. But I doubt it.

• The Greatest Economic Challenge of Our Time: Reconciling the tradeoff between a decent safety net and the bad incentives that it creates. . . . Getting politicians and voters to confront the danger of just this tradeoff. The political system is rigged to encourage ever-increasing amounts of government intervention in the lives of its citizens. At its very best, the two-party system perennially frames the choice as a trade-off between one set of interventions and another. But neither set makes much sense, the whole system is rigged to . . . well, you get my drift. Somehow, we've got to get to a more constitutional outlook, where basic limits to political machinations get asserted, and trade-offs become a matter for private citizens as actors in communities and markets rather than as rent-seeking grifters in the political realm.

So that's my list.