Grace Tsiang's Home Page

Grace Tsiang
Senior Lecturer/Co-Director, Undergraduate Economics Program
Department of Economics, University of Chicago
Appointments: Click here to email Joanna Vlahos, Rosenwald 229, 834-6672.
        Economics Majors:
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Useful links:
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Eclectic Readings for Undergraduates                     U of C Library Catalog
Literacy & Numeracy: Two essential references for undergraduates.
           G. Polya. How to Solve It; A New Aspect of Mathematical Method 2nd ed. Princeton. 1988. (First issued 1945.)
                If anyone tells you "Gee, you need to learn how to write a proof." or "You should learn how to solve problems" GET THIS BOOK.
           Joseph M. Williams. Style; Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 5th ed. Addison-Wesley. 1997.
                Take Little Red School House and learn how to edit your writing. If you can't get in, or even if you do, GET THIS BOOK.
Classics: readings from the foundations in social and political thought. (If you missed any of these in SS Core, find these in Harper Library.)
            Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan. edit by Richard Flathman & D. Johnston, Norton. New York 1997.
            John Locke. 2 Treatises on Government. ed. by Peter Laslett.
            John Stuart Mill. On Liberty, and other essays / John Stuart Mill ; edited with an introduction by John Gray. Oxford U. Press. 1991.
            Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto. (Building utopia, predicated on somewhat different view of human nature than Hobbes....)
Some Classics in Economics.
            Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.(original imprint 1776). See especially Book I & II.
            John R. Hicks. Value and Capital. (1st imprint 1939) Oxford U. Press. 1974. An elegant & lucid presentation of basic microeconomics.
Wider horizons:
           Charles MacKay. Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds. 1841.
           William H. McNeill. Plagues and Peoples. Anchor Books. 1998. (Better than the more recent "Guns, Germs, and Steel." )
           Mark Kurlansky. Cod; A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World. Penguin Books 1997.
                (Negative externalities on the Outer Banks....plus delicious recipes for dried cod=bacalao: major protein source pre-refrigerator)
           Ruth S.Cowan. More work for mother: the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave
                  New York : Basic Books, c1983. (Labor-saving technological change, but ever-expanding scope of household activities...)
Preview of graduate-level texts in economics:
           Nancy Stokey and Robert Lucas. Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics.
           David M.Kreps. Notes on the theory of choice. Westview Press 1988. **FUTURECONGRADS take note**
                (Entertaining preview of graduate-level theory of choice. Do YOU believe in the Savage axioms? )
           Campbell, Lo, and McKinley. The Econometrics of Financial Markets.
           Darrell Duffie. Security Markets; Stochastic Models. Academic Press.
           William Greene. Econometric Analysis. Prentice Hall.
Chicago: Have you ever wondered about the historical economic development of this ex-swamp?
            William Cronon. Nature's Metropolis. Norton.
            Robin Einhorn. Property Rules. U of C Press.

"Nature" Quiz for Hyde Park: 1_What smells very bad on 58th Street every autumn, just northeast of the Oriental Institute? 2.What high-velocity airborne pigeon-eating predators are beginning to populate Chicago's urban landscape? 3. What alien creature colonizing the lakefront of Hyde Park had the blessing of Mayor Harold Washington? 4. If you swam from the rocks at the south edge of The Point to the first pier and back, how far would you have gone?

For dinosaur lovers, here is a great photo of the tracks unearthed from the red sandstone of SW Utah. Photo: R.G. Hansen of St. George, Utah.

Answers to quiz: 1. The fruit of the female gingko tree. (Usually the Park District tries to plant the male trees that have no smelly fruit.) 2. Small raptors (Cooper's hawks?) now nest in Illinois and can knock pigeons out of the air by diving at them from above.. 3. Harold Washington, while Mayor, said he liked the bright green parakeets colonizing the trees north of the Del Prado apartments where he lived. Those trees have since fallen down, but the parakeets live on. 4. From the Point to the first pier south of 57th Street Beach is roughly 1 mile.