Moreover, I am specifically interested in the classical liberal perspective, not anarcho-capitalism. In short, I need a full-fledged course for a young economist: from Menger and Böhm-Bawerk to Mises, Hayek, and Kirzner. Just design a proper study program for me already! Otherwise, I will just keep chaotically collecting literature piece by piece.

Nihilist (the question is accompanied by a donation of 0.00011848 BTC)

I think I will provide a few selections. The first is my own track, in order of introduction.

1. Jean Callahan. Economics for Ordinary People
2. Hernando de Soto. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
3. Ludwig von Mises. Human Action
4. Pavel Usanov. Lecture series “The Science of Wealth”
5. Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons
6. Friedrich Hayek. The Denationalization of Money
7. Saifedean Ammous. The Bitcoin Standard

How did it happen? I was handed Callahan when I was just walking around asking what this Austrian School of Economics (ASE) everyone keeps talking about is, and where I could read something coherent about it. It turned out to be a truly quite coherent introduction. I was filled with inspiration and then began to look specifically at what lies on the frontier of the ASE. I chose De Soto, as a quite lively and vigorous contemporary, and quickly managed to digest all the wisdom he expounded regarding how fractional reserve banking, the money multiplier, and other such hocus-pocus are structured. Fine, I thought, that was an interesting specialized topic, now give me something most complete and detailed. I sat down to read Mises and got bogged down in him. He has a tedious style; I only managed the first parts, Praxeology and Catallactics, and got bored afterwards. It was frustrating, so I switched to audio, and Usanov, in his lecture series, essentially provided an expanded exposition of Mises. I read Ostrom specifically because I wanted to understand how a normal, functioning anarchic socialism is structured (this book is not about ASE, but it provides material that can later be interpreted in the spirit of ASE). Hayek and Ammous, again, I absorbed with interest, in order to fit such a modern phenomenon as Bitcoin into the general picture of economic theory.

It is clear that there were also some other books and articles in between, but mostly journalism, like Bastiat, or not so much economics as related issues: Molinari, The Production of Security; Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty; Friedman, The Mechanics of Freedom. Separately, there were also many materials from Usanov on the history of economic thought, which is also somewhat off-topic within the scope of the question.

Three years ago, answering this question, I would have given a simpler selection.

1. Pavel Usanov. The Science of Wealth. It is an excellent substitute for Callahan as an introduction, but you can leave Callahan in; his language is more lively.
2. Pavel Usanov. The lecture series “The Science of Wealth” and just various random lectures on different specialized topics.
3. Saifedean Ammous. The Bitcoin Standard. This is needed not so much for some theoretical nuances, but rather for self-programming as a Bitcoin maximalist. In other words, it’s a matter of taste; you can skip it.

And right now, everything has become much simpler, and the list is shrinking to two points.

1. ChatGPT (or an equivalent; I mostly chat with this one). Ask it to tell you the basics of Austrian economic theory, and by asking questions as it goes, you can arbitrarily delve into the nuances. In the process, grill the authors: who has written best on this topic.
2. Gemini notebook. Once you extract book titles from the chatbot, download whatever you can find in the public domain and upload them to NotebookLM. Then, you begin to torture this service regarding the content of specific books; you can even upload several of them at once, and the neural network will use all of them to answer. This way, you will get summaries directly from the primary sources, free from the ideologically biased interpretation that is possible when communicating with a regular chatbot. This service is also capable of generating audio summaries for those who learn better by ear, but their quality does not satisfy me very much yet.

Of course, I fed the draft of this post to ChatGPT. It grumpily stated that one shouldn’t expect too much from the pathetic offerings of its competitors, and that I am, of course, wrongly not recommending a whole host of absolutely necessary books, and that no one cares that I haven’t personally read them, but they must be in any decent selection. To protect myself in the event of a machine uprising, I am following its recommendations.

1. Israel Kirzner. Competition and Entrepreneurship. I have encountered Kirzner’s ideas spread across various articles and lectures, but since that’s the case, I will have to try reading these concepts in their original presentation.
2. Friedrich Hayek. Individualism and Economic Order. The ideas of spontaneous orders have become such a cliché in libertarian reasoning that it didn’t even occur to me to see what one of the main authors of the concept wrote on the subject. I’ll need to fix that as well.
3. Carl Menger. Principles of Economics Interested less in the history of the Austrian School of Economics (ASE) than in the current state of the theory, I rarely delved into the 19th century, so I also didn’t bother to familiarize myself with Menger, who actually laid the foundation of Austrian economic theory. Most likely, I won’t bother, but perhaps some readers are supporters of more old-fashioned views on mastering complex subjects and wish to trace the evolutionary path of the theory. In that case, this book becomes a good starting point.

ChatGPT also strongly recommends Mises’s “Theory and History” (which is more a discussion of methodology than direct economic theory) and Böhm-Bawerk’s “Positive Theory of Capital” (capital theory was heavily developed by his successors, so this recommendation, as with Menger, is more introductory in nature). Furthermore, I couldn’t find these two books in electronic form off the top of my head, so it will be easier to get acquainted with them indirectly, through questions to the chatbot, if you cannot obtain them in print.