Thanks very much for this well-thought out thesis. Sometimes it feels like I'm taking crazy pills whilst reading the Internet, and this brought back a much needed dose of sanity to my corner of reality. Interested in any additional reading material along these lines of thinking, if you care to list any.
The single best economic resource I can recommend myself is the various Federal Reserve datasets, especially the St. Louis FRED tables[1]. A lot of my own OCD and generalized anxiety has been channeled into reviewing those on the regular, if only to understand my own economic risks and placate anxieties about things like employment or housing. Seriously, the fact those datasets are free blows my mind.
Admittedly I'm a bit weird in that I don't have a whole lot of books to recommend, because I'm often just reading and interpreting datasets or whitepapers instead. Books, while immensely useful and generally recommended as the best way to communicate complex information (seriously, read more books), are also colored with bias and opinion that can be difficult to untangle from actual fact in the moment, especially when they're agreeing with your own prejudices or biases. It's why I always try to approach what I'm reading with a giant bowl of salt, so I'm not as easily taken in by good writing or flimsy arguments (which has been super handy for my current read, Strauss and Howe's "The Fourth Turning"; no wonder cryptofascists hold this thing up like a Bible).
Basically, consume more data, try to identify correlating patterns, and build your own conclusions based on that data. Read more books in general (any book on systems analysis - economic, historical, logistical, technical, whatever - is going to be a great starting point and build out foundational reasoning), but always ask yourself what their bias/angle might be in the narrative.
And for what it's worth, next on my economic reading list is "Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas Piketty, a book that's seemingly either the height of genius written by a brilliant visionary, or propaganda garbage trumpeted by a Frenchman cosplaying as an economist, depending on the critic in question. It's come up a lot as a reference in some other books I've read, so I figured I'd challenge myself and see what new info I can grep from it.
