One reason to read textbooks when you want nonfiction is they have high investment costs & small audiences gatekept by professors. While not a guarantee of quality, it does mean for rigorous subjects like economics and science you avoid the low-info-but-well-articulated clunkers
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde26.7. klo 22.12
What happens when your understanding of economic history comes from a bestseller picked up at an airport bookstore? You end up knowing as much about economic development as you would about tactical armor deployment from watching a WWII documentary on the History Channel. No, tariffs did not make American manufacturing great in the 19th century. Read: by Alexander Klein and Christopher M. Meissner.
Of course, this winnowing of the chaff breaks down when the gatekeepers (professors teaching a course) become low quality. Humanities and softer social sciences especially suffer. I would actually say (pre-WWII) historians & economists remain less infected, though!
Coming from an archaeology background, 101-level textbooks are far superior to the hyper specialized books seeking to look at [culture/time] through some sort of “lens”
1,82K