Publishers were out in force at the recent annual meeting of the American Economic Association, so it was a good opportunity for me to gather up the Spring 2011 catalogues. There are so many promising books coming up that I'm going to post in two parts.

I'm sure readers will forgive me for starting with Princeton University Press and my own forthcoming book The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters, out next month. Others that look appealing are: Blind Spots: How We Fail to Do What's Right by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel (business ethics and decision making); Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk and the Role of the State by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg (financial markets and capital allocation); Collaborative Governance by John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser (how private and public sectors can work together especially when money is tight); and A Co-operative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (a cross-disciplinary study of co-operative behaviour).

The themes evident here – markets and their misbehaviour, improving decision-making and governance, and big-picture books about society – are also demonstrated in some of the other spring lists. Harvard University Press is highlighting a number of new books on these various themes. There's The Illusion of Free Markets by Bernard Harcourt; The Crisis of Neoliberalism by Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy; and Maynard's Revenge: The Collapse of Modern Macroeconomics by Lance Taylor – spot the pattern in these three! I also like the look of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective edited by Niall Ferguson and others; and Capitalizing on Crisis by Greta Krippner, an account of the US political origins of the financial crisis.

Oxford University Press has a focus on the international. Out this month is Barry Eichengreen's Exorbitant Privilege, looking at the role of the dollar.  I'm also going to be looking at The Dragon's Gift by Deborah Brautigam – high time we had a systematic study like this of China's investments in the continent.

From the University of Pennsylvania Press an edited volume on the role played by weak corporate governance in the crisis – an overlooked contributory factor – Corporate Governance Failures edited by James Hawley and others. There's also Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio and the Politics of the New Media by Michael Stamm, which looks of great interest to me wearing my BBC Trustee hat. And, not an economics book but looking incredibly timely, post-Tucson shootings, Public Discourse in America edited by Judith Rodin and Stephen Steinberg.

Turning from the university presses to general publishers, just out – and already widely reviewed (see for example today's Observer review by Paul Collier) is Dambisa Moyo's How the West Was Lost (Penguin/Allen Lane). I'd like to read that alongside Ian Morris's Why The West Rules for Now (Profile). One of the highlights of the late spring will be Tim Harford's new book Adapt, out in May in the US (Farrar Straus and Giroux) and June in the UK (Little Brown) – there is a taste of one chapter available on Tim's website. Also eagerly awaited (from Norton) is Dani Rodrik's The Globalization Paradox.

In Part 2, to follow, MIT Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Wiley, Cambridge University Press and Yale University Press.