The spring publishers' catalogues are arriving, so here's a preview of what new titles will be out during the next few months. I'll start with Princeton University Press, and will follow up with others during the next week or so.
There's bound to be a lot of interest in Animal Spirits by George (market for lemons) Akerlof and Robert (irrational exuberance) Shiller, which sounds like it could catch the spirit of the times. They promise a “robust, behaviourally-informed Keynesianism”. It's out in March. June will bring Portfolios of the Poor by Daryl Collins and others, which sounds fascinating – it describes how poor people live on less than $2 a day, and the authors all have extensive field experience. Also in June a book about the economics of pirates (the 18th century kind, not the Somali oil-tanker grabbing kind), The Invisible Hook by Peter T Leeson. Stefan Szymanski has Playbooks and Checkbooks on sport economics out in May. For those interested in the US education system and its funding, there is Schoolhouses, Courthouses and Statehouses by Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth in July. And what looks like a landmark project, the Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy edited by Kenneth Reinert and Ramkishen Rajan, published this month.
Some recent titles are new in paperback: Greg Clark's A Farewell to Alms (history and development); Dani Rodrik's One Economics, Many Recipes (one size doesn't fit all in development); The Making of an Economist, Redux by David Colander (economics is becoming less remote from real life, honest); Code Red by David Dranove on the economics of healthcare; The Great Contraction by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz (a timely reissue of their 1965 text on the Great Depression). And many others of interest.
It looks a strong list to me, even allowing for the fact that PUP has been wise enough to publish my own The Soulful Science (also out in a recent paperback). The recent strengths have been in the arease of development, institutions, and behavioural economics, I guess, but it's pretty wide-ranging. The catalogue is online at http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/econ09text.pdf
I'll follow up with some others this week – MIT Press, Edward Elgar and Routledge already to hand so they'll be next, and I'll track down catalogues from the other university presses with strong economics lists. Without doing a detailed comparison of past and present catalogues, this is purely impressionistic, but I do think we're blessed with a very fruitful economics publishing scene at present, from the highbrow academic end of the spectrum all the way through to recent pop paperback hits thanks to stars like Tim Harford, Steven Levitt etc. This reinforces me in my view that the subject itself is going from strength to strength at the moment. Hooray!