I'm halfway through this new book by Joshua Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke and thoroughly appreciating it. I was planning to post when I'd finished but just found this very useful comment by Andrew Gelman, who has saved me the job.
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/%7Ecook/movabletype/archives/2009/02/mostly-harmless.html

Steven Durlauf, one of the editors of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, was kind enough to talk to me about this massive and impressive project. The 2008 edition (being updated though 2009 as well) has some 7,500 pages in the $2950/£1710 print edition, containing 1,872 articles or about six million words. The Dictionary is an update of the 1987 1st edition, itself a successor to R. H. Inglis Palgrave's original Dictionary of Political Economy (1894–9), and Henry Higgs's revised edition, Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy (1923–6). The spirit of the Dictionary is an overview of the whole of economic thought, and as Professor Durlauf explained, the task he and his co-editor Larry Blume faced was to retain the best of the earlier edition but at the same time identify how economics had evolved in a quarter of a century, in order to commission new articles and remove many older ones. This involved a lot of reading – as he said: “It was my last chance to go to grad school.” I'm sure the two of them had to be extremely widely read to even embark on a project like this, and clearly are even more so now.
They identified about 15 entirely new areas in economics, such as behavioural economics. And, like any discipline, there are some fashions as well. No doubt the rational expectations sections written in the mid-1980s look dated now. The task took the co-editors a day a week on average and they spend five years preparing the Dictionary. One of the features I like about the Dictionary (its website is http://www.dictionaryofeconomics.com/dictionary) is that it retains some classic 1987 articles and has commissioned alongside them some new ones on the same subject. Prof Durlauf gives as a good example Amartya Sen's original article on justice, and a survey article on new perspectives by Bertil Tungodden; or James Heckman writing an update on his own earlier article. Showing the evolution of approach that you get from successive survey articles is a great idea.
The Dictionary is clearly a mainly online resource at present although later there will be single volume paperback companions which collect articles on specific themes. So this is the reverse of the Princeton University Press strategy of moving from the physical volume to the online world later, which I wrote about a few days ago. Prof Durlauf says he hopes it will be a tool for graduate students or scholars to start researching and identifying issues. The online format means it should be very easy to integrate into teaching and very accessible for researchers. It looks a terrific resource to me, especially because of the quality of the contributor list, and the sample articles I've seen have (unsurprisingly) been excellent. My quibble is that it's aimed too much at the academic market and library subscriptions. Non-academic researchers working in consultancy firms (like me) or public policy economists might also benefit from this kind of tool, but you have to email the publisher to get a price quote. This is probably a good way to maximise producer surplus given a fixed demand curve but not a good way to grow the market, it strikes me. I wonder if there isn't scope to experiment with pricing strategies for the wider community of economists, given that the marginal cost of supplying them is next to zero?

In this New Year preview of the publishers' catalogues, it's the turn of the Oxford University Press's highlights. Writing about a new Encyclopedia and Dictionary as I am at the moment, it's right to point out that the OUP has a large number of reference guides and companions. These are different kinds of animal, with a deeper focus on narrower areas of the subject. There's a new Handbook of Rational and Social Choice just out, and this month the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality. A related title out in May is Debates in the Measurement of Global Poverty, edited by Anand, Segal and Stiglitz. April brings the Oxford Handbook of Banking. Still on the reference theme, the OUP's Very Short Guides are obviously very successful, although I have a few and am never sure who would either read them through (because they're not narratives) or refer to them (because they are very short – no doubt this is the right length for the short attention span generation). I can't spot any forthcoming economics titles in this series, however.
Other new titles include two volumes emerging from the IFS's Mirrlees Review on 21st century tax, Tax By Design and Dimensions of Tax Design; Industrial Policy and Development, edited by Giovanni Dosi and Mario Cimoli; Business in Britain in the 20th Century, edited by Richard Coopey and Peter Lyth; and several on health economics due in the spring and summer. There's also a Festschrift in honour of the marvellous econometrician David Hendry, The Methodology and Practice of Econometrics, edited by Jennifer Castle and Neil Shephard, due in June. This is another form of book I very much enjoy – the format often seems to liberate the contributors to think around a subject quite creatively. I wonder what others think about this?
Finally, it's well worth flagging up quite a few new or forthcoming paperback editions, all I think well worth picking up now if you haven't read them already: Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion; Roger Ridell's Does Foreign Aid Really Work; William Easterly's White Man's Burden; Robert Shiller's Macro Markets; Avner Offer's The Challenge of Affluence; the late Andrew Glyn's Capitalism Unleashed; China, Fragile Superpower by Susan Shirk; Bernard Van Praag and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell's Happiness Quantified; and Ranald Michie's The Global Securities Market. (The last two of these rather less aimed at the general audience.)
And finally, finally, I'd like to flag up my friend Ed Glaeser's excellent Lindahl Lectures, Cities, Agglomeration and Spatial Equilibrium, even though it was out last July and so doesn't strictly qualify as new.
Back to the reference theme later today when I speak to the editors of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.