Time for a first round up of new and forthcoming titles. Unsurprisingly, the journalists and politicians have plenty of titles hot off the presses. Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable's The Storm is already published, and also was reviewed in the Economist and the Guardian. Two by journalists: Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed by BBC Newsnight's Paul Mason is out very soon, as is Gillian Tett of the FT's Fool's Gold. Martin Wolf's Fixing Global Finance is another recent book by an eminent FT writer. The BBC's excellent Hugh Pym and co-author Nick Kochan have What Happened? And Other Questions Everyone is Asking About the Credit Crunch.

From the academic world, Robert Shiller's The Subprime Solution is excellent. Also illuminating about the origins of the crisis is Inside the Fed Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke, by Stephen Axilrod.

More practically oriented, by the highly regarded John Calverley of Standard Chartered, is When Bubbles Burst: Surviving the Financial Fallout. One I haven't looked at but has a promising title is The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles and the Efficient Markets Fallacy by George Cooper. I've also read good things about Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles Morris but again haven't read it myself yet.

Loads more possibilities. An Amazon search on 'credit crunch' returns 93 titles including the Credit Crunch Cookbook. And no doubt loads more to come.

As it's a long holiday weekend here in the UK, I relaxed with a terrific mystery set in Victorian London, featuring Joseph Bazalgette, Charles Darwin, Charles Babbage, Florence Nightingale and above all the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel (just pipped at the post by Winston Churchill in a 2002 BBC vote for the Greatest Britons). The book is Tony Pollard's  The Minutes of the Lazarus Club.  The hero is a surgeon, and the book has all the naturalism about dissections and body parts one might expect from an author who runs the University of Glasgow's Centre for Battlefield Archaeology. It's a page turner too and ideal for others who, like me, have a passion for the technological surge of the Victorian era, the difference engines, steam engines, railways and not forgetting the first London sewerage system.

It set me pondering about the way the Victorians achieved a combination of private gain and public achievement in a manner which was chaotic and disruptive at the time but, from our perspective, appears incredibly robust. The past quarter century has profoundly failed to bring about a happy union between private and public domains, and it strikes me as an urgent and serious challenge now. How should we organize our societies for the greatest mutual benefit? We can't even create a robust sense of public domain in the online world, never mind the material. Yet you only have to look at a superb Victorian building like Manchester's Town Hall, as I did on Monday, to realize that when private and public interests can be aligned, anything is possible.

This new book by the origins of the Euro by one of its intellectual architects, the ECB board member and formerly Bundesbank chief economist, has been favourably reviewed by Oliver Kamm of the Times; it's a review which is in the new issue of The Business Economist, the journal of the SBE. Subscribers will find a lively batch of reviews in there. Non-subscribers will have to wait three months before they go freely online, but I'll post the link when they do.

The time is obviously ripe for assessment of the single currency: the political economy of the Euro is the subject of another new book by David Marsh. This will be reviewed in a future edition of The Business Economist.

There is a positive review of Economics 2.0 by Norbert Haring and Olaf Storbeck  in Chris Dillow's always-interesting Stumbling and Mumbling blog. I was hoping to get son no.1, who is heading off to university in October to read economics, to write a review of it for me, but he has other priorities (exams, driving lessons, arranging his summer holidays, playing World of Warcraft etc….).

It's taken me a few weeks to work through Joshua Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion. Although econometrics was one of my specialisms in graduate school, a million or so years ago, no econometrics text was going to be a light read. But I must say this one came quite close. I'd recommend it to the entire range of empirical economists, from those still in training to those who, like me, have only a hazy memory of statistical theory and stick to our tried and tested methods of estimation. For although it's by no means a comprehensive treatment of econometrics – for example, you'd certainly want to supplement it with Hendry-style time series methods – it is an excellent guide to how to do basic regression/IV/panel data estimation really well. In particular, it demonstrates through many examples how to bring about a happy marriage between one's underlying model and the data which might or might not confirm the researcher's hypotheses. There is a strong emphasis on clarity of thought about how to approach testing a model, including the fact that tests of causal relationships imply a counterfactual world, and about what estimation strategies will allow that hypothesis to be tested rigorously. Both statistical significance and economic significance are taken into account. All the regression results presented are discussed not only in terms of their associated statistics but also – and how rarely one sees this – in terms of what the size of the coefficients indicates and whether the results are meaningful. I think the authors perhaps over-claim for the range of estimation problems that can be addressed in the way they set out, but this is a minor quiblle – especially as they include some jokes. Funny jokes, not just anoraks' jokes!

For people like me who defend economics against its legions of critics in the public debate, it is a constant worry and embarrassment that our subject is marred by so much very poor quality empirical work. Here is a very accessible book (relatively speaking, anyway) which can perhaps make some inroads into the harmful econometrics practised pretty widely by the profession. I also worry that many of us as we age fail to keep up with the econometric work done by younger colleagues; but just as senior bankers really should have made sure they understood CDOs and SIVs, we really should understand the technical basis for the empirical results we read about. Finally, it's a very reasonably priced trade paperback. No excuses!

The book was also usefully and favourably reviewed by Andrew Gelman, who writes an excellent statistics blog.