This week I spent a couple of days at the Global Economic Symposium in Ploen, Schleswig-Holstein, a thinking person's Davos. Although the GES has a focus on delivering practical recommendations that can be put into action by someone – governments, companies – its ratio of academics to business people is higher than at the better-known World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort, where bankers and executives get together to schmooze each January. This made it a far more interesting event than Davos, which from my brief experience there seemed to treat the academics as entertainment. a break from the serious business of deal-making and networking. Fittingly, many of the participants at the GES talked about the books they were reading (I think an impressive number of them had written books too). Here are the ones I heard mentioned most often:

Animal Spirits by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller had its own well-attended special session at which the authors spoke about their book and the financial crisis. It's been reviewed on this blog.

Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice was singled out by Trevor Manuel, the thoughtful former finance minister of South Africa. I've reviewed it here.

Michael Mack CEO of Syngenta cited Tom Standage's latest book, An Edible History of Humanity.

Misha Glenny was there in a session on failed states and spoke about his book McMafia, which is a terrific piece of reportage on the globalization of crime.

I was moderating a session on 'knowledge-creation regimes' and had been reading James Boyle's The Public Domain in preparation. A review will follow. Suzanne Scotchmer, professor of economics, law and public policy at Berkeley and author of Innovation and Incentives used the panel to argue for international negotiation on what forms of knowledge should form a global public domain and be kept out of the international arms race towards ever-tougher (and probably ever-less enforcable) protection of IP via ludicrous patents and copyright terms. Hear, hear. I hope it's one of the ideas the GES follows up.

Finally, my relaxation on the plane home was Mohammed Hanif's Case of Exploding Mangoes, a brilliant novel about the Pakistan of General Zia and the roots of the fundamentalist violence in Afghanistant which haunts us still.