It's the season for them – the books business depends more heavily than most branches of the retail trade on shopping in the run-up to Christmas. Today brought one from the Financial Times and one from The Guardian. No doubt others too – suggestions and links welcome. But those were the newspapers on my kitchen table this morning.

The Great Trade Collapse is a new ebook published today by VoxEU/CEPR, ahead of Monday's ministerial meeting at the WTO. It's edited by the wonderful Richard Baldwin, so although I've not read more than the introductory chapter yet, I'm confident it will be full of authoritative wisdom. The title refers of course to the fact that the drop in world trade volumes in this recession has topped even the decline in the Great Depression. As the intro puts it: “World trade experienced a sudden, severe and synchronised collapse in
late 2008 – the sharpest in recorded history and deepest since WWII.”

However, the detail is even more interesting than the headline. The volume analyses the way the creation of global supply chains has led to the most synchronous collapse in different categories of trade ever recorded and points the way towards understanding the implications of the extraordinary international division of labour in the globalization of the late 1980s and 1990s. The punchline is that domestic incomes no longer have their old decisive role in explaining trade patterns. What's more, there's no evidence at all that the recession is leading to any retreat from the global pattern of production. We are truly globalized.

The download is free – worth it for the charts in the intro alone, and clearly stuffed with really interesting research. Almost certainly more worthwhile than the WTO ministerial next week will be.

It's a temptation, having read so many reviews of Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, to reply to the reviews rather than giving my own views. And most of them have focussed on the controversial chapter on climate change, which critics have interpreted as a claim that there are some easy technological fixes. I'm going to resist the temptation and leave a few comments about that chapter until the end of my review.

My other difficulty in reviewing Superfreakonomics is that I was teased, entirely fairly, for criticizing Freakonomics for its glibness when I'd published myself a book called Sex, Drugs and Economics which had been massively less successful commercially. Dare I risk once again the charge of sour grapes?

Well, my reaction to this follow-up isn't entirely negative. It's enjoyable to read, perfect for Tube journeys. There are some extremely interesting parts – more on these below.

Having said this, I don't think there's very much economics at all in Superfreakonomics. Levitt and Dubner claim that it's about micro, not macro. It isn't really. It's about empirical social science but there's little overlap with the domain of economics, which is choice about the allocation of resources and activity. Although I'm usually all for economic imperialism, Levitt and Dubner stray too far for me, and head off into the same kind of territory that Malcolm Gladwell patrols in books such as Outliers and The Tipping Point, or Sunstein and Thaler in Nudge. (And why not? Sales figures suggest there's a large public appetite for it.)

The early chapters are closer to economic decision making, and the first tries to draw readers in with the economics of prostitution. It falls between two stools, I think, being neither a polished piece of journalism nor a clear economic analysis. (My first chapter in Sex, Drugs and Economics does the latter job better, I think, though they do have great data from the Chicago streets – I will post my chapter as soon as I'm able so readers can make their own assessment.) The first is the weakest chapter of the book by far, and the second is also all over the place in terms of its structure. I think it's trying to use statistics on mortality and the risk of death to make some points about how to interpret evidence, but that's my retrospective structure superimposed on the text.

The second half of the book is substantially better and more interesting. The terrain is decision-making in the face of an array of imperfect data and the need to structure incentives in order to change people's behavior. This is a fascinating subject and the examples given here are very telling. Many of the examples are medical, and so overlap with Atul Gawande's wonderful book Better. Improving outcomes in areas such as health not only requires the scientific breakthrough which enables identification of the causes of a problem – incidence of puerperal fever, low productivity, high infection rates in hospitals etc – but also the psychological breakthrough which makes people change their habits. Freakonomics and Gawande's Better both look at how hard it is to get doctors to wash their hands, the only way to minimize MRSA-type infections in hospitals. Levitt and Dubner report that one effective method was the use as screensavers of the cultured hand prints of surgeons (taken at lunch!) which showed in glorious technicolor their collection of bacteria.

Often the most effective interventions are structural not behavioural – one example given here is the much greater effectiveness of circumcision compared to greater use of condoms to limit HIV/AIDS infection rates in Africa. There are also some terrific examples of the iron law of unintended consequences – laws intended to protect wildlife which induces landowners to cut down trees in order to clear out all the wildlife that might be eligible, for example.

The controversial climate change chapter takes the same perspective – what does the evidence say? what actions will be effective? As the authors note, climate change does take many people into the realm of belief rather than openness to evidence. Bravely, however, they compare different sources of contributions to greenhouse gases and suggest we can do more by switching from eating beef to eating kangaroos than by switching from conventional cars to hybrids. They note the great uncertainty about the human contribution to global warming, the existence of large swings anyway in global climate, and question the contribution of carbon dioxide as opposed to other gases and water vapour (or rather itslack over the oceans). The most telling point is perhaps their comparison of the forecasts about climate with macroeconomic forecasting – and we all know how flawed the latter has been.

As someone who is cerainly willing to take some actions to increase my energy efficiency, yet made queasy by the intolerant passion of the climate change doomsters, I found this chapter very interesting. I'd certainly like to see governments test some of the geo-engineering ideas presented here. If there is going to be catastrophic climate change, better to approach policy choices with an open mind than a closed one. So I'm glad Levitt and Dubner have weighed into this debate. For all that it has some flaws, Superfreakonomics is worth reading for this chapter alone – the sales will be a good reward for the authors' bravery in taking on the climate change priesthood.

The journal Strategy + Business has just published its annual round-up of the best business books of the year. With lots of titles covered and good writers commissioned, it's always a very good feature for book lovers. (I've written essays for the books special issue a couple of times in the past.)

Not surprisingly, one of the essays this year is about the financial crash – written by Clive Crook. Charles Handy has written on leadership books. Steven Levy covers books on technology – this essay, 'Disruption 2.0', is terrific. Other essays cover biographies, marketing, management, strategy and globalization.

There's free registration required for s+b, only takes a moment.

Michael Sandel came to popular attention in the UK, at least as far as Radio 4 counts as popular, as the latest Reith Lecturer (and what other broadcaster in the world would host an annual lecture series of this kind?) He used the lectures to attack market ideology – this was deep in the financial crisis – and although I disagreed with much of what he said in detail, he's one of the few people to articulate so thoughtfully the way market philosophy might actually change behaviour for the worse. (Donald Mackenzie is another to do so – being a sociologist he refers to it as 'performativity'.)

Duly interested and provoked, I bought Sandel's new book Justice, drawn from his Harvard lectures, which are now available online, in a fantastic step by the university.

It's certainly the most readable philosophy book I've ever read, in fact a page-turner at points. He covers the three fundamental approaches to ethical decision making – utility, freedom and virtue – and tests them by applying each lens to practical questions. It's a terrific process for testing one's own beliefs and their consistency or lack of it. Sandel is in the virtue camp, a lineage dating to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. In other words, he concludes that questions of morality and fairness stem ultimately from a basic set of values, which are located in a specific social and historical context.

Sandel's Justice should be read along with Sen's The Idea of Justice – reviewed here earlier. Sen is in the freedom camp, with freedom given practical meaning by an emphasis on the capabilities individuals have to exercise it. The utilitarian camp is strongly represented by the happiness advocates, people like Richard Layard and Robert Frank.

Sandel doesn't persuade me fully. Although looking at the wreckage of the financial landscape and the policy response to it, one does want to insist on the importance of civic virtues as opposed to an undiluted reliance on the operation of markets, I don't want to take the reliance on values too far. There have been great gains in social welfare from the increasing emphasis on freedom and rights during the past 50 years. Giving too much of a role to virtues in society is a recipe for conformity and ultimately repression. And while I find utilitarianism hugely flawed, with its own tendencies to paternalism, or repression, it is a great lens for public choice in many contexts – in fact in precisely the context of decision-making at the margin.

As a non-philosopher, one naturally wants to pick and choose from these philosophical frameworks depending on the context – as is increasingly apparent, we have strong instincts about what is moral or just, David Hume's and Adam Smith's 'moral sentiments' having a basis in biology. Steven Pinker has written wonderfully accessibly about moral instincts. Perhaps there's an impossibility theorem in ethics more broadly than the formalities of social welfare theory? Perhaps it is appropriate to apply a different framework in different contexts? At least I'm now aware of my philosophical inconsistencies.

Meanwhile I'll pass the book on to my eldest son, who has just started philosophy at university. He can apply the remorseless logic of the young and tell me what I should think.