News of the death of Paul Samuelson, at 94, sent me to my bookshelves. There's a beaten-up copy of Foundations of Economic Analysis there (a free download can be found here). Paging through it caused me the odd experience of not recognizing the book at all – did I in fact read it? – and yet finding the material not only familiar but a sort of deep grammar of thought, neoclassically-trained as I am.

When a student I didn't actually use the Samuelson textbook, Economics, whose latest incarnation is written by William Nordhaus. I note, though, that the cover is a definite selling point. It has the fantastic map of the location of economic activity on the planet from Nordhaus's economic geography website – if you've never looked at this, I urge you to do so.

A surprisingly high proportion of economists like to relax with either detective fiction or science fiction. I believe it has something to do with the application of strict logic in an ordered world. Below are images of an article I wrote about this in The Independent long ago – apologies for the quality as it's a scan of a yellowed cutting from the pre-Internet dark ages.

Dominating the detective fiction landscape at present is the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, which hardly represents an ordered universe. On the contrary, he portrays modern Sweden as an infernal land of violence, corruption, misogyny. In a dark mood, one could take it as a commentary on the state of capitalism. There's a long review in Vanity Fair by Christopher Hitchens, a writer who can do dark moods very well. He's a bit lukewarm about the books. I thought they were fab.

One of the essential interests of an educated economist, the subject of my previous post, is economic history. This used to be a compulsory element of many PhD programs (as it was mine – excellent courses taught by Steve Marglin and Barry Eichengreen) but fell by the wayside. But what about the history of economics, rather than economies? There seems to be an interest in it. Robert Heilbronner's The Worldly Philosophers or at the scholarly end Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect seem to be widely read still.

These reflections were prompted by reading The Hesitant Hand: Taming Self-Interest in the History of Economic Ideas by Steven Medema. In a way it's very specialist, being about the evolution of the approach to economic welfare since the Ancient Greeks, but particularly since Adam Smith. But having picked it up in a slightly random way, I'm finding it unexpectedly thought-provoking. The different perspectives on the definition and assessment of welfare over the ages does indeed shed light on current debates about welfare, market failure and the role of the state.

Early in the book is a relatively unfamiliar quote from Adam Smith: “In civilized society [man] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.”

This is the great mystery of economic organization – the focus of Paul Seabright's wonderful book The Company of Strangers. How we achieve the right balance of privately organized and government-organized institutions (including markets) for the best is a more urgent question than ever given the evident failures of both governments and markets in recent times.

What kind of education do economists need? I've always felt privileged by mine: PPE at Oxford, an inter-disciplinary course with the economics taught by Peter Sinclair, a gifted teacher who has taught and mentored many of the best applied microeconomists in the UK and beyond; and a PhD at Harvard, with the rigour and excellent teaching that involved. In that mix of breadth and technical depth I was lucky, however. One of the themes of my last book, The Soulful Science, was the need for breadth as well as technical competence in the teaching of economics.

This is the focus of a new book edited by David Colander and KimMarie McGoldrick, Educating Economists. It's published by Edward Elgar so the hardback is outrageously priced, but the paperback is £20. There's also a good flavour of the book in an article on the Liberal Education website. The book contains its editors' report on the economics major as part of a liberal education, and some essays in reaction. (One is by Ben Friedman, another by Steve Marglin, both of whom were amongst my terrific Harvard teachers.) I haven't yet read it and will commission a review for next February's Business Economist.

But this question is obviously 'in the air'. I just heard about the LSE100 course (being run by my Oxford and Harvard contemporary, Jonathan Leape), an inter-disciplinary one year course for undergraduates. The LSE trains many of the economists who go on to work in the City of London. When I went to talk to the Economics Society about Soulful a couple of years ago, the students I met complained then about the narrowness of what they were learning and the shadow cast over the breadth and depth of their studies by the focus on training financial economists in tools for the financial markets. So I'm sure the course will be a huge success.

Even more hopeful, perhaps there is at last a wider re-evaluation of the professional formation of economists under way, and the exciting developments in the subject will become part of the undergraduate curriculum. Or is that too optimistic? I'd love to know what academic economists think.

There are several reviews of interest in today's UK papers. The FT's marvelous Gillian Tett reviews John Cassidy's How Markets Fail, and makes it sound more enticing than the publisher's blurb manages. They write it up as being mainly about behavioural economics, which feels familiar now thanks to Nudge, Predictably Irrational etc. Tett paints it more as a critique of the real world effects of free market ideology, grounded in the history of economic thought. She sums up: “This is esentially a manifesto….for a pragmatic, flexible type of policy making.” Which sounds sensible enough. I just hope that he's not another of those unbalanced critics of economics and recognizes the strengths of the subject as well as its weaknesses (on which see my Soulful Science, new edition just out).

Incidentally, John Cassidy also wrote a good instant history of the internet boom and bust of the early noughties, Dot Con, albeit a very US focused one. For the UK equivalent, read Dot Bomb by Rory Cellan-Jones – a brilliant book by my husband.

In the FT also, Crispin Tickell reviews The Economics and Politics of Climate Change, a hot topic indeed if you'll forgive the pun. It's edited by Dieter Helm and Cameron Hepburn. Dieter Helm is an extremely good rigorous and empirical economist whose verdict on these contentious matters I'd certainly trust. (Bizarrely, the article doesn't appear on the FT website at the moment.)

Meanwhile over at the Guardian, Maya Jasanoff reviews what sounds like a terrific history by James Mather of the Levant Company, founded in 1581 with a royal monopoly over trade with the near and middle east. Apparently Pashas is the first history of this important but little known trading company to appear since 1935. It is, the reviewer says, a sensitive and intelligent response to the 'clash of civilisations' nonsense.

The Guardian books section also has a round-up of books of the decade. They include The Tipping Point, No Logo, Nickeled and Dimed, Freakonomics and Postwar.