Buy my book!

The revised edition of The Soulful Science is out very soon and available now for preorder on Amazon UK or Amazon US as well as other booksellers.

Given the hammering economics has taken from its critics as a result of the financial crisis, it's all the more important to appreciate the strengths and insights of the subject. That's exactly what I try to do in Soulful, which explores the substantial changes in economics during the past 20 years – that is, ever since the high tide of free market ideology in the Reagan-Thatcher era.

Here's what reviewers said about the first edition:

“The book is well written, copiously referenced and generous in its
acknowledgement of the relationships between economics and other social
sciences. . . . [T]he general reader . . . will find much to think
about.”–David Throsby, Times Literary Supplement

“Coyle's
style is very accessible, and this book is an excellent survey of the
frontiers of economics for the general reader. Students of economics at
all levels will benefit, as the work's academic credentials are strong,
with more than 300 references to leading books and articles. Overall, The Soulful Science can be recommended highly.”–Paul Ormerod, Times Higher Education Supplement

“The
best thing about [this book] is a deft mapping of the developments in
economic thought. Coyle describes brilliantly the intellectual
geography of her subject.”–Frances Cairncross, Nature

“Most of The Soulful Science
is devoted to a grand whirlwind tour of modern economics, with
fascinating vignettes of individual economists. It's a trip worth
taking, because what economists do has changed considerably in the past
two decades, and the textbooks haven't kept up. Coyle, who is both a
journalist and a Harvard-trained economist, is ideally suited to the
role of tour guide: She understands economists as only a fellow
economist can, and she can write, as most economists cannot.”–David
Colander, American Scientist

“This is an astonishing
book: beautifully written. . . . [I]t is also beautifully edited; it is
the first book I have read in a long time that is equally at home on
either side of the Atlantic–which is not an easy trick to pull
off.”–Andrew Hilton, Financial World

“Fluently written with the balance of a good novel, the result is a tour de force.”–Donald Anderson, Business Economist

News will follow soon about a new book on public value I've written for the BBC Trust. Watch this space.

Machine Beauty

This morning I happened upon an interesting article in the Chronicle Review about computer scientist (and much more besides) David Gelernter. The article is about his new book, Judaism: A Way of Being, but mainly about the impact his serious injuries at the hands of a parcel bomb from the Unabomber transformed his way of thinking and being.

It reminded me that Gelernter's 1998 book, Machine Beauty, is one of my all-time favourites about the culture of computing. Thinking about this book from the perspective of a world transformed by Apple's design aesthetic and capability, it looks rather far-sighted (although actually the book is somewhat critical of Apple). His formula for beauty is power+simplicity, so there's more than a whiff of high modernism in his personal machine aesthetic. Gelernter has his passions about different bits of technology and they differ from mine. But what I really like about Machine Beauty is that it gets away from the tech-mania of many geeks, and places the machines in the realm of the human.

This theme emerges in the Chronicle Review article as well. Author Evan Goldstein writes:

Two years after the bombing, Theodore J. Kaczynski, who would shortly
be identified as the Unabomber, sent Gelernter a letter: “People with
advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are,” he wrote. “If
you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of
people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are
changing the world.” Gelernter himself, in fact, has always been
profoundly ambivalent about technology. “Because David has a concern
for the whole of human life, he doesn't fall for the view that
technology can provide answers to our deepest needs and aspirations,”
says Kass. Gelernter's byline routinely appears over articles that
include statements like: “American schools would do better if they
junked their Macs and PC's and let students fool around somewhere else.
Schools should be telling students to reads books, not play with
computers.”