Much as I love technology and gadgets, I'm an e-reader refusnik. This includes refusing to read books on my husband's new iPad, which is a glorious device. So glorious that it would obviously be great to get all my work-related papers loaded on to it, and put an end to the heavy, bulging briefcases. However, e-reading is clearly growing in popularity, and I found this Chronicle article in which several academics explain their relationship with e-readers very interesting.

All have some caveats – different ones. The three themes, I think are:

1. Academics want to be able to cut and paste selections into other documents, and the copyright protection mania (I guess) means none of the devices have that functionality;

2. The price point for e-books is set too high currently. My hypothesis is that price will need to be quite a lot lower for these intangible products than for their physical equivalents – with an e-book you're not paying for an asset that will decorate your living room or study as well as an experience of a few hours.

3. The iPad users are more enthusiastic than the Kindle users.

Finally, I think this comment by one of the contributors is spot on:

The truth is, e-books are simply not interesting.

The iPad and the Kindle before it are marvels of engineering and
commerce. They're endpoints on a publishing-and-distribution chain. They
make book-buying quick and easy, and by most accounts, they make
book-reading easy, too. Yet they also reinforce the most conservative of
publishing and reading practices. The iPad is the height of
21st-century consumer technology so far, but the e-books you might read
on it are much less experimental than any paper-and-glue book.

The creative potential of this new medium has yet to be fully explored. When it is, though, e-readers will become far more interesting.

It's now 8 years since I read Albert-Laslo Barabasi's Linked, and longer since Paul Ormerod published Butterfly Economics, which prefigured some of the applications of network theory and complexity mathematics in economics. A recent high-profile example is Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. Some of the most creative economists have worked on social norms and their implications for policy – Ed Glaeser at Harvard springs to mind, for example. Over the intervening years there have been quite a few other books on this subject, so I've become a bit blase about new titles and was slow to pick up Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. However, I think it's well worth reading even if like me you're not a newcomer to network models, and is a terrific introduction for social network novices.

The key message is a vital one for policymakers. It is that policies which focus on individual characteristics – race, sex, IQ, socio-economic status, whatever it might be – as explanatory factors and therefore target variables won't be as informative as looking at people in their structural position in their social network. An effective policy will try to target the people who're in the most influential positions in their network. It's not only who people are that shapes their lives, but who they know. The empirical programme this suggests is mapping networks and trying to identify the small subset who are influential in their networks. This is obvious for public health, for example, when thinking about contagions or how to reduce smoking rates. Many of the examples in the book are drawn from the field of health, the research background of Christakis.

As the authors note: “This approach shifts decades of public health work. It targets neither socioeconomic inequality nor socioeconomic or behavioral vulnerability per se, but rather structural inequality and structural vulnerability.” (p131)

The same applies to other areas of policy. They mention en passant the social nature of contagion in the financial world, although not specifically in the context of the recent crisis. (Andy Haldane's Bank of England paper remains the outstanding analysis of this.) The book doesn't touch as much as as I would have liked on economics more generally, although they note that preferences cannot be taken as fixed and determined independently of others. The authors nod favourably towards behavioural economics – although it seems to me that many behavioural economists also assume that preferences and decisions are independently determined for each individual, it's just that they happen to differ from the ones in conventional economic models. Network models deliver the obviously (sometimes) factually correct prediction that some trends will feature 'avalanches', especially in the modern world of socially networked media.

Finally, the book notes: “The social networks we create are a valuable, shared resource.” They mean the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts in society. Network theory undermines much conventional policy-making but offers, in return, a profoundly optimistic message.

Here's another review of the book, in The Guardian.

The ever-excellent Boston Review has an extended review by Jonathan Kirshner of three books about Keynes. They are The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic
Prosperity by Paul Davidson, Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th
Century’s Most Influential Economist by Peter Clarke and Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert
Skidelsky. Kirshner poses the key question:

Just what did Keynes believe?

It's some years since I last read the General Theory, but my memory is that it's an imprecise text. The reader needs to puzzle over many passages to work out exactly what they could mean. After all, it uses words on the whole rather than equations. Modern economics likes to have equations that explain what the words mean. So to me the current debate about whether or not we need a 'return' of Keynes is rather imprecise. Kirshner has the same reaction:

From his vast writings, a few ideas were quickly distilled into
analytical tools and policy prescriptions that became known as
“Keynesianism.”
This produced some stark differences between Keynes’s ideas and
those that bore his name. Once, after a wartime meeting with American
economists, Keynes observed, “I was the only non-Keynesian in the room.”
Following his death in 1946, the divergence only grew.

Still, the reasons for the revival of interest in Keynes are obvious.

I'd add to the list in the Kirshner review the latest book by Richard Overy, The Morbid Age. It's about the pervasive sense of crisis of the inter-war years, 1919-1939, in the UK, including the crisis of capitalism. Keynes features, though this book rangers over culture, society and diplomacy as well as the economy. There are clear lessons for our own morbid times. Richard Overy gave the most compelling lecture I've ever heard in my life – he had a post-cocktail audience in a stuffy room sitting upright in their seats hanging on every word he had to say about the Nuremberg Trials. A brilliant historian and amazing writer.

I've not yet read The Big Short by Michael Lewis but am keen to do so. There was a tantalisingly good extract in Vanity Fair, and a highly favourable review by Jeff Madrick in the New York Review of Books has reinforced my interest.

The flow of new books on the financial crisis shows no signs of abating. Another in my in-pile is the excellent Raghuram Rajan's Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten The World Economy – the subtitle says it, but for good measure here's the blurb:

And I only just came across The Myth of the Rational Market by Justin Fox, which looks well worth a read too. There's a New York Times excerpt as a taster.

Finally, focusing on the specifics of banking regulation, Mathias Dewatripont, my co-author on a recent CEPR report on competition in EU banking, has a book out with Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, Balancing The Banks: Global Lessons from the Financial Crisis. The cover rightly describes them as 'three giants in the field.'

This is neither about economics nor a book, but just a flyer for a concert in London next Tuesday by Carlou D. He's a fantastic Senegalese musician whose first album Muzikr will be out soon. Highly recommended!