A slender volume has dropped through the letter box. It's Darrell Duffie's How Big Banks Fail And What To Do About It. The author is Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford University's
Graduate School of Business and has written key texts in finance, so this is a book to take seriously. It promises to identify the specific mechanics of failure at a dealer bank, and to point to the institutional and regulatory changes needed to mitigate the risk of big failures.

All this in only 60 pages with no equations and seemingly little jargon. Even I, no expert in finance, might have a go at this one and report back. If Prof Duffie has figured out the crux of the systemic financial weakness as clearly and concisely as it seems, he'll have set a high standard for other authors to live up to. The first two pages augur well….

I've just spent an interesting couple of days at an Erasmus University symposium on popular economics books – 'Economics Made Fun in the Face of the Crisis'.

My argument (in the opening talk) was that there is a paradox of popularity – both supply of and demand for popular economics books has increased despite the damage the crisis has done to the reputation of the subject. The paradox is resolved partly by the popularity currently focusing on behavioural and happiness economics, which although written by serious economists, appear in the popular mind to be anti-economics. But in addition, there are serious tastes for serious times, and a widespread desire to understand what's happening. Finally, I argued that the growth of the 'economics made fun' genre may be good for economists – if it encourages more to communicate well – and good for the public – if it improves at all the general understanding of economic principles.

Many of the other participants discussed Freakonomics specifically, a book which some other economists consider either too gimmicky or too 'imperialist' in tackling subject so far removed from the normal terrain of economics. The theme of a few simple principles being used to explain what's really happening in a wide range of everyday phenomena is common to quite a few books in the genre, however. The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford and Robert Frank's The Economic Naturalist are both great examples.

Another sub-category concentrates instead on explaining economics – both my Sex, Drugs and Economics (download from here a pdf under a Creative Commons licence) and The Soulful Science try to do this. Yet another type brings the academic work of its author to a wider audience – say Robert Shiller's Irrational Exuberance.

Roger Backhouse posed a key question about all these books, though: do they oversimplify and even trivialise by making 'fun' a subject which is inherently both complicated and serious? I think it's a good question, but don't think such doubts will bring the phenomenon to an end just yet. There are even new 'popular economics' sections in a couple of bookstores I've visited recently. Anyway, the symposium's organisers Jack Vromen and Emrah Aydinonat hope to bring the papers together in a conference volume.

Meanwhile, Tim Harford has drawn my attention to the following list of accessible economics books. It's a great list (although I'd point out that my Sex, Drugs and Economics predates Freakonomics by three years, and the Armchair Economist does so by many more years).

David Evans, of the University of Chicago Law School and UCL, has made available an innovative book, Essays on the Economics of Two-Sided Markets: Economics, Antitrust and
Strategy. The subject matter is apparent from the title, and there look to be some interesting and useful papers here.

The format is interesting too. It's a downloadable pdf which contains links to freely-available versions of each paper. There is an author's preface commenting on the economics of publishing which is worth quoting in full:

“Given the subject of this collection, there is some irony in how I’ve chosen
to bring these essays to you. Publishing has traditionally been a two-sided model.
Publishers get authors and readers together. They typically make their money
by charging the reader and giving some fraction of the earnings to the author as
royalties.

This 20th century model of publishing doesn’t serve authors of academic
books well. Often, publishers set the price of academic books relatively high,
expecting to earn the greatest profits from libraries and a handful of aficionados.
For most books that aren’t aimed towards a popular audience, including most
academic books, royalties are quite small. Optimistically, I might have been able
to buy a pretty good new bicycle if I had published these essays in the traditional
fashion, but I’d rather have more people read my work than collect the chump
change from royalties.

Therefore, the two-sided publishing model fails in two ways: the author
doesn’t make much money, and the author doesn’t get read by very many
people. Moreover, most publishers in my experience are still using 20th century
technology to produce and distribute books. It can take many months—if not
years—from a book’s conception to its appearance in a reader’s hands.
The irony is apparent that, in order to bring my work into the 21st century,
I have decided to publish my collection of essays about two-sided markets in a
one-sided way. I ditched the intermediary and chose to connect directly with
likely readers. I’m sure some of you would prefer the feel of paper and leather but
hopefully the price is right. It was easy for me to decide to make this volume free
because it cost almost nothing to produce and distribute it.

This version of the book consists of a series of urls (website addresses) that
will take you to the original papers. It is easy to download and store them as pdfs
on your iPad or whatever e-reader you use, as well as on your personal computer.
For those who find multiple downloading inconvenient, just wait: I am planning
to release a downloadable pdf of the entire volume in the early part of 2011. It
will have all of the chapters available in a single download.

This approach is novel, and no doubt imperfect, but I’d like to make it better
next time. Please feel free to post your comments on the LinkedIn group that I’ve
created (Two-Sided Market Economics, Strategy, and Law) or email me directly
at david.evans@competitionpolicyinternational.com with your suggestions.”

I'll contact Prof Evans myself in a while to see how his publishing experiment is going.

Later today I'm heading off to Erasmus University in Rotterdam for a symposium on the booming 'Economics Made Fun' genre of books. The event is the brainchild of Professor Jack Vromen, who has an interesting paper on the subject of this boom. While pondering my talk, and looking up my own collection of pop economics books, I realised that almost no women write them. No wonder I seem to be one of the relatively few women on the symposium programme.

By coincidence, Deirdre McCloskey's new book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, dropped through the mailbox for review. Professor McCloskey is a standard bearer for female popularisers. I particularly like an earlier book, How to be Human – Though An Economist. The only other female 'pop' author I can think of is Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind, the absolutely must-read biography of John Nash.

Of course this paucity reflects the male-dominance of the economics profession as a whole, something which – in Europe at any rate – seems to be getting worse rather than better. (This will make it clear that my preference would be to have a less uneven sex ratio in economics.) I wonder whether the famous Schelling segregation model is at work? If women have a slight preference to work in fields where there are some other women already climbing the career ladder, the dynamic would lead to a diminishing proportion of female economists the more prospective students see men predominant in the field. And, let's be honest, male economists are not as groovy and stylish (with honourable exceptions – I'll spare their blushes) as male historians, doctors etc.

I'll report back on the symposium on this blog at the weekend. Meanwhile, Bourgeois Dignity looks very promising. The argument as summed up in the blurb seems to be somewhat similar to Joel Mokyr's view about the importance of culture and ideas for the development of capitalism, as set out in his Gifts of Athena and elsewhere. McCloskey gives her own precis here. My review will be published in January.

It's interesting to read about the backlash against microfinance – in Bangladesh now as well as India (see for example Amy Kazmin in today's FT). Its advocates have always emphasised the importance of relationships, both within groups of borrowers in a community and between the borrowers and the microfinance institution, as crucial to its developmental potential and high repayment rates. So the obvious question was always going to be, so how does that ever scale up? The early successes led to more and bigger banks piling in, and it seems possible that the internal contradictions of large-scale micro-finance are now emerging. Contrast the successes of M-Pesa and now M-Kesho in Kenya, offering transactions and now savings that were always designed to be large scale businesses. But again, it's not obvious that such schemes will transfer between countries because the regulatory environment and structure of the banking industry can be obstacles – see our 2007 report on M-transactions for Vodafone at number six here.

There's a deeper issue as well, which is the need for financial services for those on very low incomes to understand the needs of the customers. These are both culturally specific – financial habits differ greatly from country to country even between say the UK and Germany – and very different from the needs of the better off. And the key need is not access to loans but access to a safe means of saving very small amounts. The low cost of mobile platforms means mobile savings holds out great promise for a transformative financial service. I always believed the microfinance industry was aiming off-centre in its emphasis on borrowing rather than saving.

The best book I know of on the financial needs of poor people is based on detailed diaries collected in Bangladesh, India and South Africa. I highly commend Portfolios of the Poor for anyone interested in this subject. (It was reviewed on this blog.)