The peerless Robert Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance and co-author with George Akerlof of Animal Spirits, has done an interview with The Browser recommending his five top books about human aspects of capitalism. It's a great selection, staring with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.

My review of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World is available online now.

McCloskey argues that economic growth is a far bigger phenomenon than can be explained by the marginal calculus of modern economics – and also that economic growth is the precondition for intellectual and spiritual growth.