Here are the piles of books next to my reading armchair (that's Flat Eric in the background). I still have a few days to go on Ian Morris, but feeling a bit tired and January this afternoon, I've been letting myself indulge in thinking about which one I'll read next (while eating a smallish bar of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut). Economics books on the left here, others on the right. What do you suggest?

I'm now 250 pages into Ian Morris's Why The West Rules For Now, and thoroughly enjoying it – although I fear it's putting my bag under strain as I carry it around London. The first part of the book ends with the heroic calculation of an index representing the state of development in West and East respectively from 14,000 BCE to 2000 CE. The index consists of four sub-measures: energy capture, urbanisation, information processing capability, and military power. Details are presented on the author's website. One just has to admire the ambition.

What's more, the resulting index puts in perspective the debate between Angus Maddison and Kenneth Pomeranz on the relative status of The West and China in the 18th century. Literally so – after all, their debate covers a mere millennium of history. Morris takes The West to be all the societies descending from the 'Hilly Flanks', the first areas of southwestern Asia to see settled farming, an arc around Mesopotamia, and The East to be the societies descended from the first settled farming in China, between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers. His index of the grand sweep of history shows the two had a very similar trajectory to start with, but one which started 2000 years earlier in The West due to accidents of climate and ecology. The West then suffered a setback which resulted in The East taking the lead from around 550 CE to the mid-eighteenth century, although  – again – the trajectories were similar until a setback in the East in the Middle Ages. By the early 18th century the two were close. Then The West accelerated back into the lead and – as we know – The East is rapidly catching up. Quibble with the index, sure, but this broad pattern seems consistent with Maddison's GDP data and actually with both sides of the 'was China really ahead' debate. The overall picture is actually one of broad similarity in development paths.

I also like the dynamics Morris injects into his account. There is an advantage in backwardness – those societies are made more ingenious by need, and can leapfrog the current leaders. And there is a paradox of development which is its converse: “The price of growing complexity was growing fragility.” (p191)

Besides, what's not to love about a book whose author complains about the absence from the debate about future geopolitical trends of the archaeologists and ancient historians? What do we mere economists know?

I've made a start on Ian Morris's Why The West Rules For Now and am loving it. The grand sweep of history has always been appealing to me, and what's more the opening section of this book cites some of my previous favourite reads: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel; David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations; Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence. I'd add to this opening list Greg Clark's A Farewell to Alms, and The Company of Strangers by Paul Seabright. And more gloomily, Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies and Jared Diamond's Collapse.

Morris's book so far has quite  a lot of overlap with Seabright, as its first section covers (from the perspective of an archaeologist rather than an economist) what I'd inexpertly call Stone Age history. He, like Seabright, brings in anthropology and evolutionary biology as well as his own discipline. But one of the  opening points Morris makes as that when trying to think about how to interpret the grand sweep and the status of the West vs the rest, we often think about the past 250 years, maybe the Renaissance onwards, or about the earliest millennia of human history and our evolution into talking, thinking creatures, but rarely about  the millennia in between (from say 10000 or 8000 BCE to 1400 CE). I'm about to get onto that long and often overlooked stretch.

His other introductory argument overlaps with Diamond's claim that geography matters overwhelmingly. But Morris adds that this should be thought of as an interaction between geography and other facts – biology, psychology, culture, chance – in what he terms the Great Chain of Energy. Electro-magnetic energy from the sun is converted to chemical energy by plants and kinetic energy by animals (including us). Changes in the Earth's climate make different geographical factors weigh in different ways at different times.

Anyway, to return to my first point, this is grand sweep with a vengeance, being interdisciplinary rather than merely historical. I'll report back as I work through the remaining 600 pages.

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.