Publishers were out in force at the recent annual meeting of the American Economic Association, so it was a good opportunity for me to gather up the Spring 2011 catalogues. There are so many promising books coming up that I'm going to post in two parts.

I'm sure readers will forgive me for starting with Princeton University Press and my own forthcoming book The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters, out next month. Others that look appealing are: Blind Spots: How We Fail to Do What's Right by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel (business ethics and decision making); Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk and the Role of the State by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg (financial markets and capital allocation); Collaborative Governance by John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser (how private and public sectors can work together especially when money is tight); and A Co-operative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (a cross-disciplinary study of co-operative behaviour).

The themes evident here – markets and their misbehaviour, improving decision-making and governance, and big-picture books about society – are also demonstrated in some of the other spring lists. Harvard University Press is highlighting a number of new books on these various themes. There's The Illusion of Free Markets by Bernard Harcourt; The Crisis of Neoliberalism by Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy; and Maynard's Revenge: The Collapse of Modern Macroeconomics by Lance Taylor – spot the pattern in these three! I also like the look of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective edited by Niall Ferguson and others; and Capitalizing on Crisis by Greta Krippner, an account of the US political origins of the financial crisis.

Oxford University Press has a focus on the international. Out this month is Barry Eichengreen's Exorbitant Privilege, looking at the role of the dollar.  I'm also going to be looking at The Dragon's Gift by Deborah Brautigam – high time we had a systematic study like this of China's investments in the continent.

From the University of Pennsylvania Press an edited volume on the role played by weak corporate governance in the crisis – an overlooked contributory factor – Corporate Governance Failures edited by James Hawley and others. There's also Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio and the Politics of the New Media by Michael Stamm, which looks of great interest to me wearing my BBC Trustee hat. And, not an economics book but looking incredibly timely, post-Tucson shootings, Public Discourse in America edited by Judith Rodin and Stephen Steinberg.

Turning from the university presses to general publishers, just out – and already widely reviewed (see for example today's Observer review by Paul Collier) is Dambisa Moyo's How the West Was Lost (Penguin/Allen Lane). I'd like to read that alongside Ian Morris's Why The West Rules for Now (Profile). One of the highlights of the late spring will be Tim Harford's new book Adapt, out in May in the US (Farrar Straus and Giroux) and June in the UK (Little Brown) – there is a taste of one chapter available on Tim's website. Also eagerly awaited (from Norton) is Dani Rodrik's The Globalization Paradox.

In Part 2, to follow, MIT Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Wiley, Cambridge University Press and Yale University Press.

The Browser recently carried Branko Milanovic's selection of the five books on global inequality that had most influenced his thinking on the subject. It's an eclectic mixture. I've read only the Angus Maddison book, Contours of the World Economy, which is an essential text on long-run growth trends, and long ago sections of J.A. Hobson's Imperialism. (I recently re-read and reviewed here J.A. Hobson: A Reader – he's now a regrettably little-read thinker.)

The selection set me to thinking about what else I'd recommend on this issue. On the historical evidence, David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz. On modern evidence, Milanovic's own work on inequality is essential as well, careful and
balanced empirical studies of the data shedding light on an emotive
subject. Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality is
at the moment the definitive word on the empirical evidence.

Finally, today I also came across rather an interesting Atlantic article on the global elite by Chrystia Freedland. She describes the growing detachment of the rich from the rest and concludes:

“The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two
ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth. It
is obvious which of these would be the better outcome for America, and
the world. Let us hope the plutocrats aren’t already too isolated to
recognize this.”

Indeed.

Of course there is a vast amount written on this subject and I'd like to hear about other people's favourites.

The session in which I took part at the 2011 American Economic Association annual meeting was about Popular Economics, chaired by Peter Dougherty of Princeton University Press and with Robert Frank, Steven Levitt and Robert Shiller as my co-panellists.

I'm sure they will each write about their own views (Bob Shiller will be posting a column for Project Syndicate) so I'll just sum up their remarks briefly. Professor Shiller kicked off by discussing the rather negative view many academic economists would take of books reaching out to the wider public. Writing accessible books doesn't help any academic's career, and some economists would anyway regard it as improper to air in public opinions not yet vetted by the process of peer review and professional scrutiny. But he disagreed, arguing that economics as a social science properly requires a debate between the profession and the public.

Robert Frank followed, arguing that he sees economists as having a duty to try to educate and influence the wider debate, perhaps especially on controversial issues such as deficit reduction. He gave the example of making the case for infrastructure spending even when the government budget has to be cut,  explaining to the wider audience (including politicians) the distinction between spending on capital and current account of the government budget.

In my remarks I made two points. The first is that there is a 'paradox of popularity' – economics books have become more and more popular with the general readership at a time when the standing of the profession is low, with economists getting at least our fair share (maybe more) of the blame for the crisis. There seem to me to be two explanations. One is that the most popular economics books are the ones that seem to 'disprove' economics, or rather, what people take economics to be about. That would include for example anything about behavioural economics or 'happiness'. I'd also include Freakonomics and similar books, because to many readers they seem to be not really about economics at all and therefore much more interesting. A second explanation for the paradox is that people still want to understand what's happening in the world in such tumultuous times, and will read the economics even if they have some degree of distrust of economists,

My second theme was that this doesn't matter anyway as long as a wider audience is reading more economics. The reason is that implementing public policies that are broadly sensible and don't fall victim to some daft headline or bandwagon is truly difficult, so anything that improves the public understanding of economics is welcome. Daniel Bell predicted in 1976, in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, that the main faultline in modern politics would be between technical advice in circumstances of great complexity and difficulty and the populism of modern democracies. He was right, but it's much worse than he thought because we have hyper-populism with constant media and online dynamics. Just as there is now a chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University (held currently by Marcus du Sautoy) we really need one for the Public Understanding of Economics. Although of course the quid pro quo is that economists have to be humbler about the limits of our own understanding.

The final speaker was Steve Levitt (his co-author Steven Dubner was in the audience too). He made two very interesting points. One, that economists learn from the public, and as social scientists we need to understand them as much as the other way around. Secondly, that the reach of Freakonomics and its spin-offs (radio, movie, blog…) is that he can now generate data sets from the public.

I'm not sure we convinced all the audience, which consisted mainly of academic economists. While some comments were in sympathy with the panel, others seemed to consider popularisation as a side-show compared to the serious business of research. But I think more economics professors are now doing more to engage with the public, and that can only be a good thing.

In the next few days I'll be writing about the 2011 annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Denver, from which I've just returned. But such was the dreadfulness of my journey home that I'm going to start with a review of the book that kept me completely absorbed through the unpleasantness of a 9 hour flight and 5 hours of delay. That's Matt Taibi's Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.

The title sort of sums up his views, but the detail is compelling. Taibbi looks at sub-prime mortgages, Alan Greenspan's fuelling of the bubble years by always bailing out the financial markets from their latest crisis, the more recent commodity bubbles in oil and foodstuffs, takes a detour into health insurance in the US, and always comes back to the leading role played by the vampire squid, his famous term for Goldman Sachs.

In some ways the book is similar to John Lanchester's Whoops! It has the clarity of a book about finance written by a non-expert who has gone to the length of understanding the market jargon and the complexities of financial products. However, Griftopia is also a book about politics and the corruption of US democracy by big business donors in general and the banks in particular. So in that way it sits alongside 13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak. The financial crisis is a political story as much as a business and economic one. Taibbi, who works for Rolling Stone magazine, is on the political left but he concludes concludes that partisan voters of both the left and the right are correct, and has great sympathy with the source of anger amongst Tea Party supporters, though not with its exploitation by the movement's leadership: both big business and the government are screwing the people. They're doing it hand in hand.

This is of course a book about the United States but that shouldn't be much comfort to those of us living elsewhere. The big banks have excessive market and political power elsewhere – the City has certainly had a privileged place in British politics and we can only hope the coalition government sticks to its tough line on tackling the banks' power. Griftopia explores in detail the relaxation of regulation in the US in recent decades, but although the details differed the trends were the same elsewhere.

Moreover, the financial markets are global. The latest get-rich-quick asset bubble on Wall Street, pouring the ample liquidity that's around courtesy of the Fed into commodities indices, has been driving up oil prices and – even more damagingly – food prices. People are going hungry thanks to big finance. I'm not sure what can be done about it. If the Americans can't fix their political system, it's hard to see what anyone else can do. But Griftopia's themes of the harm caused by short-termism, and the way that market and government failure often go hand in hand, are important – they feature in fact in my forthcoming The Economics of Enough: How To Run The Economy As If The Future Matters.

Griftopia is also a greatly entertaining read. Taibbi is an angry man, and a fine writer made more eloquent by his anger. He's also very rude about many people, and it's often hilarious. So, don't wait for a long journey – this is a book about the financial crisis very well worth reading.

There's a review in this morning's Financial Times of The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do by Eduardo Porter. I hadn't heard of this one before – it gets only a mildly positive review from Martin Sandbu. He picks out one chapter as best, 'The Price of Free', covering intangibles and zero marginal cost products, which is of course a fascinating question.

In day-to-day competition policy, a rule of thumb is that you can distinguish competitive from non-competitive markets depending on whether the executives in hearings say they set prices depending on costs or depending on 'what the market will bear'. In the end, economics falls back on the latter – prices paid are a demonstration of revealed preference. People will only pay as much as something is worth to them. Which is both true and – like Freudian interpretations of behaviour – inescapable and therefore banal. It all depends what you mean by 'worth'….

I am off now to the American Economic Association Meetings in Denver, where I hope to meet lots of top economists and gather blog-worthy material. Here is the description of my own session with Robert Frank, Steven Levitt and Robert Shiller. Meanwhile, no new posts here until I get back on Monday.