Tim Harford's keenly-awaited new book, Adapt, is out. I highly recommend it – it's definitely going to reach the bestseller list, a terrific read.

I've reviewed it for the International Monetary Fund's Finance & Development magazine, and there are comments on the magazine's Facebook page including a reply from Tim to my observations.

Adapt is one of the books ranked high on Geoff Riley's summer reading list, which is a fantastic set of suggestions (Geoff is @tutor2u_econ, if you don't yet follow him). He's also kindly listed my own The Economics of Enough. There are some on the list I haven't read and will try to correct that this summer.

A while ago I asked for reading suggestions to prepare me for my forthcoming panel discussion about the future at the British Library (with Cory Doctorow, William Gibson, Mark Stevenson and Jon Turney). The BL is running a science fiction exhibition. This request has broadened my reading in a healthy way, and I'm now midway through The Dervish House by Ian McDonald. I've long had a soft spot for SF – many economists do, including Paul Krugman, who says his interest in economics was aroused by the 'psychohistory' of Asimov's Foundation novels. Something to do with predicting the unknowable far into the future?

Anyway, it's an excellent read. One thing I particularly like is that a central character is actually an economist, and one of the bits of character establishment is that as a young man he engaged in scholarly argument with Nassim Taleb. It set me to wondering about other novels where real economists have walk-on parts. At the moment I can't think of any but maybe others can?

There's a good Washington Monthly article on Edward Tufte, whose books I adore. Anybody responsible for conveying information to the public should read both the article and Tufte's books. The classic is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, but I also recommend Beautiful Evidence. The poster Tufte sells of Napoleon's march on Moscow, and subsequent retreat, by Charles Joseph Minard, hangs on my living room wall.

The article says:

“His four books on the subject [data visualization] have sold almost two million copies, and
in his crusade against euphemism and gloss, he casts a shadow over the
world of graphs and charts similar to the specter of George Orwell over
essay and argument.”

The field has lately been growing by leaps and bounds. I also love Howard Wainer's books on the subject, such as Picturing the Uncertain World  – he places more emphasis on the statistical validity behind the presentation of data in visual form. But there are now lots of websites. I like Infosthetics. And recently came across C.A.Hidalgo (thanks to Tim Harford's excellent new book Adapt). Other suggestions will be most welcome!

I'm rather late to this 2009 book by President Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, whose title of course echoes The Audacity of Hope. The Audacity to Win is a well-written account of the primary and general election campaigns and will be essential reading for people involved in practical politics and students of politics alike. It's actually a thoroughly enjoyable read – I almost missed my train station, so gripping was I finding it.

Plouffe explains the strategy and tactics clearly, and is especially interesting on the interaction between the Obama campaign's famed success with online fundraising and engagement and the conventional campaign tools. He insists that the astonishing number of supporters and fundraisers they reached online was the result of the effort they put into building up an old-fashioned grassroots campaign of volunteers in the real world. The two spheres were complements, not substitutes. An interesting point for all those in politics who hope to harness the magic dust of the internet for themselves.

There's a lot of detail in the book, but the messages boil down to a few simple ones:

Find your strategy, and stick to it. Make all decisions in the light of the strategy, don't waste time on tactical ducking and diving.

Make sure your allocation of time and effort echoes your priorities.

Be authentic; fight through nonsense in the press and negative campaigning by opponents by telling your own story, resisting the temptation to retaliate. Oh, and point out when others' moves are merely tactical.

Organize, organize, organize, and get your supporters to do the same. Be out in shopping centres, knocking on doors, doing all that traditional legwork.

If you 'can't win' an election, get out new voters.

These are so straightforward that the only conclusion you can draw in the end about successful campaigning is that it's a lot of work. As in so many areas of life, ideas are easy but implementation is really hard.

In 1956, sociologist C Wright Mills published a book called The Power Elite, a sharp analysis of the oligarchy running the supposedly egalitarian United States. It was, after all, the era of the military-industrial complex. Mills nailed the corporate bosses, the Wall Street moguls and the machine politicians of his day. I've never read the book in full, but picked it off the bookshelf the other day while waiting for my friend and colleague Alan Harding of the University of Manchester's Institute of Political and Economic Governance to make me a coffee. This passage caught my eye:

“A society that is in its higher circles and middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience.”

Paging through, I found many echoes between the analysis of that hierarchical and static post-war order and our own oligarchical times. Time perhaps for a revival of open talk about the distribution of power?

That same day John Kay had a characteristically eloquent article in the Financial Times (£/register) about the banks' misselling of billions of pounds' worth of payment protection insurance plans. The Competition Commission had found profit margins of up to 70% on this business, because the possibility of a successful claim was so low. On the scale for which the banks have now announced provisions, they clearly had a large misselling infrastructure. Talk about the lack of an inner moral sense.