Monthly Archives: October 2013

Random recommendations

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The stack of books in my office is rather high at the moment, but people have been recommending other books to me that sound too intriguing to ignore.

One is Norbert Wiener’s [amazon_link id=”0262731118″ target=”_blank” ]Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas[/amazon_link]. Who could resist that subtitle?

[amazon_image id=”0262731118″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas[/amazon_image]

Another is Mary Morgan’s [amazon_link id=”0521176190″ target=”_blank” ]The World in a Model: How Economists Work and Think[/amazon_link]. (I also like the look of her [amazon_link id=”052115958X” target=”_blank” ]How Well do Facts Travel? The dissemination of reliable knowledge[/amazon_link])

[amazon_image id=”0521176190″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think[/amazon_image]

So much to read, so many meetings getting in the way.

Hirschman mania continues

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Aha! One of the first four titles in a new series of reissues of classic titles from Princeton University Press is Albert Hirschman’s [amazon_link id=”0691160252″ target=”_blank” ]The Passions and The Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0691160252″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (New in Paperback) (Princeton Classics)[/amazon_image]

Two histories of publishing

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Courtesy of a link tweeted by @TheLitPlatform comes the splendid History of Publishing infographic below.

It merits reading in conjunction with this optimistic article in The New Republic about the future of books. When I linked to this recently, there were some comments suggesting I was being delusionally optimistic about the outlook for the industry. Maybe, although I still think it is encouraging to see how innovative the industry has been compared to the early days of the digital tidal wave washing over the music industry, for example. There are other optimists – this in the Virginia Quarterly Review is another fascinating take on getting people to pay for value in books.

Anyway, the point is that the infographic above is a technology history, and it needs a business history alongside it. Publishing has always been a technology business, and lies at the intersection of monetary and non-monetary values.

A Brief History Of PublishingInfographic by Finvy

 

A blank slate on political economy

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A question: what would you put in a hypothetical brand new public policy/political economy course for undergraduates (mainly studying economics, mainly with a good maths A level)? What are the essential readings? Are there any examples of existing courses you would recommend?

My first thoughts – and this is very much off the top of my head – are: a bit of James Scott’s [amazon_link id=”0300078153″ target=”_blank” ]Seeing Like A State[/amazon_link]; [amazon_link id=”0141047976″ target=”_blank” ]23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism[/amazon_link], Ha-Joon Chang and/or Joe Studwell’s [amazon_link id=”1846682428″ target=”_blank” ]How Asia Works[/amazon_link] (reviewed here); definitely some Hume, always wise about the messiness of the world – maybe ‘Of A Particular Providence and A Future State’ from [amazon_link id=”002353110X” target=”_blank” ]An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding[/amazon_link]; Hirschman on possibilism (from [amazon_link id=”0691159904″ target=”_blank” ]The Essential Hirschman[/amazon_link] which I reviewed here yesterday);

[amazon_image id=”0300078153″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale Agrarian Studies)[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”1846682428″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region[/amazon_image]

Case studies, from competition, immigration, education, energy policy, areas where economics and politics so often appear to conflict – it’s papers rather than books that come to mind, such as the excellent paper by Rufus Pollock on the liberalisation of directory enquiries. But also Daniel Bell in [amazon_link id=”0465097138″ target=”_blank” ]The Coming of Post Industrial Society[/amazon_link] on the conflict between technocratic decisions in a complex society and popular/populist democracy.

But there are many possibilities. Other suggestions?

Antifragile – an update

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This morning Nassim Taleb took to Twitter to berate me for being mathematically stupid, ‘flustered’, and “not even wrong”. I suspect my fault is not so much making a mistake in the maths as having preferred his first two bestsellers to this one – I enjoyed reading his book but was a bit lukewarm. You can look at the Twitter discussion if you can be bothered (he’s @nntaleb, I’m @diane1859 on Twitter). A couple of his tweets below.

Meanwhile, you can also decide:

(a) How stupid I was in my original blog post – I haven’t changed it and there is an error (clue – an inversion, my excuse being that it was the result of writing in haste before going out that day);

(b) How mathematically skilful readers ought to be before they are allowed to read a book issued as a mass market paperback and then review it in a mildly positive way;

(c) Whether Mr Taleb’s tweeting makes you more or less inclined to buy and read [amazon_link id=”0141038225″ target=”_blank” ]Antifragile[/amazon_link].

nntaleb
@diane1859 Lesson 1) read books v. attentively w/a pencil 2) only comment within your expertise 3) expect to be treated by author same way
19/10/2013 14:40

 

nntaleb
Once again for nonmathematiciansnonbiologists like @diane1859 bloviating on the biological math in AF, a primer: http://t.co/V7PPRh6GLA
18/10/2013 22:46