This decision – again, entirely arbitrary and my own – was harder than ever this year because I left the long/shortlisting so late I had little time to mull it over. So I’m going to follow last year’s precedent and select two: The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies and The Ordinal Society by  Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy. Both speak to my own preoccupations – measurement and decision-making – but you don’t need to be as obsessed as me to derive a lot of interest and enjoyment from both books.

The prize is that I buy the winners lunch when we’re in the same location. I haven’t met Dan or Kieran before, but had the pleasure of meeting Marion when I visited Berkeley in the autumn. I hope to get back there to deliver the prize before too long. Dan I guess is London-based or close by and Kieran is at Duke, so please do both contact me to discuss delivery?

In case anyone is interested, here are previous winners.

Last year it was Ed Conway (Material World) and Paul Johnson (Follow the Money); in 2022 James Bessen for The New Goliaths and Brad Delong for Slouching Towrds Utopia (I saw Brad briefly in Berkeley too); in 2021 I picked Amartya Sen’s memoir A Home in the World; for 2020 it was William Quinn and John Turner with Boom or Bust. In 2019, the winner was Richard Davies with Extreme Economies.

Even earlier winners were:

2018 Kaushik Basu, The Republic Of Beliefs.

2017 Jean Tirole, Economics for the Common Good (I helped with the English translation so it got a closer read than usual!)

2016 Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

2015 Josh Angrist and Steve Pischke for Mastering Metrics

2014 David Colander and Roland Kupers, Complexity and the Art of Public Policy

In 2013 it went to Jeremy Adelman for his biography of Albert Hirschman

And the very first in 2012 went to Ariel Rubinstein’s Economic Fables.

I think they’ve all stood the test of time. And here I am at lunch with Profs Angrist and Pischke, celebrating their receipt of this important award – the prize is real! (I took them to Delaunay.)

There has been a long gap since my last post, which coincided with the start of Michaelmas Term – suggestive timing. Life was indeed very busy, and although I carried on reading, sitting tapping away at the laptop had diminished appeal during the autumn. However, the end of the year approaches and it’s past time to produce the shortlist for the Enlightened Economist annual prize. As ever, the contenders are books I read during the year (regardless of publication date), the selection is arbitrary, and the prize is that I offer lunch to the winner when we are in the same city.

First, a quick catch-up on relevant reading since early October (omitting the various detective novels I relax with):

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder – I rather enjoyed this, although agree with the many reviews that pointed out its lack of any analytical structures. As a cri de coeur about the precipice the world finds itself sliding over, it’s well-written and passionate. And probably too late.

Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall – this is a wonderfully informative book about the how of manufacturing by my Cambridge colleague, and also funny and super-readable. It’s out in late February – I read a proof to do a blurb. It’s the kind of book where pretty much every page has an amazing new piece of information.

The Gambling Animal by Glenn Harrison and Don Ross- out in late January, another book I read to provide a quote for. It’s a fascinating interpretation of human evolution in terms of risk taking and the way short-term socially-successful risk-taking piles up long-term giant risks – such as extinction risks due to climate damage.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk – a now quite old biography still widely agreed to be an excellent introduction to the life and ideas of W. It was a terrific read, and probably took me as close as I will ever get to the philosophical ideas. I was particularly taken by the account of a debate between Wittgenstein and Turing in Cambridge in 1939: were mathematical propositions a ‘grammar’ (W) or statements about underlying objects (T)? I read this book because I’m giving the Wittgenstein Lectures in Bayreuth in June 2025, about the use of ML/AI in public decisions.

Equality: WHat it is and why it matters by Thomas Piketty & Michael Sandel – out very soon, this is a transcript of TP being interviewed by MS, the latter mildly challenging the former about some of his views on the reason it’s important to attack inequality. It’s a nice summary of their mainly shared views but less interesting due to the fact that they fundamentally agree with each other, so the debates are over relatively minor points.

Now for the long/shortlist – in no special order (but with a few obvious themes). Two marked * are by colleagues of mine:

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing – Scott Shapiro (my mini-review)

AI Snake Oil – Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (my review)

The Atomic Human – Neil Lawrence* (my review)

AI Needs You – Verity Harding* (my review)

The Tech Coup – Marietje Schaake (I haven’t written this up

Underground Empire – Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman (my review)

The Ordinal Society – Marion Fourcade & Kieran Healy (my review)

The Unaccountability Machine – Dan Davies (my review)

The Grid – Gretchen Baake (my review)

How Infrastructure Works – Deb Chachra (my review)

Cuckooland – Tom Burgis (I didn’t write about this – a very readable and shocking account of the way London is – as we all know – a haven for global criminality and corruption)

Kaput – Wolfgang Munchau (haven’t written this up yet – it’s out last month)

Late Soviet Britain – Abby Innes (my mini-review)

Failed State – Sam Freedman (my review)

The Tyranny of Nostalgia – Russell Jones (my review)

Winner to be revealed in the next few days. But finally, a reminder that my next book, The Measure fo Progress, is out in April! It’s made the New Scientist list of best books to look out for in 2025.