My winter-break reading list

books ▪

Ah... winter break. The time to break from econ-related readings (well, sort of...). So, here is the list of things I plan to read in the next month:

1. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Bryan Caplan called it "the best book ever written on political psychology". At any rate, I am always intrigued by predictions by experts (and how often they got it wrong) and, given that this book is based on data collected for more than a decade, it promises to be a powerful analysis.

2. Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers. Trivers is famous for various efforts to link evolutionary explanations to somewhat counterintuitive behaviors, such as parent-offspring conflict and self-deception. The book collects his major papers and Trivers began each paper with a story of how he came up with the idea. The few chapters that I read was fun.

3. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. A nice reminder that theorists screw up and without some kind of checks, it can get really bad. Was voted The Economist's book of the year in 2005. (That's how I get the reference in the first place).

4. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. A history of four American pragmatist thinkers. Personally, I think Indonesian (public) intellectuals need to begin adopting this particularly American brand of philosophy.

5. One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth. Okay, fine... Yes, this is an economics book. Looks so interesting with strong reviews, I just can't resist.

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Two books on poverty

books ▪ economics ▪ poverty ▪

Thanksgiving weekend gave me a short break away from my microeconomics problem sets. So, I picked up Understanding Poverty, a collection of articles edited by Banerjee, Benabou and Mukherjee which I bought a few months back on a good friend's recommendation. I am not usually fond of anthologies, but this is no usual anthology. This one is a gem!

The articles are written by development-economics superstars, from Banerjee, Duflo, Eswaran and Kotwal, Laffont, Morduch, Tirole, etc. -- you name it. None of the articles has any equation. Yet in the background... , one can almost picture economic models underlying each of these articles. I find it a great read as somebody interested in both the theoretical and policy aspects of development. Highly recommended! I will share some of them once I have time.

Another good book on the subject on my shelf is The Bottom Billion by Oxford economist Paul Collier. I've read patches of it, and they look good. I just need to find time to read it in one go. In the winter break, perhaps...

Update: Here is a review of Understanding Poverty by New York Times's Nicholas Kristof.

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