Econ 100 Book List
Arnold Kling's Econ 100 Book List is a list for students in his econ class to choose from when writing a book report. More importantly, "All of the top ten choices are books that I think every citizen ought to read at some point":
- Robert Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death. A Nobel Prize-winning economic historian looks at where we came from and where we are going
- Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines or The Singularity is Near. A successful geek-entrepreneur looks at where we came from and where we are going. Spiritual was published in 1999, Singularity will be published in late Sept. 2005. If you use one of these books for one of your papers, then write your other paper on a different author.
- Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities. What makes some cities grow and others stagnate.
- William Lewis, The Power of Productivity. Why some countries are more successful than others.
- Michael Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich and Poor. Separates fact from fiction on the issues of inequality and income trends
- Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Economic and statistical analysis of environmental issues
- Brink Lindsey, Against the Dead Hand. Political Economy of the past 150 years or so
- Virginia Postrel, The Future and its Enemies. Political Economy of the past 20 years or so
- Robert Kaplan, Eastward to Tartary. A travelogue, mostly through failed states. Not an economics book, but there are lessons here about economic backwardness
- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital. Claims to have the solution to economic backwardness
- Dan Pink, Free Agent Nation. The odds are that you, too, will be self-employed at some point
- Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules. The modern dilemma is that information wants to be free but people still need to get paid. This book was written soon after the Internet became commercial. The examples will seem outdated but the economic principles are not
- Edward Jay Epstein, The Big Picture. Describes the economics of the movie industry (warning: also gets sidetracked on non-economic topics).
- David Cutler, Your Money or Your Life. Economic analysis of our health care system
- James Bennett, The Anglosphere Challenge. Looks at how technological innovation interacts with cultural anthropology.
- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Long, Erudite analysis of why Europe conquered the Americas rather than the other way around
- Amar Bhide, The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses. Brilliant examination of the role of size and risk in the business ecosystem. Somewhat difficult
- Randall E. Parker, Reflections on the Great Depression. Interviews with outstanding economists who lived through the 1930's. May be better suited to economics majors than to students in this course
Labels: Business
