Looking to pick up some reading recommendations for the upcoming Reading Period? My pick is Tyler Cowen’s e-book, The Great Stagnation, which has been something of a sensation since its release (if by sensation you mean, which I do, a bunch of economists and policy wonks have been reading and reviewing it). Plenty of buzz about this one, and at $4, it is about the price of a magazine.
Just not that into Stagnation? We’ve got more. Professor Finkler also just recommended a slew of books to me, including these:
- Amar Bhide’s Call to Judgment
- Raghuram Rajan’s Fault Lines (see Professor Finkler’s brief comments here)
- Nouriel Roubini’s Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
- Baumol, Litan, and Schramm’s Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism
Most of these are stocked over on the shelves of The Mudd (subject to availability, of course), along with a constant stream of tasty new releases. Just scanning that RSS feed, I see Michael Lewis’ breezy The Big Short as an appetizer(library info; more on Lewis here). And the fascinating-looking title 
Entrepreneurship, innovation, and the growth mechanism of the free-enterprise economies edited by Sheshimski, Strom, and Baumol could be a very enticing main course. I might just go run that one down.
You might consider adding to that list Branko Milanovic’s new book, The Haves and the Have-Nots (discussed here), that I plan to order presently.
For those of you who only do things for credit, there is a rumor floating around the department that as a follow up to the Schumpeter Roundtable, we will be Discovering Kirzner by reading Israel Kirzner’s Competition and Entreprenuership this Spring term. It was also recently announced that the Spring Lawrence community read will be Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Professor Galambos and I are both signed up for that one.
Finally, I am right in the middle of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, which my colleagues mostly seem to like. Something you can probably read in the car, if it wasn’t for the 6-point font footnotes.
Enjoy!