Summer Reading

My summer reading is being colored by our new, exciting fall additions.  And people named Thomas.

Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior.  This is a new one on the Freshman Studies reading list for the fall and parts of it promise to feature prominently in our instruction as we continue to emphasize the utility of abstract modeling.

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century.  This is all the rage right now, and even the critical reviews say it’s worth a read.  So read it I will!

Glen Greenwald, No Place to Hide. As William Burroughs once said, “Paranoia is just having the right information.”  If you’ve ever wondered who General Keith Alexander is, what a FISA court is, or what the whole Edward Snowden thing is all about, Greenwald lays it out for you.   I was planning on doing some reading on security regulations, and this seemed like an appropriate preface…

John Mueller and John Stewart, Terror, Security, and Money.  This has been on my shelf taunting me for a couple of years.  It walks through security regulations and gives a sketch of how benefit-cost analyses are done (or not done).  This will make its way into ECON 444 in the Winter, I am certain.

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent ViceSpeaking of paranoia, nobody does it better than Pynchon. This is a quintessential summer read, the SoCal surf-side detective story from an iconic American author.   Here’s a taste:  

“It’s like Donald and Goofy, right, and they’re out in a life raft, adrift at sea? for what looks like weeks? and what you start noticing after a while, in Donald’s close-ups, is that he has this whisker stubble? like, growing out of his beak? You get the significance of that?”

Ain’t that the truth?  This one is coming to a theater near you, so read it before the hype-la.

William Nordhaus, The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty and Economics for a Warming World.   A lot of interest on climate change and its effects, so I will probably revisit this one and do a seminar on it with interested students next year.  A great book for anyone interested in the nuts-and-bolts of the economics of climate change from the president of the American Economics Association.