2015 is the perfect year for me to list my recommendations, since this was a particularly epic time for books about the discipline of economics. In no particular order, here is a short list of good ones:
He goes on to cite books by Bernanke, Rodrik, Thaler, Ebenstein, and Tetlock. Interestingly, all of these books were on my radar screen, but I have not read through any of them, because of issues with the authors that rubbed me the wrong way.
My issue with Bernanke is that I believe that the driver of policy during the financial crisis was Hank Paulson. Bernanke’s role was to make Paulson’s bailout of his Wall Street cronies look intellectually respectable. Maybe I’ll read Bernanke’s book on my trip. I need to make sure that I am reading it with an open mind, but I fear that I will be inclined to view it as just more lipstick on Paulson’s pig.
My issue with Rodrik is that while he correctly sees that economic interventions often are based on analysis that is narrow and imperfectly informed, he thinks that interventionism is still the way to go.
My issue with Thaler is that he does not share Rodrik’s awareness of how economists’ imperfect knowledge can mess things up.
My issue with Ebenstein is that what I think is wrong with Chicago economics is not what he thinks is wrong with it.
My issue with Tetlock is that I don’t buy the reliability of what he does. And what exactly is a superforecaster? Winston Churchill had a horrible record of being wrong on many things. He was wrong during the abdication crisis. He was wrong about Indian independence. He was wrong to return England to the pre-war gold parity. But he happened to be right about Hitler. Probably any sort of “base rate” prediction would have been that Hitler would mellow once he took office and the Nazis could be easily managed. A Tetlockian superforecaster probably would have behaved more like Chamberlain.
You are making a mistake with Superforecasting, judging a book by its cover, I guess.
“don’t buy the reliability of what he does”?
What exactly do you think “he does”?
The book explains in detail what is meant by the term “superforecaster”. The forecasts they tested are more limited than what you appear to be assuming. And he apparently has plenty of empirical data testing the forecasts of the people who participated in the study. There are certainly no claims made of perfect forecasting. The book is mostly about people who are given specific questions to answer about a future event, and then they work hard creating and updating their forecasts over the time period (usually only a few months) until the accuracy of the forecast can be determined.
Is there any economist who you don’t have some “issue” with. I’d guess that I could point to an issue with pretty much any economist. Doesn’t mean they can’t still write worthwhile books.
“My issue with Rodrik is that while he correctly sees that economic interventions often are based on analysis that is narrow and imperfectly informed, he thinks that interventionism is still the way to go.”
Perhaps he believes that “government fails, use government.”
The claim that a Superforecaster would’ve acted like Chanberlin is silly. Germany had attacked it’s neighbors four times in the prior 100 years. And what exactly was the baserate success of appeasement?