A reader asks,
I would love to see your personal list of the top most influential books of the past 10 years (or so).
I have to approach this by working backwards: How has my thinking changed in the past ten years or so? Who influenced those changes? What books did they write?
The most important change is that I think of economics as embedded in culture. I note that culture evolves rapidly, at least in comparison with biological evolution. Economics really ought to be tied in with sociology, except that sociologists are so fixated on the oppression story.
People who have influenced me along these lines include Joseph Henrich, Deirdre McCloskey, Joel Mokyr, Douglass North, Kevin Laland, Matt Ridley, and others. Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success struck me the most. Kevin Laland’s Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony deserves mention. I am currently reading Pascal Boyer’s Minds Make Societies, which might end up deserving to be listed here. Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything fits in.
I am captivated by the sociological history spawned in David Hackett-Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, which is a masterpiece. For contemporary sociology/politics, I continue to recommend Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public. I often cite Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids on the socioeconomic divide that is now clearly visible.
For political economy, I have come to believe that liberal democracy is not an easy equilibrium to achieve. I was very much influenced by North, Weingast, and Wallis (Violence and Social Orders). I also was persuaded by Mark Weiner’s Rule of the Clan.
Another important change is that I have come to see economic modeling in the MIT style as a crippled way of dealing with the complexity of the real world. Influence has come from McCloskey, James Manzi, Edward Leamer, and others. Manzi’s discussion of “causal density” in Uncontrolled deepened my already-existing skepticism of regression modeling.
I got pulled back into macroeconomics by the episode of 2008 and beyond. I was drawn to heterodox views. Maybe Leamer’s Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories is the book that stands out the most. I came to better appreciate Hyman Minsky’s thinking by reading Randall Wray’s Why Minsky Matters.
Somewhat related, I have come to see American economics as “born bad.” Thomas Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers was the eye-opener there.
I have come to view political economy in terms of “This is your brain on politics,” with a lot of tribalism built in. Various anthropologists and psychologists contributed to this view. Also Robin Hanson. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was an early influence.
I have come to view specialization and trade as the core of economics. No one book stands out (Adam Smith clearly falls outside “the last ten years or so”). As much as my views fit with the Austrian school, neither the classics of that tradition nor any modern works are directly responsible. I did enjoy Erwin Dekker’s The Viennese Students of Civilization, which probably counts as one of the books that nudged me to view economics as connected with sociology.
Thank you for this list.
Back in the day, Deirdre McCloskey had a list of of recommended reading she handed out along with the syllabus for her “Price Theory” class that used her “Applied Theory of Price” text.
It started with a caveat to avoid the current year’s touted business books that were discussed often in the Wall Street Journal.
What was on her list?
Milton Friedman _Capitalism and freedom_ and also _Free to choose_
Albert O. Hirschman _Exit, voice, and loyalty_
Theodore W. Schultz _Transforming traditional agriculture_ and also _Investing in people_
Schelling _Micromotives and macrobehavior_.
Those were all on the list, along with some things I won’t bother to enumerate.
The point was not that the students in the class were all going to become economic historians, but often that this was the last class in economics they might take, and this was the last semester to reach them. Time was running out because their beliefs were still open to some influence, but maybe a window of opportunity was soon to close.
Paul Graham has a list of reading under _Rarely Asked Questions_ at his website.
Thomas Sowell’s web site has a list of readings, “Suggested Readings.”
There’s a lot to be said for these lists.
1. You can hear of a book / scholar you wouldn’t otherwise have heard of,
or
2. You can notice that the same book comes up on various people’s lists.
3. I tend to use them for confirmation–to determine that reading P. T. Bauer and McNeill’s _Rise of the West_ and the Colin McEvedy’s _Penguin Atlases of history_ was not a waste of time, but was time well spent.