Here is Arnold Kling’s list. I liked this part:
Two books that show economic intellect to advantage are Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowen and One Economics, Many Recipes, by Dani Rodrik. Cowen’s book is a set of observations on everyday life, while Rodrik’s book looks at the high-level issue of which economic institutions to recommend for underdeveloped countries. I made the case for Cowen’s book here and the case for Rodrik’s book here.
What Cowen and Rodrik have in common is a gentle approach. In contrast to Caplan and Clark, who self-assuredly hammer away at alternative viewpoints, Cowen and Rodrik allow room for disagreement and self-doubt. Cowen and Rodrik encourage their readers to think, and I encourage readers to try to learn how to think like Cowen and Rodrik, whether or not you agree with them.
The entire list is useful, so go out and elevate the practice of holiday gift-giving.
I agree that the “gentle approach” is the way to go in terms of reaching a wider audience – but hard or soft the underlying first principles are the same: incentives matter, exchange is generally good (from both a social and private cost perspective), and both markets and regulation are often imperfect (so it is often a choice of which is the less evil)
Hey Tyler, you should really find out why your book isn’t available in Australia. Both A&R and Borders don’t have records of your book.
Discover Your Inner Economist is quite refreshing to read. So many other popular books on economics are a turn off by how reductionist they can get.
Sorry Tom, I am serious as you can guess from the tone of my comments. But as I said in the last sentence I do not expect much agreement to my admiration for Naomi Klein’s great contribution to the literature. It should be noted that Klein is an economic journalist of liberal persuasion, opposed to the free market-free trade paradigm of the past 45 or so years (i.e. since Milton Friedman became nationally prominent as the champion of free market economics through his books and columns in Newsweek). Her degree from the LSE notwithstanding she has not taught economics at any university and has written only one bestseller previously (“Nologo”). So outside of her columns for the Guardian in Britain she is not well known. And as I have alluded to, I expect a great deal of denial and criticism from academic economists to her views in “The Shock Doctrine.”
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