I want you to tell me. It’s a book that doesn’t currently exist. It is a work of non-fiction. The author must be living. It must be a work the author could plausibly write. It doesn’t have to be a close cousin of a book the author has already written.
So you could request "Jared Diamond on sexual selection" but not "Joseph Stiglitz on the early history of Ghenghis Khan."
Do please tell us your pick. Comments are open…
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Steven Pinker writing a sequel to Dave Grossman’s On Killing.
Tom Schelling on any issue in the world.
Rushdie writing any novel as good or better than “Midnight’s Children” or Cormac McCarthy, same, except with “Blood Meridian.”
Virginia Postrel on the role of trust in an economy and a society. I seem to recall her writing years ago that she was working on it (there are several pages about trust in “The Future and Its Enemies”). But she never produced a book and her major interest now seems to be in aesthetics, most recently glamour.
Some time in the nineties, I heard it said, “Capitalism doesn’t work in Russia because seventy years of socialism has made people too selfish.” I think the author actually meant people had very little trust in people they weren’t close to or related to.
The Coen brothers on film & literature.
I would like an Economics Textbook in comic book format, fully illustrated with dialogs and the works. Of course this would mean that there would be a need to ‘storyboard’ the entire textbook; but still it wont qualify as fiction in the true sense!
karl rove updating “the prince” by machiavelli.
Ryan Holiday writing about how to read books properly, and what he’s learnt from the outrageous amount of books he’s read already. Sort of a book version of this:
http://athleteresourcecenter.com/2008/08/3-academic-links/#comment-19
with a bit of this:
http://www.ryanholiday.net/archives/entries/ryan_clark_holiday_book_list_1.phtml
Ed Glaeser: “On Urban Economics”
Tyler Cowen writing a Bryan Caplan biography.
Paul Krugman.
“Markets and health care: how I realised that asking the 535 poltroons in Congress to run 13% of the economy was not a good idea”
Randall Munroe: The Illustrated History of the World
Larry Summers on pickup artistry.
It’s a bit of a cheat, ’cause I know he just wrote an article on Science and Theology, but P.J. O’Rourke on God.
Don Boudreaux “Law, Legislation and Liberty, thirty years later.”
I’ll pick Robin Hanson, a book called “Meta,” and Brad DeLong on government growth.
Robert D. Kaplan writing an account of inner city U.S. street gangs and law enforcement from a classicist and geographic perspective.
Michael Shermer on modern conspiracy belief in left and right wing politics.
Wayne E. Baker on secretive social networks of organised crime (he did a paper on this, but it should be turned into a book). Possibly a book on the social networks of secretive societies as well.
Paul Krugman, “The empirically testable predictions of the New Economic Geography”
William Easterly: The right way(s) for the concerned to promote development (as opposed to what is wrong with what has been done)
Anand Rao,
Try the comics that the Fed bank of NY publishes:
http://www.newyorkfed.org/publications/result.cfm?comics=1
Arthur Danto on Photography
Robert Barro and an extension on his previous work on Ricardian Equivalance.
“The Complete Guide to Referencing and Avoiding Plagarism” by Jobama.
Harry Harrison’s “Life Of John W. Campbell.”
Vladimir Putin, The Ultimate Chess Game: My Plan to Foil US Hegemony in Europe.
One of the chapters would be, “When Did I Know I Would Eventually Rule Russia?”
Warren Buffett on his thinking behind each of the investments he has made and how he thinks about the structure of society in general.
Stephanie Meyer on why the Twilight series ends without a damn fight.
JK Rowling on why Harry Potter ends with Harry having everything he needs handed to him on a silver platter
Orson Scott Card on what makes a good book ending, so other authors can write…books with good endings
Michael Pollan, Hey guys, I was wrong, eat whatever you like
Bob Dylan on Woody Guthrie
Tzvetan Todorov on Iris Murdoch
Ralph Nader: The Inside Dope on Insurance (Everything the Insurance Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know)
Steven Levitt: If I had believed on a nobel prize…
(I would have said Alec Nove but unfortunately he passed, still I think János Kornai would do a brilliant, if different, job.)
“If I did it: How I would sold the War in Iraq if I knew there were no WMD” By George W. Bush
Orson Scott Card on what the world would be like today if we had not gone into Iraq…
Tyler, you’re in luck.
Prof. Hawkins, on string theory.
-dk
I have to go with collaborations…
Richard Dawkins and Ann Coulter on Religion in Politics (collaboration via a public version-controlled wiki)
Dawkins and Noam Chomsky on language and debate
Peter Singer and Jeffery Sachs on the ethics of healthcare
Steven Levitt on lawsuits.
I’d like to see Kahneman sum up it up for the masses.
Cowen on WMD.
Stephen King on losing it.
Not quite what you asked for but: 1. The Collected Poems of A.R. Ammons. (He’s dead, and has thus already written his collected poems, but someone needs to publish them.) 2. A well annotated edition of The Spectator (roughly equivalent to the New Yorker of the early 18th century). It contains some of the most perfectly balanced (and witty) English prose ever written, and is only available in an out-of-print Everyman Library edition. We need a good 18th century specialist to go through and explain the topical allusions, obscure jokes, etc.
An autobiography of Barack Obama that truthfully details his career.
A guide to a career as an academic economist (starting from the beginning of college, to grad school, to getting tenure, and everything in between) by some well established researcher (Greg Mankiw perhaps). There is a book just like for mathematics: “Letters to a Young Mathematician” by Ian Stewart. I want “Letters to a Young Economist” by Greg Mankiw.
A Cultural Trek Through the Andes by Tyler Cowen.
Rumsfeld on how terrorists wouldn’t be terrorists if they were getting laid. Because a sexed up Haji is a happy Haji.
Gary Becker (with a top-notch Behavioral Economist possibly) on the social cost of defining deviancy down.
Tim Worstall (Krugman, “Health Care Lessons: How I learned that giving congress control of 13% of the economy was a bad idea” and O’s (Bush, “If I Did It: How I would have sold the Iraq war knowing there were no WMDs”) submissions are both great. Thanks to both of you.
I’d love to see Stephen Pinker do a stem-to-stern update of How the Mind Works. I’d be delighted to preorder this book even if I knew it wasn’t
coming out for another ten years.
Claude Levi-Strauss on the Bible.
Agassi on tennis.
First choice, a John McPhee book on futures markets, perhaps agricultural ones specifically. Second, a Christopher Buckley book about the Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac mess.
Lee Kuan Yew: “Creating an Effective European Union”
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