1. Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, by Gene Heyman. This book overstates its claims, but if you wish to see a non-economist defending a (broadly) Beckerian model of addiction, here you go. I couldn't put it down!
2. Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care. I felt I should try one by her to stay in touch. It was better than I had expected though not really smarter than I had expected. Here is an NYT article about her.
3. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. This new translation by Julie Rose is more or less definitive. But it is heavy. If any book ought to be on Kindle…
4. Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, by Alyssa Katz. There is lots of good material about our social and policy infatuation with housing, but she commits a mistake that I have been "waiting for" — she blames part of the housing bubble on the decline of rent control
5. Javier Cercas, AnatomÃa de un instante. A micro-study of one moment of time (Feb.23) when, post-Franco, Spain ended up sticking with the path to democracy rather than falling back to autocracy. The focus is on conservative Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez and the book blends fictional and non-fictional narrative techniques very effectively. Here is one review. This is a very strong book also with relevance to current events in Iran.
6. Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, From Poverty to Prosperity. I've only been reading the Amazon blurb for it — the book isn't out yet — and here is Arnold on the book.
how would you make a link between the end of rent control and the housing bubble? end of rent control => pushing lower income people into the pool of purchasers?
Do you intend to read Eric Falkenstein’s book Finding Alpha: The Search for Alpha When Risk and Return Break Down?
I couldn’t put it down!
[rimshot]
I feel like any cognitive scientist should agree that addiction is not a disease, since the mechanisms of addiction are well known, and are basically the brains reward system working like they should, but in a direction that reinforces unhealthy or socially unacceptable behavior.
The reason why more of these scientists haven’t come out harder against the “addiction is a disease” narrative is that therapeutically it is quite useful and has seen a lot of success in the last couple decades. Particularly when compared to older attitudes towards addiction based on moral condemnation.
So I think you have a reluctance in people to fight against a story that may not be completely scientifically accurate, but that is seen as useful and that if discarded could result in worse results for the treatment of addicts.
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