Economic Books To Look Forward To In 2015 via Diane Coyle, The Enlightened Economist
It’s the time of year when I try to flag up interesting-looking titles out in the next six months or so. There’s a feast of reading coming up. This post has been updated thanks to many suggestions from people on Twitter.
Starting with my own publisher, Princeton University Press, one imminent highlight is the 3rd and expanded edition of Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance. Ian Morris has another new book (how does he write so many?), Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: How human values evolve. I am *really* looking forward to reading Dirk Philipsen’s The Little Big Number: how GDP came to rule the world and what to do about it. Francois Bourgignon’s The Globalization of Inequality is due in May, Cormac O Grada’s Eating People is Wrong in April. Outside economics, The Enlightenment by Vincenzo Ferrone and The Shape of the New: four big ideas and how they made the modern world by Scott Montgomery and Daniel Chirot look enticing. For professional reasons I’ll want to read the new edition of the Stiglitz and Atkinson Lectures on Public Economics that’s out in April. Outside my field but very timely, a second edition of Jordi Gali’s Monetary Policy, Inflation and the Business Cycle: An introduction to the New Keynesian framework.
From MIT Press, Nick Stern has a follow-up to his big climate change report, in Why Are We Waiting? The logic, urgency and promise of tackling climate change. There is Measuring Happiness: The economics of well-being by Joachim Weimann, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schöb. On crises, Understanding Global Crises: An Emerging Paradigm by Assaf Razin; Systemic Risk, Crises, and Macroprudential Regulation by Xavier Freixas, Luc Laeven, and José-Luis Peydró. From the ever-interesting Vaclac Smil, Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses. Outside economics, I like the look of Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone Can Map by Katy Börner, and The Eternal Letter: Two Millennia of the Classical Roman Capital edited by Paul Shaw. There’s also a cultural history of the shipping container, The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think by Alexander Klose (regular readers of this blog will know of my fetish for containers).
OUP is bringing us quite a lot of interesting titles on its forward list: The United States of Excess: Gluttony and the Dark Side of American Exceptionalism by Robert Paarlberg; Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age by Taylor Owen; Migration by Christian Dustmann; Everything in Its Place: Entrepreneurship and the Strategic Management of Cities, Regions, and States by David B. Audretsch; The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences by Brian Epstein; Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice by Cass R. Sunstein; The Maze of Banking: History, Theory, Crisis by Gary B. Gorton; a book of essays Sunlight and Other Fears by Amartya Sen; and Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History by Barry Eichengreen.
Two coming up from Yale University Press really interest me: Dieter Helm’s Natural Capital; and Hubris by Meghnad Desai, about what the crash has revealed about the state of economics.
From Cambridge University Press, a must-read for me will be British Economic Growth, 1270-1870 by a distinguished cast of economic historians led by Stephen Broadberry. Two among quite a few on environmental economics are The Renaissance of Renewable Energy by Gian Andrea Pagnoni & Stephen Roche and Ecosystem services: from concept to practice by J Boume and P Van Beukering. There’s also An Economic History of Europe: Knowledge, Institutions & Growth 600 to the present, Karl Gunnar Persson and Paul Sharp. A more technical one to look forward to is Causal Inference in Statistics by Guido Imbens and Donald Rubin.
Later in the Year, Harvard University Press is publishing The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism by David Kotz; and as a paperback Angus Burgin’s 2012 book The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression. In April, we get Anthony Atkinson’s Inequality: What Can Be Done. I’ll want to read also From Mainframes to Smartphones: A History of the International Computer Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Daniel Garcia-Swartz.
Beyond the university presses, Norton is publishing Citizen Coke: The making of Coca Cola capitalism by Bartow Elmore, and Move: putting America’s infrastructure back in the lead by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. In January the new edition of Burton Malkiel’s classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street is out. Unmissable will be Dani Rodrik’s Economics Rules: Rights and Wrongs of Dismal Science in the autumn.
Cesar Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies from Penguin sounds unmissable. I like the sound of Philip Roscoe’s A Richer Life: How Economics Can Change the Way We Think and Feel. Robert Skidelsky has compiled The Essential Keynes. James Rickard is predicting The Death of Money: The coming collapse of the international monetary system – the UK paperback edition of a US bestseller.
From Harper Collins, we will get The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and Birth of the Communications Age by Scott Woolley, about RCA; and a bio of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance; and Data-ism by Steve Lohr, about Big Data.
Alvin Roth has a terrific-looking book out from Houghton Mifflin, Who Gets What – and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design. It’s due in June.
From Routledge in January, Morten Jerven’s Measuring African Development: Past and Present. Zed Books is publishing in May his Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong.
Metro Books will be publishing in January The Secret Life of Money: Everyday Economics Explained by Daniel Davies and Tess Read. Peter Bylund has flagged up his intriguing-looking The Production Problem: A New Theory of the Firm, an Austrian perspective.
Finally, in my hands now, forthcoming from Icon Books, is It’s Not About the Shark: How to Solve Unsolvable Problems by David Niven. I’ll report back on whether it has the answer.
As always, if you’re a publisher and I’ve missed something exciting, let me know and I’ll update this!
Update: Gary Karz of Investor Home has sent me his list of books on the financial crisis – a really great resource, which includes upcoming titles as well.
