William J Bernstein's "A Splendid Exchange" is another insightful, decisive and highly readable piece in the picture of the world's growth and development which he started with "The Birth of Plenty" his first work of this type. The sheer competence and professional nature of his story telling is matched perhaps only by "the other Bernstein" - Peter.
Like Peter....
Like Peter....
A Million Years of Logic, the End of Economics, and the Sociological Future
from Marginal Revolution by Fabio Rojas
I agree but the push for psych and sociology rather miss the point of what economics brings... for me at least.
from Marginal Revolution by Fabio Rojas
I agree but the push for psych and sociology rather miss the point of what economics brings... for me at least.
"The Logic of Life" Tim Harford, Little Brown, London 2008
The current champions of the economics of everyday life are Steven Landsburg, Tim Harford and the even more popular if less exclusively "economic" in focus, pairing of Levitt and Dubner. I would add David Friedman too - even if he has a slightly more academic focus.
The field is not new - it seems that all great economics thinkers were great writers about the study of man in the business of everyday life - Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, Milton Friedman and numerous others.
The new breed however have hit nerves others missed. Tim Harford is perhaps softer than Landsburg but equally effective and his latest "The Logic of Life" is good squirmy stuff...
The current champions of the economics of everyday life are Steven Landsburg, Tim Harford and the even more popular if less exclusively "economic" in focus, pairing of Levitt and Dubner. I would add David Friedman too - even if he has a slightly more academic focus.
The field is not new - it seems that all great economics thinkers were great writers about the study of man in the business of everyday life - Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, Milton Friedman and numerous others.
The new breed however have hit nerves others missed. Tim Harford is perhaps softer than Landsburg but equally effective and his latest "The Logic of Life" is good squirmy stuff...
Diane Coyle is passionate about economics and the insights it can bring to an understanding of the world. Her latest book "The Soulful Science" is therefore passionate and highly readable.
I have now read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest work - "The Black Swan" twice. It is not easy to discuss all the ideas in one post and a cute review would be too dismissive. In the following I give my immediate impressions plus sign post where else on the website I shall deal with the substantive material....
23/01: Sneak Peak at the Black Swan
"Before the discovery of Australia, people were under the conviction that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by experience and empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have brought an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others who could be extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I was told, quite ugly) black bird. Just one, and not more than one. I push one step beyond this logical problem into an empirical reality, and one that has obsessed me since childhood. What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the three following attributes. First it is an outlier, an event that lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because there is nothing in the past that can convincingly point to its possibility.
Second, it carries extreme effects. Third, in spite of its status of outliers, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact and
somehow considers it explainable and predictable."
From Nassim Nicholas Taleb's forthcoming book....
Second, it carries extreme effects. Third, in spite of its status of outliers, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact and
somehow considers it explainable and predictable."
From Nassim Nicholas Taleb's forthcoming book....
