A WEEKLY COLUMN ABOUT ECONOMICS AND POLITICS,
FORMERLY OF THE BOSTON GLOBE, INDEPENDENT SINCE 2002
David Warsh, proprietor
EP spends four days a week on book work. In the old days, I could skim two books or papers on Friday well enough to make sense of them on Saturday. Not any longer. A soccer game and a book party are enough to defeat the plan pretty completely. The political situation makes matters worse, tempting me to shy away from hard topics in favor of realizable goals. Life has grown complicated again EP is making adjustments.
The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy (Norton, 2016), by Mervyn King
America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (Random House, 2016), by Andrew Bacevich
Ronald Reagan: The Fortieth President (Times Books, 2016), by Jacob Weisberg
Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy (Basic Books, 2016), by Stephen Cohen and Bradford DeLong
Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (MIT, 2016) by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky
The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve (Princeton, 2016), by Peter Conti-Brown
The System Worked: How the World Stopped another Great Depression (Oxford, 2014), by Daniel Drezner
What Is Landscape? (MIT, 2015), by John Stillgoe
Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago, 2016), by Deirdre McCloskey
Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth (Penguin, 2016), by A.O. Scott
The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation (Chicago, 2016), by Morgan Ricks
China under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard, 2015), by Andrew Walder
Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray – and How to Return to Reality (Yale, 2010), by Jack Matlock
Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings (Chicago, 2015), edited by Sandra Peart
Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist (Princeton, 2016), by L. Randall Wray
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Norton, 2015), by Bruce Schneider
The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World (Simon & Schuster, 2015), by Steven Radelet
Legislating Instability: Adam Smith, Free Banking, and the Financial Crisis of 1772 (Harvard, 2016), by Tyler Goodspeed
The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers (Simon & Schuster, 2015), by Gillian Tett
The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse (Random House, 2016) by Mohamed El-Erian
The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age (Harvard, 2014), by Russell Muirhead
Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, 2016), by William Goetzmann
From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives (Harper, 2016), by Jeffrey Garten
When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Harvard, 2002), by David Moss
How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network (Princeton, 2015), by Shane Greenstein
Financial Risk Management for Dummies (Wiley, 2015), by Aaron Brown,
The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools (Houghton Mifflin,2015), by Dale Russelhof
A History of Macroeconomics: From Keynes to Lucas and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2015), by Michel De Vroey
Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (Norton, 2015), by Dani Rodrik
Learning By Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages and Wealth (Yale, 2015), by James Bessen
Let Me Heal: The Opportunity to Preserve Excellence in American Medicine (Oxford, 2015), by Kenneth Ludmerer
My Soul is Among Lions: Pages from the Breast Casncer Archives (Amazon, 2013), by Ellen Leopold
The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of American Defense Strategy (Basic, 2015), by Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts
The Promise of Party in a Polarized World (Harvard, 2014), by Russell Muirhead
Genealogy of American Finance (Columbia, 2015), by Robert E. Wright and Richard Sylla
The Maze of Banking (Oxford, 2015), by Gary B. Gorton
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (Norton, 2015), by Richard Thaler
When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 (Penguin, 2015), by Tony Judt
American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church (Public Affairs, 2014), by Alex Beam
Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy (Princeton, 2015), by Jeffrey Frieden
The Mystery of the Invisible Hand: A Henry Spearman Mystery (Princeton, 2014), by Marshall Jevons
The New Geography of Jobs (Houghton Mifflin, 2012) by Enrico Moretti
Age of Fracture (Harvard, 2011), by Daniel Rodgers