Singer - The life you can save

Spent some of this morning with Peter Singer's "The Life You Can Save". A really interesting and provocative book posing the ethical question as to how much money people should give to others in need. He argues that those who can have a compelling moral obligation to tithe part of their income to organisations who are genuinely saving the lives of poor people. He argues that this obligation is as pressing as the obligation to rescue a child who is in danger of drowning if you are walking past.

He uses the vignette (due to Peter Unger) of the man who sees a child playing on a train track who is oblivious to an oncoming train. The man is too far away to catch the child's attention. However, he can flick a switch to get the train to divert down a sidetrack. Unfortunately his prized sports car is down this side-track. The man has cared for this car for a long time and was eventually going to sell it to partly fund his retirement. There is noone else around and presumably no cameras. Nobody is going to know if he doesn't flick the switch. He decides not to and the child presumably is obliterated by the ongoing train. Singer argues that not giving money to aid organisations that have demonstrated their effectiveness is equivalent to not throwing the switch. He spends some time arguing against common ideas about the ineffectiveness of philantrophy,arguing that is now possible without substantial effort to locate agencies that are saving lives. He then turns to the question of human nature and why it is that we do not give. He cites studies from Harbaugh and others showing that giving actually improves well-being and draws from the literature of Vohs and others arguing that money itself may distort the expression of people's preferences through priming them to think differently about issues than if they thought about them as pure resource allocation problems. He draws from behavioural economics to suggest that inertia may be a key force and argues for the use of more effective marketing and also the use of default options, whereby company employees would be opted into donations to effective aid organisations and given the option to opt-out.

This book certainly made me think fresh about an issue I have thought about since I was a small child. In some sense, it is most profound and compelling question of them all, as to our duty in a world where there is avoidable suffering.

The Changing Faces of Ireland

Steve Song (formerly of Geary and now with George Fox University, Oregon), Merike Darmody (ESRI) and Naomi Tyrrell (Plymouth) are the editors of a new book on immigration in Ireland.

The Changing Faces of Ireland: Exploring the Lives of Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Children

“Before the economic boom of the 1990s, Ireland was known as a nation of emigrants. The past fifteen years, however, have seen the transformation of Ireland from a country of net emigration to one of net immigration, on a scale and at a pace unprecedented in comparative context. As a result, Irish society has become more diverse in terms of nationality, language, ethnicity and religious affiliation; and these changes are now clearly reflected in the composition of both primary and secondary schools, presenting these with challenges as well as opportunities. Despite the increased number of ethnically-diverse immigrant children and young people in the Ireland, currently there is a paucity of information about aspects of their lives in Ireland. This book is aimed at contributing to this gap in knowledge.

This edited collection will be of interest to researchers in the fields of migration studies, childhood studies, education studies, human geography, sociology, applied social studies, social work, health studies and psychology. It will also be a useful resource to educators, social workers, youth workers and community members working with (or preparing to work with) children with immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds in Ireland.”

More details.

Rodrik: The Globalization Paradox

Recently released book by Dani Rodrik - "The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the Global Economy". Makes the case for a more robust form of globalisation where nation states play a larger role in acting as a taming force. The introduction begins with an unusually humble and frank account of how he had missed financial system vulnerabilities that were impending when writing his previous books. Continues with an argument that free trade fundamentalism is a product of social norm processes and cognitive limitations among economists. Provides a history of globalisation and argues that opening trade works best in the context of intelligent government institutions to manage it. He makes a case for developing a form of global capitalism where: markets are more deeply embedded in systems of governance, the nation state is a primary actor; there is heterogeneity in economic development models depending on the culture, endowments and preferences of nations; where countries have the right to protect their own institutions in cases where there is a clash with the imperatives of free trade; where countries do not have the right to impose institutions on others; where international institutions set rules of interaction between countries; and where democracies are given more rights under international institutions than non-democracies.

Recommended reading. Includes a chapter on potential downsides of financial innovation and capital inflows that will have resonance for people in Ireland. The narrative has not fully formed yet here but one is emerging of a country that progressed far with a model of state-managed opening up of trade and used this as a very progressive force but failed to develop a model for dealing with the large risks associated with capital inflows into domestic financial institutions. Furthermore the failure of the EU monetary project to develop a coordinated response to this has left us in a position where the Irish state is now being bailed out so that it, in turn, can bail out financial institutions that poured money into a construction bubble in a process Karl Whelan has called "No bondholder left behind". As excited as free market fundamentalists used to become when looking at Ireland, the experience of financial globalisation here should I hope lead them to cast a cold eye on us and have a read of Rodrik for ideas toward a more robust model.

From a behavioural perspective, the book has left me with some deep questions as to why it is people feel parts of nations rather than world citizens and the ethical and practical implications of this. Most people in Ireland feel themselves to be Irish, with some considering themselves European and some further considering themselves world citizens. If I had to choose, I actually feel affinity with the idea of being a "global Irish" (though aware that this concept is still nebulous to some extent) and increasingly see a merit in the idea of Ireland as a migrant country where there is a possibility of a constructive cross-national identity that is bridging and makes sense. My own identity aside, the idea of national identity as a legitimate constraint on policy is one aspect of Rodrik's book that is particularly thought-provoking and of interest to people working on psychological dimensions of economic activity.

The Hesitant Hand

Making my way slowly through "The Hesitant Hand" by Steven Medema, slowly as its a book to really immerse yourself in - a real gem and the type of book that makes me grateful for scholarship practiced strictly for its own sake. The book examines the history of the concept of rational self-interested man in Economics, from Adam Smith to the present.

Well I say from Adam Smith, but thankfully he gives a brief tour of Greek and scholastic thought in the first chapter. In discussing the Greeks, there are a few paragraphs that have a lot of resonance at present. Medema locates the fable of King Midas in Greek attitudes to finance, with Midas destroying himself through the pursuit of money much in the same way as Greek states often destroyed themselves in financial disasters. He partly locates Aristotle and Plato's concern for finding the true nature of well-being in their observance around them that looking for it merely in money and acquisition frequently lead to ruin. The parallels with the current environment are, of course, marked and, in the Irish case, you will find no shortage of links on the internet talking about various Irish financiers having a "Midas touch". For Plato and Aristotle, their solution to the problems of happiness lay partly in having strongmen control countries and keeping population and economic activity at a stationary level, aspects of which ended up with Plato becoming one of Popper's enemies of freedom. Whatever their views on how it should be achieved, their ideas on the nature of well-being as being more than acquisiton are certainly making a resurgence and probably for similar reasons as when they were first formed.

More Than Good Intentions

Dean Karlan has written some of the most highly-cited papers in the literature on randomised evaluation of development projects. His IDEAS page is here Along with his co-author Jacob Appel, he has written a book outlining the importance of rigorous design and evaluation of development projects. The website for the book is www.morethangoodintentions.org The book is an accesible and readable account of an extremely interesting literature applying randomised controlled trials in the context of development. Karlan has been particularly involved in behavioural trials that use both monetary incentives and various forms of reframing and commitment devices to influence behaviour. The book's strength is that it offers a very concise summary of a wide range of these types of trials in areas as diverse as promoting teacher attendance to encouraging efficient fertiliser use to sexual health interventions. Anyone working in the aid field should certainly read this book but I think it is also has a more general readership in terms of anyone involved in the design and evaluation of policies in any area, whether from the donor side, the evaluation side or the implementation side. We have covered the ongoing debate about the use of IV and RCT designs in development studies and it is worth keeping the wider debate in mind when reading this book but, overall, it provides a great summary of one of the most active areas of modern economics.

The Drunkard's Walk

With my usual degree of timeliness I read The Drunkward's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow. It begins with the wonderful anecdote of the Spanish man who won the lotto with a number ending in 48 and explained that he dreamt of the number 7 for 7 nights and since 7 times 7 is 48 then it was clear to him what to do!

Drawing from the history of probability theory and statistics, the book address how people form judgments and make choices under uncertainty. It has 10 chapters. Chapter 1 "Peering through the eyes of randomness" is a beautiful discussion of the role of chance in our lives and the limits to our use of intuition to understand this role. Includes, among a lot of other things, the interesting factoid that the first Harry Potter novel was rejected by nine publishers! Chapter 2 "The Law of Truths and Half-Truths" outlines some basic probability rules and how they can sometimes confound intuition. Includes a discussion of the representativeness heurisic. Former students will recognise Linda! Interesting discussion of the greek deficiency in probability. Chapter 3 "Finding your way through a space of probabilities" goes through subtle rules of probability. I still feel stupid when I see the Monty Hall problem solution, having seen it first in the late 90s though I enjoyed Mlodinow's account of it a great deal particularly as it shows that even people like Paul Erdos literally had to have simulations shown to him before he would accept the answer. Mlondinow knits the biography of forgotten Italian statistician Cardano into an account of how to solve Monty-Hall type problems through representing them as state-spaces. Chapter 4 "Tracking the Path to Success" outlines Pascal's contribution to probability theory. Chapter 5 "The Dueling Law of Large and Small Numbers" deals with random numbers and probabilistic expectation. Among many great pieces, includes the anecdote I hadn't heard that Pascal is rumoured to have invented the roulette wheel while playing with an idea for a perpetual motion machine. Chapter 6 False Positives and Positive Fallacies examines Bayes rule. Chapter 7 "Measurement and the Law of Errors", among other things, outlines normality and statistical distributions. Chapter 8 "Order in Chaos" examines statistical regularity. Chapter 9 "Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusions" examines how people impose flawed patterns on data e.g. illusory cancer clusters, baseball hothands, luftwaffe bombing clusters. Chapter 10 "Drunkwards Walk" further examines the role of flawed expectations and misconceptions of chance.

My favourite aspect of the book is the rich and complex anecdotes and examples he uses to illustrate the main concepts. I like the fact that in a discussion of medieval preference for incantations over analysis, you suddenly get a glimpse of a modern bond trader explaining to a CNN reporter that they worry about using the "wrong" toilet before a major trade. The book sets the judgement and biases programme in a history of statistics narrative and this creates a number of great points of contact between modern judgement research and the lives of people like Cardano, Galileo and Pascal.

I don't know if the publishers will see this blogpost but this book would be a brilliant RSA-animate production.

The Irrational Economist

Another good read edited by Erwan Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic. Short punchy chapters addressing vital topics of risk perception, decision making and risk management.

Table of Contents
Introduction
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic

PART ONE
IRRATIONAL TIMES 9

1 Superstition
A Common Irrationality?
Thomas Schelling 11

2 Berserk Weather Forecasters, Beauty Contests, and Delicious Apples on Wall Street
George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller 16

3 Subways, Coconuts, and Foggy Minefields: An Approach to
Studying Future-Choice Decisions
Robin M. Hogarth 21

4 The More Who Die, the Less We Care
Paul Slovic 30

5 Haven’t You Switched to Risk Management 2.0 Yet?
Moving Toward a New Risk Architecture
Erwann Michel-Kerjan 41

PART TWO
ARE WE ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS?
ECONOMIC MODELS and RATIONALITY 51

6 A Two-Edged Sword
Implications of Decision Psychology for Decision Analysis
Paul J. H. Schoemaker 53

7 Constructed Preference and the Quest for Rationality
David H. Krantz 65

8 What If You Know You Will Have to Explain Your Choices to Others
Afterwards? Legitimation in Decision Making
Paul R. Kleindorfer 72

9 Neuroeconomics: Measuring Cognition and Brain Activity During
Economic Decision Making
Colin F. Camerer 79

10 The Useful Brain
How Neuroeconomics Might Change Our Views on Rationality and a
Couple of Other Things
Olivier Oullier 88

PART THREE
INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS IN DANGEROUS and UNCERTAIN WORLD 97

11 Virgin Versus Experienced Risks
Carolyn Kousky, John Pratt, and Richard Zeckhauser 99

12 How Do We Manage an Uncertain Future?
Ambiguity Today Is Not Ambiguity Tomorrow
Ayse Öncüler 107

14 Dreadful Possibilities, Neglected Probabilities
Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Zeckhauser 116

15 Why We Still Fail to Learn from Disasters
Robert Meyer 124

16 Dumb Decisions or as Smart as the Average Politician?
Economic and Behavioral Explanations for Insurance Demand
Mark V. Pauly 132

17 The Hold-Up Problem
Why It Is Urgent to Rethink the Economics of Disaster
Insurance Protection
W. Kip Viscusi 142

PART FOUR
MANAGING and FINANCING EXTREME EVENTS 149

18 The Peculiar Politics of American Disaster Policy
How Television Has Changed Federal Relief
David Moss 151

19 Catastrophe Insurance and Regulatory Reform After the
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Dwight M. Jaffee 161

20 Toward Financial Stability: Lessons from Catastrophe
Reinsurance
Kenneth A. Froot 171

21 Economic Theory and the Financial Crisis
How Inefficient Incentives Can Lead to Catastrophes
Kenneth Arrow 183

22 Environmental Politics
Are You a Conservative?
Geoffrey Heal 192

23 Act Now, Later, or Never?
The Challenges of Managing Long-Term Risks
Christian Gollier 200

24 Climate Change
Insuring Risk and Changes in Risk
Neil Doherty 210

25 International Social Protection in the Face of Climate Change
Developing Insurance for the Poor
Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer 220

PART FIVE
WHAT DIFFERENCE CAN WE MAKE? 231

26 Are We Making a Difference?
Baruch Fischhoff 233

27 Thinking Clearly
The Importance of Training Policy Makers in Decision Sciences
Ralph L. Keeney 239

28 Decision Making
A View on Tomorrow
Howard Raiffa 248

29 Influential Social Science, Risks, and Disasters
A View from the National Science Foundation
Robert E. O’Connor and Dennis E. Wenger 254

30 Reflections and Guiding Principles for Dealing with
Societal Risks
Howard Kunreuther 263

Acknowledgments
An Unusual Journey: Homage to Howard Kunreuther 275
Notes 281
About the Contributors 297
Index 311

Economics of Enough - Coyle

Overview available here .

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters

From PUP Website:

Diane Coyle

The world's leading economies are facing not just one but many crises. The financial meltdown may not be over, climate change threatens major global disruption, economic inequality has reached extremes not seen for a century, and government and business are widely distrusted. At the same time, many people regret the consumerism and social corrosion of modern life. What these crises have in common, Diane Coyle argues, is a reckless disregard for the future--especially in the way the economy is run. How can we achieve the financial growth we need today without sacrificing a decent future for our children, our societies, and our planet? How can we realize what Coyle calls "the Economics of Enough"?

Running the economy for tomorrow as well as today will require a wide range of policy changes. The top priority must be ensuring that we get a true picture of long-term economic prospects, with the development of official statistics on national wealth in its broadest sense, including natural and human resources. Saving and investment will need to be encouraged over current consumption. Above all, governments will need to engage citizens in a process of debate about the difficult choices that lie ahead and rebuild a shared commitment to the future of our societies.

Creating a sustainable economy--having enough to be happy without cheating the future--won't be easy. But The Economics of Enough starts a profoundly important conversation about how we can begin--and the first steps we need to take.

Diane Coyle runs Enlightenment Economics, a consulting firm specializing in technology and globalization, and is the author of a number of books on economics, including The Soulful Science (Princeton), Sex, Drugs and Economics, and The Weightless World. A BBC trustee and a visiting professor at the University of Manchester, she holds a PhD in economics from Harvard.

Quiggin's Zombie Economics

Zombie Economics came out last year and I flagged it then but haven't posted on it before now. One interesting feature of the book is that it is almost entirely a blog creation, spurred by comments on Quiggin's blog and motivated and encouraged by other bloggers. Quiggin made chapters available on Crooked Timber blog as he wrote them. All in all, an interesting model of writing a book.

The book is effectively five essays arguing against what Quiggin sees as being destructive economic ideas that have contributed to the global economic crisis. Chapter 1 argues that the idea of a "Great Moderation" of business cycles is absurd. Chapter 2 argues against the strong form of the efficient market hypothesis. Chapter 3 takes aim at Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium and real business cycle theories. Chapter 4 argues against the trickle-down theories that argue that reducing taxes for the very rich will ultimately help the poor by stimulating investment and consumption. Chapter 5 argues that attempts to privatize core government services in health and education have been a failure.

Overall, Quiggin pushes for a methodology of economics with far more emphasis on realism and empirical validation rather than theoretical rigour. He is staunchly Keynesian in his belief that the government should actively intervene to regulate business cycles and is also strong in the view that an explict focus on income and wealth distribution should be an important plank of policy. A great book full of big and bold ideas and one to be read and argued about.

The Triumph of the City

Got a copy of Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City. As usual, this is not a full review. Just some notes. This is a really cracking read - one of the best popularisations of Economics ideas I have read. It is in the best tradition of popular Economics works, condensing a huge body of research into tightly packed chapters, each of which says something counterintuitive, interesting and important. I think this is genuinely a must-read for anyone working on spatial policy, urban renewal etc,. but also more generally for people working on education policy and as a general interest read.

The book has nine chapters, and also an introductory and concluding essay. The overall theme of the book is that the dense environments of cities allow ideas to spread more rapidly, and that cities in general promote human progress in pretty much every domain of life. For cities to thrive, their planners must focus on building human capital through the education system and also through making the city attractive for people with high skills and business ideas to live and work.

Chapter 1 "What do they make in Bangalore?" explores the connecting role of big cities in the process of innovation. Chapter 2 "Why do Cities Decline?" explores the decline of Big Cities, focusing particularly on Detroit. Chapter 3 "What's good about slums?" explores the advantages cities hold for poor people and the role slums play in providing pathways out of destitution. Chapter 4 "How were the tenements tamed?" examines the progress made in reducing mortality and poor health in cities. Chapter 5 "Is London a Luxury Resort?" examines the role of consumer culture in making big cities attractive places to live. Chapter 6 "What's so great about skyscrapers?" offers ideas for improving planning regulations in cities. Chapter 7 "Why has Sprawl Spread?" explores the reasons for and consequences of urban sprawl. Chapter 8 "Is there anything greener than blacktop?" explores the environmental advantages of high-density living. Chapter 9 "How do cities succeed?", in particular, focuses on the development of human capital and attracting people with high skills. The concluding essay "Flat World Tall City" recapitulates the main themes that cities are good for prosperity, that cities must build and attract human capital, that dense cities are more environmentally friendly than urban sprawl and low-density living and that helping troubled cities is an inefficient policy compared with helping troubled people.

O'Neill - 2016 Proclamation

I have just read "2016 A New Proclamation for a New Generation" authored by Gerard O'Neill. I don't do full reviews on this blog but below are a few thoughts on the book.

Gerard is is a good colleague and supporter of work that goes on in this Institute. He is also an erudite and highly experienced individual. He holds an MsC in Economics from the LSE and has had a varied career, most notably as a founder director of Amarach Research, one of the largest private sector research groups in Ireland. Most local readers of the blog will testify that he is a fascinating and engaging speaker and anyone who tunes into Turbulence Ahead, his blog, will know that he is someone with his fingers on the pulse of a wide range of issues. Like Stephen Kinsella's book "Ireland in 2050" I am struck by how important it is to have some constructive ideas about the future getting out there and how suitable both Stephen and Gerard are to steer a widespread debate.

The book is structured into eight chapters based on key phrases from the 1916 proclamation with a ninth chapter drawing things together into a 2016 proclamation.   Chapter 1 "the people of ireland" deals with the basic desire to be part of a country. Chapter 2 "the dead generations" details the different traditions living in Ireland. Chapter 3 "now seizes that moment" deals partly with linkages to Irish abroad but mostly with the idea of time and opportunity. Chapter 4 "the right of the people" deals with sovereignty. Chapter 5 "exaltation among the nations" examines international relations. Chapter 6 "cherishing all the children" deals with north-south relations. Chapter 7 "the suffrages of all" deals with gender. Chapter 8 "August Destiny" deals partly with globalisation and the general issue of Ireland's place in the world.

The key strength of the book is its breadth drawing from the fact that Gerard is a wide reader, a deep thinker and has a broad sense of the issues facing Ireland. His use of survey data blended in with narrative is interesting. His treatment of North-South issues and the Global Irish is also great (though I can't share his enthusiasm for the Global Irish farmleigh forum). In general the book hits many key themes including relations between north and south, globalisation, gender, religion, national identity, competitiveness, european integration and many others. It does so through a running dialogue between current demographic, cultural, social and economic trends and the aspirations of the original founders of the Republic in an attempt to craft an updated set of principles to guide democracy in the next 100 years.

Whether you go with the overall framing of the book will depend a lot on your general attitudes toward nationalism and the Irish national project. I have changed my mind a few times even while penning this post, which is perhaps a good sign for Gerard in terms of starting a debate. On the one hand it is a highly artificial construction forcing the author to fit a wide range of complex issues into a framework dictated by a page of text written 100 years ago to announce a revolution. On the other hand, the text is pivotal in Irish history and may help engage a much wider readership than a more neutral frame. Using such a broad framework may help to ensure that debate in the next five years doesn't descend too far into the mad management speak that has emerged from government buildings in recent years. It merits some praise that he does not use the phrase "Ireland Inc" at any stage in the book and that "smart economy" doesn't appear in the 2016 proclamation nor "national brand" either. Look forward to hearing the book being debated over the coming months.

Ten Books from Student Days

We have talked a lot about the increasing debate about undergraduate admissions and have at various times talked about teaching and research infrastructures. One can sometimes forget that one of the best things about coming to university is to have a space for three or four years where you can think and read and have lots of people around you who are doing the same (of course not just books, I had never heard of most of the best bands of the 20th century until they were drummed into me by classmates). I enjoyed most of my undergraduate modules, which is not that surprising given I was studying economics and psychology. My psychology classes, in particular, were pretty liberal and encouraged very wide reading. In general, finding good books and thinking about them was a great way to spend four years. I was very lucky to have had people around who were able to absorb conversation about all of the many things I got interested in and, at times, obsessed about.

Marginal Revolution has had people posting about the ten books that influenced them (Cowen's Top Ten are linked here).  Nearly all my ten were found when I was studying for my degree so here goes a list. These books were the ones that made me lose sleep and think most but not in most cases the ones that influenced my academic direction (something I should reflect on!). Next week or the week after we will all be arguing about the Hunt report and you will not be able to look around without seeing a memo about industry relevance of teaching programmes. There is room for many things in the university system including programmes relevant to industry. However, we are continuously talking about universities in such petty and negative terms that incoming students must be starting to get the impression that nothing good goes on here. It is very hard to quantify in management speak the feeling someone gets when they read something that lights up their brain and makes them look around as if they had recovered from a trip or landed on another planet. As I write, lots of other books come to mind and I am also conscious of how stereotypical my list is.  It overlooks periods spent gripped with Buddhist psychology and even postmodernism (sorry Kevin). It also overlooks that one of my main intellectual influences has been journal articles written about topics in economics and psychology. But it is fun to write this list as it reminds me what I valued about going to college and what I know many others did also.

1. Rawls: A Theory of Justice; Brilliant book and one of my first experiences of seeing a tough analytical approach to abstract concepts like justice.

2. Keynes: General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: Anyone who reads  this book as a confident teenager will immediately form the impression that only they and Keynes alone understand whats actually happening. It is a very obscure book in places but very good fun to see how he tears strips out of the dominant ideas of his time. Big sweeping ideas abound.

3. Freud: Civilisation and its Discontents. Freud's great rant about history and the human psyche is like walking out into a storm.

4. Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky: Judgment Under Uncertainty, Heuristics and Biases. This looks like a dull technical book if you give it a superficial glance. It has had the biggest influence on me of any book as it immediately crystallised in my head what I wanted to do for a living. I read it at a perfect time where my psychology reading and economics classes were so much in tension about what they implied for human behaviour that I was starting to actively dismiss economics as it was being taught as being a load of bullshit. KST develop that basic intuition much more constructively!

5. Dostoevsky; The Idiot. The story of a kind-hearted culchie trying to cut it in polite society was always likely to resonate with me. Brilliant psychological descriptions that completely absorb.

6. Monte; Beneath the Mask: If you are interested in theories of personality psychology, this book is absorbing. Its one of the few books that has survived with me after about 10 different apartment moves since I came to Dublin. The strength of the book is the way the lives of the great psychologists are presented in epic detail merging in with a description of how they formed their ideas and the content of those ideas.

7. Plato: The Republic: The book that hammered home to me that the classic texts were full of good old-fashioned arguing.

8. Klamer: Conversations with Economists. This book made the debates in economics real, featuring interviews with Klamer and the leading macroeconomists of the 20th century. Again, the detail of how these guys drew from their own upbringing and life experience to think about the world in a certain way is fascinating to read about particularly when you are very young and struggling to find the link between textbook abstraction and the real sweep of history of economics. Its associated in my head with a number of other very good macrobooks.

9. Russell: A History of Western Philosophy. emm.. what can you say really.

10. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Another one of those books that speaks deep truth very clearly and helps demystify the scientific process.

Book Recommendations

If anyone has recommendations for recently released books that they think would be indispensable reading for the type of people that read this blog, please post them in the comments section. An old list of mine is linked here Others have given recommendations such as Economic Gangsters by Fisman and Miguel (thanks Rob), the Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett (mentioned by Kevin), Microeconometrics Using STATA by Cameron and Trivedi, and Mostly Harmless Econometrics (people here even have bloody t-shirts for that one).

Kinsella - Ireland in 2050

UL Economics Lecturer Stephen Kinsella has recently released a book called Ireland in 2050. The book is partly inspired by the classic essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" by Keynes and attempts to map out the major changes in Irish economy and society that will take place over the next 40 years. The book is divided into twelve chapters (roughly speaking - introduction, background, demography, leisure, environment, energy, work, suburbs and cities, health, inequality, governance, conclusion). The basic concept of the book is a good one - a neccesary attempt to start some long-term debates even as the immediate present seems urgent enough to occupy the vast share of public debate. The basic thrust of the book is continuity, with the author seeing a 2050 world very similar to our own but one where the growth of China, an aging population, innovations in energy, changing health demands and health technologies, changing gender roles, increased flooding, changing attitudes to work and privacy and so on have left their mark. The average irish householder in 2050 will, among other things, be older, will be more likely to have run a number of businesses, will drive an electric car and view China as an intimate part of their business plans. NAMA is just winding down, Ireland is still heavily embedded in the EU, Dublin has sprawled further, Nuclear power has become a reality and, in general, if you fell into a coma now and woke up in the imagined Ireland in 2050 you would probably figure things out reasonably quickly.

I am inclined to agree with Gerard O'Neill's view that the book is painting a picture of ireland in 2020 as much as in 2050, with many of the trends being picked up processes that are already underway, though this is not a fatal weakness. The author puts together a set of trends that almost every analyst agrees on as important and knits them into a simple vision that can act as a spark to a wider debate. In doing this however, the book does not delve deeply into potential disruptive events that are being widely discussed across many fields. We do not spend much time thinking about the consequence of a major bio or nuclear strike on the US mainland (see for example Martin Rees Our Final Century). Other major debates, such as the implications of human genetic engineering or increasing human-machine interfaces, are also absent from the story of the book. If I could take up any part of Stephen's offer of a row, it would be to debate the extent to which such "black swans" should be an integral feature of our planning. In one school of thought, worrying too much about catastrophic events with low predictability that are outside of our control distract us from the very pressing and predictable problems outlined in the book. Take, for example, the number of people who are now worrying about ancient Mayan prophecies on the back of a new blockbuster peddling another apocalypse story. On the other hand, failure to adapt a society to the potential for catastrophic changes or major disruptive technologies is clearly also dangerous in its way. A debate about the types of human values and institutions needed to get a population through a major disruptive event should be a feature of the row that Stephen is trying to start.

I think this book works well as a first gambit designed, as the author suggests, to start a debate rather than conclude one. It represents a sensible view on a very wide range of issues facing Ireland and other countries in the next forty years and I commend the author for getting this debate going. As a lecturer in several broad economics courses in UL and someone continuously and frantically active as a teacher, researcher and commenter, the author is very well placed to moderate a national debate on the long-term future of the country and I look forward to seeing how this concept develops over the next few years. To make decisions clearly about the future, it is important to be able to see clearly the potential outcomes, to identify with things that are not in our immediate surrounding, to divorce ourselves from current pressures to enable rational thought. This book and follow-ups will help with that. Being able to think far ahead has many potential benefits and I hope that Stephen is successful in bedding this concept into political and popular debate.