Mao’s Great Famine, by Frank Dikötter. As a development economist working on food policy, I simply had to read this book after reading Pankaj Mishra’s review in The New Yorker. Dikötter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, has exploited a new Chinese law which has opened up some of the Communist Party’s archives. With an estimated death toll of 45 million, the Chinese famine of 1958 has been one of the worst famines in history, the Chinese version of the Holocaust or the Gulag. This book illustrates the spectacular failings of centrally planned economies, but it is not for the faint of heart, as the final chapters discuss the many ways — including cannibalism — in which people survived. UPDATE: It turns out Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution has also been reading this book. Here is his review.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton. There was a nice independent bookstore across the street from my hotel in Washington, DC last week. So when the Duke colleague with whom I had dinner the first night said he was in the habit of buying a book every time he went to a different city, I was happy to follow him in there. I had never read anything by de Botton before, and this was a good introduction to his works. Unlike many modern-day philosophers, de Botton strives to be accessible. This is reflected in his writing and in the fact that a photo essay accompanies the text. Each chapter focuses on a different job. I especially enjoyed the chapter in which de Botton follows a tuna fish from being a fresh catch in the Maldives to being part of a meal in Britain, discussing the entire value chain in the process. An interesting read which made me realize just how fortunate I am to have a job that I love.
How Markets Fail, by John Cassidy. I’ve enjoyed John Cassidy’s articles in The New Yorker for a while now, so I thought reading this book could help me come up with good examples of market failures in my micro course this semester. Instead, the first part discusses how the evolution of economic thought from Adam Smith to Robert Lucas led to economists mistaking theoretical results for empirical realities. Much to his credit, Cassidy does not set up the economics discussed in the first part of the book as a straw man, as the second part discusses economists whose work has focused on market failures and behavioral anomalies. The last part discusses the housing bubble, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the financial crisis. This is a very good read for anyone who, like me, is not an expert on macroeconomics or finance.