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.
My book Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School—but Didn’t is coming out in a little over two weeks on May 10. If you would like to have it in hand as soon as it comes out, you can pre-order it here.
With the publisher’s permission, I am sharing an excerpt of the book’s introduction below, after which I explain what the book covers, and how I am qualified to do so.
(Note: This post has a lot of inside baseball about the agricultural and applied economics profession. If you tend to read this blog for the econometrics post, it is safe to skip this post and wait for the next installment of ‘Metrics Monday, which will hopefully be posted next week.)
After my last post, in which I announced that I was running for the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s (AAEA) Board of Directors, a colleague sent me the following on Twitter, via direct message:
I was interested also to hear your thoughts on all of the gender issues that have been swirling in the economics field and how you think they are similar/contrast with what we have in AAEA world. You didn’t bring these challenges to the field up at all in your blog post. Do you know if these trends are similar/different? Given how big an issue this has been over the last year, I think it would be good for people to hear your thoughts on it as a potential member of the AAEA board.
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