Outstanding Nonfiction 2012 (and a few older)

Here are a batch of the best nonfiction I've read recently (as well as a few from previous years).

Five stars = 'stunning, not to be missed'; four stars = 'excellent.'

Enjoy!

Title	Author	Stars	Comment
The Wild Life Of Our Bodies	Rob Dunn	*****	Therapeutic use of hookworms, vertical farming, much more
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion	Johnathan Haidt	*****	Genetic differences in Liberals and Conservatives, much more
Thinking, Fast and Slow	Daniel Kahnemann	*****	How we mostly use heuristics for thinking and what to do when they don't work
Predictably Irrational	Dan Ariely	****	The power of Free to befuddle us, among many other things
Too Big to Fail	Andrew Ross Sorkin	*****	The Financial Crisis as a page-turner (and later an HBO movie)
Debunking Economics	Steve Keen	*****	See my full post on this one here.
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World	Liaquat Ahamed	****	The guys in charge the last time this happened (they didn't do as well)
All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis	Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera	*****	Smart guys (Goldman Sachs) and dumb guys (Merrill Lynch) during the financial meltdown
The Smartest Guys in the Room	Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind	*****	Enron and its amazing hubris and wild cast of characters
Paper Promises: Debt, Money and the New World Order	Philip Coggan	****	The history of financial crises past, and it's a long one
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	*****	If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	*****	... like a decline in housing prices ...
Fringeology	Steve Vulk	****	If we can't explain it, what do we say to ourselves?

A call for young computer scientists to help fix economics

I read this astonishing book a couple of weeks ago:

Steve Keen is a "post-Keynesian" (i.e. dissident) economist; the world is mostly run by economists who  promote the "neoclassical" model.

The problems with the neoclassical model are several:

• It does not represent such fundamentals as money, debt or banks
• It doesn't use sophisticated enough math to represent the forces in play in the actual economy
• It assumes reversion to "equilibrium" which of course the actual economy does not

The neoclassical economists control most academic departments and serve in most high government positions. (U.S chairman of the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are both advocates of the neoclassical theory, for example).

Dr. Keen and his dissident colleagues are working to overthrow the neoclassical model with representations of the economy that better represent the actual world economy. They've made a good start on this; the graph of the model in this book against the graph of the actual economy is a close match.

But to continue the work they need young Ph.D students who understand math and computer science well enough to extend these software-based models to even better accuracy and usefulness.

I emailed Dr. Keen a couple of days ago; he responded that he and his colleagues are accepting applications for students. Dr. Keen lives in Australia, but there's a U.S. conference coming up the end of September with all the relevant players:

http://www.internationalpostkeynesianconference.org/

Unfortunately I didn't find out about the conference until the registration deadline of September 1 was already here. But if this post or the book at all light you up the way they did me, you could get in touch with Dr. Keen at "debunking at gmail dot com" and/or get ahold of the conference proceedings when they are published and track down other post-Keynesians from that source.

You can also download and try a version of the model.

Think about it! We don't tolerate 19th-century physics or 19th-century biology; especially after its abject failure the last 5 years why do we tolerate 19th-century economics?