Book Tag, 2006 version
Rondi Adamson has tagged me in the latest version of blog book tag. The questions in this version are new and interesting. I hope these answers meet her expectations: Here are some convenient Amazon links for the books I have mentioned above:
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- A book that changed my life - There were several books that had a big impact on me at various stages in my life. Almost surely the greatest impact came from Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. I had been taught (unsuccessfully!) as an undergraduate that everything Friedman said was wrong, but a year after graduating (and a year before going to graduate school in economics), I read this book and realized Friedman was pretty smart and mostly correct. I have mostly been a Chicagoan neoclassical economist ever since then.
Another book which had an impact on me in an odd way was Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis. I read it that same summer, while I was in theological seminary. After reading that book I realized that I, too, was being hypocritical (though I hoped in a less odious way) and decided that evening I would leave seminary, though it took me another year to implement that decision.
In the mid-1970s, my conversion to being a Chicago-type neoclassical economist was speeded along by the conference volume, Industrial Concentration: the New Learning. In this volume, old-style east coast interventionist industrial organization economists (I call them Bainsians, since they subscribed to the Joe Bain "structure-conduct-performance" paradigm) were very effectively criticized by the Chicago-UCLA school of industrial organization, led by Yale Brozen and Harold Demsetz. It affected my entire research agenda and led to my doing more work in the field of Law and Economics.
More recently, The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene raised enough questions about string theory and an 11-dimensional universe that I have drifted away from atheism toward agnosticism.
Rondi mentioned On the Beach by Nevil Shute. I read it the summer after I completed grade 12, and it affected me, too. I remember putting the book down and crying for awhile. But I don't think it changed my life.
- A book I've read more than once - Mostly I read books more than once by accident. I sometimes find that I have read one but cannot remember that I have read it. After I start rereading it, I realize I have probably read it but cannot remember what happened in it, so I read it again anyway. Aren't the memory problems that afflict the aged fascinating? The most recent of these (that I can remember!) is Janet Evanovitch's Ten Big Ones.
By choice, other than textbooks I use in courses I teach, I can think of very few books I have consciously chosen, ex ante, to read more than once. One is The Joyless Economy by Tibor Scitovsky, a book which challenges the core paradigms of neoclassical economics. Another is Johnson and Kiokemeister's Calculus with Analytic Geometry, albeit in different editions. The reason I read a math text twice is that when I decided I wanted to do economics for the rest of my life, I realized I really had to know how to do mathematics, so I took all the calculus, etc. courses a second time.
- A book I would take with me if I were stuck on a desert island - I really like Rondi's answer. But I might consider this one or this one.
Seriously, I might take The Complete Calvin & Hobbes (or is that cheating to list a set of three volumes?), or maybe I'd take my copy of Beethoven's Nine Symphonies in Score. But maybe I'll think of something else later and update this item. Actually I'm sure some sort of "how-to" or survival book would be a much smarter selection.
- A Book That Made Me Laugh Ms. Eclectic says she knows when I am reading one of Janet Evanovitch's Stephanie Plum novels because I'm laughing out loud as I read it. All eleven of them have made me laugh, but the incident with the chicken in the first one, One for the Money, still makes me chuckle when I think about it.
- A Book That Made Me Cry - See On the Beach, in the first item above.
- A book I wish had been written - Probably any one of the three novels I started but gave up on because I keep going off on weird tangents every time I started writing them. Another might be, "It's Okay to Fight with Someone Who Has Cancer."
- A book I wish had never been written — I have to go with Rondi's choices here, Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, etc. (these are Wikipedia links, not Amazon links in this category). I might also add, as I said when I first started writing this blog, "any religious screed that encourages its devotees to kill non-believers".
- A book I'm currently reading - Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. It is painfully and frustratingly and eye-openingly on the mark. I have mentioned it before on this blog, and I highly recommend it. If you want to understand what is happening with terrorism in England (and probably elsewhere), read this book.
- A book I've been meaning to read - Another by Tyler Cowen since I enjoy his writing on his blog so much. I know it isn't his latest, but the one whose theme has always appealed to me in my role as Chair of the Philistine Liberation Organization (PLO) is In Praise of Commercial Culture.
- What turned me onto fiction "Jax" Lucas, an English Literature professor at Carleton College and an expert on Hemingway turned me on to Hemingway. I think that was the first time I ever bought a novel (The Sun Also Rises) just because I wanted to read it, not because it was assigned reading or something I had to write a book report about.
- Whom do I tag? Every time I have joined in a game of blog tag in the past, a few people have had somewhat negative reactions, so please do not feel obligated in any way. I tag (how many am I allowed to tag???):
- John Chilton, when he gets back to blogging
- Kip Esquire, when he returns from Prague
- Brian Ferguson
- Dave Friedman
- Stephen Gordon
- Stephen Karlson
- Rebekah K
- Phil Miller
- Ben Muse
- Bill Polley
and anyone else who wants to play. - John Chilton, when he gets back to blogging
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Category: Books, etc., Economics Posted on
Thursday, September 7, 2006 at 12:21pm
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I did mine here.