The People's Economics

In this book a Nobel prize winner looks at the way we think and how we can change it. It looks interesting, and I'm hoping for something that really does suggest ways to change how I think and not just amusing stories.Is it necessary to stop yourself from time to time and think more carefully about...

I didn't get on with this book. It has lots of interesting stuff, but somehow it didn't seem to be engaging. Maybe that's because I know about quite a bit about some of the material it presents, but that never seems to be a problem with other books. I got the impression that the material was being p...

Unfortunately there is no sample available for this book, so this impression is based on reading the preface. The blurb seems to suggest that this book is about scientists who have been forgotten by history, but, as Ferguson points out, its hard to claim that someone has been forgotten and then find...

Adam Smith is well known for his Wealth of Nations , but this book was written considerably earlier. Now it often happens that when an author puts forward an argument in one book, it is necessary to respond to criticism in a later book. Typically the second book will be somewhat longer, as it needs...

The sample doesn't get on to the actual work, just the introduction by Paul Foot, but that has plenty of useful information. It seems that Ransome did see the revolution as something huge, and certainly sympathised with its aims. The introduction mentions later works Ransome wrote on the progress of...

I'm interested in the history of science, and so I thought this book would be worth a try - hopefully it will be an entertaining read. After reading a lot of history of science books, particularly those aimed at a general readership, one can find they tend to go over the same material. This may well...

Yudkowsky discusses the failure of the FDA to approve Omegaven for intravenous feeding of babies, and how this has led to hundreds of deaths. He doesn't really go the the root of the problem, which is that once parents hear about Omegaven, they aren't willing to enter a controlled trial where their ...

When we learn about revolutions it often looks like there was a sudden change from one regime to another. I doubt that it is really like that, presumably people's day to day lives continue as before, and they may well not see the change at the time as anything like a big as history makes it. Arthur ...

The book starts by explaining how Milton Friedman's Nobel prize lecture in 1976 created the myth that the Phillips curve had played a large part of the recommendations from economists after 1959. Forder explains how this book is aimed at revealing what really happened, noting that things have chang...

The introduction (available in the Kindle sample in the UK) introduces the idea of a nudge, and then discusses whether influencing people in this way is excessively paternalistic. I did wonder whether this worry was really necessary as I would have thought that most governments inevitably have a lot...