Over the weekend I read the 1920 essays Liberty and The News (reissued recently) in which Walter Lippmann trails the ...   more »

Portfolios of the Poor (by Daryl Collins and three co-authors) is a masterly assessment of the financial needs of people ...   more »

The Frozen Trade by Gavin Weightman
HarperCollins (2003)


I happened to be reading William Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange: How Trade...   more »

For relaxation yesterday evening I was listening to OK Computer and reading Captain James Cook's Journal of his voyage of ...   more »

I've spent the day trying to finish drafting Chapter 1 of my next book, due out from Princeton University Press ...   more »

The MIT Press catalog for Fall 2009 is available now. The title that leapt out for me is Erik Brynjolfsson ...   more »

I've almost finished Nicholas Stern's Blueprint for a Safer Planet, his (relatively) popular version of the Stern Review of ...   more »

Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money was essentially written pre-crash but even so the grand historical sweep provides great background ...   more »

After posting on Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold, I chanced upon this article on the Wharton website pinpointing the same kinds ...   more »

One of my holiday reads (at the serious end of the spectrum) was Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett. It's an ...   more »

This is the title of the new book by Professor Robert Allen of Nuffield College, Oxford, and a fascinating assessment ...   more »

I've just read a fascinating essay by primatologist Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers. (It's the Archbishop of Canterbury ...   more »

No doubt there are 'nudges', to use the term for psychological tricks to guide behaviour popularised by Richard Thaler and ...   more »

A rich question coming from an economist, one might think. It's prompted by a book I've been dipping into which ...   more »