When, in August 1932, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post asked John Maynard Keynes if there had ever been anything like this before, he replied, “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted four hundred years.” LORDS OF FINANCE tells the story of how incredibly stupid financial decisions caused the Great Depression and World War II. Liaquat Ahamed’s brilliant financial history of the economic catastrophes of the early 20th Century holds lessons for our present economic meltdown. This is not only a great piece of financial analysis, this book brings history to life.

“The striking thing about the seemingly endless collapse of the subprime-mortgage market is how egalitarian it has been. It’s nearly impossible to draw a demographic line between the victims and the perps.” With these words, Michael Lewis introduces us to the world of financial panics. He starts in 1987 with the Wall Street crash, moves to the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, the Internet bubble, and finally, today’s subprime meltdown. In this anthology of articles about these panics, Lewis draws on many excellent writers. I prefer recent Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman’s lucid commentaries. There’s Dave Barry’s hilarious take on real estate. If you want to understand how these financial panics happen, and what to do to fix them, PANIC is the place to start.

Well this is one of those books that I could not walk past in the store without buying it. Most especially since it was a best seller as amazing as that sounds. The subject matter is quite fascinating as few truly realize how large a role salt has played throughout history. That said I had a hard time finishing this book. The author is all about food subjects and he interjects all manner of epicurean information into the book. This may amuse and interest some people but for me it just made it a hard read that seemed disjointed. This is a book I would love to give more stars too because it is fascinating, but I just can’t do it in light of how hard of a read I found it to be.

So I was all proud of myself for actually posting the review of the Einstein book, which I had finished reading a week or so ago when I decided to sit down and start reading one of the new books I had purchased for myself today. Freakonomics was brought to my attention during a discussion about politics, legislation, and abortion. Now I must admit to being a big fan of economic theory, but I feel that almost anyone would have their interest piqued if I were to tell them that its been shown that Roe vs Wade was responsible for the sharp decline in crime in the late 90’s.

So already suckered in I sat down to read. That started about 6 hours or so during which I read on and off. Those six hours have earned me an even greater respect for the methods of economics when applied to real life. The book covers a number of recent issues seemingly unrelated to economics, but when viewed through the economic lens of incentives, are suddenly illuminated with new light. The topics range from the aforementioned abortion and crime link to why teachers help their students cheat on standardized testing, and cover in between why real estate agents rip you off, why sumo wrestlers cheat, why people name their kids stupid names, why people don’t steal as many bagels as they could, and many more.

The book itself is well written with Dubner smoothing out the economic theory of Levitt. The subject matter as mentioned above is relevant and interesting. The whole tone of the book is somewhat mocking and somewhat ironic, but most of all informative. Really what is encouraged is the challenging of conventional wisdom, which while conventional is not always right. The book I feel should be read by just about everyone it is that good, and while you may not agree with what the authors have to say you certainly will look at things in new ways. Now on to the amazing history of salt I go.

NNT’s argument is that things that we don’t expect to happen matter more so we should stop forecasting (most) things because we aren’t going to get anything (important) right anyway.

He has lots of bits about why we delude ourselves with narratives (and how to prevent narratives from doing that, or how to use narratives to get ourselves to be re-deluded to believe better things), how statistics do nothing for us, and how these “black swans” matter lots and lots and we should leverage them.

The bell curve is very bad. Mandlebrotion randomness is very good. Being a successful writer require random good luck.

Most importantly, one must find their own historical foundation from the works of forgotten/neglected/partially ignored scholars.

The author gives an interesting introduction to the world of economics. You will learn why sweatshops are good things and fair trade coffee isn’t quite fair. Harford guides the reader, through many examples, to a new way of looking at the world. This book, while it may be simplistic to those familiar with economic theory is still a playful, fun, and most of all education read even if it does have like the longest secondary title ever.

I read this right before I left Buffalo so I could give it to Amy, so she could read it. While I found the idea of using economics as a framework for looking at other problems a pretty obvious idea, I thought Lewitt’s execution was very good, though I would have liked to see even more formalization of the process he used, and thought the book bordered too close to simple storytelling.

It seems people feel much better about themselves when they believe they are reading science, regardless of how scientific the science is.