Books I Would Buy (Idle Words)#
03.27.2009
Rare are the moments when I regret living in northeastern Romania. The sun is shining, the sheep are out grazing again, and there are fat buds growing on every little branch in sight. Really, one of the only drawbacks to living here is the inability to order books. The complete lack of infrastructure, and my fear of interacting with postal clerks, limits me to things I can find as audiobooks online.
But I thought I might at least share a list with my readers of the economics-related books I can't wait to scarf down if I ever return home:
This is actually a book I've been listening to as I run past the large abandoned factory on the main Botosani road, kicking at the numberless little yippy dogs that try to chase me. Taleb's central insight sounds like a tautology - "rare things are hard to predict because they are rare" - but it came as news to the people who just finished dynamiting the world's financial system.
Taleb also wrote an earlier book:
The next two books cover behavioral issues - herding and groupthink - in financial markets:
And then there are the memoirs of life among the traders:
Daniel Gross has been writing excellent columns on Slate for years, and synthesizes a lot of the material in a new book:
And finally there is Lawrence Roberts, whose supremely informative Irvine Housing Blog called the bubble years in advance, and has tracked it all the way down, with the occasional highly useful and entertaining primer into how the real estate racket works. I've been hoping he'd publish a book ever since I started reading his site a couple of years ago.
Please enjoy on my behalf!
Idle Words
brevity is for the weak
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Maciej Cegłowski
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