Tyler Cowen started a blogospheric whirlwind recently when he posted the list of books that had influenced him the most and called on other econ bloggers to do the same. In short order, we got entries from Peter Suderman, E.D. Kain, Arnold Kling, Michael Martin, Niklas Blanchard, EconJeff, Bryan Caplan, Matt Yglesias, Jenny Davidson, Will Wilkinson, Matt Continetti, Ross Douthat, Mike Konczal, Kieran Healy, Ivar Hagendoorn, Scott Sumner, and no doubt others. [Update: Some of these links were wrong; I think they’re all fixed now.]
I’m late to the party, but here’s my list:
- Clown Town, by Dixie Willson The book I fell in love with before I could read.
- Space and Time in Special Relativity, by N. David Mermin. As I said in the introduction to The Big Questions, this is the book that taught me, at age 16, that it is possible to think.
- Topics in Algebra, by I.N. Herstein. The book that taught me algebra.
- The Waste Land and Other Poems, by T.S. Eliot.
- Exchange and Production by Armen Alchian and William Allen. The book that taught me to think like an economist.
- The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes, by David Mumford. The book that taught me geometry, before it was a book. I still have my tattered copy of Mumford’s manuscript, which circulated unpublished for many years.
- Collected Poems, by Dylan Thomas
- Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas
- A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas
- Poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Quantum Reality, by Nick Herbert. This survey, aimed at the “physics for poets” crowd, inspired me to start working through textbooks, culminating in entry number 16 below.
- Collected Poems, by W.B. Yeats
- Recoltes et Semailles, by Alexandre Grothendieck. I am inspired above all by Grothendieck’s vision of geometry, but I got my first taste of that vision from Mumford’s red book, not from the primary sources, which I have therefore not listed here. This gripping and intensely personal and memoir is inspiring and saddening in a thousand different ways.
- Joe Gould’s Secret, by Joseph Mitchell
- Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett
- Quantum Mechanics and the Particles of Nature, by Anthony Sudbery
Notably absent from this list is Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which I have somehow never read front-to-back though it’s been fifteen years since Tyler told me it’s a must-read. I haven’t done a careful count, but I believe that Parfit is the most frequently mentioned book on the lists cited above. I really must get to it.
Do share your own lists.
Fair Play (seriously)
http://www.amazon.com/Fair-Play-Steven-Landsburg/dp/0684827557/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269954019&sr=8-2
I’m amazed that no one mentions the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
The only ones that come to mind right now are:
Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Entire Series)
I’m currently reading The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I’m not sure that I consider them influential beyond being the most entertaining series of books I’ve read.
I know I’m missing some here.
Patrick R. Sullivan said: “I’m amazed that no one mentions the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.”
LOL. I read that in between reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Newton’s Principia. I like Steve’s list, not only because it includes some of my favorite books, but because I can actually believe that he read them.
Here are some that have really shaped my way of thinking.
“The Selfish Gene” and “The Ancestor’s Tale” by Richard Dawkins.
“How the Mind Works” and “The Blank Slate” by Stephen Pinker.
“Basic Economics” by Thomas Sowell.
“Economics in One Lesson” by Henry Hazlitt.
“Drug War Crimes” by Jeffrey Miron.
“Ending the War on Drugs” by Dirk Chase Elderidge.
“The Power of Babel” by John McWhorter.
“Banker to the Poor” by Muhammad Yunus.
“1984” and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell.
“Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein.
“Overkill” by Radley Balko (it’s a paper, not a book, but it’s devastating to read).
“Principles of Quanum Mechanics” by R. Shankar (the textbook I most often reference).
And, the book that sparked my interest in economics (and refuted my silly notions about socialism), “Price Theory and Applications” by Steven Landsburg.
The Selfish Gene! GregS mentions “The Selfish Gene” and I don’t know how I managed to omit it from my list. Pure oversight. Consider it added! The Pinker books are strong candidates for my list also.
Where are all the econ books? A bit disappointed about lack of them…
I have read and thought about large portions of Reasons & Persons for many years, though I’ve not read it cover to cover. It’s one of those strange books where you read an argument, think “That can’t be right,” and yet have difficulty putting one’s finger on just what’s wrong. Yet the feeling that SOMETHING is wrong remains strong.
A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
I read this over and over from 4th grade through high school. I listened to the CD-ROM version so many times I nearly had it memorized. I didn’t really understand much of it, but it powerfully fueled my interest in physics.
Dune, by Frank Herbert
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Mathematics Made Difficult, by Karl E. Linderholm
See http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/forgeries.html
The Theory of Poker, by David Sklansky
I don’t, and hopefully never will, play poker. But this book taught me to think about probabilistic decision making not as simply “win / lose”, but instead to consider the “implied pot odds” of the situation.
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, by David MacKay
This book made me a Bayesian. Available as a free pdf (and as TeX / GNU Octave source). http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/ . His most recent book “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” is also excellent. It is perhaps the only treatment of “sustainability” I’ve found cogent.
Carmina, by GV Catullus; Odes, by Horace; The Aeneid, by Virgil
Anyone who thinks that the Iliad and Odyssey are better than the Aeneid is insane.
How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman
Use great ingredients, and keep it simple.
Nice to see a book that I have actually read (Quantum Reality).
Here is my list, limited to a few themes of special interest to me.
How is it possible to acquire knowledge?
* The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie, was possibly the first book that made me wonder about that.
* A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle, was the next.
Then I read the rest of the Sherlock Holmes canon, but I had moved on to epistemology and neuroscience.
* Nerves, Muscles, and Synapses, by Bernhard Katz: not only it introduced me to neuroscience, it also made me realize that calculus is actually useful.
* The Logic of Scientific Discovery, by Karl Popper: provided me with an almost complete framework which I probably use every day, subconsciously.
* Numerical Recipes in C is the main book that enabled me to turn philosophy into AI.
How to deal with people? this is not one of my natural talents, so I turned to the following books:
* How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie: taught me to look at my own actions from the point of view of other people.
* Winning the Games People Play, by Nathan Miron: this is not as famous as I think it should be. One way to describe it is that it teaches how to apply the tit for tat strategy to everyday life, but it is written by a psychologist, not a game theorist.
* The Sagas of Icelanders. It is amazing that semi-literate barbarians had such understanding of human nature — possibly because their lives depended on it. As Steve wrote elsewhere, incentives have a way of concentrating minds. Sometime I find myself thinking what the Viking Icelanders would have done in my situation, and often there is an answer in the sagas.
The 2 other books that have most affected the way I think (probably more than some of the above):
* English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, by Martin Wiener.
* The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb.
Runners up:
* Learned Optimism, by Martin Seligman.
* The Lost Literature of Socialism, by George Watson.
I reserve the right to change my mind next week.
No sucking up intended, but I’d have the Armchair Economist on my list. Four things stuck with me from this book: The revelation that economics is about happiness, the explanation of efficiency and markets, the explanation of the right way to do benefit/cost analysis, and the trade-is-a-technology argument for free trade. More importantly (for me, anyway), this book got me interested in reading about economics. I’m just an amateur, but it’s been a fascinating subject to learn about.
I agree with Windypundit. It’s not exaggerating to say Armchair Economist is the book that most profoundly changed my outlook. It showed me an entire new way to think, one that had never occurred to me before but that made more sense than how I’d been looking at the world previously. It converted me from a liberal to a libertarian, and from a mild socialist to a devoted capitalist.