Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism", Princeton University Press, 2009.  ~and~ Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies", W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. This is the first time on my blog that I am reviewing two books together, but I thought it made sense in this case because the books are complementary: both are about economics, yet they take different perspectives. Animal Spirits  by Akerlof and Shiller is essentially a vision of "behavioral macroeconomics", criticizing the mainstream standard story about the economy as incomplete and offering a theory that includes human psychology. The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee applies the principles of economics to the issue of technological change in the 21st century and argues that the digital ...

I haven't updated my blog for a while, but I am in the process of writing another book review. This time it will be two books, both related in some way to economics. Before that post is ready, I thought that it would be cool in the meantime to post a "list of questions for economists", based on a book by Rod Hill and Tony Myatt called The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics (Zed Books, 2010). The purpose of the book is to challenge the standard, conventional treatment of microeconomics of a typical undergrad textbook. It is not against mainstream economics, but against mainstream textbook economics. According to the authors, the problem with the standard text is that it obscures the most important value judgments in economics and pretends to objectivity. Hill and Myatt also criticize the world-view of market fundamentalism assumed by most introductory textbooks. Throughout the book, the authors pose "questions for your professo...

Book Review: Simon Blackburn, "Think: A compelling introduction to philosophy", Oxford University Press, 1999. Why did I read this introductory philosophy text? Well, firstly, to refresh my knowledge, and secondly, because it was suggested by Conceptually.org   as a book that can improve one's "cognitive toolkit" (the other books are on my to-read list as well). I will say upfront that this book deals only with Western analytic philosophy, and that it does not even cover all the influential philosophers and their theories within analytic philosophy. For example, Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, Peirce, Ayer, Popper, Rawls and Searle are nowhere mentioned in Think . That being said, the book does a fair job of presenting the core areas and classic thinkers of philosophy: Chapter 1 is about knowledge (or epistemology), or how we can think about the relation between our perceptions of reality and reality itself. Simon Blackburn begins with René Descartes 's ...

Book Review: Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, "Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions", William Collins, 2016. After finishing "Decisive" by Chip and Dan Heath , which prescribes a somewhat algorithmic approach to making decisions using the WRAP process, I started reading "Algorithms to Live By". This is a book about what humans can learn from computers, specifically from computer algorithms  -- i.e. sequences of steps that are used to solve problems. The problems faced by computer scientists, like how to allocate processing power, when to switch between different tasks, how to use memory resources, and when to collect more data, have parallels in the everyday problems of human thought and action and interaction. As such, the computer scientist's solutions to these problems (whether optimal or merely approximate) can give us some wisdom. Sometimes that wisdom is bittersweet, for instance: "Life is full of problem...