Yesterday I reposted my 2013 list of classic novels for economists. Commenters on the post and many people on Twitter offered other suggestions. Here they are. First, classic novels:

Balzac – Alexandre Delaigue & others mentioned Le Père Goriot (cited by Thomas Piketty) and Eugenie Grandet was recommended by Rebecca Spang (about greed, speculation and coins).

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (of course! how could I have omitted it. Thanks Stephen Kinsella.

From Laurent Franckx, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

Merjin Knibbe & others pointed to Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment and The Gambler, and Gogol’s Dead Souls. Also Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

On the Gogol, “The plot of this hilarious satire revolves over an attempt by the protagonist to acquire fictious collateral (dead serfs) for which money could be borrowed from the Russian state bank (in early 19th century)”, writes Juha Tarkka.

Merjin also suggested some others I hadn’t even heard of: by Heijermans, Kamertjeszonde (no translation?!). Multatuli’s Max Havelaar. Fukazawa’s The ballad of Narayama, Malot’s Sans Familie.

Matt Clancy suggested The Grapes of Wrath. Of course! Another one I should have thought of, were it not for the A Level aversion therapy: hated it when forced to read it.

Nick Isles proposed Jude the Obscure. (I hate Hardy’s novels; I always want the characters to just pull themselves together.)

Zola was popular:  The Ladies’ Paradise, L’Argent. Anything by Zola is magnificent.

Trollope’s The Way We Live Now was a popular one, and again a glaring omission from the original list.

Robbie Mochrie, impressively, suggested a Jane Austen work I’ve never heard of, about “the ways in which economic activity was shifting from land use to provision of goods and services early in the industrial revolution,” Sanditon.

Cyril Ritter points to Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945, “For its depiction of a system that exploits poor people and keeps them poor and uninformed.”

Then there were some non-classic suggestions, which was against the rules but there were some great ideas.

I thoroughly agree with all those recommending Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, which in effect makes the point about the formal identity under ideal conditions of decentralised general equilibrium and the centrally planned economy. But more than that it’s a cracking good read. Also Spufford’s Golden Hill and The Backroom Boys. He’s a wonderful writer.

Jacques Crémer recommended The Godfather, Mario Puzo, on game theory.

Others in this category:

China Miéville, Embassytown

Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (international capital flows)

Asimov’s Foundation series

Dune

Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

David Lodge’s Nice Work

 

 

Courtesy of Elizabeth Baldwin at Oxford, I was reminded of a list of classic novels economists should read, something I posted here a few years ago. I had forgotten about it, and must immodestly say it’s a great list. Here it is again, below.

However, it could be better. Even in my own cultural tradition, I haven’t read the great Russian authors on the whole. Which of those are particularly economics-relevant? I hate Henry James and Dickens (school aversion therapy) but accept novels like Little Dorrit could count. What about African, Indian, Chinese classics? Should modern classics be added, Vonnegut’s Player Piano, say? Suggestions please.

The 2013 list:

Nostromo, Joseph Conrad: the heart of colonialism

Germinal, Emile Zola: the fuel of the Industrial Revolution – coal and human life

North and South or Mary Barton, Mrs Gaskell: the social effects of industrialisation with a special eye on women. Mary Barton is set in my home city, Manchester.

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov: the murderous insanity of Soviet dictatorship – Professor Woland, Game Theorist? I’ve only just read this, having seen the truly, madly, deeply brilliant Theatre de Complicite staging earlier this year.

The Charterhouse of Palma, Stendhal: pre-unification Italy and European politics

The Leopard, Giuseppe de Lampedusa: The Risorgimento, and modernity.

The Whirlpool, George Gissing: in fact anything by Gissing – as he summed it up, “Not enough money,” in Britain’s newly industrialising cities

Middlemarch, George Eliot (or again, pretty much anything by her): astute political and psychological analysis of 19th century social change. Bonnets and frocks without the saccharine.

Roxana, Daniel Defoe: the economic status of women, by one of the unsung feminist heroes, who was also a famous economic journalist in his day.

We, Yevgeny Zamyatin: collectivism, conformity – the dark side of the early 20th century. Another recent discovery, courtesy of Nick Reynolds.

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo: need I say anything? I even loved the recent musical movie version

My Antonia and O Pioneers, Willa Cather: the harsh life of the American frontier, and the strength of women.

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald: the Roaring 20s in a glamorous nutshell. I haven’t yet seen the new Baz Luhrmann movie version.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressel: not the greatest literature but a novel that still speaks to working people struggling for money.

Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth: She was contemporary with Jane Austen, but lived a lot longer.

I’m on holiday & luxuriating in the reading time, mostly non-work books. I did, though, read AIQ: How Artificial Intelligence Works and etc etc (am fed up now with these super-long subtitles) by Nick Polson and James Scott. If you read about AI already then this won’t add anything new. However, it’s a very nice, accessible and balanced introduction to AI for those who aren’t semi-immersed already, which is most people of course. The book explains the basics, and gives lots of examples of what ML and AI are already doing, and what they might be capable of in future – while also explaining what the potential risks are. It’s an enjoyable read, too, with lots of stories and real world examples. It isn’t Pollyannaish exactly, but it is nice to read something on this subject that isn’t all gloom and doom. AI beginners should start here.

One thing I particularly appreciated was the way the authors highlight the role of female scientific pioneers: astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (no, I’d never heard of her either), Grace Hopper, and Florence Nightingale. I learnt some new things: that real time data monitoring is already a thing in Formula 1 racing and starting now in basketball, for instance. There’s also a nice section on health explaining that the barriers to using AI and health data are not technological but social and economic – which will make it extremely hard to use data for the benefit of individual patients, even as massive data sets enable research on populations.

Apart from that, it’s been a diet of detective novels – Mick Herron’s Dead Lions (love this series), Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man – and also Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad (clever but an acquired taste). And now, the great Swedish outdoors beckons.