The Eastern Europe sales representative for university presses including Chicago, Harvard and Yale, Ewa Ledóchowicz, has written a terrific post on the Yale University Press blog about the mixed blessings of the increasingly borderless world – and specifically the effect of e-books on the retailing of scholarly works. How are people deciding what they want to read? Are specialist bookshops viable? More questions than answers – but a great post nonetheless.

I’m putting together a major conference early next year on the education of economists, prompted by a number of conversations with employers of economics graduates but also, notably, academics who teach economics. (UK-based employers and academics can e-mail me for more info.)

There is a general dissatisfaction, to varying degrees, with the undergraduate curriculum. This is most notable in macroeconomics, not surprisingly. The Great Moderation consensus in macro has fractured and the debate now is at least as polemical as when Keynesians and Monetarists slugged it out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet undergraduates are still taught one workhorse model and DSGE. Almost nobody thinks this is satisfactory. Turning to microeconomics, here graduates are far better prepared for the kind of jobs non-academic economists do, and the subject is having a rich and successful period. Yet even here, academics know that what they are teaching is far narrower than the kinds of research they themselves are doing, and employers would like to have new graduates who are better able to step out of the narrow confines of specific models when faced with real world data, institutions and politics (small ‘p’).

The essence of the problem is that schools are now producing a much greater number of students with A level economics, engaged and eager to understand the extraordinary events in the world around them, and all the enthusiasm gets beaten out of them in their first term. John Sutton put it well in his book Marshall’s Tendencies. He says that new students all ask whether models over-simplify and whether people really maximise. He continues: “By the time that students have advanced a couple of years into their studies, both these questions are forgotten. Those students who remain troubled by them have quit the field; those who remain are socialized and no longer as about such things. Yet these are deep questions which cut to the very heart of the subject.” (p.xv)

Changing the content of the undergraduate curriculum is not easy, however. It involves shifting away from one focal point to another and therefore requires co-ordination. Hence the conference. It would also ideally be international, especially taking in the US universities. We have no budget for that but I’m planning to invite overseas economists to contribute to a pre-conference set of papers – ideas for contributors very welcome!

Meanwhile, here are some questions for this blog’s readers. Should undergraduates always be taught some economic history? History of economic thought? Methodology? Behavioural approaches? How would you produce economics graduates with adequate technical skills but a broader education in their subject than they have at present?

And of course, what books should they read? Interestingly, the history of thought is well-served. There is Robert Heilbroner’s classic [amazon_link id=”0140290060″ target=”_blank” ]The Worldly Philosophers[/amazon_link] (1953; 7th ed 1999). And a new text has just reached me, Agnar Sandmo’s Economics Evolving . It looks less accessible than the Heilbroner, which is a series of biographical sketches, but far more thorough. I’ll review it here in due course.

[amazon_image id=”0691148422″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economics Evolving[/amazon_image]

In recent weeks I’ve been reading two distinct narratives about the status of women, neither encouraging.

One is the pattern of abortion or infanticide of girls in a number of Asian countries, including China and India. This morning’s Financial Times has a feature describing the potential adverse social consequences of this imbalance:

“[China’s] 2010 census showed 34m more men than women – comparable, says retired military officer Yao Cheng, who runs Huijiawang, a charity dedicated to rescuing abducted children, to the male population of France. “What if all the men of France did not get married?”

The article comes on the heels of a new book on the same subject noted on this blog, Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl.

[amazon_image id=”1586488503″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Unnatural Selection[/amazon_image]

The second narrative has been the dismal absence of many women on the boards of listed companies in the UK. The government would like to see the proportion rise to 25%. It’s less than half that currently. However, it would like not to have to legislate for a statutory quota. The outcome will be predictable. The proportion of female directors will edge up but will not get remotely close to a quarter of the total. And in another five years we can have the same debate with another government. Male chairmen and chief execs might think they want women on their boards but in the end will appoint people who are very similar to themselves. That is, men.

Women seem more vulnerable to redundancies at present – hard times are always harder on the least powerful. A number of high-achievers I know are giving up on the workplace struggle. To cap it all, a young friend at an excellent university told me yesterday that the ambition of her female housemate is to get married. Whatever happened to feminism?

These gloomy thoughts prompted me to dust off my copy of [amazon_link id=”0140034633″ target=”_blank” ]The Second Sex[/amazon_link] (bought in 1979). De Beauvoir writes: “The woman who is economically emancipated from man is not for all that in a moral, social and psychological situation identical with that of a man. The way she carries on her profession and her devotion to it depend on the context supplied by the total pattern of her life. She is not viewed by society in the same way; the universe presents itself to her in a different perspective.”

Having got the book off the shelf, I might re-read more of it. As far as feminism is concerned, I fear it’s deja vu all over again.

Huge thanks to all who have recommended summer reading. The criteria were that it had to be a paperback that could be left behind in the holiday house or hotel if necessary, and also an improving but easy read. This is the selection.

Non-fiction:

The Snowball by Alice Schroeder

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman;

Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

Enough is Enough by Fintan O’Toole

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention by William Rosen

Parisians by Graham Robb

Aftershock by Philippe Legrain

Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking over the World by Angela Saini

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

The Truth About Markets by John Kay

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (“A perennial reminder that ‘truth’ is a working hypothesis. The neo-lib, neo-con, economic model of the past 30 years looks seriously flawed. Think a new paradigm is emerging….,” says the recommender.)

Chinese Lessons by Brian Pomfret

Dear Undercover Economist by Tim Harford (“A quick dip in and out the pool.”)

SuperFreakonomics by Levitt and Dubner (“On the beach.”)

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (“Nothing on’t telly.”)

The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb (“For the unexpected holiday twist.”)

Fiction:

The Dinosaur Feather by Sissel-Jo Gazan

One Day by David Nicholls (“If you graduated at any time in the 1980s then this is your book!  Laugh out loud funny in many places, it also moves you to tears.  My new mission in life is to seek out anyone of our generation who hasn’t yet read this, and make them do so!” says the recommender.)

The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott

Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (“Best book I have ever read – life changer,” says this recommender.)

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford (the publisher says this is non-fiction but it’s as gripping a read as any novel.)

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe.

Thanks to @brighteconomist, @lcf467, @paulstpancras, @marob23, @dirkvl, @spaceapes, @tawalton, @nextwavefutures, @brandsarebest, @mattflood and @ruskin147 on Twitter, and Rupert on this blog, for all of these. More welcome in comments (which should be much easier with this software than on the previous blog software I was using).

Yesterday I started writing a review of The God Species by Mark Lynas, and posted a brief comment about it here. I noticed that Amazon had an odd message saying the book (but not the Kindle edition) was unavailable because of a customer complaint that the item was “not as described.” It did cross my mind that this was a trick by a disgruntled environmentalist unhappy about the book’s pragmatic recommendations. Today, Mark Lynas and a rapidly growing number of people on Twitter have woken up to the apparent censorship, unwitting or not, by Amazon. Martin Robbins in The Guardian points out that maybe there was a faulty print run, but if so Amazon have not told the author or publisher about the problem, and nor are they responding to journalists’ calls or the Twitter snowball so far today.

So, without pre-empting my review, I’ll say it’s well worth reading the book if you’re at all interested in sustainability, and it’s available from Waterstones and Blackwells. Mark Lynas himself has commented on the affair.

This is, of course, if it proves to be effective censorship, a good example of the kind of consumer detriment caused by the increasing re-concentration of the book retailing market. When I was on the Competition Commission inquiry into this market a few years ago, Amazon was the competitive upstart which effectively persuaded us that Waterstones and Ottakars should be permitted to merge. Online dynamics mean that Amazon has become the incumbent with market power by now. Time for consumers to diversify to other online retailers – or indeed back to physical bookstores?