The Human Capital Handbook for 2011 is available free online. There are some really interesting essays here  including one by an old friend, Raj Thamotheram, who works at Axa Investment Management. He and a colleague focus on the tyranny of – but need for – measurable data to be able to affect companies' treatment of their 'human capital' or people. So many executives say 'Ours is a people business' but treat their employees with no respect.

I was interested to read in the essay that: “In France, companies with more than 300 employees are required to publish metrics on workforce demographics, recruitment and training, absenteeism, staff turnover rates and working time flexibility, and this legislation has already had a significant positive impact on reporting.”

I've got an essay in this book too but of course I'd like everyone to buy as well The Economics of Enough. Here's a pile of them in Heffers in Cambridge, photographed by Kan Banks (@kiwanja).

'Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans' (pdf) by Finn E Kydland and Edward E Prescott, Journal of Political Economy 1977:

“Optimal control theory is an appropriate planning device for situations in which current outcomes and movements of the system's state depend only on current and past policy decisions and on the current state. Current decisions of economics agents depend in part on their expectations of future policy actions. Only if these expectations were invariant to the future policy plan selected would optimal control theory be appropriate.”

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1532

“The promise given was a necessity of the past; the word broken is a necessity of the present.”

Yesterday morning I posted about the oddity that Amazon seemed to be charging more for the Kindle than the hardcover edition of my new book, The Economics of Enough. My esteemed publisher, in the United States, expressed surprise and indeed the Kindle edition is $9.99 on Amazon in the US ($19.53 in the UK though!) versus a $15.49 hardcover price. When I went back to Amazon UK, the anomaly had gone – the Kindle edition is currently showing as £11.88 (it was £12.20 yesterday evening) and the hardcover as £13.20.

(To complicate matters, e-books in the UK attract VAT, added to the list price, whereas physical books do not. This reminds me of the doubtless apocryphal story that imports of animal toys to the EU are subject to a tariff while imports of human figures such as dolls do not, leading to a row about the classification of Star Wars toys.)

However, a bit of slightly random checking suggests the gap between Kindle and hardcover prices is consistently smaller on my side of the Atlantic compared with the US. Maybe somebody from Amazon can explain the policy?

Meanwhile, The Economics of Enough is a bargain at any price and is of course available from all good booksellers!

PS News flash: Amazon Australia is offering an e-version of Enough, and it will also be available via http://www.ebook.com/ on or about 22 February.

Raf Manji pointed out on the Facebook page for my book, The Economics of Enough, that the price for the Kindle version on Amazon UK is higher than the price of the hardback. As he added, “Go figure!” I haven't explored thoroughly enough to know if this anomaly is very common, but it is clear that retailers have not thought through e-book pricing.

This is especially strange for Amazon, which has built its business on setting low prices for books (which are price elastic), and then figuring out what price discrimination tactics work. Speed is one: a lesson promulgated first in Shapiro and Varian's Information Rules is that one thing you can certainly charge for online is getting something at once, or before everyone else. (Information Rules is one of my all-time business economics favourites.)

Price discrimination linked to time is a tactic that has long worked well in books – the hardback is a good example. People who want a book quickly will pay more. The price differential of a hardback exceeds the cost differential of hard covers.

However, the Kindle edition of a book seems never to be the first – indeed, it will be a week or so before mine is available.

The other issue is that e-books don't include any re-use or re-sale rights in the price. I can't borrow a book my husband downloads, whereas we have always shared physical copies. And I can't sell a download back on Amazon marketplace. I think this limitation lies behind the strong consumer instinct that e-book prices will have to be significantly lower than physical prices. Retailers have focused on the price of the devices, but overlook the effect of the price of the e-books.

I suspect part of the answer to the puzzle lies in rights clearances. This is still a thicket of nonsense for e-books, especially for a book like Enough which has pictures in it (yes!). It will have to be sorted out if retailers and publishers really want to drive these sales. Apart from anything else, they have to overcome the die-hard romanticism of hard-core book lovers and buyers.

Thanks to Professor Andre Fourcans of l'Essec business school, my French has been getting a bit of a brush up recently. He kindly sent me his recent book, Les secrets de la prosperite, and its prequel, l'Economie expliquee a ma fille. Until I started reading, it wasn't clear to me why he'd lighted on an Anglo-Saxon economist. But it quickly became clear that he and I share a passion for explaining the insights of economics in clear prose, for the benefit of all those souls who have not experienced the same professional formation.

I particularly liked the robust start to the book. There is a well known instance of a kindergarten starting to fine parents who were late picking up their offspring a small amount of money, to discourage a lack of punctuality. The move proved counterproductive, however. Parents lost their sense of guilt about being late because they were being charged; the fine felt like payment for extra service. I think I first came across this example in Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational; it has gained wide currency since. Michael Sandel has also cited it. Anti-economists love this kind of example – they think it disproves conventional economics.

Professor Fourcans dismisses this as nonsense. The kindergarten just got the level of the fine wrong, he says. If they had charged 50 euros instead of three for latecomers, they would have ensured punctuality.

A long section of the book concerns the economic arguments about environmental matters, pollution and climate change. I think this compares favourably with the similar section in Superfreakonomics – it's tryingless hard to grab attention. There is a section on long run growth and institutions. And finally La Fin de la Croissance? This question, after a discussion of the idea of limits to growth (or Enough?), he ends with a slightly tentative negative. As he ends, addressing the daughter who has been the designated audience for his books, the main purpose of economics is to teach enlightened scepticism.

So it's a book after my own heart and clear enough for a non-native speaker to follow. I don't know how well the book has done in France, especially as the logic of market discipline and neoclassical economics do not sit naturally with the French, but I found it an enjoyable read, very suitable for non-economists and students.