What I've been reading...

Some recommendations among the books I've recently finished reading:

• "On Bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt, truly a gem of a book (in fact a book in miniature; it can be read in less than an hour). Teaches you the obvious and not so obvious differences between "bullshit", "humbug" and "lies" & much more than that... I guarantee you that you'll love it; I chose a fragment of this book as last week's quote on my blog.

• "Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science", by Charles Wheelan. The reason I started reading this (and other similar books) in my scarce free time is because I wanted to recommend my non-economist friends the best books they can read, void of the formal dressing that most Econ texbooks wear, so that they grasp what (basic) Economics is really about. But in fact this book fulfills that criteria and does much more: it is filled with excellent examples (true, most of them are linked to the USA; also, the book is published in '02, but most examples still hold) that can be succesfully used in undergraduate Economics classes to incite and deepen the interest of students who could be, a priori, put off by the formal modelling omnipresent in such classes (I've experimented this already on at least such a student: it really works :-) )... Therefore I would recommend this book to anyone who would like/ plans/ has just started to study Economics or to anybody else who simply wants to "gain an understanding of basic economics with little pain and much pleasure", as Gary Becker writes in his short characterization of this book. Though some of his examples are exaggerated, Wheelan does an excellent job in using them to point out fundamental economics mechanisms.

• "The Armchair Economist. Economics and Everyday Life", by Steven E. Landsburg. This 1993 book is by now a classic (some excellent Econ teachers have been recommending it to their undergrad students as holiday reading, for years...). This is perhaps the book that 'opened' the way to the best-selling series on 'Freakonomics' books (the best best-selling so far being Levitt and Dubner's "Freakonomics", of course-- I've tackled previously topics directly or indirectly connected to that book here and here and here and here...). However, caveat lector when interpreting what I've just said above: this book is at the same time different from the 'Freakonomics series' in that it chooses to systematically explain the very basic principles of Economics by means of concrete (yes, sometimes very unusual, counterintuitive) facts and not the other way around, i.e. attempt to explain some extremely unusual/ counterintuitive facts by means of economic theory, sometimes stretched-to-extremes economic theory etc... So I'd place Landburg's book in a category with Wheelan's book above and recommend it to all those who would like to get a feeling of how genuine economists think. Milton Friedman praised the book in the following words: "An ingenious and highly original presentation of some central principles of economics for the proverbial Everyman. Its breezy tone conceals the subtlety of the analysis. Guaranteed to puncture some illusions and to make you think". Now, for people who never had Economics in their higher education, I'd recommend reading this book after having read "Naked Economics", since indeed Landburg's "Armchair Economist" is somewhat more subtle. But very much fun indeed!