A Cheerful Take on Economics: How We Got to Now, by Steven Johnson

As Jerome K. Jerome said, "I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours." I concur and heartily recommend Steven Johnson's book based on the PBS show of the same name. How We Got to Now is an opportunity for you to watch other people work, with no obligation whatsoever to do anything yourself. After all, air conditioning and microscopes and the War on Poverty and sewers have all been invented already!

It was truly an unmitigated pleasure to listen to Johnson trace the development of, for example, the technology of glass from its accidental creation in the deserts of North Africa to the experiments involving crossbows that resulted in fiber optics. The ingenuity displayed, the hardships suffered, the sleepless nights and fortunes won and lost that enabled us to read small print and live in Arizona and not die of childbed fever and associate iced tea and lemonade with the summer even though there is no naturally occurring ice at that time... all this and more fits into one slim volume, seven CDs, or 6 episodes on PBS, and is a great relief from these anxious times.

330-339: Economics

Economics... famously called "The Dismal Science." Turns out it includes not only boring but important works by Alan Greenspan, but also lively personal finance authors like Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman.

And very entertaining books about human motivation, probably the most famous of which is Freakonomics. This book became a cultural nine days' wonder and the title of a website, blog, podcast and overall cash cow for its authors. They have names --Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner-- but they are really more of a rock duo like the White Stripes or the Black Keys. They eventually issued a book/audio "Greatest Hits" compilation from their blog, meaning that I can catch up with their latest thinking while driving. And did I mention they are VERY entertaining? After all, the book is called When to Rob a Bank.

Speaking of entertaining and audiobooks, memoirs and bios are also available in this section. Disrupted, by Dan Lyons, is sort of the anti-How Starbucks Saved My Life, by Michael Gates Gill. Older white-collar white guy gets the boot, ends up at an entry-level job surrounded by people younger than his children, has some kind of epiphany. Only where Gill's epiphany was that money isn't everything and young people work hard, Lyons' seems to be that startups are ridiculous and so are the young people who work at them. He gets 50 pages or one disc, and if he's too mean-spirited, I'm going to give him the boot as well.


Second-best to the stunt memoir is the sensational biography, and American Heiress, by Jeffrey Toobin, fits that bill. If you are one of Lyons' or Hill's young co-workers, you may not recognize the name "Patty Hearst," but us old folks can never forget that enigmatic photo.  

Patty Hearst

Hearst was the disconnected 19-year old daughter of a newspaper magnate when she was snatched from her apartment by a group of about 6 people calling themselves "the Symbionese Liberation Army." She accompanied them on some bank robberies and eventually released this picture and a statement to the effect that it was her choice to join the group and that she believed in their goals (whatever they were). She changed her name to Tania. She went on the run, but eventually was captured by the FBI (I guess she should have read the Freakonomics book and timed her exploits better). She was tried and convicted, but her sentence was commuted by Carter, and she was pardoned by Clinton. If you're confused by now, you are in good company-- as this story unfolded on the national news, no one could figure out what in the world was going on! 

And who said economics was boring?