1. The Gathering, by Anne Enright. Enright’s prose is a bit like Joan Didion’s: calmly incisive, yet moving. The Gathering won the 2007 Booker Prize, and its story centers on the death of the narrator’s brother, the closest sibling she has in a large family. Through the arrangement for the funeral, the story delves into intricate family relationships (fortunately not stumbling on clichéd dysfunction), parsing out sibling bonds, the echoes of childhood trauma, and what the dead mean to the living. Heavy stuff. Wonderful read.
2. The Ascent of Money, by Niall Ferguson. I found Ascent of Money disappointing, but I acknowledge that part of that had to do with high expectations. What I was hoping for: A thoughtful treatise on what exactly money and finance does for our economy and society, using history to illuminate the question. What I got: A history book on the rise of finance, laying out facts in chronological order, but without a cohesive philosophy on how we interact with capital. This is mostly because Ferguson is a historian, not an economist, and he succeeds in what was likely his goal: a succinct history of finance.
3. The Little Book That Builds Wealth, by Pat Dorsey. I enjoy but am always a little embarrassed to carry these Little Books On Investing, with their horrible titles, into a café or on a subway. (But apparently, not embarrassed enough to write it up on a public blog. Eh, consistency is overrated.) Dorsey is the Director of Equity Research at Morningstar and is a Buffet-and-moat type of guy. He evaluates companies by two factors: their intrinsic value and the strength of their moat or competitive advantage. My strongest quibble with Dorsey — and thus the Morningstar school — is that a moat is an input into determining intrinsic value, not a separate and equally important attribute. It may be one of the most important variables in determining value, but it is just one of many factors. The moat metaphor creates a wonderful visual to evaluate strengths of businesses. The problem is that people start talking about moats as if they’re binary — you either have it or you don’t — but it’s really more nuanced and gradient. Despite those and other minor criticisms, Dorsey has put out a nice book, if for nothing else than giving the reader (i.e. investor) a mechanism to think about defensibility of businesses.
4. From Poverty to Prosperity, by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz. Kling and Schulz have taken an ambitious first step in re-thinking traditional economics, and they’ve produced a great book. Their main premise, which they call Economics 2.0, is that Old School economics was based on physical goods and how to allocate a scarce amount of resources, and as a greater portion of our goods are intellectual/services (“recipes” they call them), the principles of economic exchange are different (my post on the subject). Fortunately, there are very smart people who have been thinking about these ideas for a while, and a good portion of the book is Kling and Schulz interviewing eminent economists like William Baumol and Paul Romer. By far my favorite part of the book is the interview with Romer. Here’s an excerpt:
One thing I wanted to try and make clear [in my book] is that part of this transformation was [moving] away from thinking of production as — we talk about an economy producing things, but in some sense we don’t really make anything. Think of it just the way a physicist would; we don’t produce anything, we just rearrange it. The way we create value is by rearranging the physical mass that’s available here on earth, and the value-creation process amounts to using recipes for rearranging things, instructions for rearranging things, to put them in more valuable configurations that older ones, and that helps people understand why running out of stuff is not the problem.
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