Best books I read in 2014

Jason Collins

4 years ago

Continuing my tradition of giving the best books I read in the year – generally released in other years – the best books I read in 2014 are below (albeit from a smaller pool than usual).

John Coates’s (2012) The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust: The best book I read this year. An innovative consideration of how human biology affects financial decision making.

Gregory Clark’s (2013) The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility: Not the most exciting book to read, but an important examination of social mobility.

David Colander and Roland Kupers’s (2014) Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: An important way to think about policy, even though I’m not convinced by many of their proposed applications.

Gerd Gigerenzer’s (2010) Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty: Essays capturing a lot of Gigerenzer’s important work. I reread it following his disappointing Risk Savvy. I didn’t write a review, but posted about parts of the book here, here and here.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s (2013) Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much: A novel way of looking at scarcity that extends beyond the typical analysis in economics, but I’m not convinced it presents a coherent new perspective on how the world works.

P.G. Wodehouse’s (1936) Young Men in Spats: Magic.