(I wrote this list at the beginning of 2021 but for some reason never posted it. I figured it’s worth putting up now – they’re all still good books.)
Books I read in 2020. None of them were life-changing, but several were very good.
Weather, by Jenny Offill. A small graceful novel about middle-class life against the background of climate change.
The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel. Final installment of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Better than the second, not as good as the first, in my opinion. Gripping as the others as a story, and shifts our perspective on the central character in some interesting ways, but much of the most interesting history of the period (like the Pilgrimage of Grace) happens oddly offstage, and the central conflict between Cromwell and Henry VIII is never properly motivated. Was Archbishop Cranmer’s protege really a true-believing Protestant reformer all along?
Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It, by Morten Jerven. GDP and other national accounts numbers for poor countries (and for the distant past everywhere) are bullshit. Sorry but it’s true. I read this because I was thinking of assigning it; I ultimately didn’t, but it’s a good book.
The Causality Mixtape, by Scott Cunningham. Another one I read in order to use in a class. Good, clear, accessible, but it also reinforced my sense that there’s something fundamentally wrong with econometrics. I think there is a deep reason why so many textbook examples are about how much of pay differences are due to differences in innate ability – that is the kind of question econometrics is designed to answer. Anyway, if you’re teaching (or taking) a class on statistics or econometrics, you might well want to look at this. Otherwise, not.
The Histories, by Herodotus (Landmark edition). I’m trying to think of a way to not sound like an asshole when I say that I read all this to 8-year old Eli, and that we are now reading Thucydides. Nope, no luck. (ETA: We finished Thucydides and moved on to Xenophon.)
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, by Zach Carter. The first two thirds of this is a quite good and timely biography of Keynes. It benefits from the fact that author is a journalist rather than an economist — his interest is in how Keynes’ various writings were responding to particular political situations, rather than trying to fit them all into one coherent system. And then the last third is random gossip about postwar economists and greatest hits from the wikipedia “macroeconomic policy” page. Oh well.
Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder, by Christian Parenti. Christian is an old friend and colleague. I read most of this in draft, but I reread it this year after it came out. It’s very good.
The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, by Stephanie Kelton. I reviewed it in The American Prospect. I also discussed it at more length on the Current Affairs podcast.
Keynes against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism, by Jim Crotty. Another one I read in draft, years ago in this case. The ideas in this book, and in the articles that preceded it (especially this one), and even more all the conversations with Jim over the 20 years since I first studied macroeconomics with him, have so fundamentally shaped my thinking about Keynes and about economics that honestly it’s hard to evaluate the book as a book. But I think it’s important, and very good. Maybe read the articles first?
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward Baptist. I used this in my economic history class last spring. It works very well in the classroom — reads like a novel, and very effectively connects concrete experiences of slavery to economic logic of the system as a whole. There have been a number of claims that the book misrepresents or distorts the material it draws on in the service of its larger narrative, at least some of which unfortunately seem to be valid. I still haven’t decided whether/to what extent these problems cancel out the book’s merits.
Labor’s War At Home: The CIO In World War II, by Nelson Lichtenstein. This was one that had been sitting on my shelves for years and years, which I finally picked up while working on my articles on WWII economic policy with Andrew Bossie (here and here). In those papers we emphasized the positive lessons from the war, but the book gives a sense of the much more radical direction wartime economic planning might have gone in, but didn’t.
Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, by John Womack. Read this after listening to the Mexican revolution series on the Revolutions podcast, which draws on it heavily. If you’re looking for a genuine hero, someone thoroughly admirable, in the history of radical politics, I don’t know that you can do better than Zapata.
American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, by Edmund Morgan. Another book I read in order to use in my economic history class. A classic for a reason.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider, by Katherine Anne Porter Laura was casting around for fiction dealing with the 1918 flu pandemic, which is surprisingly hard to find, and finally lighted on this. It’s a beautiful set of three linked novellas, wrestling in different ways with the ways in which one’s choices are or should be constrained by one’s personal or family past. (Only one involves the influenza epidemic.) The middle story (“Noon Wine”) is especially striking for the fully realized interior life granted its rural, working-class characters, which you never find in writing about similar milieus by someone like Faulkner.
Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand, by Mike Konczal. Mike is one of the few people in the world that I agree with about almost everything, so naturally I agreed with everything in this book. Reading it felt like picking up loose ends from numerous conversations over the past five or six years: oh, that’s where that was going. Well, that’s why I liked it, but you would probably like it too. It’s a good book.
Previous editions: