Apart from the ubiquitous Harry Potter, I've been doing some other, more serious reading recently. Note: This is non-fiction, so please don't complain if you can't understand WTF I'm talking about
The Return of Depression Economics by Paul Krugman
Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz
The two books are by different authors, but I list them together because they share similar theses. Krugman is an economist from Princeton University who has a regular column in the New York Times, while Stiglitz is another economist who has worked in the Council of Economic Advisors as well as the World Bank. Both share similar views about the current state of world economic management.
Krugman's book is mainly about the financial crisis that enveloped Asia in 1997. It is largely an essay on how several decades of largely uninterrupted prosperity have mistakenly convinced people that the business cycle is dead. Krugman's main argument is that the Asian crisis has proven more than ever that depressions are as likely as they were 70 years ago.
Krugman makes another, secondary point later into his book, one which segues nicely into Stiglitz' main argument. He notes that the IMF totally mismanaged the crises that erupted in East Asia, Russia and elsewhere, by imposing policies that ran contrary to everything that we have learned from dealing with crises (e.g. raising interest rates in the face of a demand slump, doing away with financial market regulations which increases vulnerability to speculative attacks, etc)
Stiglitz takes this point and runs with it for the entirety of his book. Having worked with the World Bank, the IMF and the US Treasury Department during his career, Stiglitz professes to be shocked at their policy prescriptions that appear to blindly follow the textbook prescriptions for a free market economy without proper theoretical backing or consideration for the norms of particular countries. He notes, rather correctly, I would imagine, the irony that an institution founded on the principle of correcting imperfections in the market (the IMF) is now a zealous champion of markets while deeply distrustful of intervention of any kind (in spite of it intervening in many such cases to prop up overvalued currencies and the like).
Krugman's tract is broad-based, and covers a wide range of issues, from the Tequila crisis in Mexico, to Latin American debt/foreign exchange crises, to Japan's stagnation, to the East Asian Financial Crisis. His book makes for easy reading even for non-economists, due to its simple language and use of simple models to explain basic macroeconomic principles.
Stiglitz' book is lengthier, more focused on the titular issue (how globalisation has failed to live up to its promise) but is still quite eminently readable. The text does not devolve into jargon, but does expect you to have some basic knowledge of how markets work.
As for the strength of their arguments, I personally found Krugman's reasoning and argument to be convincing, but Stiglitz is a little too negative a lot of the time, often making it seem as if the international financial institutions can do no good, which is a point of view that my centrist outlook is not very willing to believe. His basic argument, though, is sound, and he makes a real case for the substantial reform of those institutions so that the fruits of globalisation may be shared by all.
Both books are recommended for anyone interested in the economic issues of our day.
