My friend Beth Myler just loaned this to me after my dinnertime screed on why electric meters should be on the INSIDE of houses (ie, the more transparency you have into your energy usage, the more likely your behavior will change). Can't wait to dig in.
recent, current and wishlist reading
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Bonnie just bought this or me. It's a really nice little book and echoes my own experiences in architecture school in the 80's.
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Alperovitz is an economist with a lot of policy experience. Currently halfway through this, and many of his ideas about ESOP's (employee stock ownership plans) have changed the way I think about how companies can be structured to deal with our current problem of massive unequal distribution of wealth, nevermind what it can do for productivity. Sad stats on the state of labor unions in the United States today. More on this soon.
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Currently halfway through this. F--king *love* this book. Some great ideas already: the infinite recycling of money, ESOP's, the contradictions of free markets and society. I've read a number of Greider's essays in The Nation. More soon.
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On the nightstand. I read the author's blog "Marginal Revolution" every day.
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Currently reading this book. More on it soon. Thackara, a friend, is one of the most important thinkers about the future of design in our day. A must read.
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I've always liked Gore. And I also like how polarizing a personality and mind he is in this country. I was not surprised that he co-won the Nobel Peace Prize. You don't have to like him to appreciate the ideas in this book, which deal with how the intermingling of politics, media, wealth, and concentration of private power has really diminished the democratic foundations as they were originally conceived by America's founding fathers. Important book once you realize that the version of democracy we have today is but a shadow of what it once was and what it could be. I love the idea of a president with an intellect. Gore '08.
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The title says it all. It's a big book, and I think Barber is very well researched. Taking a break from it (halfway through), since he has many double-digit references and footnotes to many of the other books I am reading/plan on reading. I am a non-linear reader, that's for sure. Saw his segment on the Colbert Report which was pretty great.
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I did not read Yergin's book, but I watched the 3-DVD set (6 hours of economics goodness), and frankly, it is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. I highly recommend this to anyone in my age group who grew up in the 70's and 80's and really had no idea what was really going on around them. The archival footage is worth it alone, not to mention priceless interviews with world leaders and economists.
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There is no better book to explain the idiosyncracies, contradictions, and complexities of the art market. Written by a Dutch economist which uses data from the New York and Amsterdam markets to dissect how the economics of the art market work. Aesthetic theory and art-speak go straight out the window when confronted with cold hard numbers. One highlight is this economist's liberal use of the concept of "morphologies", a linguistic term, but used here to describe visual and aesthetic grammars of spatial and street-level experiences of retail environments vs. art gallery environments.
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It's Werner versus Paul Krens (director of the Guggenheim). Werner is a traditionalist academic and Krens is a capitalist seeking expansion and applying the rules of global business to a private art institution. I saw Frank Gehry and Paul Krens at the Lensic Theatre recently and was impressed by Krens. Werner puts out some compelling arguments, so it's a complicated subject on why and how art is consumed and the role of the institution in all this consumption.
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On the nightstand. Currently being used as a second source reference since so many of the books I am reading reference this book.
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On the nightstand and Bonnie's recommendation.
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Brilliant little book by one of my favorite sci-fi-writers and bloggers. Lorraine Wild catches a lot of shit for the design of this book, which I find puzzling since it is clearly a modern-day illuminated manuscript. Brilliant ideas about the potential application of RFID chips in everyday objects leveraging today's Internet, computation and storage/retrieval technologies to allow us to track the lifecycles of "things". Great premise and we'll see if anyone in the "real world" is influenced by his ideas. Lots of Google/YouTube videos online of Sterling hawking the ideas from this book. Check it out.
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On the nightstand. I asked my colleague at work Rich Bojanowski (currently head of Ops at OptionsHouse and working on his MBA at University of Chicago and economics undergrad) for a book recommendation on the economic theories behind carbon offsets, the pros/cons of the Kyoto Treaty, and how pollution credits work. Tietenberg's text is actually a textbook he used in undergraduate studies, which begs the question, "why aren't these ideas more thoroughly understood if they've been around for a while?"
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On the nightstand. Quick flips shows lots of juicy charts that prove again and again that we're all just a bunch of pigs.
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On the nightstand. Learned about de Soto on "Commanding Heights" DVD set. de Soto is a left-wing economist. Yes, they exist.
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