A Facebook friend nominated me to list 10 books that have stayed with me the longest or have changed me in some way. Feel free to list 10 yourselves on your own blogs or in the comments here, and consider this a nomination. I posted this list yesterday on Facebook, but here it is again with links.
1. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. This book probably did more than anything else to nudge me away from being a socialist toward being a libertarian.
2. Industrial Concentration: The New Learning by Goldschmidt, Mann, and Weston. The collection of papers in this volume pitted the east-coast interventionists against the Chicago-UCLA economists studying industrial organization. I'd been trained as a "Bainsian" by the former, but this book pushed me toward the Chicago/UCLA approach.
3. The Economic Way of Thinking. When I first saw this book in 1984, I fell in love with the approach and later had the opportunity to write the Canadian edition.
4. Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot. I read the entire collection in chronological during my first summer in grad school.
5. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I think this might have been the first novel I ever read on my own initiative.
6. Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe. Some of the best mystery stories ever written.
7. Summerhill by A. S. Neill. What a bizarre, intriguing approach to education and parenting. I loved it at the time. Not so much now.
8. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffen. As a young white man, this book gave me insights that guided me through much of the rest of my life.
9. The Economic Analysis of Law by Richard A. Posner. I reviewed the first edition of the book in the early 1970s and had my mind blown/altered on so many topics through his careful applications of economics. It is still my go-to book when teaching Economic Analysis of Law.
10a. I'm not sure this qualifies, but I have spent more time with this paperback than with most other books: the pocket score for Dvorak's New World Symphony.
10b. I'd be remiss in not mentioning Bill James' 1984 Baseball Abstract. It put me on the road toward Sabremetrics and becoming a baseball sportscaster.
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