December 2011 Entries
My mother-in-law sent me a copy of this book for my birthday and I finally got around to reading it this last fall. Economics is a fascinating field and von Hayek's work "The Road to Serfdom" is incredibly relevant today even though it was originally published in 1944. The book was not intended to be an economic treatise but rather an application of economic theory to political reality. Hayek saw what happened in Europe between the wars and felt compelled to write a book to his fellow Britons
Jonah Lehrer's book "How We Decide" is an interesting traipse through the field of decision theory from the perspective of cognitive psychology. He touches on a number of cognitive biases as well as digging into the physiology of the brain. Most of what he writes isn't brand new research but he does put it on a level that mere mortals (such as myself) can comprehend the subject.
For some history reading over the summer I listened to the audio book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The book is a massive (something like 36 CDs) and present an incredibly in-depth view into the political atmosphere surrounding Lincoln's rise to the Presidency.