Tyler Cowen's Top Book Recommendations

Tyler CowenThis is a book of ideas. It’s not a book about the internet. It was written much earlier, in the 20th century, and written in Portuguese. It’s really a book of meditations. It’s very philosophical. It applies to the internet in that the main point is how much joy you can take in small things and small changes and the true drama of life can be extraordinarily minute in scale, and this, I think,... (Source)

Tyler CowenIt basically says wikis work and wikis are important and wikis are the way of the future. (Source)

Alan Rusbridger Read 4 Too Big To Know by David Weinberger Read (Source)

Tyler CowenDavid’s book is brilliant, but I think it raises an important question. We’re doing five books and not five blog posts or five user threads or whatever, so why is a book the most important organising medium for talking about or reading about the internet? Weinberger is a guy who gets this – that the internet is a way of ordering or not ordering reality, that you stack things in a pile, that it... (Source)

Tyler CowenHayek puts forward a general theory of how decentralised processes work, why they are so powerful and can use and mobilise and distribute information so well. (Source)

Peter BoettkeHe argues that the price system systematically communicates dispersed information that you and I hold. (Source)

Brad FeldI think every entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur should read the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was written in the 1970s by a guy named Robert Pirsig. It was his first book, it's kind of a hippie philosophy treatised journey. The word that sort of came out of it was Chautauqua, he's like having a conversation with his son as they do a motorcycle trip across the country, and... (Source)

Drew Houston[There are] engineers who [dismiss] all these things that can’t be fit into an algorithm, or that don’t have some kind of mathematical rigor underpinning them, [this book] is about that question. (Source)

Tyler CowenHonorable mentions: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Joy of Sex, all given to me by my mother. I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking. (Source)

Tyler CowenThis is about the beauty of organised structures and how we play them in game-like fashion and how much they entrance us. (Source)

Marcus du SautoyThere’s the ideas of mathematics, of philosophy, of music all brought together in this game, the glass bead game. (Source)

Igor DebaturQuestion: What five books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path & why? Answer: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche The Castle by Franz Kafka 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Source)

Tyler CowenI also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary. From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwork, and success. (Source)

Tyler CowenFrom this book I realized you could think you understood a chess position, but then later learn you didn’t really understand it at all. A huge lesson, one I learned again and to a higher degree when high-quality chess computers came along. Most of the commentariat on economic and social affairs could use a reminder on this one. This book also taught me that you learn by doing — trying to solve... (Source)

Tyler CowenI also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary. From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwork, and success. (Source)

Tyler CowenHonorable mentions: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Joy of Sex, all given to me by my mother. I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking. (Source)

Kate FigesIt seems so innocent really now, all those daring explanations of S and M and positions, but it was before Aids and people were so optimistic. It was as though we’d discovered sex and free love. (Source)

Susan QuilliamThis was a seminal book. It not only reflected but created the sexual revolution. Even now, people who haven’t read it know what it’s about. (Source)

Peter AttiaI’d encourage [young people] to read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. (Source)

Tyler CowenHonorable mentions: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Joy of Sex, all given to me by my mother. I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking. (Source)

Wim Hof[Wim Hof said this is one of his most-recommended books.] (Source)

Tyler CowenFrom this I learned how powerful the individual human mind could be, and also how much school wasn’t teaching me. It began to occur to me that the mainstream doesn’t necessarily have the best or only methods. That said, non-mainstream approaches still have the responsibility of coming up with the right answer. Query: does it these days ever make sense to actually use this stuff? (Source)

Tyler CowenI read this one quite young, and learned that problems are to be solved! I also developed some sense of what a history could look like and what a history should report. I recall my uncle thinking it deeply strange that a boy my age should be reading a book of such length. (Source)

Tyler CowenI wasn’t influenced so much by this book itself as by a long series of articles in Chess Life and Review, showing the analysis was full of holes. See my remarks on Kotov. (Source)

Tyler CowenReflects a certain kind of classicism in thinking and method. Later, it was revealed much of the analysis was faulty and in part was from Larry Evans and not Fischer himself. (Source)

Adam RobinsonI played over these games every night, these 60 games. (Source)

Adam RobinsonI played over these games every night, these 60 games. (Source)

Walter IsaacsonThe great Garry Kasparov takes on the key economic issue of our time: how we can thrive as humans in a world of thinking machines. This important and optimistic book explains what we as humans are uniquely qualified to do. Instead or wringing our hands about robots, we should all read this book and embrace the future. (Source)

Charles DuhiggGarry Kasparov's perspectives on artificial intelligence are borne of personal experience - and despite that, are optimistic, wise and compelling. It's one thing for the giants of Silicon Valley to tell us our future is bright; it is another thing to hear it from the man who squared off with the world's most powerful computer, with the whole world watching, and his very identity at stake. (Source)

Max LevchinA highly human exploration of artificial intelligence, its exciting possibilities and inherent limits. (Source)

Tyler CowenThe Making of Star Trek helped me master the details of what was then my favorite TV series, and also to think about cosmopolitanism across different kinds of intelligent beings. In addition to chess I also was influenced by playing paper and dice war games, most of all Barbossa (the exact title may differ slightly), a really scary game where you have to consider the possibility the Nazis could... (Source)

Michael Okuda@daytonward That book changed my life. Endlessly fascinating, The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield (Poe) showed me that working in television and film production was something to which one could aspire, and it led me (and Denise) on the road to working at Paramount Pictures. (Source)

Tyler CowenWho are the Indian nouveau riche and what do they want? James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj will prove the defining work on these questions. It is a must-read for anyone interested in wealth, inequality, India, or the evolution of capitalism. (Source)

Nicolas ColinThe Billionaire Raj is a book by Singapore-based Financial Times alumnus James Crabtree. It depicts the radical change that India is currently going through, with the rise of extreme inequalities and the capture of the political system by wealthy families. What’s striking in James’s riveting painting of modern India is the optimism with which he describes the current state of things: not... (Source)

Rafat AliStarted reading @jamescrabtree’s Gilded Age book & enjoying it, less optimistic than him on U.S. vs China vs India future. I fully believe future of how the world lives is being created in SE Asia. The future will be best tested in South East Asia, even if it isn’t created there. https://t.co/OjfivYfxcN (Source)

Tyler CowenAllison Schrager’s An Economist Walks Into a Brothel is the best, most readable, most informative, most adventurous, and most entertaining take on risk you will find. (Source)

Adam GrantIf you want to understand risk better, you have to go into some unconventional settings. In the tradition of Freakonomics, that’s what Allison Schrager does as an economist, and her book is not just informative—it’s an entertaining read too (Source)

Nick GillespieThe world may be in flames, but are *you* taking enough risk? Great @TEDTalks from economist @AllisonSchrager, whose An Economist Walks into a Brothel, is a book-length treatment of the topic. https://t.co/SDdHAABPO4 (Source)

Tyler CowenIf you had to pick one individual who was the sharpest and most prescient commentator on the web and the internet it would be Clay. (Source)

Lev GrossmanShirky is simply the best person at articulating what’s very weird and new about what’s going on. (Source)

Alan Rusbridger Read 2 We the Media by Dan Gillmor Read (Source)