What I read this year

On history, socialism, film, policy, and the current thing (not)

The two books that took me the longest to read weren’t an input in any project, and I had no immediate reason to read them. They were also the ones I enjoyed the most. Many people had recommended Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Finally, the constant chatter about Xi as an outlier from the kind of policies that started with Deng made me pick it up. It is so vivid and detailed that I couldn’t skim or hasten it. This is how I wish all the political history, economic history, and biographies I read were written. Also, Deng is remarkable, but that’s almost beside the point; it felt like the biography of a country, culture, and political movement and not just an individual.

The second was Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I started reading it during the run-up to the Oppenheimer movie buzz, but I finished it months later. Unlike Vogel, thankfully, this one was on the Kindle, and traveled with me. I felt like a fly on the wall, watching them pull together a heist in the middle of a war with the craziest geniuses.

Students, podcast listeners, EV winners, and others often ask me what I am reading, how I choose the books I read, and how I read. As an economist, I read/skim too many papers for the list to be valuable. In this post, I’ll focus on non-fiction books - about 90 percent of my book reading - and start with the last question first.

How I read

I read multiple books at the same time. Few books, TV series, movies, etc., keep me engaged for hours. So, if I set the standard as “this should engage me start to finish, in one shot, and be an un-put-downable page-turner,” I would limit myself to murder mysteries or Mary Oliver’s charming Dog Songs (I finished it standing, waiting for the coffee to brew). Reading multiple books across topics ensures that I always have a book I want to read at that moment. I am also a slow reader. This combination means I take weeks, sometimes months, to finish books. And I don’t finish everything I start, and I am quite ruthless about abandoning crap.

This year's major realization was that books about the “current thing” written in the “current moment” are usually rubbish. Exhibit A is Going Infinite by Michael Lewis. I’ve been following the whole sordid SBF saga. The book, however, was disappointing. It might be the first Lewis book I didn’t finish.

What engaged me the most this year was Indian history because some parts of the book I am working on go back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Time Machine

Rahul Sagar’s books were clear favorites. The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government presents this extraordinary and previously unknown minister to Indian monarchs, with an almost 100-page introduction by Sagar before Rao’s writing. Rao’s approach reads more like James Buchanan’s or Knut Wicksell's, linking public finance with constitutional constraints, than his contemporaries. Remarkably, India had Wicksellian ideas in the nineteenth century and forgot those ideas before Wicksell came around. I was giddy reading Rao’s draft constitution, and in our conversation I thanked Rahul for introducing me to what felt like an old friend.

Sagar’s other work, To Raise a Fallen People, is a compilation of essays and articles by now-forgotten nineteenth-century South Asian commentators. The key insight is that India has long strongly advocated for liberalism and cosmopolitanism, as well as domestic and foreign trade. The phases of mercantilism, socialism, and autarky were deviations from this norm. Both books significantly enhanced my understanding of nineteenth-century Indian thought, a gap I am keen to fill in my knowledge. Thankfully, his platform, Ideas of India, has a great catalog to help me find the writings from that time.

Linda Colley’s The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen was also insightful. Covered a lot of ground on lesser-known constitution writing adeptly and accessibly. This is another reminder that what we consider “modern” is not always “western.” Think Tunisia in 1860.

Philip J Stern’s Empire Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism offers an intriguing perspective on corporate colonialism by the East India Company and its, forgive the pun, other ‘limited liability partner’ in colonialism - the British parliament.

History of thought

I have always loved reading the history of economic thought. Unsurprisingly, one of my favorites this year was Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does it Matter? by Tyler Cowen. The book is published online with its own AI chat box and allows learning and reading HET in a new way. https://goatgreatesteconomistofalltime.ai/en I read it the old-fashioned way, cover to cover. Oddly, my favorite thing is that it is deliciously reductive when most historians of thought belabor and expound the meaning of a single sentence or phrase for entire chapters. I think Tyler underrates Hayek. And I need to read more JS Mill.

And more generally, read more utilitarians, given their influence on India. Eric Stokes’s The English Utilitarians and India is a useful account of the kinds of questions Company administrators and British Parliamentarians asked in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century on property rights, taxation, courts, and the whole gamut. Oddly, after reading it, I rate the Enlightenment thinkers even higher. Smith was always right about the Company.

I also enjoyed Jennifer Burns’s Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. The institutional builder side of Friedman and Chicago academic politics was relatively new to me, and it is an excellent read on Friedman’s scholarship and professional life. A quick and fun read was Ned Phelps’s My Journeys in Economic Theory if only to shed more light on how different Chicago was at the time.

The one book I loved reading on crypto this year is Lawrence H. White’s Better Money. I’m biased, and I’d read anything written by Larry. Economists always ask, “Compared to what?” This book explains Bitcoin compared to the gold and fiat standards. It’s a great way to think about monetary systems, not just Bitcoin. It’s odd to classify this book under the history of thought, but there is a LOT of history of ideas embedded in the discussion.

Socialism, 1991 Reforms, Transition Economies

In preparation for recording oral histories with the 1991 reformers, I greatly enjoyed reading Forks in The Road: My Days At RBI And Beyond by C Rangarajan. It was gripping when he described the day-to-day of the balance of payments crisis, how the second evaluation took place, the reforms in July 1991, and external sector management thereafter (our podcast here).

Another policy memoir I read this year was Backstage by Montek Singh Ahluwalia (our podcast here). It is beautifully written, and it feels like one is in the room with Ahluwalia through his various positions in government.

While thinking about reforms, I better understood India’s socialist model through Nikhil Menon’s Planning Democracy: Modern India’s Quest for Development. He provides an excellent lens into how the planning infrastructure got built, with Mahalanobis as the architect and general contractor (our podcast here). Also, there are many lovely gems on Hindi movie doyens who lend a helping hand to socialist propaganda.

Aditya Balasubramanian’s Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India analyzes a similar period. There is not much history of economic thought as I had expected, but a political history from the opposition perspective, mounted by the ideologically principled Swatantra Party. It shows a mirror to both modern-day opposition and conservatives if we have any left in India.

Another book about that time, not just about Nehruvian socialism, though it pops up often, is Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths by Taylor C. Sherman. It is well-researched, has a lot of new (to me) details on Nehru, and Sherman doesn’t pull any punches.

On the transition from socialism to markets in other countries, I learned a lot from Peter Boettke, Matthew D. Mitchell, and Konstantin Zhukov’s books, The Road to Socialism and Back: An Economic History of Poland, 1939-2019 and The Road to Freedom: Estonia’s Rise from Soviet Vassal State to One of the Freest Nations on Earth. With some transition economies, like Poland overtaking the UK in GDP per capita this year, we need to think more deeply about the varied experiences of transition economies and lessons for South Asia and Africa. I also re-read Boettke’s work on Hayek for our podcast, but that’s another long list for another day.

Global Cooperation and G20: Role of Finance Track, by Saon Ray, Samridhi Jain, Vasundhara Thakur, and Smita Miglani, helped me update my understanding of post-financial crisis financial sector changes globally and in India. But it’s written like a serious academic book for academics, dense and dry, not for beginners or the faint-hearted.

In the theme of structural transformation and state capacity building since 1991, but specifically for internal security, the edited volume by Devesh Kapur and Amit Ahuja, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State – an all-star list of contributors dispelled many myths. India is getting less violent, not more, and some chapters in the book help understand the current unrest in the Northeast and the constant internet curfews and shutdowns (our podcast here).

Earlier this year, I took a deep dive into understanding the India-China border conflict with The Fractured Himalaya: India, Tibet, China 1949-62 by Nirupama Menon Rao. Great on Nehru’s thinking the way the Tibet question has played out. I was fortunate to have Nirupama join me on the podcast. 

For Policy Wonks in training

Some contemporary policy books I read on questions troubling India were Missing in Action: Why You Should Care About Public Policy, by Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S Jaitley (our podcast here). Every chapter starts with a well-chosen Bollywood dialogue or song, and it is a first principles approach to big questions.

On the same broad theme of the role of and interplay between society, state, and markets, Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar: A Citizen-first Approach, essays and articles by Rohini Nilekani (our podcast here) provide a great peek into her policy, journalism, activism, and philanthropy.

Also, Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government is Holding Indians Back, by Subhashish Badra on contemporary policy questions, is a quick read, accessible, and well-written with lots of public choice insights. Ashoka Mody’s India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today is too entangled with the current moment and offers a rather pessimistic view of India. But if you don’t have a background in policy, I would start with Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah’s new edition of In Service of the Republic before reading these books.

For those who want to start conversations with their children about markets, society, and the state, I recommend reading Nitopadesha by Nitin Pai as a family. If Adam Smith and Elinor Ostrom, Machiavelli, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, James Madison, and the like were to write Panchatantra and Jataka tales or Aesop’s Fables, you would get Nitopadesha (our podcast here).

Courts are never as good as a Cutchery

The big case I followed keenly this year was marriage equality. For our podcast, I found Kirpal’s edited volume, Sex and the Supreme Court: How the Law Is Upholding the Dignity of the Indian Citizen, helpful in understanding how the Court thinks about individual rights versus custom. Raises good questions, especially in light of the incomprehensible Supriyo v Union of India.

We also discussed Kirpal’s Fifteen Judgments: Cases That Shaped India’s Financial Landscape. I learned that the highest court is paternalistic in virtually all matters, and the economy and financial sector are no exception. And that Indian courts are willing to live with absolutely no market failure and infinite government failure.

Speaking of failure, an excellent data-driven analysis quantifying the many failures of the Indian Supreme Court is Court on Trial by Aparna Chandra, Sital Kalantry, and William H.J. Hubbard. Also, see Unsealed Covers, previously published essays and blog posts by Gautam Bhatia, but worth a read as a compiled volume.

Cities as labor markets and a bottom-up emergent order

Alain Bertaud, my colleague at Mercatus, published Order Without Design a few years ago. I had the good fortune of reading it in the manuscript stage at NYU, and I reread it while preparing for the podcast. Alain is an incredible thinker; his ideas are important for India's structural transformation, internal migration, and urbanization. I hope his ideas gain greater recognition, and I would say this is a must-read, any year, any time. I’d replace the ubiquitous signs “yahaan peshaab karna mana hai” and “yahaan paan thookna mana hai” on government building walls with “we don’t need top down planning for urban order.”

Speaking of urban wall art, another book on cities I enjoyed is by my former SUNY colleague, Sanford Ikeda. A City Cannot Be a Work of Art (open access link) feels like a giant party graciously hosted by Ikeda where Jane Jacobs meets Israel Kirzner and Elinor Ostrom.

Another book on practical urban policy questions that shuns top-down planning and takes a bottom-up approach, focused on India, is India’s Blind Spot: Understanding and Managing Our Cities by Devashish Dhar. It’s nice to see some of Alain’s ideas echo in the work of Indian urbanists.

On the regional impact of India’s transformation, Regional Economic Diversity: Lessons from an Emergent India by Poornima Dore and Krishnan Narayanan takes a data-driven approach and explains the sub-national transition in India well. It is also written like a serious academic press book, full of tables and graphs. Grab it if you work in the area; otherwise, listen to our podcast.

Re-reading

Virginia Postrel's The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World was a book I read a few years ago but reread this year. I loved the book when it first came out (podcast here), and even though I picked up the book to reference a small portion, I read the whole thing. It is wonderfully written, with insights from economic history, history of science, fashion, chemistry, and culture.

The second book I reread was Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity by Claudia Goldin. Partly because of the Nobel announcement when it was in the air, and also for a project I am working on with Kadambari Shah. There is no surprise here, the book is excellent and holds up well on the second read. As a rule, I’d read anything by Goldin, a book, paper, essay, or post-it.

Back to a new book on family structure, Melissa S. Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind was a good read. That children in two-parent families do better is unsurprising. For me, the insightful parts were learning that America has its version of inequality due to marriage endogamy and selection, not through caste-based arranged marriage, but through class and education.

Film, Music, Culture

Close to the end of the year, I got to read several books on film and music. It started with Nasreen Munni Kabir’s new book Talking Life: Javed Akhtar in Conversation, an addition to their previous two books Taking Films and Talking Songs. To record the podcast (will release in January), I re-read all the books in her In Conversation series with Gulzar, AR Rahman, Waheeda Rehman, Zakir Hussain, and Lata Mangeshkar. Nasreen is prolific but also very accessible, and all the books were fun reads and made me listen to many music references.

I read very little poetry this year. Dana Gioia’s Meet Me at the Lighthouse, which I heard about from Russ Roberts’s podcast. Not my usual sort of read, but I found it very moving, probably because I had context about his other work and life.

And I got quite obsessed with Bulleh Shah (it’s a long story….). First, I got the Murty Classical Library translation of Bulleh Shah, but it is a translation from Gurmukhi to English and not a transliteration. Even the boomer native Punjabi speakers I know don’t/can’t read Gurmukhi. So, I abandoned that pretty early and moved on to internet sources with transliteration. His poetry is worth reading. And a lot of it has been set to music by Punjabi qawwals; even better than reading is listening to Nusrat or Master Saleem singing Bulleh Shah couplets.

Books I am reading right now, at various stages of completion:

Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924-1977 by Abhishek Choudhary. My colleague Shreyas Narla and my husband have been raving about it, and I’m only 30 pages in, but it’s well-researched and well-written. Also, Pratinav Anil’s Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77, makes for an interesting companion to Vajpayee.

Also, Seema Sirohi’s Friends with Benefits: The India-U.S. Story. I picked it up because she’s covered US-India relations as a foreign correspondent for over 30 years, and I am enjoying it. It traces the change in the US-India relationship, one that was mired in distrust, to now strategic partners who can work together on big geopolitical questions.

I am currently enjoying Rahul Matthan's conceptual approach in The Third Way: India’s Revolutionary Approach to Data. I need to think more about India’s digital public goods, and Mathan provides a framework.

When the Chips Are Down: A Deep Dive into a Global Crisis by Pranay Kotasthane and Abhiram Manchi is on the semiconductor chips crisis from the Indian point of view. In addition to geopolitics and technology, there is much on industrial targeting, central planning, and innovation policy. I am amazed by (read envious of) Pranay’s productivity; he has two books out in 2023, writes two weekly newsletters, has a Hindi podcast, and teaches at Takshashila!

How I choose my books

There are a few different ways to find the books I haven’t read before.

First, when reading for a particular writing project, like a paper or a lecture, I read in clusters to get a sense of the literature. If I have a podcast guest who has written multiple books, I always try to read as much of it as possible. For these kinds of projects, my first reading is quick, and then I revisit parts of the book more carefully.

Reading to think through a question I am working on often requires revisiting older books I have read before, and then I only read specific portions. For instance, I am reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations for maybe the seventh or eighth time for an essay I am writing. For another project, I’m reading Olson’s Logic of Collective Action for perhaps the third or fourth time. Reading the relevant bits of Scott’s Seeing Like a State when I prepare for something (usually bad policy) has become a nervous habit.

I have an ever-growing list of classic books; I hope I get to them eventually. But I have found that I am great at picking up a classic book and skimming but terrible at reading classics without a project that requires that reading. I envy those who can pick up classic books and read them from start to finish for no reason other than that it is a classic must-read book.

Second, I read a new book in an area I am deeply interested in (like constitutions), and the consensus is that I “should” read it. I consider recommendations from people I trust and follow, often from podcasts I listen to or colleagues at work, etc.

Third, books are sent to me. I am in a privileged position where I receive books at the manuscript stage from fellow academics or authors. I also receive lots of review copies from publishers for the podcast or Substack. I’m grateful for these books and always (eventually) read them. So please continue sending review copies (Address: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 3434 Washington Blvd, Arlington, VA 22201).

My students, friends, and family continue to gift me books. Please stop. As gifts, I prefer vinyl …they take up less space and have more repeat value, and I won’t give them away as I do with books.

Happy reading and a very happy new year.