Tyler Cowen started this meme, which I noticed via Michael Martin. Arnold Kling took it up as well. I’ve already written a very long post about all of the books that influenced me.

The books on this list are by no means the ones I love or respect the most. Some of them influenced me in funny ways (i.e. I’ve forgotten what’s actually in a lot of these).

[Listed in the order I read them in]:

1. David Foot, Boom, Bust & Echo » While I was high school this got me in the habit of thinking about the future by focusing on social factors, rather than technologies and policies as if they’re separate from people’s lives.

2. J. D. Salinger, Catcher In the Rye » Over and above the usual reasons for listing it, Catcher crystallized my fascination with psychology and may have led to everything that followed (until then I wanted to be an architect).

3. Thomas Petzinger, The New Pioneers » A lot of the counterintuitive ideas about business in the 21st century are outlined in this book. It set me in the right direction relatively early.

4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media » Not so much for the content. This is here because it’s the book that started my habit of taking careful notes and following up on the bibliography — otherwise I might not have read any of the books listed below.

5. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea » Maybe the most substantial influence on my thinking. Like McLuhan’s, this is a great bibliographic hub that opened up a lot of insights and opportunities for further study. More importantly, it taught me to think about everything in evolutionary terms.

6. George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets » I read this to learn more about Goethe, loved it — I’m still living by some of the quotes — and then when I tried learning more about Santayana I was introduced to William James and Charles Peirce and they kept me pretty busy studying pragmatism for the next few years.

7. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality » I only read the first section (where he outlines his whole cosmological scheme). I don’t think I understand it, but in the attempt to grasp it I gained a whole new appreciation for how our minds affect our ideas about time and space.

8. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis » Another very useful bibliography, it gave me a lot of evidence-based corroboration of ideas I had already derived from people like James and Dewey, giving me the confidence to keep moving forward.

9. Jacques Barzun, The Modern Researcher » Barzun really helped elevate my discipline at exactly the moment I needed it — bringing everything together after years of intellectual grazing… I imagine him standing over my shoulder telling me I’m doing it wrong.

10. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self » Another great bibliographical hub. This helped me connect most of the dots, connecting ideas from a lot of different fields [and finalizing much of the vocabulary I needed to articulate my thinking].

Honourable mentions: Thinking Learning For One’s Self: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian Thought, by William Theodore de Bary; Destructive Emotions, edited by Daniel Goleman; Authentic Happiness, by Martin Seligman; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, by Richard Rorty; The Malaise of Modernity, by Charles Taylor… and a whole stack of books by Whitehead, John Dewey, James, and José Ortega y Gassett.

Related Posts:

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• Update On That Project Provisionally Called A Book
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David Warsh at Economic Principals has a very complimentary piece this week about Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View:

Economist’s View is a lightly-edited aggregation of items from around the Web – newspaper columns and blog posts mostly, plus the occasional podcast or video, continually updated throughout the day and augmented periodically by Thoma’s own commentary, all the package distinguished by a selecting principle that is lively, informed, inclusive and nearly straight up-and-down. In this respect, Thoma’s site resembles Romenesko on the news industry, Johnson’s Russia List, or Real Clear Politics on the US scene (minus the slowly-increasing volume of Real Clear Politics-produced filler). Thoma monitors nearly 300 feeds, culls them, links thirty items or so, and himself writes as many as a dozen annotated entries a day. The easy-to-use site is an alternative to the sort of RSS feed-reader you might laboriously build yourself. Though the demarcation criteria are not quite so clear as on those other sites – the topic is vast, after all – I find Thoma pretty close to one-stop shopping for the sort of economic news and analysis that interests me qua news – a digital fire-hose, to be sure, but a manageable one. Looking at Thoma once a day is enough.

There’s more in the piece about blogging in general, specifically where Thoma and a couple of others like him (mentioned above) fit into the broader blogosphere:

The proprietors of each are essentially editors. They hue as best they understand it to the perpendicular. They seek to see whole the debate they cover, to present its raw files fairly to readers, to occupy the center ground and treat all comers fairly. They function more like referees on a stylized battlefield than (as Robert Wright distinguishes among bloggers) disc jockeys or musicians. It is no accident that in each of these cases the blogger’s ego is almost totally subordinated to the task, that the proprietors work long hours for little or nothing.

It’s in stark contrast to a column I read yesterday by Connie Schultz at The Plain Dealer (via Jeff Jarvis). She argues that tightening copyright law is the way to save newspapers. Fine for her and her organization, but it would be at the expense of everything newspapers supposedly stand for: open discussion, transparency and objectivity, public accountability, keeping the powerful in-check, shining a light on corruption, giving a voice to the weak and oppressed — all things that a more free and open web would naturally promote, but would be undermined by the atmosphere that would be created by efforts to tighten copyright laws.

I actually spent a long time working on a really negative piece, critical of Schultz’s plan, and more generally, the deeply contradictory attitude being exhibited by some journalists. I was glad when David Warsh and Mark Thoma gave me a positive alternative.

As an aside, I’ve been using Economist’s View as one of many models for my own blogging practices, but now that I think more about it, you might begin to see even more similarities here at Open Conceptual.

Related Posts:

• From News to Nascence
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• Memo to Professional Media: “Stop Resisting!”
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