I’m doing a book chapter on The Politics of Australian Economic Policy which needs “suggestions for further reading”, and one thing I need to suggest is a couple of good sources (preferably books, but reports or survey articles would do) giving a summary of the general case in favour of microeconomic reform in Australia and a positive evaluation of the reform experience.

I’d normally cite Productivity Commission reports, but I’d like something a bit less technical [the main audience is undergraduate political science students]. On the critical/sceptical side, I plan to suggest my own book Great Expectations and books by Michael Pusey and Fred Argy. Any other suggestions would be gratefully received.

Another question Thanks for comments and suggestions so far, which basically confirm my view that there isn’t a book of the kind I am looking for. I would also be interested in a book covering the period 1945-75 in Australia with a focus on economic policy from a political viewpoint. Perhaps I should follow the suggestion of one of my commentators and write it myself

I’ve been reading lots of different things, but a couple of books illustrate the opposite ends of the spectrum of thought about the Internet and its possibilities.
Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Silicon Snake Oil was one of the first manifestations of neo-Luddism. An interesting example of a failed reductio ad absurdam is a critique of estimates of the growth rate of the Internet, where Stoll says

Just by counting network nodes, the Internet is now doubling in size every year. This growth rate can’t continue for long – at this rate, everyone on Earth will be connected by 2003. Impossible

Here we are in 2003, and while it’s not literally true that everyone on Earth is connected, it is true that almost everyone in the developed world has access to the Internet.
Stoll is similarly dismissive of prospects for a revival of public debate on the Internet, taking as his model the dying days of UseNet. He misses almost completely the impact of the Web. Of course, he does not anticipate blogging which, I think, has gone a long way towards fulfilling the early promise of the Internet. Imperfect as blogs are, they contain a lot of well-written and well-argued discussion of a wide range of issues that would have had very little chance of publication in the days before the Internet.

If Stoll was too pessimistic, this was nothing compared to the ludicrous overoptimism of the dotcom boom, chronicled in James Ledbetter’s Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year: The Short Absurd Life of the Industry Standard We have yet to see a really good book on this topic. (Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God, which I reviewed here is easily the best book on the 1990s boom as a whole, but is only peripherally concerned with the dotcoms.

I’ve finished the Inferno and am now beginning Dante’s ascent of Purgatory. I also made my first visit to Brisbane Forest Park, a very pleasant expanse of mixed eucalypt and subtropical rainforest, just west of my new home.

Partly because I was thinking about Dante, it struck me that Queensland seems to have more optimistic/picturesque placenames than the areas I’m used to. On today’s journey, for example, I passed Mt Glorious. By contrast, a typical bushwalk in the Snowy Mountains might begin at Dead Horse Gap, and bypass Mt Purgatory on the way to Mt Terrible. Or there’s Scabby Range, Dry Plain and Doubtful Creek, to name just a few of the spots I’ve visited.

Despite occasional temptations, I’ve stuck to my resolution to abandon The Bill, which, as Rob Corr pointed out, jumped the shark some time ago (I nominate the station firebombing, which wrote out six characters in one episode, but the warning signs were evident well before that). I have, however, received reports of the ultimate shark-jump, a dramatic wedding episode. I didn’t get any good recommendations for alternative TV addictions, so I’ll be curled up in front of a video, instead of watching while Debbie, covered in blood, escapes from Tom’s office, as promised in the TV guide.

Update Demonstrating yet again this blog’s intimate link with the Zeitgeist, The Age runs a story on the soaping up of The Bill. It confirms that the firebombing was the first initiative of the shark-jumping new executive producer, but then descends into the realm of the bizarre, claiming that all of this reflects viewer demands for more “realism”. This confirms the inversion of the term that first arose with the use of the term “reality TV” to describe live-in game shows.

I have recently experienced a significant relaxation in my research budget constraint. To translate from economese, I have more money to spend (thanks, Brendan!), and one thing I plan to do is to add to my research library. As can be seen from my website my interests are very diverse and it’s not always easy to keep up. So I thought I’d ask for suggestions. They don’t have to be in economics. In fact recommendations for important books in other fields (particularly other social sciences) would be most welcome. But within economics, if there’s a really good book on endogenous growth theory and related topics, I’d be keen for a recommendation.

Although my budget constraint is not too tight at present, my time constraint is very tight, so reading has to provide consumption benefits as well as contributing to my work. Unless it’s absolutely essential, I’m not going to wade through anything that’s badly written, or printed in hard-to-read type on cheap paper.

One thing I’d particularly like to do is to update and extend my maths library, most of which dates back to my undergraduate days in the 1970s. Areas where I’d particularly like a good recommendation include number theory, differential geometry and algebraic topology. I’d also like suggestions for good books on analysis and general topology(currently I have Rudin Functional Analysis, Royden’s Real Analysis , Conway Functions of One Complex Variable Ash Real Analysis and Probability and Dugundji Topology, so I’m looking for something substantially new and improved). And if there are any hot new areas that have developed since the 1970s that I don’t know about, I’d like to find out.

Finally, of course, I’m always keen to have suggestions for new reading of any kind, even if it has no possible relevance to research. Hopefully readers of this blog will have an idea of what I might like.

What I should be reading is Magill and Quinzii Incomplete Markets, an excellent work on finance theory that drops the usual assumptions of perfect rationality and complete markets. Of course, this is just the time when I decide it would be a good idea to reread the complete works of Nick Hornby and watch the movie versions for purposes of comparison. So far we’ve all watched the movie of Fever Pitch and I’ve reread most of it, as well as High Fidelity.