NP - Econ books

[eburns at gmail.com]

I really enjoyed Debt- the first 5000 years by David Graeber


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

-----Original Message-----
From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
Sender: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2013 15:12:19 
To: Prashant Kumar<siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon -l<pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: NP - Econ books

may not what you're looking for but I really liked Red Plenty which
covers Soviet economic aspirations in the 60s, hopes and dreams and
how they were dashed. they way the author takes very complicated
subjects and explains them to a layman audience is one of its
strengths

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/07/red-plenty-francis-spufford-ussr

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a
fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called “the
planned economy,” which was going to gush forth an abundance of good
things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a
little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed
to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it
came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash
leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future
of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would
out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a
Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant
best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy
ending.

Rich

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 7:30 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury.
>
> Ostensibly a history of the Cadbury chocolate company, it's actually a
> history of "the corporation". Brings in ethics, war, slavery, religion
> (esp. Quakers), colonialism, hucksters and humbuggery, dreamers and
> drifters. I don't even like chocolate, but I got teary at the end.
>
> It's a fun and easy read, but at the same time completely altered my
> understanding of the moral implications of a debt society that has
> forgotten what indebtedness means.
>
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Prashant Kumar
> <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Looking for some recommendations. Popular/semipopular stuff rather than
>> treatises.
>>
>> P.