I am happy with our little book clubs, but they induce the wish to read more books than we actually read. Especially I have found it frustrating that we had to cut our economics studies short. I know some people have tried to read very large amounts in a very short time span like 12-24-36 hours. It is really demanding but most likely very rewarding.

Now I should like to try this on:

Carlin and Soskice (2014) Macroenomics: Institutions, Instability, And The Financial System – about 600 pages

Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz (2016): The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth.

I should like to start Friday morning 9AM and be done by Sunday 6PM.

We will start with the Origin of Life book and do it April 21st to 23rd.
Does somebody want to participate?? It is possible to do via Skype.
I suggest each day:

Read 100 pages

Write 1 page summary

Run 7 km

Lunch 2pm

Read 100 pages

Write 1 page summary

Dinner – Sleep

Take Monday off. Maybe all week. Maybe quit academia.
We will also make a powerpoint presentation over the book, but maybe after the 3 days.
I originally wanted to suggest running a marathon, but realism made me suggest a ½ marathon in installments instead

Today we turned the last page on John Maynard Keynes: General Theory.  It has been an extremely impenetrable book: There is hardly any data and the formulas that are there are very simple and not central to the main arguments. I hope to arrange that we can meet with an economist (Sophocles Mavroides) a couple weeks from now.  We will each suggest 2 books for what to go through next.  Since reading Keynes didn’t make me understand of the overall economy has not increased a lot, so I am keen to study a more modern work with both theory and data analysis.   I myself went through 2 very large papers by Mavroides that he then explained to me, which was very rewarding for me.  One was on identifiability of a set of dynamics models for macroeconomics and the second was on fitting the New Keynes Philips Curve [NKPC] to economic data for the last 60 years.  The Philips Curve was originally an empirical observation of reciprocicity of the levels of inflation and employment.  These papers contained much of what I missed in Keynes: Data and Theory.

However, my co-readers felt they had had Economics enough for now.  I intend to suggest these two for next readings:

Jotun1: Noam Chomsky (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

Chomsky is a towering intellect and I read 1 longer 1955 grammar paper and it could be the best paper I have ever read.  A larger summary of this theory would be very rewarding to read and it is about 200 pages.

Jotun2: I would not suggest a book but rather to go through 10 Nobel Lectures by key economists doing 2 lectures at each meeting.  I recently read 3 2013 Nobel lectures in Chemistry by the Karplus, Levitt and Washell and they were an absolute ideal introduction to the history and problems of Molecular Dynamics. So now I suggest the same for economics and it could be these laurates: Friederich Hayek, Leonid Kantorovich, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, John Nash, Daniel Kahneman, Paul Krugman, Scholes, Stieglitz and Amartya Sen.  This could be done in 5 meetings lastting 3+ months.

In general this Book Should:

1. Read things I would/could not have read otherwise.

and the actual books fall into 2 topics:

I. Current Affairs: Global Warming, Immigration Studies, What is Democracy, The Cause of Conflicts, Theories of Religion, Understanding the Economy, Conceptual Foundation of Political Ideologies, … I rather want to read 3-500 pages of good overview, than a lot of daily news

II.  Real Classics: Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Hume, Global Sacred texts,…

2. I think too long books takes too much time. Ideally 2-300 pages, max 500.

3.  I think it is a good idea to put possible books in Dropbox so we can pre-view them before buying them.