Summer reading list for the Prime Minister

Earlier this week, NZIER released their first Summer Reading List for the Prime Minister, which they "hope the Prime Minister, her advisors, and anyone interested in economics and public policy, will find both informative and enjoyable to read". I had a small (and uncredited role) in the list, recommending one of the books (2014 Nobel Prize winner Jean Tirole's Economics for the Common Good) that made it onto the final list.

The reading list includes:

• The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2019);
• Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand, 1830–1847, by Peter Adams (1977);
• Good Economics for Hard Times, by new Nobel Prize winners Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2019);
• The Sex Factor, by Victoria Bateman (2019);
• Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, by Herbert Guthrie-Smith (1921);
• Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth, by Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Andrew Berg (2019);
• Island Time: New Zealand's Pacific Futures, by Damon Salesa (2017);
• Economics for the Common Good, by Jean Tirole (2019); and
• Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, by Eric Topol (2019).

You can read a brief synopsis of each book on the reading list PDF file. Here was my short list of recommendations (with some brief notes):

• Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. Rosling developed Gapminder, and a strong proponent of using data rather than intuition to answer questions (I reviewed it here);
• Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Thomas Ramge. This one is one my soon-to-read list, but seems important for understanding the period of creative destruction we are going through right now;
• Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science, by Dani Rodrik. This one is a more sensible version of Doughnut Economics, by an author who is less in love with their own metaphors. Rodrik himself notes that "this book both celebrates and critiques economics" (I reviewed it here);
• Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives, by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafit. I haven't read this one yet, but it looks like it strikes a good balance between empirical research and real-world application, while selling an important story about the importance of understanding how people respond to having less than they need.
• Economics for the Common Good, by Jean Tirole. This one is probably a bit dense, and long (560+ pp.) but I had to include something from a recent Nobel laureate. This is Tirole's reflections on the most important contributions to society that economics can make in the future.

My list is clearly more contemporary, with all the books released in the last few years. However, if you're looking for some summer reading for yourself, the books on either list are a good place to start. Enjoy!