Crazy Book Pricing- Decline to Fall: The Making of British Macro-economic Policy

Decline to Fall: The Making of British Macro-economic Policy and the 1976 IMF Crisis-Douglas Wass

Kindle edition costs USD 80
Hardcover on Amazon- USD 125

Related:
A review of the book from F&D;

In the subsequent discussions between U.K. and IMF officials, the main issues were fiscal adjustment and the exchange rate. Particularly on fiscal adjustment, according to Wass, it became clear in the technical discussions that "there could be no meeting of minds on the logic," because the British officials viewed the IMF's financial programming approach as inapplicable to their economy. The officials were skeptical about the basis for targets for monetary growth, and about the assumed links between the fiscal balance and domestic credit expansion in an economy with an advanced financial system. However, the IMF had more of a meeting of minds with Chancellor Denis Healey, who agreed that monetary expansion on existing fiscal policies was likely to fuel inflation, although he disputed the scale of the adjustment that the IMF sought. Differences were eventually narrowed, partly by the IMF's agreeing to the authorities' commitment to fiscal measures to be taken only if growth in the second year of the program exceeded a certain rate.

Top Power Books to Read

Here's the full list

Book Recommendations

Books that have influenced the Austrian Economist;


“Notes on Democracy” By H L Mencken: Wonderfully written. I have never enjoyed anything in the recent past than Mencken’s elitist views. I wonder why I never read him before. He has a deep contempt for the unthinking masses, which I happen to share. He writes, (on the common man): “A politician by instinct and a statesman by divine right, he has never heard of “The Republic” or “Leviathan.” A Feinschmecker of pornography, he is unaware of Freud.”

“How to Develop a Super Power Memory” by Harry Lorayne: I read it when I was 17 and just out of school. I owe my near-photographic memory to this book, among many others. It helped me realize that our mind has several powers which we don’t even know of.

July Book Club readings

Assorted

People, computers, and data

El Salvador’s Economic Rate of Return (ERR) Project Spreadsheets

Eight centuries of financial folly and counting

Our Giant Banking Crisis—What to Expect

The predictioneer: Using games to see the future

Global Economic Monitor

Global Monitoring Report 2010

Influentional Books Assorted

Mathew Yglesius

William McNeil, Plagues & Peoples: This had a kind of revelatory quality to me, the idea that everything you thought was important about history was actually kind of trivial and the real determinants of human destiny are something else entirely. Guns, Germs, and Steel is arguably the better book in this genre, but I only ever read it because I’d read P&P first so I’m giving McNeil the nod.

Tyler Cowen (who started the meme);

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography. This got me thinking about how one's ideas change, and should change, over the course of a lifetime. Plus Mill is a brilliant thinker and writer more generally.

Bryan Caplan;

Judith Harris, The Nurture Assumption. Harris sucked me into the exciting world of behavioral genetics - and got me thinking about the implications for the meaning of life.

David Henderson;

A Guide to Rational Living, by Albert Ellis. I hit some bumps in my last year in the Ph.D. program at UCLA. I got extreme writer's block and was getting nowhere on my dissertation. I write about this in Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, co-authored with Charley Hooper. I went to see a therapist, Roger Callahan, who gave every one of his new patients a copy. That one book has helped me deal with so many life situations.

Arnold Kling;

Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules. Again, you may find that the examples seem old, but no better book has been written on the economic issues of the information-driven economy. Among other things, this book convinced me that Price Discrimination Explains Everything.

Josh McCabe;

Off the Books by Sudhir Venkatesh. I hate to add something so recent from a guy who turned into one of the “superstars” of sociology, but this was one of the books which got me excited about the kind of things ethnography could do for your analysis. Like Jacobs, Venkatesh finds all sorts of order where others only see chaos.

Will Wilkinson;

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. I dug into this book with the intention of saying what was really, really wrong with it. Instead, I ended up feeling like I understood political philosophy.

Kieran Healy;

Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior. So clever, so unassuming, so it made me want to be an economist. Then I took some economics and it wasn’t much like Schelling at all.

William S. Cleveland, Visualizing Data. “This book presents a set of graphical methods for displaying data”. Does it ever. Tufte gets the Presidential Commissions and the high media profile, and deserves all that, but Cleveland shows you how it’s done in practice and wrote the software that lets you code it yourself. For me it opened up the world of serious thinking on data and model visualization for quantitative data.

Russell Arben Fox;

Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View. I think I must have underlined every sentence in this book. It was the first book I'd read that made me think both critically and practically about all the stuff I'd been reading about "republicanism" for years.

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