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Books which have influenced me most
Chris, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I'd like to see you list the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world.
I'll go with the "gut list," rather than the "I've thought about this for a long time list." I'll also stress that books are by no means the only source of influence. The books are in no intended order, although the list came out in a broadly chronological stream:
1. Plato, Dialogues. I read these very early in life and they taught me about trying to think philosophically and also about meta-rationality.
2. The Incredible Bread Machine, by Susan Love Brown, et.al. This was the first book I ever read on economics and it got me excited about the topic.
3. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand. This got me excited about the idea that production is what matters and that producers must have the freedom and incentives to operate.
4. Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order. The market as a discovery procedure and why socialist calculation will not succeed. (By the way, I'll toss a chiding tsk-tsk the way of Wolfers and Thoma.)
5. John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes is one of the greatest thinkers of economics and there are new ideas on virtually every page.
6. 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.
7. Willard van Orman Quine, Word and Object. This is actually a book about how to arrive at a deeper understanding than the one you already have, although I suspect few people read it that way.
8. Reasons and Persons, by Derek Parfit. This convinced me that a strictly individualistic approach to ethics will not in general succeed and introduced me to new ways of reasoning and new ways to plumb for depth.
9. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae. I don't think the ideas in this book have influenced me very much, but reading it was, for whatever reason, the impetus to start writing about the economics of culture and also to give a broader focus to what I write. Alex, by the way, was the one who recommended it to me.
10. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. This is still the best book on interiority.
I'd also like to mention the two books by Fischer Black, although a) I cannot easily elevate one over the other, and b) I capped the list at ten. La Rochefoucauld's Maxims also deserves honorary mention, on self-deception and related issues. Plus there is Shakespeare -- also for thinking with depth -- although I cannot point to a single book above the others. Harold Bloom's The Western Canon comes to mind as well.
I would encourage other bloggers to offer similar lists.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 16, 2010 at 07:15 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
I am very disappointed in you -- bad, bad Tyler. A nice boy like you should not be seen the company of unpleasant and disreputable women like Camile Paglia and Ayn Rand. Miss Rand concerns me in particular.
Posted by: Tori in DC at Mar 16, 2010 7:46:09 AM
La Rochefoucauld is a fun read.
Posted by: Dave Prychitko at Mar 16, 2010 8:13:16 AM
Tori,
Believe it or not, Tyler was once young; and when he was, things influenced him. There are probably things much stupider than Ayn Rand in everyone's list of *actual* influences. Of course, this list is more about signaling than about what actually made Tyler Tyler even if Tyler is trying to be as honest as possible.
Posted by: josh at Mar 16, 2010 8:21:15 AM
The closest thing on the list to science is... Plato?
Really??
Posted by: Trevindor at Mar 16, 2010 8:33:45 AM
That is a unique take on Word and Object. Aside from semantic ascent, I'm not entirely sure how you get that reading.
Posted by: Urstoff at Mar 16, 2010 9:05:38 AM
Adam Smith and Keynes: among the most influential of economists,
though in different directions; both knew many other fields in addition
to economics, the latter often a characteristic of seminal thinkers.
Posted by: Candadai Tirumalai at Mar 16, 2010 9:14:55 AM
Thanks!
I'm glad that someone else rates Rand's nonfiction above her fiction.
Posted by: Chris at Mar 16, 2010 9:43:42 AM
Tyler clearly misremembered. Knowing him, I cannot believe that My 60 Memorable Games or some other chess book is not in his top 5.
Posted by: john nye at Mar 16, 2010 10:00:41 AM
Tori, have you actually read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal? It's pretty good. I don't like Rand's black-and-white thinking and her belief that she knows everything about everything. I don't like most of her fiction, and her art book is particularly heinous. But Capitalism is really good. The sections written by Alan Greenspan, who was a disciple at the time, are particularly interesting.
Posted by: Chase Saunders at Mar 16, 2010 10:02:00 AM
John Nye is completely correct. The Fischer book is not only about chess, but it's about the appeals and perils of a style which emphasizes clarity and control above all else. Irving Chernev's *The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played* was another big influence; it's a book about human diversity and creativity and surprise. I pretty much memorized a big chunk of it when I was ten or so.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Mar 16, 2010 10:06:35 AM
Interiority? Try Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner - the shiveriest novel I've ever read.
Posted by: dearieme at Mar 16, 2010 10:17:52 AM
I have a related question that I wish I would have asked a few days ago when requested:
In what order do you rank different media as currently shaping your thinking (i.e. TV, traditional newspapers, journal articles, blogs, twitter/social media, books)? And, what media have blogs & social media replaced in recent years when it comes to affecting your thinking (not just in terms of consumption volume)?
Posted by: Jay at Mar 16, 2010 10:29:07 AM
The autobiography of Mikhail Tal.
Balthazar Castiglione - Book of the Courtier.
The 1001 Nights. (A Victorian translation.)
The Sorrows of Young Werther.
A Candle in the Dark.
Pale Fire.
A History of Western Philosophy.
Posted by: Steve Z at Mar 16, 2010 10:30:49 AM
It's an interesting exercise to try to find areas of deep interest that grew out of one book. Most of my deep interests actually arose from interactions with teachers and other people, which I then followed up on by reading books. For example, I took an economics course, then got interested enough to do follow-up reading. But there are a few area of interest that I can trace back to one spontaneous reading...
1. Goedel, Escher, Bach. Epistimology, mathematical logic, and unusual applications of mathematics. Poundstone's "Prisoner's Dilema" is good in this regard as well.
2. Otto Friedrich's "Before the Deluge". Opened up a world of well-narrated history. Tuchman's "Guns of August" and Morton's "A Nervous Splendor" would have done as well.
These I actually recommend. Others I have to credit, but under no circumstances would I recommend them.
3. John Gribbin's popular science books. These are sensationalistic and border on pseudo-science, but they got me hooked as a kid and I ultimately got a Ph.D. in physics.
4. Clarke's "2001" and Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series got me interested in science fiction and fantasy. Neither is very well-written, and I don't read much from these genres anymore, but they dominated my childhood and nurtured a love of reading.
Posted by: David Wright at Mar 16, 2010 10:31:23 AM
Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman pretty much changed my life.
Posted by: Greg at Mar 16, 2010 11:42:41 AM
I just want to mention how important serendipity can be, and how odd influence can be. For Economics, there's no doubt that reading Jevons "The Theory of Political Economy" got me interested in the subject. I only read the book because I had been looking at his work on Logic and Probability. But, having read some Marx, it seemed to me that he solved a puzzle that Marx had made hay with. The thing is, I started reading Economics and Political Economy seriously after that. Before that time, I read it them as Philosophy or for any philosophical relevance.
I still value parts of that book, and you can read it here:
http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnPE.html
Posted by: Don the libertarian Democrat at Mar 16, 2010 11:43:18 AM
Here are 10 I can come up with a bit of thought:
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (especially "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird")
Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment
Shakespeare's The Tempest (really, it's this one play in particular)
Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
Heller's Catch-22
Barthes' Camera Lucida
Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Gibson's Neuromancer
Paul Celan's poetry
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
It's hard to keep Catcher in the Rye off this list. I think it may shake The Crying of Lot 49 to 11.... and Space Merchants gives Neuromancer a strong run for its money.
Posted by: C at Mar 16, 2010 12:16:58 PM
I'm trying not to infer anything from Tori's condemnation, but I find both Rand and Paglia refreshingly honest and insightful (even though I'd never dream of living in the same house as either one of them).
Posted by: caveat bettor at Mar 16, 2010 1:27:58 PM
I didn't say anything negative about Hayek, only that I'd put David Ricardo on the list first. I stand by that -- Ricardo's contributions to economics were much greater than Hayek's (in my opinion). Instead of tsk, tsking, do you have an argument as to why Hayek ought to be included over Ricardo?
Posted by: Mark Thoma at Mar 16, 2010 1:37:53 PM
Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace and The General Theory
Friedman's Price Theory
Sowell's Conflict of Visions
Mumford's The City in History and Technics and Civilization
Churchill's history of the Second World War
Williamson's Markets and Hierarchies
Anything and everything authored by Orwell
Grant's Memoirs
Enchiridion (Epictetus)
Posted by: LT Phillips at Mar 16, 2010 1:42:08 PM
Mark,
I am not able to post on your blog since you put up that roundtable on China. Somne weird
thing pops in saying there is a plug in error and then my computer freezes and I have to reboot,
so no more comments there from me for now.
In any case, you have not explained what is so wonderful about Ricardo. Is it that he
formulated the first theoretical version of the standard classical model? Is it the Principle
of Comparative Advantage? Both of those plus Ricardian Equivalence plus more unmentioned?
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Mar 16, 2010 2:44:04 PM
Yes, Paglia's book was a huge influence on me, too.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 16, 2010 4:58:47 PM
I first met Tyler when he was, I believe, 17 or 18, and this period, I gather, was just after his Rand and Hayek introduction and just before Keynes and Mill (if the list above is in fact in chronological order).
I have no idea if during this period Tyler had a chance to read Hazlitt's The Failure of the "New Economics" before reading Keynes (as I did) or Hayek's comments and analysis in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor prior to reading Mill's Autobiography, but the experience of having coming in touch of those books first certainly inoculated this writer from being easily swayed from those quarters.
Posted by: Jule Herbert at Mar 16, 2010 5:20:37 PM
steve Z
A History of Western Philosophy is one of my favourites - do you happen to know why it has been so panned by Professional Philosophs
Posted by: ed_finnerty at Mar 16, 2010 5:24:32 PM
Plato boggled my mind as a freshman in college. I'm not sure why, but it shocked me that one author could think so deeply thousands of years ago.
Posted by: thehova at Mar 16, 2010 7:39:54 PM
An interview with Friedman, 1979, that began #government must act in cases of crisis". I said another one. The interview was publishes by a pro-stalinist newspaper ( yes, in 1979)But i was bored while my father ´s car was been repaired so i continued reading. Then I read Free to Chose.
Constitution Of Liberty.
Vote´s motives
Surely, you are joking Mr Feynmann.
Darwin´s Legacy . Brian Leith. Faaaar better then that overvalued , unscientific, selfish gene
Julius Caesar , the play
The essence and value of Democracy Kelsen
Lessons of History . Will Durant
Antigone, Sophocles
Faust , Goethe
Posted by: k at Mar 16, 2010 8:12:34 PM
I know you prefer to write short, often cryptic, remarks, but the claim about W&O demands an explanation. It strikes me less as a heterodox reading and more of a non sequitur.
@steve z @ed_finnerty I actually haven't read a history of western philosophy myself, but my understanding is that it is regarded as gratuitously wrong about many, if not most of the historical figures it covers. So the explanations will be specific to the individual philosophers.
Posted by: Justin at Mar 16, 2010 8:58:17 PM
I was once deeply influenced by Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a book I now see as biased and tendentious
For what it is worth, I have never read a word of Ayn Rand, but I have read some Hayek
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (I don't think I understood a tenth of it, as I was a teen, and I realize it is deeply problematic, but it had a long-lasting and haunting effect on me)
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere
Stendhal, On Love
Homer, The Odyssey
One of the greatest and most influential books I've ever read is Jon Elster's Sour Grapes
Posted by: tkehler at Mar 16, 2010 9:45:32 PM
I was once deeply influenced by Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a book I now see as biased and tendentious
For what it is worth, I have never read a word of Ayn Rand, but I have read some Hayek
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (I don't think I understood a tenth of it, as I was a teen, and I realize it is deeply problematic, but it had a long-lasting and haunting effect on me)
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere
Stendhal, On Love
Homer, The Odyssey
One of the greatest and most influential books I've ever read is Jon Elster's Sour Grapes
Posted by: tkehler at Mar 16, 2010 9:45:54 PM
In the games arena, Master Play by Terence Reese was a huge influence.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Mar 16, 2010 9:56:54 PM
Heidegger is out of fashion. But several of his essays in, "The Question Concerning Technology and other essays" were deeply enlightening to me.
Posted by: thehova at Mar 17, 2010 12:18:09 AM
Is Proust's 'Remembrance of Things Past' a different translation than 'In Search of Lost Time' or is it the same with a different title?
Posted by: Andrew1 at Mar 17, 2010 6:55:04 AM
I like your blog and i am quite impressed with it. I am also fond of reading books. I would like to read one of it which you have listed over here. Thanks for sharing the list.
Posted by: iedge karte at Mar 17, 2010 7:58:19 AM
Not in any particular order, except for number 1, which is the best book ever written, by a wide margin, period:
1) Leaves of Grass
2) Sophie's Choice
3) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
4) Look Homeward, Angel
5) On The Road
6) Sylvia Plath - The Collected Poems
7) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
8) The Trial
9) Tao Te Ching
10) The Lord of the Rings
I'll give honorable mention to Proust. It is amazing. I just haven't finished it yet...
Posted by: William at Mar 17, 2010 11:30:07 AM
ed_finnerty: Ditto re: the above reply. I think it's been panned for being an inaccurate history. Regardless, it was great insofar as it introduced me to a broad range of ideas at an early age.
One book that I haven't read but imagine excellent is Emanuel Lasker's "Kampf," setting out his theory of games. Does anybody know if it's been translated into English?
Posted by: Steve Z at Mar 17, 2010 1:00:43 PM
Andrew1:
I assume by Remembrance of Things Past he is referring to the C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin translation, which is still the only complete translation available in the U.S., due to copyright issues. In the U.K., however, one can purchase a new translation by Lydia Davis, Mark Treharne, James Grieve, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier, and Ian Patterson (one translator per volume), edited by Christopher Prendergast, which is arguably much more accurate than even the 1992 revision of the Moncrieff Proust, which also changed the title to the more literal In Search of Lost Time ("Remembrance of Things Past" is taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30).
Posted by: Matthew Robert Walther at Mar 17, 2010 1:25:02 PM
Prof Thoma,
While I believe Ricardo definitely added some understanding to economics and human understanding, I'm not sure I'd consider his works more important than Hayek's. But that seems a rather subjective point that is really neither here nor there. The issue is whether adding Ricardo to already existing curriculum really adds anymore insight than adding Hayek would. On that issue, I would contend that no he doesn't, as Adam Smith already provides much of the material that Ricardo does (labor theory of value, comparative advantages, advantage of trade, etc.) Hayek adds an informatics complexity element that some of the other authors mentioned simply don't. Also missing from the list is growth theory, in which case a bit of Solow would be a good addition too.
In other words, I don't think the point of Economic curricula is to champion the guys who waved the biggest academic dick, but to provide a rich amount of perspectives as to build a much more complete view of Economics.
Posted by: Ryan Vann at Mar 17, 2010 6:27:33 PM
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the book that forever altered the lens through which I view new ideas.
Posted by: Gretchen Shanofsky at Mar 17, 2010 9:24:42 PM
I have read many of the pans of History of Western Philosophy and was left with the impression that most of the critisism was because he mocked some of the giants in the field, and specifically dismissed Hegel as unreadable (and pointless even if you did), Kant as wrong, and Rousseau as ridiculous.
Posted by: ed_finnerty at Mar 18, 2010 2:21:09 PM
For what it's worth, here's a list of ten. I started heavy on literature, then broke out into other things.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Shakespeare, King Lear
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas
Jonathan Swift--anything and everything
Thucydides, History of the Pelop. War
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
I minored in philosophy as an undergraduate. Couldn't take any philosophers seriously before Nietzsche. They never seemed to be talking about the real world. Plato was perhaps the worst. I also find it hard to take any philosophers seriously after Nietzsche (with the possible exception of Whitehead). If you strip away Nietzsche's romanticism and the silliness about the superman, he just about nailed it.
Posted by: English Professor at Mar 18, 2010 3:12:10 PM
Allison, Essence of Decision (the best political science book I ever read)
Newfield, RFK: a Memoir
Hobbes, Leviathan,
Wilson, To the Finland Station
Dawkins, the Selfish Gene
My 9th grade literature textbook, which introduced me to Borges, Ionesco, Beckett, Ibsen.
A Shakespeare reader
Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis.
The Sunday New York Times and the New Yorker my father subscribed to.
The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-49 by C. Woodham-Smith
Posted by: mark at Mar 18, 2010 3:49:50 PM
No particular order:
Nietzsche's GENEALOGY OF MORALITY ( --the Hackett translation by Clark and Swenson)
La Rochefoucauld's Maxims ( --definitive translation by Blackmore and Blackmore for Oxford UP)
Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN
The penultimate volume -- "Albertine Disparue" (aka "The Fugitive") -- of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME ( --the 2002 Penguin UK translation by Peter Collier)
Nietzsche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA ( --the OXFORD UP translation by Graham Parkes)
Posted by: Rob at Mar 18, 2010 4:30:14 PM
Your list you've made consists of books you THINK have influenced you the most. I would like to know the books that you don't realize have influenced you the most.
Posted by: Bill at Mar 18, 2010 6:53:15 PM
I have scant background in philosophy but A History of Western Philosophy has been a favorite a of mine since I was in my teens It is a "personal view" (as the BBC said of Kenneth Clark's series) and wrong on many things, even I can tell -- Russell's view of Romanticism is very dated, for example. But Russell's humanity, compassion and wit are timeless and make it still very much worth reading, a literary masterpiece, almost on a par with Gibbon. It is also a superb introduction to logical thinking.
Posted by: Harold at Mar 18, 2010 7:35:31 PM
I am so glad that you included both Proust and Quine, and agree entirely with your description of both of them.
Posted by: William Flesch at Mar 19, 2010 2:30:21 PM
http://www.yeahrightblog.com/yeah_right/2010/03/whitneys-influential-books.html
Posted by: Whitney at Mar 19, 2010 2:52:26 PM
My personal favorite is The Bamberg Affair In The All. It represents some astounding philosophical thought that explains the 7 fundamental laws at work in the universe. The laws are unchanging truths that consistently operate across all epochs, and answered so much about "who am I, why am I here, etc." It left me viewing things in a totally different way.
Posted by: randy at Mar 19, 2010 3:53:00 PM
I love to read. And I love to track every book I read.
In fact, I began logging every book I finished starting in the 8th grade, and I’ve been doing it ever since. Every January, I close out the prior year, print my log, hole-punch it, and put it…
Posted by: Hidden Cameras at Mar 20, 2010 3:15:07 AM
Keynes? If you really read, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, how is it that you missed the muddled thinking and the contradictions? I think that you must have mistaken skimming with careful reading.
Posted by: VangelV at Mar 20, 2010 12:10:34 PM
War and Peace
Hamlet
Brothers Karamazov
Tao Te Ching
Moby Dick
I Ching
Leaves of Grass
Cien Sonetos de Amor
Middlemarch
Requiem
of these I probably only need to mention the names of two authors; Cien Sonetos--Pablo Neruda, Requiem-Anna Akhmatova. War and Peace has it all--historiography, social philosophy, a riveting novel, and profound meditation upon a people in good times and bad, youth and death.
Ayn Rand...why not Erle Stanley Gardner or Danielle Steele for similar intellectual heft. Ian Fleming, perhaps, I know, Michael Crichton--the dinosaurs are coming, along with the Red States, or the real antidote to Ms. Rand's Gantry hokum, a long if boring induction into the worlds of Sinclair Lewis.
Posted by: CitizenE at Mar 21, 2010 7:36:35 PM
