Read More Holiday 2023 Reading List, with Mohamed El-Erian, Mariana Mazzucato, Stephen S. Roach, and more

We highlight recent works by PS contributors that belong on your holiday shopping list. The PS Say More Newsletter [PS Read More]( This week in a special edition of PS Read More, we present a selection of new and noteworthy works written by PS contributors. From artificial intelligence to the US-China rivalry, from the changing face of authoritarianism to the failures of economics, the books on the list confront some of the most critical risks and trends of our time. [Read now](. [Book Cover Charles Wheeler Witness to the Twentieth Century]( [Charles Wheeler – Witness to the Twentieth Century: A Life in News]( By Shirin Wheeler, with a foreword by Christiane Amanpour A look at the major events of the twentieth century through the eyes of the man who witnessed it all: celebrated BBC foreign correspondent Charles Wheeler. "How did they describe Charles Wheeler? Integrity, authority, humanity. All of us are privileged to walk in his footsteps today." – Lyse Doucet Sponsored by Manilla Press Holiday 2023 Reading List [Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be]( By Diane Coyle Coyle says: “Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is And What It Should Be is my plea for criticisms of economics to stop focusing on tired old straw men – ‘Why does economics use so much mathematics?' 'Why does it make unrealistic assumptions about behavior?’ – and instead focus on the discipline's actual weaknesses. I highlight a number of those weaknesses in the book, such as a lack of diversity in the profession and a particularly serious failing as a social science. Economics suffers from the positivist claim that the discipline deals only with objective facts, even though economists are always advising about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ courses of action, and thus implicitly making value judgements. And the workhorse models economists use to assess policy decisions still do not reflect the characteristics of the digital economy, such as the fact that data (unlike, say, grain) are not depleted when one person consumes it.” [Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century]( By Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman Guriev says: “In Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, Daniel Treisman and I show that nondemocratic regimes are not what they used to be. Whereas the tyrants of the twentieth century ruled through violence, fear, and ideology, most modern autocrats control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in democracies, they distort facts to win support. Beyond showing how such dictators emerge and operate, we examine the unique threats they pose and offer recommendations about how democracies should respond.” [Monetary Policy and Its Unintended Consequences]( By Raghuram G. Rajan Rajan says: “In August 2005, I pointed to the perverse incentives for private players to take risks in a low interest-rate environment. It was no comfort to me when these risks materialized in the 2008 global financial crisis. But as central banks pursued yet more accommodative – and even unorthodox – policies to revive ailing economies, I worried that we were ignoring a primary cause of the crisis: central banks. They intervened merrily in a variety of markets, supporting prices and sometimes market players. They occasionally tied monetary-policy actions to market movements and sentiments. Somewhat perversely, the more the central bank did, the more it was expected to do, and the more it ended up doing. For instance, the mini banking crisis in March 2023 was alleviated by massive intervention by the US Federal Reserve and Treasury, including the effective insurance of all uninsured deposits, but this no longer seems to register as an aberration in the public consciousness. My central argument in this book is that monetary adventurism is rarely as much of a panacea as we think and often has unintended effects, which require yet more adventurism to address. The book is a plea to central bankers again to become more conservative and boring, and not to assume that they have all the solutions.” For the full list – featuring Daron Acemoglu, John Cochrane, Mariana Mazzucato, Stephen S. Roach, and more – [click here](. [PS. Save $50 on any new PS subscription.]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [LinkedIn]( Project Syndicate publishes and provides, on a not-for-profit basis, original commentary by the world's leading thinkers to more than 500 media outlets in over 150 countries. This newsletter does not entitle the recipient to re-publish any of the content it contains. This newsletter is a service of [Project Syndicate](. [Change your newsletter preferences](. Follow us on [Facebook]( [Twitter]( and [YouTube](. © Project Syndicate, all rights reserved. [Unsubscribe from all newsletters](.