This title's beautiful allusion to Pokémon is admittedly pretty weird. Nevertheless spot-on for what's happening academically to me, a week and a half before the next semester starts: so much reading, so much interesting things around - and I'm gonna get through them all!
A feature which most of you are probably painfully aware of is how the growth rate of your reading list tends to permanently outstrip the speed of your reading ability.
Slightly annoying, considering you only have so much time. As I recalled the other day, there are so many exciting things about being an economist in our age: the potential change of a paradigm and the completely unprecedented monetary policy just to mention a few. Not surprisingly, there's a ton of great material out there, ready for me to explore!
Other things constantly poke at my attention; my last Mises.se-article was provocative enough for that audience to comment a lot, to which I of course responded. For this blog I have a few long overdue posts, most urgently my discussion of Bernanke's book (see my swedish Review here) and then of course the ever-interesting exchange of ideas and discussion in the comment section of the Econ Blogosphere. I can barely keep up with the excellent material produced by bloggers I follow, not to mention the 50+ journal articles saved in a folder named "Econ Reading", painfully reminding me about all the writings I yet have to read.
However, these days I'm also reading a couple of books at once (which somehow always seems to happen). I'm about halfway through Thomas Sowell's latest book Wealth Poverty and Politics which is an absolute delight, but takes way too long to go through since I need to scatter down some notes on pretty much every other page. This morning I once again picked up Ferguson's 2009 book The Ascent of Money in order to find an argument I had been pondering; I've almost finished Selgin's breathtaking study of private coinage in the early 19th century Britain and while going for a long walk this afternoon, I decided to finally get on with the Audio version of Hülsmann's biography of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism.
In a weak moment I also ordered Coyle's recent book on measuring GDP, and of course in April McCloskey's latest tome Bourgeois Equality is coming out. Since I'm a good student of economic schools other than my own, an absolute must-read this semester is top-marxist Anwar Shaik's recent 1000-page blockbuster which is all every left-leaning economist has been talking about for months.
Bottom Line? I have tons of stuff to read, and the semester hasn't even started yet. Taking non-mainstream positions requires you to read significantly more than your student friends. Massive reading lists really is the curse of the heterodoxy. But I'm Gonna Master 'em All!
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