Second batch. Started by pulling out the economics books, including ones on the health care system. That was enough to make my 40-50 quota. Still have a lot more to go, and still adding to them.

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Mark Anielski: The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth (paperback, 2007, New Society): Asks why people aren't happier given the amount of economic growth that has occurred since the 1950s. Economists are good at promoting growth because they have some idea how to measure it. If they could only measure happiness, they might be able to promote it as well. This is an idea that's been floating around for a while, even showing up on the political right in Arthur C Brooks: Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America -- and How We Can Get More of It. I'm not sure that happiness, even if you can somehow quantify it, is the right measure, but we need something more than money, because there is more to life than just money.

Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational: The Hiden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2008, Harper Collins): Book shows up in economics sections, where its critique of rational actors can do the most damage. Don't know how predictable they are, or what to make of it.

Dean Baker: The United States Since 1980 (2007, Cambridge University Press): Short survey of the economic fruits of the right-turn following Reagan's election. Baker has been a pretty sharp observer, especially of the housing bubble. He also wrote a short essay, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. He also edited Getting Prices Right: The Debate Over the Accuracy of the Consumer Price Index, the set of statistical changes introduced in the 1990s that serve to understate inflation and thereby to underfund cost-of-living increases.

William J Baumol/Robert E Litan/Carl J Schramm: Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism: And the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (2007, Yale University Press): Admits that capitalism exists both for good and bad, but doesn't seem to have realized that it may be both at the same time. Part of that may be due to seeing growth as good always.

Peter L Bernstein: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (paperback, 1998, Wiley): Big economic history of risk management; also available as part of a box set with Capital Ideas and The Power of Gold.

Peter W Bernstein/Annalyn Swan: All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make -- and Spend -- Their Fortunes (2007, Knopf): Seems to be a spinoff from Forbes, the magazine that cares about such things, with a lot of charts breaking the list down in various ways.

Sara Bongiomi: A Year Without "Made in China": One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy (2007, Wiley): The story of the author's attempt to spend a whole year without buying anything made in China -- the difficulties testifying to just how much in our daily lives is imported from China.

Shannon Brownlee: Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (2007, Bloomsbury): One of those books one mistrusts politically even though there is little doubt that its fundamental premise is true -- the big problem is that its opposite is also true, that despite all the oversell much of America is undertreated. You can spin these arguments any way you like politically, but if the author is honest we'll see overtreatment as one of many bad effects of a system that is fundamentally corrupted by business.

Diane Coyle: The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters (2007; paperback, 2008, Princeton University Press): A new attempt to dress up the dismal science. Not sure what the point is or why it matters, but often these meta-books turn out to be more interesting than the primary research. Author has written a bunch of books, such as Paradoxes of Prosperity: Why the New Capitalism Benefits All. Hadn't noticed that it did.

Elizabeth Currid: The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City (2007, Princeton University Press): Something on the arts business in NYC. Not sure how good on either arts or business.

David M Cutler: Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System (paperback, 2005, Oxford University Press): An economist on questions of choice in the health care system.

Devra Davis: The Secret History of the War on Cancer (2007, Basic Books): Epidemiologist, focuses on environmental causes of cancer, which often as not got a pass in the so-called war. Also wrote When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution.

Philip M Dine: State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence (2007, McGraw-Hill): The state of the unions is poor, which has in turn hurt the middle class, the economy, and political prospects for doing anything about it. Dine may make that case, but I'm skeptical that restrengthening unions is the way back. More likely, if unions benefit at all it will be as beneficiaries of a political left that remembers them fondly.

Ronald Findlay/Kevin H O'Rourke: Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (2007, Princeton University Press): 1000 years in 624 pages.

Charles Fishman: The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works -- and How It's Transforming the American Economy (paperback, 2006, Penguin Books): Likely a balanced account, likely critical enough. Other critiques include: Greg Spotts, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price; Al Nonnan, The Case Against Wal-Mart; John Dicker, The United States of Wal-Mart; Anthony Bianco, The Bully of Bentonville: How the High Cost of Wal-Mart's Everyday Low Prices Is Hurting America; Bill Quinn, How Walmart Is Destroying America (and the World): And What You Can Do About It.

Duncan K Foley: Adam's Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology (paperback, 2008, Belknap Press): Adam as in Smith, the starting point for a critical survey of keystone economists Robert Heilbroner covered in The Worldly Philosophers. Foley also wrote Understanding Capital: Marx's Economic Theory.

Robert Frank: Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (2007; paperback, 2008, Three Rivers Press): Wall Street Journal columnist, not economist Robert H Frank. A tour through the world of the ultrarich, long on how they differ and short on what it means.

Robert H Frank: The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas (paperback, 2008, Basic Books): Another scattered collection in the economics-as-oracle genre (cf. Freakonomics). Frank has several interesting credits: the recent Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class; an older business book I read when it first came out, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us, co-written with Philip J Cook.

James K Galbraith: Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire (paperback, 2006, Palgrave Macmillan): An essay collection, written as the damage piled up under Bush and Greenspan. One of his main focuses has been growing inequality. He also has a new book coming out in August, tackling one of the sacred cows of economists: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.

Norton Garfinkle: The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth: The Fight for a Productive Middle-Class Economy (paperback, 2007, Yale University Press): Why settle for middle class when you can have a slight chance of becoming rich? That's the question Americans have been gambling on the last few decades. Same years casino gambling has been spreading: good practice at losing.

Steven Greenhouse: The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (2008, Knopf): Mostly case studies -- NYT review claims they were largely selected from lawsuits, a quick way to identify corporate dirty tricks. Barbara Ehrenreich said "my blood boiled when I read [it]."

Ramachandra Guha: How Much Should a Person Consume?: Environmentalism in India and the United States (paperback, 2006, University of California Press): Interesting question for a point of comparison. Guha also wrote the recent 907 page India After Gandhi: The History of the Largest Democracy, and the briefer, earlier Environmentalism: A Global History.

Tim Harford: The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World (2008, Random House): Another study of the fuzzy edges to economic rationality. Harford previously wrote a book I've read: The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor -- and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car. He's most convincing about that car, not that he's right.

Alexandra Harney: The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage (2008, Penguin): Big subject, probably a lot of angles to it, with the low-price burden falling harshly on Chinese workers, and their competitiveness undermining workers here as well as elsewhere. One could even look at the waste side-effect of cheap goods, the psychological impact of consumerism, etc., but I'm not aware that Harney does so.

Michelle Kennedy: Without a Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America (paperback, 2006, Penguin Books): Memoir, one case study, fortunate enough to be able to write about it.

Tarun Khanna: Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures -- and Yours (2008, Harvard Business School Press): There are several books along this line, celebrating ubiquitous capitalism and taunting the west for slipping behind, not being pro-business enough. The reality is that China and India have a few entrepreneurs and a whole lot of cheap labor, and the latter are less likely to be suckered into dreams of becoming rich than Americans have been.

Maggie Mahar: Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much (2006, Collins): Well, that's my theory too, good for 480 pages here. Mahar is a financial journalist, author of Bull: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-2004.

Robert W McChesney: The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (paperback, 2008, Monthly Review Press): Author of many more books on political control of media -- e.g., Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media; The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century; Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times; Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy; with John Nichols, Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media d Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Also related: Eric Klinenberg: Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media.

Lawrence Mishel/Jared Bernstein/Sylvia Allegretto: The State of Working America, 2006/2007 (10th edition, paperback, 2006, ILR Press): From Economic Policy Institute, updated every other year since 1988. Basic data. Bernstein is an economist I have read.

Ray Moynihan/Alan Cassels: Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients (paperback, 2006, Nation Books): Focuses on drugs in search of patients, advertising to sell people on sicknesses they didn't realize they had. Like most overtreating treatises, the truth is hard to determine with so much money on the table.

Loretta Napoleoni: Rogue Economics: Capitalism's New Reality (2008, Seven Stories Press): Economist/journalist, previously wrote Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks, and seems to specialize in clandestine finance, money laundering, etc.

Katherine S Newman/Victor Tan Chen: The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (2007, Beacon Press): Drawn on interviews from 1995-2002, a short stretch in precarious times. Basically, what others call the working poor. Newman also wrote Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market.

Paul Ormerod: Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (2006, Pantheon): Economist, author of The Death of Economics and Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior. Seems like an subject of some interest, but got a lot of negative reviews at Amazon.

Robert Paarlberg: Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (2008, Harvard University Press): Actually, a book promoting GMO -- genetically modified organisms, especially plants, which are held to be the solution to Africa's food crises. I don't really buy that argument on several levels, but it presents an interesting problem.

Raj Patel: Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (paperback, 2008, Melville House): Looks like the place to start in investigating the global food crisis. Has an interesting blog and an activist stance -- claims to have been tear-gassed on four continents.

Melody Petersen: Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (2008, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Whether so many drugs are good for us or not (and which ones, when, and for whom) is less the issue than how the whole picture has been clouded by the singleminded pursuit of business. The effect is to poison the issue by making it turn on interest.

Paul Polak: Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (2008, Berrett-Koehler): Attacks top-down approaches as having failed; promotes small plot farming, which the author has considerable experience with.

Juliet B Schor: Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (paperback, 2005, Scribner): How marketing to children works, and what it has done to them. Schor has written a number of related books, including: The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need. And with Betsy Taylor, she looks beyond, editing Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-First Century.

Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (paperback, 2005, Harper Perennial): Psychology professor looks at the downside for consumers of having too many options (especially marginal ones). This notably runs against economic theory. I suspect this shows up a fundamental mismatch between humans and economic rationality.

Amartya Sen: The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity (paperback, 2006, Picador): Famous Indian economist, not coincidentally an interesting thinker on subjects political and philosophical. I've been meaning to read his book Development as Freedom, and am also curious about the recent Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny.

Richard Sennett: The Craftsman (2008, Yale University Press): Sociologist, has written many significant books, including The Hidden Injuries of Class back in the 1970s and The Culture of the New Capitalism most recently. This one looks at the skills and practice of craftsmanship, how such have evolved over history, and what is happening to them now.

David K Shipler: The Working Poor: Invisible in America (paperback, 2005, Vintage Books): Of a number of books in this income bracket, this seems to be the basic one.

George Soros: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means (2008, Public Affairs): Rich guy shows what he knows (or doesn't know) about the current financial markets mess. I've always suspected that when rich guys start writing books they've lost their touch and are cashing in on what little credibility they have left. But Soros is also known as a political shaker, so maybe he has a different angle.

Gabor Steingart: The War for Wealth: The True Story of Globalization, or Why the Flat World is Broken (2008, McGraw-Hill): I'm not sure what it would mean for the Europe and the US to form an "economic NATO" as a counterbalance or defense against emerging economic giants like China and India -- seems more likely than not that such geopolitical agenda have lost their place. Why should this be a war for wealth?

Nicholas Stern: The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (paperback, 2007, Cambridge University Press): Major attempt to model and quantify economic effects caused by climate change (e.g., global warming). Seems to be the closest thing we have to a standard reference.

James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (paperback, 2005, Anchor): Writes an occasionally interesting economics column for The New Yorker, where at least some of this came from.

Nassim Nichols Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007, Random House): Highly improbable and unpredictable events still occur and can have massive impact. Given their impact, we tend to falsely ascribe more logic to them than is warranted. Taleb calls these events black swans. Taleb started this line of investigation in his previous Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in Markets, which improbably attracted the attention of market speculators.

Louis Uchitelle: The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences (paperback, 2007, Vintage Books): Layoffs cut business costs, depress wages, push workers down the economic ladder. No surprises there. Just case histories. More all the time.

Vijay V Vaitheeswaran: Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet (paperback, 2004, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Optimistic survey of new trends in energy development, at least some of which look pretty dubious to me. Writes for The Economist.

Stuart Vyse: Going Broke: Why Americans Can't Hold On to Their Money (2008, Oxford University Press): Credit card debt, lotteries, casino gambling, all kinds of money traps that leave most Americans with no savings and mouting debt. Goes into why this happens, what to do about it.

Michael D Yates: Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist's Travelogue (paperback, 2007, Monthly Review Press): Retired economist as hobo, moving around America, picking up odd jobs, jotting down what he finds along the way. Yates has a fairly long list of books, including: Why Unions Matter; More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States; Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy; Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs: Employment and Unemployment in the United States.