Books like Epistemological Problems of Economics. Ludwig Von Mises — picked by fans

This is one of the first books in English on what we now call the Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s.

It’s now estimated that about 3.3 million people died in this famine, which Stalin imposed via a policy of “collectivization.” Under this policy, Ukrainian peasants had to turn over their entire harvests to the state, leaving nothing for themselves to eat: some even turned to cannibalism. Things were so bad that the government put up posters saying, “eating people is wrong.” 

When Conquest published this book in 1986, many people denounced him as a right-wing anti-communist, but since then many other scholars have proved him right. This was one of the first books I read when I started teaching courses on comparative genocide studies in the 1980s. 

This was the first real effort to bring together a picture of the whole story of the global Communist movement and the many famines it created. It covers the whole-scale of the misery in regimes in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, Russia, India, China, and southeast Asia. It’s a lot of ground to cover but the narrative does not flag. Although the opening of the archives had produced more information, this is still a very impressive book however sobering it might be.

I once saw the 10th Panchen Lama give a very rare press conference in Beijing. This remarkable Tibetan endured years of imprisonment for writing a report describing mass arrests, political executions, and man-made starvation in Tibet in the early 1960s. The report makes it clear that the famine and the eradication of religion was a deliberate policy. It was quite likely that more than any other group the Tibetans suffered more than any other group in China. Although he was at times criticised as a collaborator, compared to the Dalai Lama, who escaped to India, the report reveals that there was no escape from this genocide for any Tibetan.

Yang Jisheng is a Chinese journalist who worked for the state news agency, Xinhua reporter, but diligently spent many years researching the archives to pull together a detailed story of the Great Leap Forward famine, on a province-by-province basis. It is extremely rare for anyone in China who works for the state to paint such an unflinching look at the Chinese Communist Party’s actions. It gives the account unassailable credibility. However, Yang struggles to place the story in the context of the full global history of communism, and attributes the folly to China’s culture and Mao’s shortcomings.

So, what, exactly is this ‘world’ or ‘global history’? Authors slap the two words on their books, universities offer new courses in it, and government officials across the planet now speak of ‘global this’ and ‘global that’. One could be forgiven for throwing up one’s hands in exasperation for failing to understand what exactly these two words mean. That is until Sebastian Conrad published this gem of a book aptly entitled: What is Global History? Yes, it’s a bit academic, but it’s also clearly written, logically organized, and succeeds brilliantly in explaining what global history is and is not without losing the reader in theoretical jargon. If you want to try something beyond the ‘nation’ and ‘empire’, Conrad’s global history is a great place to start.

Written over a century ago, this is a book for the ages.

I read this book early in my career, and it provided a basis for understanding money that helped form my current economic theories. Mises reveals how money originated in the market and how its value is based on its efficacy as a commodity in exchange.

Mises concisely lays out the case for sound money with no inflation and introduces the beginnings of a full-scale business cycle theory. 

Though this book focuses on psychology, it has lessons for all social sciences.

Chambers, like me, is critical of certain practices and yet deeply respectful of what has been accomplished. He devotes much of his attention to the problem of confirmation bias. We as humans are more likely to accept results that conform to prior beliefs.

Journals are also more likely to publish such results. Scholars play with their findings, adding or removing data points to achieve a target level of statistical significance. The result is that we are often more confident in scholarly consensus than we should be. Chambers explains complex ideas clearly, and is passionate about the need for reform.

If you’ve never thought of “intersectional feminism” or “the gender binary” as essentially data-scientific terms, please allow this book to correct that. Data science is a locus of power, and that power can be wielded in the service of oppression or liberation. This book raises essential questions about the predominantly white, male, technocratic interests served by the traditional narratives of data analysis and what feminism and data science have to offer each other. Bottom line: the data doesn’t speak for itself, never has, and never will.

How can the humanities offer a space for moral reflection if they are heirs of a tradition that has often been discriminatory, oppressive, and blatantly Eurocentric? Archaeology of Babel offers a much-needed corrective to books like Celenza’s by drawing attention to colonial abuses of philological scholarship (with grammars, dictionaries, and translations serving as instruments of colonial rule). The book’s subtitle is, of course, exaggerated: the humanities are better conceived of as a multi-layered heritage than as an edifice built on a single foundation. But the exaggeration serves a purpose: Ahmed invites us to “see ourselves as inheritors of a colonial legacy.” Apparently, the humanist tradition to which we are heirs is a mixed bag. Continuing it requires careful stock-taking: what do we want to take with us into the future?

I was fascinated by Foster’s detective work in literary history–searching for the actual authors of poems, political novels, and proclamations, the authors of which had always been considered “anonymous.” Using a variety of ingenious methods, Foster tracks down the persons behind mysterious documents ranging from the Unabomber’s threats to “The Night Before Christmas.”

I loved Foster’s wry and sometimes caustic sense of humor, especially when he is skewering the “experts” whom he proves to be wrong. This book is, quite simply, great fun for the intellectually curious.