Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely

Predictably Irrational is a selection of short essays on the ways in which people are influenced by context and cognitive shortcuts (heuristics) to repeatedly make suboptimal choices. This field of economics, called behavioral economics, appears to be just catching up to what cognitive psychologists have been studying for decades. It was nonetheless an interesting book written in an engaging, chatty tone, and cited various studies by Ariely which provide new examples of these "predictably irrational" behaviors from an economic standpoint.

David Harvey - The Enigma of Capital

David Harvey, who is, along with Fredric Jameson, one of my favorite academics, here presents his analysis of the recent financial crisis and offers a theory that attempts to explain the crisis-prone nature of capitalism in terms of the inner contradictions of the system.  At the center of his argument is the "surplus absorption problem," in which the surplus generated by capital today must be reinvested into new lines of production in order to maintain an increasingly unrealistic 3 percent annual compound growth.

While the argument is complex enough that I don't want to try and represent it here, the book is surprisingly accessible and the ideas in it are presented relatively simply.  Some familiarity with the vocabulary of academic Marxism is helpful to understand Harvey's argument, but it is much easier going than Jameson, for example.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the present financial crisis and why we desperately need to be shrinking our economy, not growing it.