An Incomplete Literature Review for my Blog

List Challenges, accessed 2/10/2018

In an effort to provide transparency for my work and my thought process, and to give credit where credit is due, I have decided to write this post on books that I found were formative and highly valuable to shaping my understanding of the world around us.  These texts are also the evidence I bring to the table to assert my syntheses on choice, cause and effect, and an actually better way forward for ourselves, our society, and our environment.  This list is by no means complete of the works that have influenced my world view.  That would be too long of a list, and would go off on many different tangents that would distract rather than inform the reader.  The theme here is evidence to justify my social, economic, and environmental stances.  This is intended to challenge the existing way of perceiving and working with the world by economists, social scientists in general, and public officials and policymakers.  The outcomes and consequences of these choices can be observed in our world.  I am asserting that my general path of government involvement in the economy on behalf of people and the environment, government accountability and feedback from members of society and data on the environment, society, and economy, and the need to include all people equitably and fairly in economic outcomes and political choices is superior to the current trends in the US of laissez-faire government action, government favoring a minority few at the expense of others, a lack of accountability and accurate feedback from the environment, society, and economy, and the exclusion of people from wealth and political influence.  The texts that are listed here are my ammunition to accomplish this goal.

• The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society by Eric Beinhocker.  This was one of the first books I read that started me thinking about how the economy works and can work beyond the Neoclassical paradigms.  Indeed, I read this heterodox account before I got my education in Neoclassical economics at the University of Kentucky's Martin School for Public Administration.  Indeed, after seeing how entrenched existing economic dogma is in academia among some professors, this book convinced me to set out on a different path with my intellectual growth, and to remain skeptical of institutionalizing or centralizing prestige in ideas and people that may just be plain wrong in their behavior and lines of reasoning. 
• American Amnesia, How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.  This extraordinarily timely text looks back at American history and answers questions (with evidence) on what made America prosper as a country, particularly after World War II and up until the 1970's.  The conclusion they reached was that it was effective government involvement in the economy, and the subsuming of private business interests and profits for commonly shared wealth and environmental well-being
• Success in Agricultural Transformation: What It Means and What Makes It Happen by Isabel Tsakok.  This book looks at evidence at the global level for what enables some societies to advance into industrial, developed nations, and what holds them back.  Tsakok finds evidence that it was not laissez-faire, economic specialization with existing agrarian industries, but pro-active government investment and oversight of the economies of currently wealthy nations that led to the evolution of some societies from agrarian-rural economies to industrialized-urban economies.  This book provides evidence that public institutions play a larger role than current Neoclassical economics would have us suppose.
• Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.  More evidence from human history that public institutions designed to distribute and not extract wealth is a healthier form of social function than alternatives.
• Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth.  A great alternative to existing metrics of economic, social, and environmental well-being, Raworth challenges us to rethink our metrics and incentives in order to produce more generally desirable and healthier outcomes in our human societies.
• The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. These two epidemiologists (who study the causes of disease in public health setting) conclude after much interrogation of quality data that inequality is a greater problem to all in human society than just absolute poverty.  They look at health data, and economic and social indicators from all countries, and US states to back up their conclusions.
• Concrete Economics by Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford Belong.  Like American Amnesia, this book looks at the history of the US to show how government has and can shape the rules of the economy to produce more desirable and sustainable outcomes within a human society.  Their evidence comes from the history of the US directly to show it was Hamilton's proactive approach, and not Jefferson's laissez-faire policies, that led to America becoming the wealthiest nation in the world.
• The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato.  Mazzucato shows how nearly all technologies of the 21st century originated in government funded labs or projects at private labs.  Her crowning example is showing that the iPhone, often touted as a triumph of entrepreneurial and technological genius of the market economy, is actually the product of anonymous government engineers and scientists, working government funded labs on government projects.  Steve Jobs may have assembled a lot of government tech to make the iPhone, such as cellular telephone technology, touchscreens, Siri, and the Internet.  But all of those composite pieces of the phone started and matured in government labs; the entrepreneurs merely making a new commercialized product from the efforts and funding of public sources.  Her most radical assertion is that governments can (and should) direct the economy through research prioritization that the private sector wouldn't touch, in order to produce a more sustainable and healthy world for humans.
• Teeming: How Superorganisms Work to Produce Infinite Wealth in a Finite World by Tamsin Woolley-Barker.  Though this book is intended for business owners, it does point to several key concepts that can be applied in the broader human society, as well as in company operations.  Her evidence comes from other superorganisms, organisms who have stretched beyond individuals (such as ants, bees, naked mole rats, etc) are able to survive, adapt, and produce wealth for all.
• The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman. This book I am currently reading (as of 2/10/2018) is extremely useful for creating a construct of reality through understanding reality's epistemological structures.  It may be one out of many perspectives, but I hypothesize that this structuralist approach to understanding how we construct reality is useful for understanding our socially created world, and discovering ways we can alter or change our world for the better.

Again, this list is mostly thematic and applicable for the work that I am currently attempting to do.  This list is incomplete, but illustrates how I came to the syntheses that I'm coming to.  I may do more of these posts as I continue to read and develop my understanding of the world through experience and experimentation.  Until that time, please feel free to explore and challenge these assertions.