Bloomberg's Recommended Business Books, June 14, 2013 (Part 2)

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman (Norton). The Princeton economist makes his case for more government spending and less austerity. You can almost hear his teeth gnash as he takes on the “Austerians.” (Also available as a downloadable audiobook.)

Engines of Change by Paul Ingrassia (Simon & Schuster). Ingrassia, who shared a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for writing on management turmoil at General Motors Co., presents a quirky history of American culture as seen through 15 cars.

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller (Princeton). The influential Yale University economist argues that finance, for all its manifest failings of late, remains a force for good in society.

Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States by George Soros (PublicAffairs). This is a compilation of op-ed articles that the billionaire investor wrote as the euro crisis boiled up. As a retread, it displays Soros’s knack for assessing market linkages and psychology on the fly.

Getting It Wrong by William A. Barnett (MIT). Poor monetary data were a root cause of the financial crisis, argues Barnett, a University of Kansas economist and former Federal Reserve Board staff member.

Hedge Hogs by Barbara T. Dreyfuss (Random House). Brian Hunter’s out-of-control trading in the natural-gas market led to the collapse of Greenwich, Connecticut-based hedge fund Amaranth Advisors LLC. Dreyfuss does a great job of providing the historical context.

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely (Harper/HarperCollins). We like to think of ourselves as honest. Yet experiments show that we all cheat, says the behavioral economist. (Also available as a downloadable audiobook.)

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf  by John Coates (Fourth Estate/Penguin Press). During his 12 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Merrill Lynch & Co. and Deutsche Bank AG, Coates began to wonder whether testosterone and other hormones were impairing the judgment of traders -- and fueling bubbles and busts. So he retrained as a neuroscientist and conducted tests on trading floors. He synthesizes his findings in this highly speculative and absorbing book.

The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (Penguin Press). A rich history of Bell Labs, a hothouse of 20th-century innovation.

Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (Knopf). The Facebook executive offers advice to women, urging them not to pull back from career challenges years before having children. (Also available as a downloadable eBook and as a downloadable audiobook.)

Luck by Ed Smith (Bloomsbury). Serendipity molds everything from sports to politics and finance, argues the former cricketer.(Not held by Evanston Library, or any library in the consortium.)

A Nation of Deadbeats by Scott Reynolds Nelson (Knopf). The U.S. was founded by bankers who used their political connections to make lots of money. Sound familiar?

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). A persuasive look at why some U.S. cities have prospered in recent decades while others have declined.

Octopus by Guy Lawson (Crown). Hedge-fund manager Sam Israel, who faked suicide in 2008 to escape a prison sentence for running a $450 million Ponzi scheme, was himself the victim of a con artist.

Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and theDemise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made by Charles V. Bagli (Dutton). Buying Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village was an ill-advised deal for Tishman Speyer and BlackRock even before the financial crisis. Bagli recounts the horror story with clarity and authority.

Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland (Penguin Press). “Being self-made is central to the self-image of today’s global plutocrats” Freeland says. “It is how they justify their luxuries, status and influence.”

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (Heinemann/Random House). Dipping into neurological case studies, Duhigg explores how our brains form habits and how we can change them. Examples range from murderous sleepwalkers to Goldman Sachs.  (Also available as a downloadable eBook, as a downloadable audiobook, and on CD.)

The Price of Inequality by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Allen Lane/Norton). Economic growth and democracy suffer when the top 1 percent of Americans earns a fifth of the country’s income and controls more than a third of its wealth, the Nobel Prize-winning economist says.

Red Ink by David Wessel (Crown Business). The Wall Street Journal economics editor presents a slim primer on the people and politics driving the U.S. budget war. (Also available as a downloadable eBook.)

Wait by Frank Partnoy (Profile/PublicAffairs). From F-16 pilots to speed traders, the best performers are those who learn to delay their responses, argues Partnoy, a former Morgan Stanley (MS) banker. (Also available as a downloadable eBook, and as a downloadable audiobook.)

What Money Can't Buy by Michael Sandel (Allen Lane/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The Harvard University professor who wrote “Justice” explores the moral limits of markets in civil society, from baseball to death bonds.

White House Burning by Simon Johnson and James Kwak (Pantheon). A survey of how the U.S. government, ignoring Alexander Hamilton’s precepts, piled up more than $15 trillion in debt.

“Winner Take All by Dambisa Moyo (Allen Lane/Basic). China has embarked on a “commodity crusade,” making it the pre-eminent buyer of resources ranging from metals to food, says the former Goldman Sachs banker. The result may be “famine, conflict and worse” for everyone else in the decades to come.

“Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (Crown/Profile). Why do some nations prosper while others remain mired in poverty? The answer lies in politics, the two economists argue in this compelling and readable study.