Like many folks in Washington, I've been making my way through Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
. The authors are both eminent economists -- George Akerlof won the Nobel in 2001 and Robert Shiller has been the among the best and most prescient analysts of bubbles -- and word is that their book has gained a number of adherents inside the administration. But that's not the fault of Akerlof and Shiller's publisher. It is perhaps not surprising that a book about the economics of irrationality is somewhat irrationally presented. But it's still puzzling. Take the blurbs on the back cover. The first comes from Robert Solow. That's all for the good. Getting a Nobel laureate on your book jacket does wonders for credibility. The second, however, comes from Dennis Snower, an economist at the University of Kiel, in Germany. The third comes from Diane Coyle, author of The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters, which is currently #621,324 in the Amazon rankings. And the last comes from George Perry, an economist at the Brookings Institution.You could imagine a page of blurbs meant to establish the credibility of the authors. Or you could imagine blurbs meant to supercharge sales ("this book was like opening a window at the top of a tall mountain that's already broken through the glass ceiling. It's nothing but net." -- Thomas Friedman). But this particular collection seems designed to do neither. Similarly puzzling is the writing: It's rough. That's to be expected. Shiller and Akerlof are economists of of immense repute. Their core competency is not crafting elegant prose. But Freakonomics -- which paired an economist with a writer -- demonstrated the existence of a pretty significant market for accessibly written texts on economics. This book, however, will deter all but the most committed reader. The question, again, is why Akerlof and Shiller didn't pair their comparative advantage in economics with someone else's comparative advantage in writing good books. Seems like it would have been an economist-like thing to do. Specialization is well understood in the discipline! But aside from the wildly successful pairing of Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner -- you've not seen the model replicated. 
