Tuesday, April 14, 2009

What is Joshua Gans reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Joshua Gans, an economics professor at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, and the author of Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting.

He received the inaugural young economist award from the Economic Society of Australia, an award given to the best economist working in Australia aged under 40. He is the author of countless academic papers, reports and books. Gans contributes daily to two blogs (Core Economics and Game Theorist).

One book in his entry:
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky is a professor at NYU and writes about the impact of the internet on society and the economy. I picked up this book because of a current interest that I have in what is to become of the newspapers. Clay Shirky's simple answer is that we are in one of those times where there is transformational change and that it may take a decade or more for the shackles of the past to be dropped and some new stability to emerge. In the meantime, that change will be tough on many people. As an example, Shirky points to the the profession of scribe as the printing press diffused. Even when it was inevitable that the whole profession would die, for years there were movements to protect scribes as the supposed learned part of society. The great thing about this book is that it uses many current examples and anecdotes to help us come to terms with what the Internet is doing; something that is mostly for the good. [read on]
See the Table of Contents and sample chapters from Parentonomics, and visit the Parentonomics website.

Learn more about Joshua Gans' work and research at his website.

Writers Read: Joshua Gans.

--Marshal Zeringue