Why are you reading this?

I’m gradually working my way through a reading list from Ha-Joon Chang, reader in Economics at Cambridge, which was promoted by Heffers bookshop last summer. It’s an odd time to take up reading about economics as it is a discipline under some pressure at the moment. Behavioural economics has for a while been eating away at the rationalist principles underlying much of micro-economics. More recently the financial crash and subsequent recession continue to challenge macro-economics. I decided it was time to explore how thinkers in this field are responding to the challenges and remedy my own ignorance at the same time.


One of the books I have read from Chang’s list is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. No relation to the film about ballet, it is largely about can be predicted and, more importantly, what can’t be predicted and how we should respond to the randomness inherent in the world. Some things such as the financial crash are predictable but we are misled into thinking that all the accumulating evidence (of prosperity) points to things continuing as they are when in fact we are heading towards the invisible precipice. Other things such as the Harry Potter phenomenon, 9/11 and the consequences of the Arab Spring are simply unpredictable and we should accept that when we try to look ahead we will always miss the biggest, most important things.

Taleb rejects reading newspapers as a waste of time. Rather than accumulating facts and absorbing spurious, ill-founded “expert” predictions of an unpredictable future, he suggests we should spend our reading time deepening our thinking through serious writing, particularly philosophy. The book ends with his reflections on Seneca: Taleb re-learnt Latin to read Seneca in the original. Serious indeed.

This blog no doubt falls well short of such exhortations to seriousness even if I am avoiding spurious predictions. I will, however, predict that you would find The Black Swan compelling, challenging to how you see the world and very odd. So I thoroughly recommend it.

I’m off to present a paper to a conference in Turkey next week. I’ll pack a history of Istanbul, my current book from the economics reading list and a rubbishy novel but definitely no Latin primer.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.