Recommended reading

With Christmas holidays comes time to read. I just finished the book “Reinventing the Bazaar” by John McMillan, and I liked it a lot and felt like recommending it to everyone who happens to read this blog. It’s a refreshingly sober discussion of market mechanisms, showing where they work well as well as where they fail and what might be done in these cases. McMillan is also one of the few individuals who, while being very adept in their particular field, have no false pride about their profession that prevents them from admitting defeat – like his discussion of the failure of the shock introduction of free markets in the 90ies in Russia that was prescribed by western economists. “Reinventing the Bazaar” shines especially where he highlights the failures and shortcomings of market mechanisms, like his chapter on intellectual property titled “The embarrassment of a patent”, but all the time he tries to explain the reasoning behind the introduction and what the original intentions were. His insights, expressed in simple terms, are, in my humble opinion, required reading for anyone remotely interested in economics.