Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation -- Don Ross

I finally finished this book. This was by far the most technical philosophy book I have ever read. I spent half my time looking words up that were not even in the dictionary, words that I had to use Wikipedia to understand. The read was definitely arduous, however there was a good deal of substance to this book. I have been looking for someone to lay out philosophical issues related to economics and the interface between economics and cognitive science. This book performs this task quite well. Furthermore, the author puts forth his own hypothesis for what is happening inside our brain and mind. My take on his point of view is that human brains are composed of groups of neurons; these groups can be modeled as straightforward economic agents. These modules of neurons play coordination games in order to arrive at a specific utility structure to implement at a given time for the human as a whole. Over time however, as these games play out, the human as a whole can not be represented as your average rational agent, in the pure economic sense of this term. Moreover, we use public language and external pressures to scaffold our knowledge to overcome the computational challenges that such a paradigm presents.

I personally find this hypothesis appealing and ultimately close to the truth. I would only recommend this book to a trained philosopher or someone who is willing to look up words in every other sentence. The author does not define words, he rather attempts to give them meaning through context, but this does not work well. The economics is actually rather light, meaning the formal structure is not necessarily there. I liked this book for its overall theme and the way it reviews many other areas of thought pertaining to this subject.

Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics -- Paul W. Glimcher

A fascinating book about the relatively new science known as neuroeconomics. The main thesis of the book is "that the fundamental limitation which neurobiology faces today is a failure to adequately incorporate probability theory into the approaches we use to understand the brain." The book basically begins with a ground up explanation of the history of neuroscience and mathematics (extremely abridged). The examples throughout the book make the ideas from the past and the hypothesis proposed by the author quite easy to understand. The book even includes some interesting pictures that illustrate certain experimental situations.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the brain, decision making, history of science or who just wants to expand their knowledge of how the world works. It is written at a level accessible to almost anyone, but is very illuminating to one with a bit of formal training.

Freakonomics -- Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

The picture is of the revised edition, I read the original edition of this book. After everyone telling me I should read this book and thus making me want to read it less, I was sitting around the house and it happened to be on my parents' bookshelf. So, I decided I would pick it up read it because it didn't look to long and the print was pretty big once I actually opened it. It took less than a day to read and was actually pretty entertaining. However, there are no deep truths in here or really anything too surprising. The central theme of the book seems to be that correlations exist all over in the world, but we must be careful not to confuse correlation and causation. To a scientist/mathematician/economist (I suppose that is what I am), this is an obvious point. But, people who have read this book still make that mistake because they just remember something about abortion, sumo wrestlers, teachers cheating, etc. They do not remember the fine details and hence commit the sin the book seems to be trying to prevent and start to say that X causes Y because they happen to be loosely correlated. I enjoyed the book as something quick and light. I would in fact recommended this book to those who did not study anything difficult in school, i.e. business majors, psychology majors, etc. To someone who knows a lot about the theory of regressions this book is just a nice little compiliation of interesting tidbits, but useless because most people I run into have either read the book or have been told all the little tidbits already.