Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling
Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton
The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
The Winner’s Curse by Richard Thaler
The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
The Hare and the Tortoise by John Kay
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff

The following is a non-exhaustive list of non-business books that I plan to read in 2007.

1) The future of life by Edward Wilson

2) Robosapiens by Menzel and D’Aluisio

3) Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

4) As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

5) The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson

6) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz

7) Ultimate Zero and One : Computing at the Quantum Frontier (Hardcover) by Colin P. Williams, Colin Williams, Scott H. Clearwater

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (Paperback) by Steven Johnson

9) On Intelligence (Paperback) by Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee

10) DNA: The Secret of Life (Paperback) by James D. Watson, Andrew Berry

11) Designing the Molecular World (Paperback) by Philip Ball

12) Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (Paperback) by Kevin Kelly

13) Biohazard by Ken Alibek

14) Breakfast at Buck’s by Macniven

15) The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

16) Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

17) Nature Via Nurture by Matt Ridley

18) Biocosm by James Gardner

19) The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl

20) The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

21) The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

22) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley

23) Nanofuture: What’s Next For Nanotechnology by J. Storrs Hall

24) The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins

25) The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications by David Deutsch

26) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M Mitchell Waldrop

27) Emergence from Chaos to Order by Holland

28) A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer by George Johnson

29) Redesigning Humans: Choosing our genes, changing our future (Paperback) by Gregory Stock

30) QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman

31) The New Humanists: Science at the Edge by John Brockman

I just finished an extraordinary book, ‘Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk’ by Peter Bernstein.

I had always believed that the story of civilization is a story of human’s conquest of risk, or atleast a reduction in the most banal forms of risk. Unlike cavemen, we don’t worry about being eaten by wild animals. The vagaries of the weather seldom have life-threatening implications for the general populace. Every human activity, in commerce and in every day life is oriented towards minimizing unknown risks and eliminating known risks.

Bernstein’s book serves to teach you the history of how we came to understand risk, measure it and then proceed to try to eliminate it. While we have reduced risk in many natural spheres, we have created more in the process. Humans have learnt to conquer the risks caused by nature (for the most part) but how about the conquest of risks caused by the actions of fellow human beings?

Volatility is a consequence of irrationality (pause to think about this statement).

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

– G.K. Chesterton

The Economist on the book “Why Should anyone be Led by You?”

“Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, two British academics, eschew the notion that effective bosses can be constructed piecemeal. Rather than suggesting that high-quality leaders can be constructed from what they dismiss as an “amalgam of traits”, they stress that there are “no universal leadership characteristics”. The talent that the pair thinks most vital is “authenticity”.

The authors go on to make some fairly obvious points that the truly authentic and self-aware could probably work out for themselves: be conscious of how well you read situations (and try to get better); conform (but not too much); get close to your underlings (but not too close); and communicate authentically too.”

I enjoyed reading the book ‘Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture became Consumer Culture’. The following is a summary from the last chapter in the book. I am inclined to believe that there is definitely a lot of truth in the authors’ thesis.

“...countercultural theorists routinely take concrete social problems and trace them back, in one way or another, to a gigantic “technocratic” apparatus of conformity and repression. For example, environmentalists take straightfowards problems like pollution and blame them on some deep structure of Western rationality (as opposed to an incompleteness of the system of propoerty rights) Antiglobalization activists take the homogenizing effects of trade and blame them on an emerging “Empire” of capital, while ignoring the fact that these same tendencies have been manifest in trade relations since beginning of history. Consumer activists look at the obnoxiously depressing spectacle of brand-consciousness in our society and blame it on a fundamental requirement of the mass production system, rather than simply on the exploitation of a preexisting competition for distinction among consumers.”

The authors cite lively examples to prove the above points. A very thorough debunking of activist progressive left.

“>Via Harvard Business School Working Knowledge : Extreme entrepreneurship.

... For this personal yet unsentimental travel story, freelance writer Michael Benanav donned a turban and journeyed on camelback into the Sahara for thirty-six days. His goal: to join a desert caravan and travel among tribal salt traders as they hauled huge slabs of precious “white gold” back to the towns and cities of Mali.