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Tyler Cowen's Top Book Recommendations

Founder/Marginal Revolution University

Want to know what books Tyler Cowen recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Tyler Cowen's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology. and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague."Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of... more
Recommended by Tyler Cowen, and 1 others.

Tyler CowenThis is a book of ideas. It’s not a book about the internet. It was written much earlier, in the 20th century, and written in Portuguese. It’s really a book of meditations. It’s very philosophical. It applies to the internet in that the main point is how much joy you can take in small things and small changes and the true drama of life can be extraordinarily minute in scale, and this, I think,... (Source)

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2

Wikinomics

How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

In just the last few years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center—has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

A brilliant...

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Recommended by Tyler Cowen, Alan Rusbridger, and 2 others.

Tyler CowenIt basically says wikis work and wikis are important and wikis are the way of the future. (Source)

Alan Rusbridger Read 4 Too Big To Know by David Weinberger Read (Source)

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3

Everything Is Miscellaneous

Perfectly placed to tell us what's really new about [the] second-generation Web.--Los Angeles Times

Business visionary and bestselling author David Weinberger charts how as business, politics, science, and media move online, the rules of the physical world--in which everything has a place--are upended. In the digital world, everything has its places, with transformative effects:

- Information is now a social asset and should be made public, for anyone to link, organize, and make more valuable.

- There's no such thing as too much information. More...
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Recommended by Tyler Cowen, and 1 others.

Tyler CowenDavid’s book is brilliant, but I think it raises an important question. We’re doing five books and not five blog posts or five user threads or whatever, so why is a book the most important organising medium for talking about or reading about the internet? Weinberger is a guy who gets this – that the internet is a way of ordering or not ordering reality, that you stack things in a pile, that it... (Source)

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4
In this collection of writings, Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek discusses topics from moral philosophy and the methods of the social sciences to economic theory as different aspects of the same central issue: free markets versus socialist planned economies. First published in the 1930s and 40s, these essays continue to illuminate the problems faced by developing and formerly socialist countries.

F. A. Hayek, recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, taught at the University of Chicago, the University of London, and the...
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Recommended by Tyler Cowen, Peter Boettke, and 2 others.

Tyler CowenHayek puts forward a general theory of how decentralised processes work, why they are so powerful and can use and mobilise and distribute information so well. (Source)

Peter BoettkeHe argues that the price system systematically communicates dispersed information that you and I hold. (Source)

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5
This lyrical, evocative, thought-provoking journal of a man's quest for truth - and for himself - has touched and changed an entire generation, and is ready to reach out to a new one. At its heart, the story is all too simple: a man and his son take a motorcycle trip across America. But this is not a simple trip at all, for around every corner, through mountain and desert, wind and rain, and searing heat and biting cold, their pilgrimage leads them to new vistas of self-discovery and renewal.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an elemental work that has helped to...
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Brad FeldI think every entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur should read the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was written in the 1970s by a guy named Robert Pirsig. It was his first book, it's kind of a hippie philosophy treatised journey. The word that sort of came out of it was Chautauqua, he's like having a conversation with his son as they do a motorcycle trip across the country, and... (Source)

Drew Houston[There are] engineers who [dismiss] all these things that can’t be fit into an algorithm, or that don’t have some kind of mathematical rigor underpinning them, [this book] is about that question. (Source)

Tyler CowenHonorable mentions: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Joy of Sex, all given to me by my mother. I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking. (Source)

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6

The Glass Bead Game

The final novel of Hermann Hesse, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, 'The Glass Bead Game' is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.

Set in the 23rd century, 'The Glass Bead Game' is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since his childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music,...
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Tyler CowenThis is about the beauty of organised structures and how we play them in game-like fashion and how much they entrance us. (Source)

Marcus du SautoyThere’s the ideas of mathematics, of philosophy, of music all brought together in this game, the glass bead game. (Source)

Igor DebaturQuestion: What five books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path & why? Answer: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche The Castle by Franz Kafka 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Source)

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7

Guadalcanal Diary

This celebrated classic gives a soldier's-eye-view of the Guadalcanal battles--crucial to World War II, the war that continues to fascinate us all, and to military history in general. Unlike some of those on Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942, Richard Tregaskis volunteered to be there. An on-location news correspondent (at the time, one of only two on Guadalcanal), he lived alongside the soldiers: sleeping on the ground--only to be awoken by air raids--eating the sometimes meager rations, and braving some of the most dangerous battlefields of World War II. He more than once narrowly escaped the... more
Recommended by Tyler Cowen, and 1 others.

Tyler CowenI also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary. From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwork, and success. (Source)

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8

Think Like A Grandmaster

A classic, now available in modern algebraic notation for the first time! Few books have had as much impact on chess literature as this: the first edition sold out within months, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of chess instruction. Twenty years later, it remains a bestseller in the field and one of the best practical training manuals available.
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Recommended by Tyler Cowen, and 1 others.

Tyler CowenFrom this book I realized you could think you understood a chess position, but then later learn you didn’t really understand it at all. A huge lesson, one I learned again and to a higher degree when high-quality chess computers came along. Most of the commentariat on economic and social affairs could use a reminder on this one. This book also taught me that you learn by doing — trying to solve... (Source)

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9

Instant Replay

The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer

This classic sports book takes readers inside the 1967 season of the Green Bay Packers, following that storied team from training camp to their dramatic victory in Super Bowl II.
 
Candid and often amusing, Jerry Kramer describes from a player’s perspective a bygone era of sports, filled with blood, grit, and tears. No game better exemplifies this period than the classic “Ice Bowl” conference championship game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, which Kramer, who made the crucial block in the climactic play, describes in thrilling detail. We also get a rare and insightful...
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Recommended by Tyler Cowen, and 1 others.

Tyler CowenI also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary. From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwork, and success. (Source)

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10

The Joy of Sex

An international bestseller since it was first published in 1972, this updated edition brings this imaginative, uninhibited guide to lovemaking and sex to a whole new generation. It has been revised in such a way to retain Dr Comfort's original, revelatory advice while making it appropriate for the 21st century. less

Tyler CowenHonorable mentions: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Joy of Sex, all given to me by my mother. I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking. (Source)

Kate FigesIt seems so innocent really now, all those daring explanations of S and M and positions, but it was before Aids and people were so optimistic. It was as though we’d discovered sex and free love. (Source)

Susan QuilliamThis was a seminal book. It not only reflected but created the sexual revolution. Even now, people who haven’t read it know what it’s about. (Source)

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Don't have time to read Tyler Cowen's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

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11

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

This is a story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules...people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves...people who know there's more to this living than meets the eye: they’ll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than ever they dreamed.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is no ordinary bird. He believes it is every gull's right to fly, to reach the ultimate freedom of challenge and discovery, finding his greatest reward in teaching younger gulls the joy of flight and the power of dreams. The special 20th...
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Peter AttiaI’d encourage [young people] to read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. (Source)

Tyler CowenHonorable mentions: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Joy of Sex, all given to me by my mother. I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking. (Source)

Wim Hof[Wim Hof said this is one of his most-recommended books.] (Source)

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12

The Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics

The Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics is a revolutionary system for calculating and teaching basic math. Children, who had repeatedly failed in arithmetic until their parents sent them to learn this method, were able to perform amazing calculations within seconds. In one demonstration, a ten year old kid when asked to multiply 5132437201 times 452736502785 simply wrote on the blackboard the answer, 2323641669144374104785 in seventy seconds. He never set up the basic and familiar line by line chart, multiplying and adding each row of numbers. Instead, he just wrote down the answer... more
Recommended by Tyler Cowen, and 1 others.

Tyler CowenFrom this I learned how powerful the individual human mind could be, and also how much school wasn’t teaching me. It began to occur to me that the mainstream doesn’t necessarily have the best or only methods. That said, non-mainstream approaches still have the responsibility of coming up with the right answer. Query: does it these days ever make sense to actually use this stuff? (Source)

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13
The magnificent, unrivaled history of codes and ciphers—how they're made, how they're broken, and the many and fascinating roles they've played since the dawn of civilization in war, business, diplomacy, and espionage—updated with a new chapter on computer cryptography and the Ultra secret.

Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars...
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Recommended by Tyler Cowen, and 1 others.

Tyler CowenI read this one quite young, and learned that problems are to be solved! I also developed some sense of what a history could look like and what a history should report. I recall my uncle thinking it deeply strange that a boy my age should be reading a book of such length. (Source)

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14

Basic Chess Endings

Basic Chess Endings, written by International Grandmaster Reuben Fine, is the most authoritative reference on the endgame. Serious students of the game find the work unmatched in its depth and range. Now, Grandmaster Pal Benko has revised this classic with the latest innovations in the endgame and adapted the book to algebraic notation. The result is what chess aficionados have been eagerly waiting for--a thoroughly modern bible on basic chess endings.

A handy guide for the practical player, Basic Chess Endings focuses on the aspects of the ending that occur most...
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Recommended by Tyler Cowen, and 1 others.

Tyler CowenI wasn’t influenced so much by this book itself as by a long series of articles in Chess Life and Review, showing the analysis was full of holes. See my remarks on Kotov. (Source)

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15

My 60 Memorable Games

Tyler CowenReflects a certain kind of classicism in thinking and method. Later, it was revealed much of the analysis was faulty and in part was from Larry Evans and not Fischer himself. (Source)

Adam RobinsonI played over these games every night, these 60 games. (Source)

Adam RobinsonI played over these games every night, these 60 games. (Source)

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16

Deep Thinking

Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

Garry Kasparov's 1997 chess match against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue was a watershed moment in the history of technology. It was the dawn of a new era in artificial intelligence: a machine capable of beating the reigning human champion at this most cerebral game.
That moment was more than a century in the making, and in this breakthrough book, Kasparov reveals his astonishing side of the story for the first time. He describes how it felt to strategize against an implacable, untiring opponent with the whole world watching, and recounts the history of machine intelligence...
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Walter IsaacsonThe great Garry Kasparov takes on the key economic issue of our time: how we can thrive as humans in a world of thinking machines. This important and optimistic book explains what we as humans are uniquely qualified to do. Instead or wringing our hands about robots, we should all read this book and embrace the future. (Source)

Charles DuhiggGarry Kasparov's perspectives on artificial intelligence are borne of personal experience - and despite that, are optimistic, wise and compelling. It's one thing for the giants of Silicon Valley to tell us our future is bright; it is another thing to hear it from the man who squared off with the world's most powerful computer, with the whole world watching, and his very identity at stake. (Source)

Max LevchinA highly human exploration of artificial intelligence, its exciting possibilities and inherent limits. (Source)

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17

The Making of Star Trek

"A complete history of the original Star Trek™. Filled with quotations from cast members, memos to and from Gene Roddenberry, biographies of cast members, sketches, photographs, set descriptions, and even budgets and cast schedules, this volume is a fascinating, invaluable behind-the-scenes account of the development and production of the original Star Trek™ series."
- source unknown

"The book on how to write for TV! The complete story on how the U.S.S. Enterprise was designed, the original concept behind the show, backgrounds of the characters—the whole authentic...
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Recommended by Tyler Cowen, Michael Okuda, and 2 others.

Tyler CowenThe Making of Star Trek helped me master the details of what was then my favorite TV series, and also to think about cosmopolitanism across different kinds of intelligent beings. In addition to chess I also was influenced by playing paper and dice war games, most of all Barbossa (the exact title may differ slightly), a really scary game where you have to consider the possibility the Nazis could... (Source)

Michael Okuda@daytonward That book changed my life. Endlessly fascinating, The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield (Poe) showed me that working in television and film production was something to which one could aspire, and it led me (and Denise) on the road to working at Paramount Pictures. (Source)

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18
A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India's new billionaire class in a radically unequal society

India is the world's largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China's. But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country's top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India's new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of yesterday, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles...
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Tyler CowenWho are the Indian nouveau riche and what do they want? James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj will prove the defining work on these questions. It is a must-read for anyone interested in wealth, inequality, India, or the evolution of capitalism. (Source)

Nicolas ColinThe Billionaire Raj is a book by Singapore-based Financial Times alumnus James Crabtree. It depicts the radical change that India is currently going through, with the rise of extreme inequalities and the capture of the political system by wealthy families. What’s striking in James’s riveting painting of modern India is the optimism with which he describes the current state of things: not... (Source)

Rafat AliStarted reading @jamescrabtree’s Gilded Age book & enjoying it, less optimistic than him on U.S. vs China vs India future. I fully believe future of how the world lives is being created in SE Asia. The future will be best tested in South East Asia, even if it isn’t created there. https://t.co/OjfivYfxcN (Source)

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19
A Financial Times Book of the Month pick for April!

Is it worth swimming in shark-infested waters to surf a 50-foot, career-record wave?

Is it riskier to make an action movie or a horror movie?

Should sex workers forfeit 50 percent of their income for added security or take a chance and keep the extra money?

Most people wouldn't expect an economist to have an answer to these questions—or to other questions of daily life, such as who to date or how early to leave for the airport. But those people...
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Tyler CowenAllison Schrager’s An Economist Walks Into a Brothel is the best, most readable, most informative, most adventurous, and most entertaining take on risk you will find. (Source)

Adam GrantIf you want to understand risk better, you have to go into some unconventional settings. In the tradition of Freakonomics, that’s what Allison Schrager does as an economist, and her book is not just informative—it’s an entertaining read too (Source)

Nick GillespieThe world may be in flames, but are *you* taking enough risk? Great @TEDTalks from economist @AllisonSchrager, whose An Economist Walks into a Brothel, is a book-length treatment of the topic. https://t.co/SDdHAABPO4 (Source)

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20
A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill
A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to...
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Recommended by Jack Ma, Seth Godin, Tyler Cowen, and 9 others.

Tyler CowenIf you had to pick one individual who was the sharpest and most prescient commentator on the web and the internet it would be Clay. (Source)

Lev GrossmanShirky is simply the best person at articulating what’s very weird and new about what’s going on. (Source)

Alan Rusbridger Read 2 We the Media by Dan Gillmor Read (Source)

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Don't have time to read Tyler Cowen's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.