Writers Read: Bryan Caplan

Friday, June 10, 2011

Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and blogger at EconLog, one of the Wall Street Journal's Top 25 Economics Blogs. He lives in Oakton, Virginia, with his wife and their three children.

His latest book is Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.

Last month I asked Caplan what he was reading. His reply:

Tim Harford’s Adapt: Why Success Always Starts from Failure. Another great popular social science book from the Undercover Economist.

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, and Meera Balarajan. The book’s full of fun facts about migration and covers the academic literature well. I share its pro-immigration conclusion, but I wish the authors tried harder to convinced skeptical readers.

Melvin Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind. The best book on evolution I’ve read since Graham Bell’s Selection: The Mechanism of Evolution. It’s amazingly well-written given the density of the evidence it presents.

Maus (volumes 1 and 2) by Art Spiegelman. I read these graphic novels about the Holocaust years ago, but now I’m sharing them with my eight-year-old sons every night at bedtime. The story is tragic, but transcendently wonderful. Reading it should be a rite of passage in every family.

The Walking Dead (volumes 1-13) by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore. After watching the AMC television series based on these graphic novels, I raced to read the whole series. At first glance, it’s just another zombie story. But if you give the books a chance, you’ll soon discover a rich, almost Tolstoyan epic about human nature – and how much we all owe to civilization.