What Inspires Your Professors? Part I

In Spring 2020, we posted Faculty Reading Recommendations. The post proved so popular that we decided to revisit and expand the topic. This time we asked Harris professors what inspires them—books, blogs, podcasts, you name it!  The response was overwhelming, so we’ll release this in two parts. Enjoy part 1.

Fiona Burlig, Assistant Professor

• My favorite place for cogent analysis of energy and environmental topics on the internet is the weekly blog from the all-star team of economists at UC Berkeley's Energy Institute at Haas. 
• The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein. In the wake of the recent police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and too many other Black Americans, I've been reflecting on my own privilege and trying to educate myself about things I should have already learned about racism in the United States. Rothstein paints a compelling, super readable picture of the role of government policy in driving segregation.
• A mix of technical insights and highlights of new research, the World Bank's Development Impact blog is a staple in my rotation. I learn something new every time I read one of these posts.
• The Revolutions podcast is an ultra-longform podcast about large-scale political revolutions in history that's been a fun escape from reality. The current "season" is 39 episodes (and counting) on the Russian revolution. It's a fascinating deep-dive, and the host, Mike Duncan, has a great dry humor that I really appreciate.

• I'm a huge fan of Johnny Harris' YouTube channel. Johnny is a reporter at Vox who has branched out to make videos on his own. They're mostly explainer-type videos, full of interesting deep-dives, beautiful video and animation, and great maps. A recent highlight: "How Switzerland stayed neutral." Johnny's wife, Iz, also has a great channel of her own, with more vlog-style content, which I really enjoy as well. 

Steven Durlauf, Steans Professor in Educational Policy

History

•  One of the greatest and most important books ever written on American history is Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois. The discussion of the Civil War and reconstruction made visible long submerged truths about the agency of slaves in freeing themselves, and the evils done during Reconstruction to the newly freed. The discussion of the role of racism in allowing the resurrection of white hegemony echoes in current events. A true landmark.
• Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China by J. Y. Wong is a brilliant study of the Second Opium War between China and the UK. The idea of fighting a war to force a country to import opium seems incomprehensible from the vantage point of 2020. However, understanding the world in 2020 requires understanding how wrongs such as this could have happened.
• Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning studies the behavior of a German order battalion that committed numerous acts of genocide during World War II.  Unlike many others, its members were captured and interrogated, providing records to understand why seemingly ordinary people committed these crimes, and how a few refused orders.
• Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914 – 1921, Laura Engelstein. A superb, exceptionally well written history of the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and the emergence of the Soviet state.    

Mathematics

• Phase Transitions by Richard Sole gives a readable overview of a range of nonlinear processes which have applications to many issues in social science. Phase transitions refer to environments in which a small change in a parameter can lead to qualitative changes, such as the change from water to ice around 32 degrees Fahrenheit. These mathematical models speak to the importance of thinking about policy effects as they perturb the complex dynamics of a given socioeconomic context.

Philosophy

• Bottlenecks by Joseph Fishkin is an important contribution to the philosophical literature on equality of opportunity. Fishkin’s innovation to asking how to enhance equality of opportunity involves “opportunity pluralism” which argues that a just society needs to diminish bottlenecks that induce competition and hence limit how many can pursue the life courses they prefer.  
• In Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy and Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, John Rawls, the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century, provides a unique and profound perspective.

Wioletta Dziuda, Associate Professor

• In Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East, Lebanese-born Kim Ghattas provides a fascinating perspective on the turmoil that has plagued the Middle East and Southeast Asia for the last forty years. She questions the Western narrative that blames much of this chaos on the age-old theological conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, and instead attributes its origins to the events of 1979.  

Anthony Fowler, Associate Professor

• This is shameless self-promotion, but I would recommend Not Another Politics Podcast, hosted by Wiola Dziuda, Will Howell, and me. We discuss recent research in political science and relate it to our current political situation. Unlike many other political podcasts, we dig into the theory and evidence, and when we don't think a particular argument or piece of evidence is compelling, we say so.
• I would also recommend How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg. It's a fun, readable, accessible introduction to thinking clearly about data and quantitative evidence. Students will get more out of their statistics/econometrics classes if they've read this first.