I haven't been able to read a real book for a few months now, but I realized that I forgot to write anything about the last couple of books that I finished.

The first one was The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith. It was a well-researched and well-thought out essay about how people's notions of economics and productivity are still based on the ones from the 18th and 19th centuries when production was so very important. His argument is that we should no longer be obsessed with production and measuring it since we as humanity are capable of producing far more than we need. The two main points of his book were that we need to find a way to value public goods as much as private ones, and that by reforming our unemployment policy, we would be able to better manage employment in today’s society where many people have jobs but do no work of real value (in terms of producing products that we actually need). The book was written in the 1950's, but you can see how pretty much all of it still applies today. It gave me real pause for thought about why we measure the success of our society in terms of GDP, and how we might better put our resources to use.

The second book I read was called Pit Bull: Lessons from Wall Street's Champion Trader by Martin "Buzzy" Schwartz. It was basically an autobiography of Buzzy's life as a day-trader, and was mostly comprised of him bragging about all his accomplishments. It was neat to get a "view from the floor" at a number of different markets, but I think biggest lesson I learned is that I am probably not cut out for day-trading. In the end, the stress and the sheer amount of work involved nearly killed him (literally). I think that's something I can probably do without!