Reading provides readers with different utilities. First, it is pleasurable, so it is consumption. Second, it makes you more informed, more intelligent, and more effective, so it is investment. Finally, it makes you predictable, which lowers the costs for other people of dealing with you. I thought of this after reading a beautiful interview with Lawrence Summers, "president emeritus of Harvard University, adviser to presidents, former chief economist of the World Bank and treasury secretary of the United States".
BOOKS: Which of your high-pressure jobs left the most time for reading?
SUMMERS: I thought it was important to read in all of them. At the World Bank I read a set of ethnographies on village life in the developing world. When I was with President Obama I read a lot about the history of financial crises, the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s response to it. That had a significant influence on the advice I gave the president.
BOOKS: Who influenced you as a reader?
SUMMERS: My mother used to take us to the public library every week or two and that set the habit. Whenever I get separated from my family in an airport they look for the bookstore because they figure that’s where I am.
BOOKS: Who do you talk books with?
SUMMERS: I try sometimes with my wife, but she’s an English professor so she talks books in a more sophisticated way than I do. Sometimes we are able to find some convergence on something historical. I joke with her that the fiction she likes doesn’t have enough verbs in it. She finds the fiction I like to be a tad primitive, meat-eating and number crunching.
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