The Occupy Handbook.
Janet Byrne, editor.
New York: Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company / Hachette Book Group, 2012.
Book information: Publisher; Google Books 1; Google Books 2; Amazon.com.
The Occupy Handbook is a collection of short essays on economics and policy. Most of the authors have written books on these topics so The Occupy Handbook can serve as a guide to further inquiry in this area. Perhaps inevitable in a large collection like this, one will find some variation in quality. The book contains two or three more contributions from journalists (instead of economists or other scholars) than I would prefer (but this book is intended for non-specialist general readers) and the "Solutions" section contains a few proposals I think could be described charitably as weak and unrealistic. Those lower quality contributions make up perhaps 10% to 20% of the book, so on balance I think the majority of the contributions makes this book worth reading. The speakers in the videos below provide a preview of the higher quality essays.
Videos from book launch events, April 2012:
The Occupy Handbook: Speakers
Watch it on YouTube.
The speakers are: Carmen M. Reinhart; Robin Wells; James A. Robinson; John Cassidy.
The Occupy Handbook: Q and A
Watch it on YouTube.
Economics and Occupy Wall Street: Solutions from The Occupy Handbook
Watch it on YouTube.
The panel includes: John Cassidy; Robert Solow; Martin Wolf; Bethany McLean; David Cay Johnston; Jeff Madrick; Raghuram Rajan; Jeffrey Sachs.