Reading List (for the umpteenth time....)

[Tim May]

At 1:46 AM -0700 4/15/01, Ryan Sorensen wrote:
>  > Read the hundreds of articles on these matters. Read "The Enterprise
>>  of Law: Justice without the State," by Bruce Benson. Read David
>>  Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom," and his other books. Read...
>>
>>  The point is, Aimee, _read the background material_.
>>
>Admittedly, I'm not Aimee.
>I was wondering if I could get a few helpful pointers towards the 
>background material?
>Any assistance would be much appreciated.

See my articles earlier today referencing background reading.

Reading lists have been put forth many times over the years. Try 
using search engines to find them.

Here are a handful I suggest you should be familiar with. Some are 
entertaining, some are works of fiction, some are not light reading, 
some are... Descriptions of what they are readily available on the 
Net, e.g., at Amazon.

* Vernor Vinge. "True Names." A new edition is supposed to be coming 
"Real Soon Now."  Also, the short stories of Vinge, including "The 
Ungoverned."

* Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game." Kids using untraceable pseudonyms.

* Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom." (Hayek, Von Mises, Popper, others are 
part of the world view of Cypherpunks, and the ideas are related to 
emergent order, complex systems, agents, evolutionary game theory 
(and "evolutionary economics," though this name is not used), 
distributed systems, why central planning fails, etc.)

* Axelrod, "The Evolution of Cooperation." And everyone should have 
basic familiarity with the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Iterated 
Prisoner's Dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commons, and a handful of 
other basic "evolutionary economics" ideas. Some of this will be 
found in Axelrod, some in the books he cites, some in Hofstadter's 
"Metamagical Themas" book, some in Martin Gardner's books.

* Rand, "Atlas Shrugged." (Best read as a teen, in my opinion. I 
devoured it in 2 days of intense reading at age 16, but haven't been 
able to get past page 10 in the last 30 years.)

* David Friedman, "The Machinery of Freedom." Also, "Law's Order," a 
more recent treatment of the law from an economic perspective.

*Stephenson, "Snow Crash."

* Hakim Bey, "TAZ."

* Loompanics Press books, Paladin Press books...black markets, etc.

* Hazlitt, "Economics in One Lesson."

* my own Cyphernomicon, readily findable on the Web with search engines.


--Tim May




-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns