Tyler Cowen's Favorite Non-Ficton Books of 2012

Tyler Cowen shares his picks:

• Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.
• Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.
• David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States.
• George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe.
• Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.
• Michael Dirda, On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling.
• James Fallows, China Airborne.
• Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story.
• Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750.
• Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography.
• Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Khanho Shin, From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy.

Arnold Kling adds to the list. 

My additions to the list would include James Manzi’s Uncontrolled, Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs (in my opinion, one cannot put Murray on the list and leave out Moretti), Bruce Schneier’s Liars and Outliers (that one does not seem to have impressed anyone else I know), Paul Reid’s completion of William Manchester’s three-volume biography of Winston Churchill, and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (this is on an even higher plane, in my opinion–a candidate for book of the decade? See my review essay.)

I'm afraid I've been too busy working on my dissertation this past year to have much to add.  Hope to remedy that next year.  In the meantime, I just added Murray's Coming Apart and Haidt's The Righteous Mind to my reading list.