1. Everything is Obvious, by Duncan Watts. In the section available as a free sample, he writes,

whereas a formal system of knowledge would try to derive the appropriate behavior in all these situations from a single, more general “law,” common sense just “knows” what the appropriate thing to do is in any particular situation, without knowing how it knows it.

I think that there is something to be said for framing the “macro wars” as a tussle between a formal system of knowledge (microfoundations) and common sense (Keynesian macroeconomics). In this instance, I think that neither formal knowledge nor common sense delivers helpful answers.

More generally, Watts has a theme that we should be careful to question what we strongly believe to be true. I am quite sympathetic to that position.

2. An Epidemic of Absence, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff. The topic is not economics. It is the “hygeine hypothesis” as a possible explanation for a rise in autoimmune diseases. In this case, it is the Russ Roberts podcast that caught my interest. The author says,

When you have a peanut allergy, the immune system sees the peanut and rejects it, and sees it as an enemy. Now, what the parasites do is they convince you to tolerate them and treat it like some food that’s supposed to be there. That’s how they live for years inside of their hosts. And by strengthening that part of your immune system, the thinking goes, they then prevent allergic disease and possibly the autoimmune disease from ever emerging. So now you back up for a second. You realize that that kind of tweaking of your immune system was constant throughout not just our evolution but through probably most animals’ evolution. You rarely find an animal that is not parasitized by a few parasites at some point in its life. Usually early in life you are parasitized the most. And that’s when of course these diseases tend to emerge these days in humans, early in life. So you have this strengthened, let’s just call a part of the immune system that’s like a muscle, that helps you tolerate things. That helps you not respond; that helps you, say if you are a very well-balanced person and people provoke you in a way that could lead to some sort of conflagration, you are just very well balanced; you have an equilibrium, you don’t respond. That’s what those parasites help you do–they help strengthen that part of your immune system, that aspect of yourself.