re: Economics Book Club (EBC): Book 4 Starts Aug 21 (The Smartest Guys in the Room)

In. Current broke tax/business law/estate planning attorney.

I vote Ray Dalio's principles to start things off.

Cool: just added you to the list, updated the group stats, and will add that book suggestion to our reading list.

I have some other cool stuff for the OP page coming down the pipe later this afternoon as well

Alright everyone. Economics in One Lesson and Applied Economics received the first and second most votes, respectively. We will start with the former on the 12th.

I've skimmed though the book and it looks like an easy read. I think 20 pages an hour would be easily doable, which would be 100 pages per week based on our 5 hour target. But to be conservative in this first run, lets budget the first 14 chapters for the first week (only 88 pages) and the next 10 chapters for the following week (only 94 pages).

That sound good to everyone or should we spread it out more? Keep in mind this will be an evolving process and we can make changes as we move along.

Also, all books which didn't make this round were added to our group's account on GoodReads and will be brought up for vote next go 'round. I've updated the OP to include a cool spider chart showing the topical weighting of the books we have in queue and also added a "Trophy Room" section where we will showcase completed titles.

Let's do this

I want to suggest this book at some point Taxing Ourselves

I read parts of this for an Econ class at LSU and I've been meaning to read it again. I have the 4th edition but the new edition comes out in a few days. This was for Dr. Richardson's class who does a lot of studies on the tax code in Louisiana. He's presented a lot of his work to the state legislature but it seems like they never listen to him. Classic Louisiana

Absolutely. We will add it to queue. Sounds like a much-needed read given our current situation.

Love it. Just bought the book. Good flight reading for traveling over next several days.

First: Do you have a suggested protocol for discussion? Like after week one we can discuss the first 100 pages and after week two the rest of the book? Or are we looking to finish the entire thing before discussion? Or is there a third route you see as best? I see the merits of the different methods, but didn't want to jump the gun.

Second: Is there a separate thread that will be started by the "moderator" of the book that will facilitate the conversation? Or will it be included in this thread?

Apologies if you already mentioned the standard and I missed it.

So we discuss the book on this board??
I think opening a Slack account would be optimal. You can categorize books and have a separate "general" section.

Discussion should be broken up into chapters or sections imo

Everyone weigh in. This is all of our book club. I've never used Slack, but the only concern I have is that an external platform would end up being a low traffic dead man's land because it's inconvenient relative to TD where we all already spend a bunch of time anyway. If I need to be educated, help me out. If I can go to X to do A, B, and C (maybe check Poli board, check Money board and check Book Club thread) or I can go to Y to do only C, chances are I'd go to X(C) a lot more than I'd go to Y(C).

I mentioned Slack because several money talk posters continue to have robust discussions daily after about a month. It's easy to check. There's an app.
But I understand your reservations.

As long as we all keep in mind that this first book is V1 of the EBC discussion forum, we'll be golden. I'd vote that once the period to discuss the book starts, we stick to whatever the set rules are regardless of how the discussion is evolving during the read.

After book 1 discussion is finished, then we can talk about the protocol, how to improve the discussion, role of moderator, pages/week, etc. If we try and change any of that mid-read within the forum it could be confusing to members and be more detrimental to the overall goal.