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

Alright everyone, with the night drawing to a close, just wanted to say I'm thrilled by the overwhelmingly positive response to this and look forward to getting started. As stated earlier, we'll get our list to choose from together tomorrow and will put the selection process up for a vote. We will target a start date of Monday the 12th. We'd initially said we'd target 5-10 hours a week but based on the totality of responses received, I've revised that down to 5. This will guide us when we go to make the weekly reading assignments. Obviously, page size, font size and the complexity of the material will be factors, but this should work out to about 100 pages a week on average. Does that number sound fine to everyone?

Also, in order to prompt discussion and keep the conversation moving along as fluidly as possible, I suggest we have a designated "moderator" for each book who has no formal responsibilities but is instead just asked to be active, ask a lot of questions, and try to be the one driving the discussion. I'm happy to volunteer for the first book, but this person should ideally be different for each book. Also, for planning purposes and to minimize shipping costs, it may be smart to decide on two or three successive books at a time. When we vote tomorrow, let's say those books receiving the second and third most votes will be the ones we read after the first book.

If all goes as planned, I think this will be a fantastic experience and we'll all grow tremendously from it.