Zack Cooper: A Joy For Reading

I tell them I’m a professor (just not a very good one).

Just finishing up Call for the Dead by John Le Carré. I read at night before bed; generally, spy novels. I try and always have a fiction book I’m reading for fun and read a bit each day. It feels like an escape.

I’d encourage them to read books on topics they enjoy and try and get them into fiction. I think it’s critical for kids to develop a joy for reading and I’m game for them reading whatever it is that piques their interest.

It was a blast. On the first visit, I really wanted to make sure I took in the experience, so I arrived early, wasn’t rushed, and tried to just absorb it – treat it like a really special event. My goal is to do work that improves public policy – that makes the world better, even in tiny ways – so it was fun to present the work in a setting where it can hopefully inform some policy-makers.

I think Mostly Harmless Econometrics by Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke is a pretty good choice because it really outlines the how and why of understanding causality rather than correlation. However, it’s a pretty technical book. For a general audience interested in health policy, I think An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal is a good read.

There are a bunch I’ve read more than once. One that jumps out is About Alice by Calvin Trillin. He really captures the beauty of relationships. I adore seeing the pure love he had for his wife Alice.

Maybe I shouldn’t say it in this interview, but I usually refer my students to articles. There aren’t too many ‘economics’ books. When it comes to public policy, I always encourage my students to read biographies. I think it’s a fascinating way to get insights into people. I’m a big fan of Lincoln biographies.

Spy novels!

I’d say John Le Carre, Pat Conroy, and Calvin Trillin.

I’m definitely an escape reader.

My close friend Jimmy Hatch wrote a terrific book called Touching the Dragon. It’s a book about his experience navigating mental illness post getting shot in Afghanistan. He’s an amazing fellow who, at age 52, is now a sophomore at Yale College. He wrote an amazing article about his first semester at Yale called ‘My Semester with the Snowflakes’, which I’m hoping he’ll turn into a book eventually. The article really captured how his experience at Yale forced him out of his comfort zone. He had a lot of preconceptions about what our students would be like (snowflakes) and found out they were anything but what he was expecting.

There were quite a few really. My Losing Season by Pat Conroy really affected me. I read it while I was transitioning out of sports and it was amazing to read a book written by someone who loved athletics who could write so vividly.

I’m spending a lot of time working on quantifying how rising health care costs impact local employment opportunities and income. I think we need to understand how health spending impacts people’s day to day lives so we know how much priority we should be placing on making our health system more efficient.

I want to read more history books this year to get a sense of whether our current levels of partisanship are historically anomalous and to see if our past can offer any insight about how we can navigate out as a country.

Motorcycles and me.