I'm a big fan of The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What To Do About It by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig. Anyone interested in the future of banking and how banking should be regulated needs to read this highly accessible book. Recently, Admati and Hellwig have written a response to their many critics, which attempts to debunk 28 flawed claims - it is available here. In the video below, Admati gives an interview to INET about The Bankers' New Clothes.
The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.