I’ve been remiss in failing to recommend my friend Chris Mooney’s book Storm World, a worthy followup to his excellent first book, The Republican War on Science.

In the book, Chris takes you inside the battle among scientists and weather experts over the relationship between hurricanes and global warming, much of which takes place during the deadly 2005 hurricane season. It’s as vivid and sociological an account as I’ve seen of what academic disputes are really like — I’d put it alongside The Great Influenza (the dramatic story of how scientists raced to understand the great flu epidemic of 1918) and Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations (a surprisingly compelling account of the development of new growth theory in economics).

The battle also spills over into politics, particularly the Bush administration’s pattern of altering and censoring science that contradicts its policy preferences. By contrast, Mooney is scrupulous about sticking to the science; he explains that the link between increasing hurricane severity and global warming has not been definitively established, but makes a convincing argument that the threat is sufficiently serious to warrant action.

I also want to second Tyler Cowen’s recommendations of two big-think economics books for a popular audience. First, The Persistence of Poverty by Charles Karelis argues that the marginal utility of additional income for poor non-immigrants in the US is increasing, not decreasing, a simple modification of standard economic theory that seems to explain “the persistence of poverty” and its attendant pathologies better than existing explanations.

Second, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class by Robert Frank is the best single explanation of why rising inequality harms everyone, not just those at the bottom. The argument centers around what Frank calls “positional goods” (like houses) for which our levels of consumption are highly visible. The problem, Frank shows, is that our enjoyment of them is contingent on relative status, and inequality helps fuel “positional arms races” (such as bidding up the price of real estate in neighborhoods with good schools) that leave everyone worse off both financially and psychologically.