*The Russian Origins of the First World War*

That is the new book by Sean McMeekin; I enjoyed it and found this passage striking:

From the raw data, it is easy to see why policymakers in Berlin felt time was not on their side: Russia’s population had grown by forty million since just 1900, and was approaching 200 million to Germany’s sixty-five.  By the time the Great Program was complete in 1917-1918, Russia’s peacetime army…would number 2.2 million soldiers, or roughly trip the size of Germany’s.  Russia’s economy, although still only fifth-largest in the world…was growing at a “developing economy” rate of nearly 10 percent annually, rather like China’s is today…It was not hard to extrapolate forward a geopolitical map on which Russian territory included half of China, Afghanistan, northern Persia, Anatolia, Constantinople and the Straits, Austrian Galicia, and Eastern Prussia.

That book is from Belknap; Oxford University Press sent me a new short book by Allan H. Meltzer, Why Capitalism?  Thomas Hazlett’s new, short The Fallacy of Net Neutrality is a clear take in line with its title.  Also noteworthy is Richard B. McKenzie’s new Heavy! The Surprising Reasons America is the Land of the Free — and the Home of the Fat.