Category: Books
The new Levitt and Dubner book is due out in May
When to Rob a Bank: …And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants
Drawn from the Freakonomics blog, self-recommending of course…
Compensating Differentials
The latest section of our Principles of Economics course at MRU is up today and it covers price discrimination and labor markets.
In this video, The Tradeoff Between Fun and Wages, we introduce the idea of compensating differentials in wages, an idea that goes back to Adam Smith.
Sharp readers will notice a homage near the beginning in what might otherwise appear to be an odd scene setting.
Charles Murray has a new book coming out
By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, due out in May, here is some summary:
In this provocative book, acclaimed social scientist and bestselling author Charles Murray shows us why we can no longer hope to roll back the power of the federal government through the normal political process. The Constitution is broken in ways that cannot be fixed even by a sympathetic Supreme Court. Our legal system is increasingly lawless, unmoored from traditional ideas of “the rule of law.” The legislative process has become systemically corrupt, no matter which party is in control.
But there’s good news beyond the Beltway. Technology is siphoning power from sclerotic government agencies and putting it in the hands of individuals and communities. The rediversification of American culture is making local freedom attractive to liberals as well as conservatives. People across the political spectrum are increasingly alienated from a regulatory state that nakedly serves its own interests rather than those of ordinary Americans.
An AEI notice is here, and for the pointer I thank David Levey.
The forthcoming Akerlof and Shiller book
Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception.
Due out September 6, I have pre-ordered of course. Hat tip goes to Cass Sunstein.
*Genealogy of American Finance*
By Robert E. Wright and Richard Sylla, Columbia Business School Publishing, this is both a beautiful picture book, coffee table style, and also a history of America’s “Big 50” financial institutions. It appears to be a very impressive creation, full of useful information.
File under “Arrived in my Pile”! You can order it on Amazon here.
Education in Mao’s China
Advancement in China’s school system was highly competitive, and the odds of reaching the top of the educational ladder were very steep. Of the 32.9 million children who entered primary school in 1965, only 9 percent could expect to enter junior high school. Only 15 percent of junior high school entrants, in turn, could expect to graduate and enter high school. Among the highly selected groups that graduated from academic high schools, only 36 percent could expect to enroll in a university. Of those who entered primary school in 1965, only 1.3 percent could expect to attend an academic high school, and only one-half of 1 percent could expect to attend university.
Of course the Caplanian point is that China managed a lot of post-1979 economic growth with what was fundamentally a not very educated generation.
That excerpt is from Andrew G. Walder’s China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed, my previous post on this excellent book is here.
Will Wilkinson, and his novel in progress, partly about Leo Strauss
Here is one excerpt from his very interesting post:
I get and very much like the skeptical, anti-theoretical thrust of Strauss. I like his deep wariness of ideal theorizing, his exhortations to pay attention to the political life we are always already living. He’s right to see reasoning with others about about how to live as an inherently political activity. He’s right to insist on honoring the distinctive excellences of those sensitive to the texture of real political life and expert in its ceaseless negotations. He’s right that social scientific theories about politics are less politically valuable then good political judgment, and that people who think they’re going to govern “scientifically” are dangerously stupid. (Paraphrasing, here.) And, yes, when philosophy is merely a handmaiden to the dogmas of our age, pursued under the “ecumenical supervision” of the universities, it is profoundly compromised. To be a philosopher is not to have a job you clock in and out of. To be a philosopher is simply to be, philosophically, always. Right! But the Socratic life is the one very best life? The naturally right, life? Nope. Nope. I’ve read and read and never quite follow how we end up there. I mean, I think this is a great life, beyond wonderful. But nope.
Anyway, Strausseans are strangely obsessed with this idea that the philosophical life, so construed, is the best human life, full stop, and are therefore obsessed with the tension between the best life, which is in the business of exposing bullshit, and the political life, which is built on it.
I am very happy to order this book in advance, I hope Will lets me know when that is possible.
China under Mao
That is the new and excellent book by Andrew G. Walder. Here is one excerpt:
The Communists’ contribution to the war effort was extremely modest. According to a December 1944 Soviet Comintern report, a total of more than 1 million Nationalist troops had been killed in battle, compared to 103,186 in the CCP’s Eighth Route Army and another several thousand in the New Fourth Army. The Communists suffered only 10 percent of total Chinese military casualties. One author has called Mao’s famous doctrine of people’s war one of the “great myths” about the period: “people’s war was hardly used in the conflict against the Japanese.”
Definitely recommended.
Assorted links, books and otherwise
1. I enjoyed my page browse through Becoming Steve Jobs, which seems fun, readable, and informative, but it’s not what I feel like reading right now. But if you think you might want to read it, you probably should.
2. Charles C.W. Cooke’s The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future is all the rage right now. Books which attempt to redefine or carve up the political spectrum aren’t exactly my thing, but this one is well-written and vital. Here is a Reason interview with Cooke. Here is a NYT interview with Cooke.
3. The new edition of David Boaz’s The Libertarian Mind is out.
4. The best piece so far on Lee Kwan Yew; how much and how rapidly will it matter that the focal point has passed away?
Claims about America
The grand confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.
…The death of Mainline Protestantism is, as we’ve noted, the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: Mainline Protestantism has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.
That is from Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America.
The Tea Party, the great stagnation, etc., maybe you can find it all right here.
Don’t worry people, just joking on that one…
*Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World*
That is the new Ian Bremmer book, with the subtitle Three Choices for America’s Role in the World. It can be Indispensable America (our postwar role), Moneyball America (pick priorities and accomplish them), or Independent America (limited foreign policy aspirations but lots of nation-building at home and trade abroad), and Ian prefers the latter — “I believe it’s time for Americans to redefine our value to the world.” Most of all he thinks we have to choose, and articulate the reasons for our choice; right now we are left with Question Mark America, arguably the worst of all worlds.
As you would expect from a focus on foreign policy, he builds a good case for TPP, starting on p.114, from a broadly social democratic point of view, very much worth the read.
The most notable feature of this book is that Bremmer constructs the very best case for each of the foreign policy approaches, not just his favorite, and in this sense he makes the maximum effort to instruct the reader. We could use a lot more of this approach. He is also one of the very best people to follow on Twitter.
Alain Badiou on the French headscarf law
This is from his Polemics book:
43. In point of truth, the headscarf law expresses only one thing: fear. Westerners in general, and the French in particular, are no more than a bunch of shivering cowards. What are they afraid of? Barbarians, as usual. Barbarians both at home, the ‘suburban youths’, and abroad the ‘Islamic terrorists’. Why are they afraid? Because they are guilty, but claim to be innocent. Guilty from the 1980s onward of having renounced and tried to dismantle every politics of emancipation, every revolutionary form of reason, every true assertion of something other than what is. Guilty of clinging to their miserable privileges. Guilty of being no more than grown-up kids who play with their many purchases. Yes, indeed, ‘after a long childhood, they have been made to grow up’. They are thus afraid of whatever is a little less old than they are, such as, for example, a stubborn young lady.
44. But most of all, Westerners in general, and the French in particular, are afraid of death. They can no longer even imagine that an idea is something worth taking risks for. ‘Zero deaths’ is their most important desire. Well, they see millions of people throughout the world who have no reason to be afraid of death. And among them, many die for an idea nearly every day. For the ‘civilized’, that is a source of intimate terror.
I’ve tried a few other Badiou books, but I find this to be the one easiest to make sense of. Here is Wikipedia on Badiou. Here is a Guardian article on him.
Claims about meritorious books which I did not finish
Richard Roberts and David Kynaston, The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC. This is an important book for the historian, but it is not written for the eye of the economist.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant: A Novel. It has a beautiful air of mystery and profundity, but by p.120 I still didn’t care. Some of you will like this a lot, but I put it down to pick up some other book which I will not finish.
Then it’s back to Houllebecq and The Mahabharata.
What I’ve been reading — more good books should be this short
James McPherson, The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters.
Edward Mendelson, Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth Century Writers. Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Kazin, William Maxwell, Bellow, Mailer, Auden, and O’Hara.
*Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling*
There is a new version of the Mahabharata, in blank verse rather than prose, translated/created by Carole Satyamurti. I’ve only read an initial sliver of it, but dramatically and linguistically it is very effective. This is a beautiful edition, and deserves serious consideration as a purchase for just about every library. I have yet to see any significant reviews of the work.