Category: Books

1. Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography, by Georgi Derluguian.  How did the Soviet Union come to be, come to collapse, and was the ethnic trouble in the Caucasus brought on by globalization?  This book has a unique narrative style, while the content draws upon Wallerstein, Tilly, Randall Collins, and others.  There is wisdom and analysis on virtually every page.

2. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark.  The sad story of how murder and population exchanges have made the nations of the modern Mediterranean more monocultural; someone needs to write on Egypt as well.

3. Good Bread is Back, by Steven Kaplan; the subtitle says it all: A Contemporary History of French bread, the way it is made, and the people who make it.  Here is Alex’s earlier post on French bread.

4. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan.  This short novel is about young British newlyweds trying to have/trying to not have sex in 1962.  Critics are calling it a return to form, but it feels slightly overwrought to me.  Can the British really be like that?  If so, do I have to read about it?  I did find the last ten pages strikingly beautiful.  I got my copy early on Amazon.co.uk, the American edition is out in June.

In Germany peak hour traffic on a Friday is 2 pm.

That is from Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi, The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline.

In grading his daily performances, he gave himself numerical credit for writing and research — including his endless effort to master mathematics — but seldom for teaching, counseling students, or any other duty.  He enjoyed reading Latin and Greek texts, as well as European novels and biographies — Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Morley’s multivolume Gladstone, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.  Sometimes he indulged himself with Ellery Queen and other detective novelists.  He loved to dine out and to attend art exhibitions and classical music concerts.  But he regarded most of these activities as unseemly distractions.  The only thing that really counted as work.  On that dimension Schumpeter held himself to unattainable standards and wrestled constantly with his conscience.  He was still trying to work out an "exact economics; and in doing so he was setting a real intellectual trap for himself.

That is from Thomas McCraw’s superlative Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.  Here is David Warsh on the book.

The girl’s quick mind, unrefined by study, sought to have the advantage of being considered pure and airless; it was conscious of this, and it made use of this consciousness to further its ends; but such a mind had given me too strong an impression of its cleverness.

That is from History of My Life.  Is that why human self-deception has evolved?  If we don’t know our own artifices, we can more successfully conceal them from others.

What are they?  A loyal MR reader wants to know.  Comments, of course, are open.

Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, by Thomas K. McCraw.  It is beautifully written, suspenseful throughout, full of love and intrigue, a story of European migration, also a history of Harvard economics, reassesses Schumpeter’s thought, and is as good a biography of an economist as has ever been written.  I do not make the latter claim lightly.

There is actually [sic] a restaurant in New Jersey called Stuff Yer Face, and fast food generally is about stuffing your face: about nutrition, fueling up, taking in the calories, food as instrumentality, eaters as mere animals responding to biological imperatives.

The subtitle of the new book is How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantalize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole.  Here is the restaurant’s home page, with sound.

The new Christopher Buckley novel Boomsday concerns a blogger — Cassandra — who proposes that a cash-strapped, demographically-burdened society pay old people to do themselves in.  The elderly are to kill themselves for tax breaks.  In Swiftian fashion we can improve this idea by convexifying the choice.  Let’s make it a risk and subsidize sky-diving for the non-working elderly. 

There are two positive externalities from the resulting deaths; first, a bequest of material wealth passes to other individuals, second, the deadweight loss of taxation falls.  The negative externality from the death falls upon other family members and friends; whether the would-be victim internalized those costs in the first place is difficult to calculate.  Have I mentioned that economics has few good ways of modeling two-way altruism and keeping the standard welfare theorems intact?  Distribution and efficiency are no longer separate, but hey that’s the real world.

Here is a New York Times review.  Buckley is one of the most entertaining public speakers I have heard, hire or go hear him if you can.

I knew as a libertarian that it was imperative to be tolerant of alternative lifestyles.  Until I walked into that convention hall, I had no idea how many alternatives there were.

Ed Crane on the first Libertarian Party convention in 1972.  From Radicals for Capitalism.

¨…may I advocate classical-liberal limited government, so that my son may advocate anarcho-capitalism, and that my grandson may plan to build new artificial countries in the ocean.¨

from Radicals for Capitalism.