Results for “What I've Been Reading”

442 found

Marcel Proust, The Seventy-Five Folios & Other Unpublished Manuscripts.  Early drafts of In Search of Lost Time, fragments, but still of interest to Proust lovers.

Claire Hughes Johnson, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building is that rare thing — a good and also useful management book.  She was COO at Stripe, this is a Stripe Press title, and I was happy to see it make the WSJ bestseller list.

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?  The authors are skeptical on the actual settlement of space, and so am I, so I am glad this book exists.  I hope somebody proves them wrong, but that is not my bet.

Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income, is a good history of ideas on the basic concept.

Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, Superman Brainiac, Superman wins, but is that plausible?  Yes.  The writers note there is too much that Brainiac cannot control, most of all on Earth.

Peter Attia, with Bill Gifford, has now published Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity.

I have only browsed Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism, but it seems to be a very good and serious treatment of its chosen topics.

Lionel Page, Optimally Irrational: The Good Reasons We Behave the Way We Do, argues that many behavioral “imperfections” in economics are in fact rational in a broader perspective.

Simone and Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, the authors lay out what their version of a pro-natalist world and philosophy would have to look like.

There is Shanker A. Singham and Alden F. Abbott, Trade, Competition and Domestic Regulatory Policy: Trade Liberalisation, Competitive Markets and Property Rights Protection.

I will not have time to read Chris Wickham’s massive tome The Donkey & the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180, but surely it is worthy of note and it appears to be a major achievement.

And Is Social Justice Just?, edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne.

Colin Kidd, Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500-2000.  A very good and well-written look at Scottish views on the Union over the centuries.  Explained conceptually in a nice way, not just a catalog, and tied to religion as well.

Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History.  One of the best one-volume introductions to Irish history.

W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood.  Argues that the Mormons had relatively universalistic origins, and that Brigham Young was the one who introduced the later segregationist ideas.

There is Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.

The impressive Jon Elster has just published America Before 1787: The Unraveling of a Colonial Regime.

Do not forget John Cochrane’s The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, as presented on John’s blog as well.

Coming out is Robin Douglass, Mandeville’s Fable: Pride, Hypocrisy, and Sociability.

1. Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest & Culture in 11th-Century Europe.  A very clear and to the point book on a complex topic.  This is a good one to read with GPT-4 accompaniment for your queries.  In Sicily, near Palermo, the Normans produced one of my favorite sites in all of Europe.

2. John A. Mackenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire.  “A vital characteristic of polo was that since it lacked immediate physical contact it could be jointly played by British and Indians, which of course meant elite Indians, inevitably associated with the princely states.”  A very good book on both a) early globalization, and b) actually understanding the British empire.  I hadn’t known that during the 1930s and 40s, maximum years of resistance to the British empire, cricket tournaments largely were abandoned.

3. Carmela Ciuraru, Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages.  I hadn’t even known Patricia Neal was married to Roald Dahl.  Overall I enjoy intellectual/romance gossip books, and this is a good one.  Full of actual facts about the writings, not just the affairs and the marriages and divorces.  Moravia/Morante was my favorite chapter.  Here is a Guardian review, superficially you might think there is no real message in this book, but then again…

4. Lucy Wooding, Tudor England: A History.  A good book, but most of all a very good book to read with GPT-4 as your companion.

Jeanna Smialek, Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis, is a good, readable, non-technical introduction to the Fed, focusing on personalities and internal mechanics, rather than macroeconomic theories.

Rainer Zitelmann, In Defense of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths.  A very good pro-capitalism book, broadly in the Milton Friedman tradition.

Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History.  Long, full of information, and well written, but somehow lacks a central organizing thesis to hold it all together.

Murray Pittock, Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh’s Civic Development 1660-1750 is an excellent book on how the built environment of Edinburgh, and its building reforms and improvements, shaped the Scottish Enlightenment.  Gives a better sense of the Edinburgh of the time than any other book I know.  I don’t mean the thinkers in the city, I mean the city itself.

Charles Dunst, Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman.  Full of true claims, common sense, and a needed dose of optimism.

I have not yet read Mark Calabria’s Shelter from the Storm: How a Covid Mortgage Meltdown was Averted, Cato Institute book.

1. Owen Hopkins, Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain.  Covers the “great” British brutalist buildings of the postwar era, the debates surrounding their demolition, and their eventual demolition.  Photos too, excellent to dip into.

2. Anna Grzymala-Busse, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State.  A good and original book about how European state-building grew out of earlier church traditions.  For instance, by the time of the Reformation about half the land in Germany was in the hands of the church.  “Church-building” often came first, and then state-building copied and improved on some of the methods.

3. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What it Means for Our Country is a good look at what it promises.  Most of all, I like how it stresses that these individuals are more apolitical than often is realized.

4. Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th Century Europe.  The best book on the Normans?  And what an opening set of sentences: “In the eleventh century the climate was improving, population was growing, and people were on the move, west from central Asia, and south from north-western Europe.  In 1054 the unity of Christianity between east and west was broken, a rift which lasted for centuries.  In 1096 the idea of recovering Jerusalem from Muslims was translated into action.  Existing empires and principalities were challenged and new polities were founded.  War was at the centre of these events, waged by small armies led by men who achieved lasting fame, men such as William the Conqueror, Robert Guiscard, and Bohemond.  That these men were of Norman extraction seemed to their chroniclers to be no coincidence.”

And just arrived in my pile is Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, Campus Economics: How Economic Thinking Can Help Improve College and University Decisions.

I’ve also started (and put down) a bunch of books somewhere between GPT 3.3 and 3.8…and read a bunch of books on Pauline political theology (reading in clusters!), and Jonathan Swift on church-state relations and on religious politics more generally.  And yes, Spare is in my reading pile.

Ahmet T. Kuru, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison is one of the best books on why Islam fell behind Western Europe.  I don’t think it solves the puzzle, but has plenty of good arguments in the “rent-seeking” direction.

Newly published is Daniel B. Klein, Smithian Morals, Amazon link here, some of the essays are with co-authors.  Free,  open access version is here.

Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein, Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company, is an interesting defense of corporate hierarchy, based on economic reasoning and also a dash of Hayek.

Jamieson Webster, Disorganisation & Sex.  Lacanian, yet readable.  Recommend to those who think they might care, but it will not convince the unconverted.

There is the interesting Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism, by Shadi Bartsch.  Here is my very good CWT with her, in which we discuss the topics of the book a bit.

Pretty good is Jon K. Lauck, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900.

There is Owen Ullmann, Empathy Economics: Janet Yellen’s Remarkable Rise to Power and Her Drive to Spread Prosperity to All.

And a new libertarian memoir, Murray Sabrin, From Immigrant to Public Intellectual: An American Story.

Dalibor Rohac, Governing the EU in an Age of Division is a classical liberal take on its topic.

Paul Scharre, Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.  This book bored me, but here I mean that as a positive statement.  It bored me because I knew a lot of the content already, and that is because this is such important content that I have put a lot of time into trying to know it.  Both the author and I thought it was very important to know this material.  AI and the military is right now is a critical issue, and this is the book to read in the area.  Whether or not you are bored.

Perry Mehrling’s Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System is a definitive biography, and also a good look at the “rooted in academia but mostly in the policy world” branch of macro and finance that was so prominent in the postwar era.

I read only a small amount of Philip Short’s Putin, at more than 800 pages.  It seemed entirely fine, and useful, and surely the topic is of importance.  Yet I didn’t find myself learning conceptual points from it, or even new details of significance.  In any case it is now the biography of Putin, and some of you will want to read it.

Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole, and Other Living Treasures is a series of short, fun takes on strange animals including the wombat (runs faster than Usain Bolt) and the pangolin, among others.  Good for both adults and children.

When I first saw the title of Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, I thought it was some kind of satire, or perhaps GPT-3 run amok.  Nonetheless some of the book is a serious economic history of the 1920s and its fiscal and credit policies, and you should not dismiss it out of hand.  That said, mechanisms such as the supposed “logic of capital accumulation” are assigned too much explanatory power.  The book also will convince you that “austerity” is almost always poorly defined.

There is Julian Gewirtz, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s.  Somehow this book felt naive to me.  Yes, many Chinese paths were discussed in the 1980s, but the system nonetheless had an underlying logic which reasserted itself rather brutally…

Peter H. Wilson, Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500.  I thought I would love this lengthy tome (913 pp.), and it is quite a catalog, and impressively objective to boot.  Yet something is missing, and I skipped around and ended up putting it down with few regrets.

Michael Pritchard, FRPS, A History of Photography in 50 Cameras is very useful and very good, exactly what it promises, good photos too (better be good!)  I think of photography as one of those innovations that started 20-30 years earlier than I might otherwise have expected, had I not known the historical record.  1839 for basic daguerreotype, that is impressive.

Roger D. Congleton, Solving Social Dilemmas: Ethics, Politics, and Prosperity is a good book on classical liberalism and how it is embedded in stories of the historical evolution of cooperation.

Michael Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate.  Coryate was an intrepid traveler from 17th century England.  He walked along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, through Persia and Afghanistan, and into the heart of the Moghul empire.  He was the first Englishman to visit India “for the heck of it,” and he walked.  Quite possibly he introduced the table fork to England, and the word “umbrella” to the English language.  Non-complacent from top to bottom, he died at age forty, of dystentery, while underway in Surat.

Johan Fourie, Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History.  An unusual narrative take on the broad sweep of economic history, Africa-centered, original, unusual, broken up into different stories.  The author is professor of economics and history at Stellenbosch, here is his home page.

Ronald H. Spector, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955.  This book is an excellent way to pick up knowledge on a critical period that most Westerners do not know enough about.  Most interesting to me were the sections on how many people thought the Indonesians would gladly return to Dutch colonial rule.  Narrator: They didn’t.

S Encel, Equality and Authority: a Study of Class, Status and Power in Australia.  Might this be the best explanatory book on Australia ever?  Explains the odd mix of egalitarianism, individualism, plus bureaucratic authoritarianism that characterizes the Aussies.  There should of course be many more books like this, books attempting to explain countries to us.  From 1970 but still highly relevant.

W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change.  A very good book outlining status and signaling arguments for explaining how culture works and changes.  My main gripe is that it doesn’t seem at all aware of Simler and Hanson, and Robin Hanson more generally and for that matter my own What Price Fame? (among other writings).  So while I like the content, on the grounds of both scholarships and originality I have to give it a pretty big ding.

Arrived in my pile are:

Kevin Erdmann, Building from the Ground Up: Reclaiming the American Housing Boom, and

Daniel B. Klein and Jason Briggeman, Hume, Smith, Burke, Geijer, Menger, d’Argenson.

Annie Duke, Quit.  A defense of quitting, which is often necessary to reallocate resources properly.

Frances Spalding, The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between the Two Wars.  Wonderful text, quality images, and the whole subject area remains underrated, so this book was a big plus for me.  The history of modernism is not just cubist and abstract art on the continent.

Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.  I liked this book and found it useful, though I wished for more on Taiwan and more recent times, and for less on the earlier years.  Just my subjective preference.

Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford, How to be a Founder: How entrepreneurs can identify, fund and launch their best ideas.  Do you have it in you to be a founder?  If you are asking that question, this book is maybe the best place to start looking for some answers.

Thomas H. Davenport and Steven M. Miller, Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration.  Actual examples!

There is also Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, which I have not yet read.

Samuel Gregg, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World is a useful corrective to some recent attempts to overrate the import of industrial policy, especially in an American context.

Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen John I found a moving set of (imaginary) letters from one living female painter to another first-rate deceased female painter, both having lived through some similar situations.  Excellent color plates too.

Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise.  A good look at the essential continuity in Chinese history between the Maoist period and the “capitalist” period.  Of course the main thesis no longer seems so crazy as it might have ten years ago.