Results for “best book” 2009 found
*Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America*
Again, that is the new book by Jeremy Jennings, here is another excerpt:
These grave misgivings [about travel] have persisted. “I have been reading books of travels all my life,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “but I have never found two that gave me the same idea of the same nation.” Those who “travel best,” he added, “travel least,” and, in Rousseau’s opinion, they travelled not by coach but on foot. Others have agreed. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Xavier de Maistre (brother to the more famous Joseph) resolved only to journey for forty-two days around his own room, “safe from the restless jealousy of men.” “We will travel slowly,” he wrote, “laughing as we go at those travellers who have visited Rome and Paris.” Heading north, Maistre discovered his bed. On this view, one travelled best by moving hardly at all. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill displayed a similarly dismissive attitude. “In travelling,” he wrote, “men usually see only what they already had in their own minds.”
From another segment of the book:
Gustave de Beaumont not only travelled to America with Tocqueville but accompanied him on trips to England and Ireland and to Algeria. No one was better able to assess how Tocqueville travelled. Tocqueville’s way of travelling, Beaumont wrote, was “peculiar.” Everything was “a matter for observation.” Each day Tocqueville framed in his head the questions he wanted to ask and resolve. Every idea that came into his mind was noted down, without delay, and regardless of where he was. For Tocqueville, Beaumont continued, travelling was never just a form of bodily exercise or simply an agreeable way to pass the time. “Rest,” Beaumont wrote, “was foreign to his nature.” Whether or not his body was actively employed, Tocqueville’s mind was always working. Never could he undertake a walk as a simple distraction or engage in conversation as a form of relaxation. The “most agreeable” discussion was the “most useful” discussion. The worst day was “the day lost or ill-spent.” Any loss of time was an inconvenience. Consequently, Tocqueville travelled in a “constant state of tension,” never arriving in a place without knowing that he would be able to leave it.
Recommended, buy it here.
What I’ve been reading
Maria Blanco and Alberto Mingardi have produced a very useful volume, Show and Biz: The Market Economy in TV Series and Popular Culture (2000-2020), providing an updated look at the (somewhat) rising popularity of business and capitalism in U.S. popular culture.
David O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity: Delacroix, Civilization, and Barbarism. A very good book planting Eugene Delacroix — both his paintings and writings — squarely in a “progress studies” tradition. Like so much other 19th (and also 18th) century art. Good color plates too.
Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women. Do you judge books by their degree of insight, or based on whether you agree with where they end up? This volume is a litmus test for that question, and I give it either an A or an F minus, depending on your standard. In my view, Dworkin remains an underrated and intellectually honest (if overly consistent) feminist thinker. This one is from 1978, still interesting albeit repulsive if you try to apply any moral judgment to it. But don’t! If you are looking for reductios in support of reactionary points of view, this is the best place to start. Better yet is to drop all the consistency requirements and end up somewhere in between.
Simon Shorvon, The Idea of Epilepsy: A Medical and Social History of Epilepsy in the Modern Era (1860-2020). A remarkably thorough and intelligent treatment of a topic that now has a near-perfect stand-alone book.
There is Alan S. Kahan, Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism.
And Michael J. Bonner, In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present.
Vikash Yadav, Liberalism’s Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism.
Seth D. Kaplan, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, forthcoming in October.
*Unshackled*
The subtitle is A practical guide for highly-skilled immigrants to thrive in the United States, and the authors are Soundarya Balasubramani and Sameer Khedekar, just published. Covers all of the main immigration options into the United States in clear, understandable language. Even if you do not wish to come, this is perhaps the best and clearest attempt to explain a very muddled immigration system. You can buy it here. Here is the book’s website, with many resources, including on-line materials with core content.
How to eat well in Sri Lanka
Food here is excellent, but eating well involves some counterintuitive advice.
For one thing, there are few “undiscovered gems” along the roadways. It is just not a thing here, and several Sri Lanka residents have confirmed this to me (one person suggested there used to be lots of them, but they have faded). During my extensive road travels, I saw many many closed, empty, or otherwise deserted roadside restaurants. The open ones had few or no customers. So don’t put a lot of time into searching for them. You will do just fine eating at the obvious restaurants, including hotel restaurants.
Often breakfast is the best meal, as you can sample hoppers and string hoppers. If they will cook a hopper for you with an egg (and spices) inside, do that. Think of it as a spongy carbohydrate turned into a kind of crepe. The egg inside should not be overdone, but the woman cooking it for you has done this 7,834 times before, so probably it will be just right.
When you get string hoppers, it is all a matter of composition. Put the right spices, sauces, and sambals on top. Ask for assistance. The quality of the string hoppers varies only marginally, it is really all about your skills at composition and at asking for aid.
Hoppers and string hoppers are pretty much always very good. You want to keep on ordering them. And yes, food in Sri Lanka is somewhat of an exercise in repeated monotony, but it is a very appealing repeated monotony.
Vegetables in Sri Lanka are first-rate, and if you visit the vegetable markets in and near Dambulla you will come away impressed. If you are served just ordinary broccoli or cauliflower, without spice or garnish, it will be as good as anywhere.
The best vegetable to eat Sri Lankan style is the green beans. Never turn them down. Overall, Sri Lanka is one of the very best countries for vegetarians or vegans. You’ll see many other kinds of curry, such as with jackfruit or manioc, and they are not bad, but once you have tried them you will be returning to the green beans.
The lentils are consistently superb, arguably better overall than in India, though in fewer styles. Keep on ordering them.
Thou shalt not refuse any curry served with cashews in it.
If you are at a buffet, sample any item that has a small green leaf in the sauce. Sample any item with an unusual name, with “tempered cowpeas” being one but not the only example.
Beware of buffets designed for Russian or Chinese package tourists, though usually there will be hoppers or string hoppers somewhere to be had.
Coconut roti is a wonderful snack, but you should not eat too many of them, either at once or across the course of a lifetime.
There is the usual array of tropical fruits, high in quality, though to be frank most of them bore me at this point.
Both pork and bacon are excellent (and common) in Sri Lanka. The pork is much better than the beef. So far I’ve had better luck with shrimp than with fish, though I don’t feel I’ve cracked the cultural codes yet for seafood. Some love Sri Lankan crab, but I haven’t had the chance to explore that direction.
Western-style baked goods are by no means a total disaster here, and it is not a mistake to try them. The high quality is supposed to stem from the earlier Portuguese influence, at least if you can believe llama Chat.
Aqua Forte, in Galle, is a Michelin star-quality Italian restaurant with affordable prices. The chef is from Trentino. The cured raw fish with pistachios is one of the best courses I’ve had in years.
In Colombo, Monsoon is a good Asian fusion place, get the beef rendang. Shang Palace is a good Chinese restaurant.
In sum, you can eat very well here at great prices and booking doesn’t ever seem to be a problem. You do need to be willing to double and triple down on some items, but don’t worry — you’ll like them!
Addendum: The perceptive reader will note I have covered only the food of southern Sri Lanka. That is also the part of the country — by far — that you are most likely to visit.
What I’ve been reading
Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849. The new go-to book on this topic, magisterial on the lead-up causes and later on the international influences and contagions. Will make the year’s best non-fiction list.
Fearghal Cochrane, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People. A wonderful book on this most underrated city, the best overall general introduction to Belfast.
Rory Naismith, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages is a historically important work about the significant of coined money in dragging the Western world out of the Dark Ages.
Florian Illies, 1913:The Year Before the Storm, considers what the leading German and Austro-Hungarian cultural figures were doing in that year, right before disaster struck.
Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. A lengthy and highly detailed polemic arguing that Protestantism is the true universal church, rather than a dissent per se. These are not my issues, but some people will like this book a good deal.
I can recommend Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions, mostly about the 1820s.
Tara Isabella Burton, Self Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians is an interesting look at the earlier history of self-made celebrity images.
Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham, Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces that Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, is a Freakonomics-style look at what we can learn from controlled and also natural experiments in medicine.
Soon to appear is Yasheng Huang’s The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline. Here is my earlier CWT with Yasheng Huang.
I will not right now have time to read Wang Hui, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, but it appears to be a major work of importance.
Saturday assorted links
1.The cost of trade in books — EU to UK — is rising.
2. “The results suggest an intent-to-treat effect of 0.17 years higher longevity as a result of prohibition. A back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests a minimum treatment-on-treated effect of 1.7 years impact.” Link here.
3. Why did nuclear flop in Britain?
4. MIE: “121-year-old Cadbury coronation chocolates to be sold at auction.“
6. New Bloomberg crypto ecosystem dashboard, “mainstream integration accelerating…” Listen to Jamie Coutts! The future of crypto remains uncertain, but currently reading a person’s comments about crypto is one of the best ways to spot some of said person’s cognitive and emotional biases.
8. Can Claude 2 write like you?
9. Why many men reject the mode of discourse found in therapy (hint: too feminized).
My excellent Conversation with David Bentley Hart
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
David Bentley Hart is an American writer, philosopher, religious scholar, critic, and theologian who has authored over 1,000 essays and 19 books, including a very well-known translation of the New Testament and several volumes of fiction.
In this conversation, Tyler and David discuss ways in which Orthodox Christianity is not so millenarian, how theological patience shapes the polities of Orthodox Christian nations, how Heidegger deepened his understanding of Christian Orthodoxy, who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970, the simplest way to explain how Orthodoxy diverges from Catholicism, the future of the American Orthodox Church, what he thinks of the Book of Mormon, whether theological arguments are ultimately based on reason or faith, what he makes of reincarnation and near-death experiences, gnosticism in movies and TV, why he dislikes Sarah Ruden’s translation of the New Testament, the most difficult word to translate, a tally of the 15+ languages he knows, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Hart is probably the best-read CWT guest of all time, with possible competition from Dana Gioia? Excerpt:
COWEN: If you could explain to me, as simply as possible, in which ways is Orthodox Christianity not so very millenarian?
HART: Well, it depends on what you mean by millenarian. I’d have to ask you to be a bit more —
COWEN: Say the Protestant 17th-century sense that the world is on the verge of a very radical transformation that will herald in some completely new age, and we all should be prepared for it.
HART: Well, in one sense, it’s been the case of Christianity from the first century that it’s always existed in a time between times. There’s always this sense of being in history but always expecting an imminent interruption of history.
But Orthodoxy has been around for a while. It’s part of an underrated culture, grounded originally in the Eastern Greco-Roman world, and has a huge apparatus of philosophy and theology and, I think, over the centuries has learned to be patient.
The Protestant millenarianism you speak of always seems to have been born out of historical crisis in a sense. The rise of the nation-state, the fragmentation of the Western Church — it’s always as much an effective history as a flight from history.
Whereas, I think it’s fair to say that Orthodoxy has created for itself a parallel world just outside the flow of history. It puts much more of an emphasis on the spiritual life, mysticism, that sort of thing. And as such, whereas it still uses the recognizable language of the imminent return of Christ, it’s not at the center of the spiritual life.
COWEN: How does that theological patience shape the polities of Orthodox Christian nations and regions? How does that matter?
HART: Well, it’s been both good and bad, to be honest. At its best, Orthodoxy has cultivated a spiritual life that nourished millions and that puts an emphasis upon moral obligation to others and the life of charity and the ascetical virtues of Christianity, the self-denial. At its worst, however, it’s often been an accommodation with historical forces that are antithetical to the gospel, too.
It’s often been the case that Orthodoxy has been so, let’s say, disenchanted with the millenarian expectation that it’s become a prop of the state, and you can see it today in Russia, in which you have a church institution. Now, this isn’t to speak of the faithful themselves, but the institutional authority of the state — of the institution, rather, of the church more or less being nothing but a propaganda wing of an authoritarian and terrorist government.
So, it’s had both its good and its bad consequences over the centuries. At its best, as I say, it encourages a true spiritual life that can teach one to be detached from ambitions and expectations and the violent projects of the ego. But at its worst, it can become a passive participant in precisely those sorts of projects and those sorts of evils.
Recommended, interesting throughout, and yes I do ask him about the Baltimore Orioles.
Central Notions of Smithian Liberalism
Just out, by my colleague Daniel B. Klein, I have not yet read it. It is described as follows:
Central Notions of Smithian Liberalism explores notions jural, political, and economic. The author does intellectual history as a way of theorizing—that is, to advance political theory, jural theory, moral theory, social theory, economic theory. The author treats Adam Smith and the liberalism he shared with David Hume and Edmund Burke. They represent classical liberalism at its best. Their classical liberalism is today aptly called conservative liberalism. The chapters derive mostly from substantial articles previously published in scholarly journals. Chapters expound Smith’s tri-layered justice, liberty, jural dualism, Humean conventionalist political theory, and Smithian liberalism. A chapter written with Erik Matson, “Convention without Convening,” explains natural convention, transcending “nature” and “convention” and attesting the place of Hume and Smith in natural law traditions and enlarging our understanding of those traditions. A chapter asks and answers, “Is It Just to Pursue Honest Income?”. Another chapter identifies four sets of nonconflicting rules, namely (1) government law, (2) commutative justice, (3) ethics writ large, and (4) just government law. Other chapters relate Smithian liberalism to various topics, including Iain McGilchrist’s divided brain, being grateful for without being grateful to, and the Export-Import Bank. The final chapter considers the fortunes of liberalism in relation to prevailing attitudes toward allegory and God.
Free download at the link, I am pleased to see more books presented in this fashion. Much better than the $100 price tags (and up) you get from some publishers…
What does it mean to understand how a scientific literature is put together?
In just about any scientific literature, there is an undercurrent of tacit knowledge which is not very directly expressed in any of the published pieces. That knowledge may cover the following issues, among many others:
1. How the rules of the conversation operate, and how a body of literature on a question coheres.
2. Why certain papers and methods are not taken seriously any more (you don’t generally find outright refutations of them).
3. Which results and papers are taken how seriously. Citations metrics help here, but not nearly as much as you might think.
4. What kinds of results and methods would be required to induce researchers to move to a new conclusion.
5. Why/when one paper pointing in a particular direction doesn’t prove much of anything, and why people don’t do things a certain way.
6. How, by asking around, you can figure out some (not all) of these issues, even if you do no work in that field. This includes knowledge of how to interpret the verbal feedback you receive from practitioners and how to integrate it into a broader knowledge of the body of research.
There is much more, as that is a very brief introduction to some key issues. I now have a few points:
a. I wish people would present this knowledge more directly! If only in oral form. Why not have some key people in a field talk through how their field actually works? Record that, issue transcripts, and yes feed it into LLMs.
b. LLMs should be more explicitly tested for their skill at explaining how these matters work. It is an important question for how much LLMs might speed up scientific progress.
c. Debates between people will not go well when one person has a good understanding of a particular field in this manner, and the other person does not. The debates will go even less well when one of the participants doesn’t understand these matters for any field whatsoever, and has no real idea that these questions even exist. That said, debates stand a chance of going well when both parties share a common understanding on these matters.
d. Many of the people who claim the mantle of science might cite published papers, but in fact they have little or no understanding of science as a conversation and a body of literature.
(Ilya Novak wrote to me: “I think the issue is less that RFk JR is a conspiracy theorist, but that he thinks being “pro science” means being able to reference this or that paper. He does not understand the concept of science as a research agenda among a community of scholars having a long running conversation with back and forth papers. He can reference “big” papers, but he can tell you nothing about their research methods or criticism made of them by subsequent papers.)
e. It is possible to be a successful researcher and not have a great sense of the tacit conventions across other fields, or how you might learn them if you had to.
f. Many contrarian science-related books fail because they fail on this question. Having the author throw a lot of arguments against the mainstream doesn’t solve this problem. Very often such commentators fail utterly at identifying and addressing the hinge questions upon which their most substantive propositions depend.
g. The very best science and social science journalists understand these matters, but most do not.
h. There is something unfair about this standard, because it is not extremely transparent and the quality of a person’s scientific understanding cannot always be easily verified to an external audience. That is bad news for the public acceptance of science, but it does not make these matters less important.
Plagues Upon the Earth
Kyle Harper’s Plagues Upon the Earth is a remarkable accomplishment that weaves together microbiology, history, and economics to understand the role of diseases in shaping human history. Harper, an established historian known for his first three books on Rome and late antiquity, has an impressive command of virology, bacteriology, and parasitology as well as history and economics. In “Plagues Upon the Earth.” he explains all of these clearly and with many arresting turns of phrase and insights:
There are about seventy-three bacteria among major human pathogens–out of maybe a trillion bacterial species on earth. To imagine bacteria primarily as pathogens is about as fair as thinking of human beings as mostly serial killers.
Despite the tingling fear we still feel in the face of large animals, fire made predators a negligible factor in human population dynamics. The warmth, security and mystic peace you feel around the campfire has been instilled by almost two million years of evolutionary advantage given to us by the flames.
Mosquitos are vampires with wings….The blood heist itself is an amazing feat. Following contrails of carbon dioxide that lead to her mark, the female mosquito lands and starts probing. Once she reaches her target, she inserts her tube-like needle, as flexible as a plumber’s snake, into the skin. She pokes a dozen or more times until she hits her mark. The proboscis itself is moistened with compounds that anesthetize the victim’s skin and deter coagulation. For a tense minute or two, she pulls blood into her gut, taking on several times her own weight, as much as she can carry and still fly. She has stolen a valuable liquid full of energy and free metals. Engorged, she unsteadily makes her getaway, desperate for the nearest vertical plane to land and recuperate, as her body digests the meal and keeps only what is needful for her precious eggs.
What I like best about Plagues Upon the Earth is that Harper thinks like an economist. I mean this in two senses. First, his chapters on the Wealth and Health of Nations and Disease and Global Divergence are alone worth the price of admission. In these chapters, Harper brings disease to the fore to understand why some nations are rich and others poor but he is well aware of all the other explanations and weaves the story together with expertise.
The second sense in which Harper thinks like an economist is deeper and more important. He has a model of parasites and their interactions with human beings. That model, of course, is the evolutionary model. To a parasite, human beings are a desirable host:
Just as robbers steal from banks because that is where the money is, parasites exploit human bodies because there are high rewards for being able to do so…. for a parasite, there is now more incentive to exploit humans than ever…look at human energy consumption…in a developed society today, every individual consumer is the rough ecological equivalent to a herd of gazelles.
That parasites are driven by “incentives” would seem to be nearly self-evident but in the hands of a master simple models can lead to surprising hypothesis and conclusions. Harper is the Gary Becker of parasite modeling. Here’s a simple example: human beings have changed their environments tremendously in the past several hundred years but that change in human environment created new incentives and constraints on parasites. Thus, it’s not surprising that most human parasites are new parasites. Chimpanzee parasites today are about the same as those that exploited chimpanzees 100,000 years ago but human parasites are entirely different. Indeed, because the human-host environment has changed, our parasites are more novel, narrow, and nasty than parasites attacking other species.
It’s commonly suggested that one of the reasons we are encountering novel parasites is due to our disruptions of natural ecosystems, venturing into territories previously unexplored by humans, thereby releasing ancient parasites that have lain dormant for millennia. Like the alleged curse of Tutankhamun’s tomb we are unleashing ancient foes! Similarly, concerns are voiced that climate change, through its effect on permafrost melt, may liberate “zombie” parasites poised for retaliation. But ancient parasites are not fit for human hosts as they have not evolved within the context of the contemporary human environment. So, while I don’t trivialize the potential consequences of melting permafrost, I think we should fear much more relatively recent diseases such as measles, cholera, polio, Ebola, AIDS, Zika, and COVID-19. Not to mention whatever entirely new disease evolution is bound to throw in our path.
Indeed, one of the most interesting speculation’s in Plagues Upon the Earth is that “global divergences in health may have reached their maxima in the early twentieth century.” The reason is that urbanization and transportation turned the new diseases of the industrial era, like cholera, tuberculosis and the plague (the latter older diseases but ideally primed for the industrial era) into pandemics (also a relatively recent word) at a time when only a minority of the world had the tools to combat the new diseases.
Science, of course, is giving us greater understanding and control of nature but our very success increases the incentives of parasites to breach our defenses.
[Thus,] the narrative is not one of unbroken progress, but one of countervailing pressures between the negative health feedback of growth and humanity’s rapidly expanding but highly unequal capacities to control threats to our health.
*Goodbye Eastern Europe*
The author is Jacob Mikanowski and the subtitle is An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Might this be the best overall book on how Eastern Europe ended up so different (but not entirely different) from Western Europe? I’ll be doing a CWT with him later this fall (hold your suggestions for now, and I’ll hold further commentary as well), but though I would flag this book for you in the meantime. I hope it gets some good publicity as the release date is approaching.
*Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter*
Ian Mortimer is the author of this excellent book, here was one of my favorite bits:
It may seem preposterous today to describe a 5 mph increase in the maximum land speed as revolutionary. It sounds like someone pointing to a hillock and calling it a mountain. But it was revolutionary, for a number of reasons. Like a one-degree rise in average global temperature, it represents a huge change. This is because it is not a one-off event but a permanent doubling of the maximum potential speed. By 1600 the fastest riders could cover 150 miles in a day and individual letters carried by teams of riders could travel at speeds of up to 200 miles per day. This significantly reduced the time it took to inform the government about the goings-on in the realm. If the Scots attacked Berwick when the king was at Winchester, and the news came south at 40 miles per day, as it is likely to have done in the eleventh century, it would have taken nine days to arrive. After the king had deliberated what to do, if only for a day, the response would have travelled back at the same speed — so the north of the kingdom would have been without royal instructions for almost three weeks. If, however, the post could carry the news at 200 miles per day, the king and his advisers could decide on a response in less than two days. After a day’s discussion, the king’s instructions would have been back in the Berwick area less than five days after the danger had arisen — two weeks faster than in the eleventh century.
It is hard to exaggerate the political and social implications of such a change. The rapid delivery of information allowed a king far greater control over his realm…The rise in travelling speeds subtle shifted the balance of power away from territorial lords and towards central government.
The speed of information thus created a demand for more information.
That meant, among other things, more spies. And there was this:
Looked at simply as a statistic, an increase in speed of 5 mph is not very impressive. In terms of the cultural horizons explored in this book, however, it is profoundly important. Imagine the rings spreading out from where you are now — the first ring marking the limit of how far you can travel in one day, with a further ring beyond it marketing two days, and then a yet further ring marking three days. Now imagine all those moving further and further outwards, each one twice as far…you haven’t just doubled or trebled the area you could cover in one, two or three days, you’ve increased it exponentially…With the collective horizon also increasing exponentially, you can see how a doubling of the distances people could travel in a day had a huge impact on the nation’s understanding of itself and what was going on within and beyond its borders.
Interesting throughout, this one will make the year’s “best of non-fiction” list. You can buy it here.
What I’ve been reading
Bjorn Lomborg’s Best Things First delivers the expected dose of correct common sense.
Charles Horsnby, Kenya, A History since Independence is a very good long treatment of everything up to about 2010, conceptual too.
David Schleicher, In a Bad State: Responding to State and Local Budget Crises. An important, unfortunately timely, and very intelligent book on how the federal government has responded to state and local insolvency in the past. My main complaint is that at 171 pp. of text it is far too short.
Norman Lebrecht, Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces. A good introduction to Ludwig van, even if some parts do rush by too quickly. Also a good introduction for how to think about different recorded versions of the same piece.
There is Markus K. Brunnermeier and Ricardo Reis, A Crash Course on Crises: Macroeconomic Concepts for Run-ups, Collapses, and Recoveries.
And also Angus Deaton, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.
Kelly Smith offers his account of Prenda micro-schools in his A Fire to Be Kindled: How a Generation of Empowered Learners Can Lead Meaningful Lives and Move Humanity Forward.
Patrick Mackie, Mozart in Motion: His Work and his World in Pieces is a good introduction to what the title promises.
*The Lost Album of the Beatles*
The author is Daniel Rachel, and the subtitle is What if The Beatles Hadn’t Split Up? This is perfectly fine as a music book (for Beatle fans, it won’t convince the unconverted), but I couldn’t stop thinking of the Lucas critique.
For the author, the Beatles “final last album” is a double album of the best cuts from Beatle early solo careers, and that is an impressive assemblage indeed. McCartney’s “Back Seat of My Car,” for instance, was written in 1968, or at least started in that year, so surely it would have ended up on the last album. Or would it have? It didn’t end up on Let It Be or Abbey Road, so who knows? As long as the end of The Beatles was in sight, perhaps each Beatle would have hoarded his best potential solo material. Or maybe the other Beatles would have vetoed some of those songs, just as Paul in 1968 had decided that George’s “Isn’t a Pity?” wasn’t suitable as a Beatles song. Or maybe John and Paul would have had to give more songs to George and Ringo, to keep the group together, but arguably to the detriment of the final album. Most of the songs on All Things Must Pass are very good, but best suited to their own little walled garden.
In contrast, this economist believes that an additional album would have fallen somewhere between Let It Be and The White Album, with an overall sound somewhat akin to “Free as a Bird,” or perhaps also Ringo’s “I’m the Greatest,” penned by John and cut with George as well. Good stuff, but I’m still glad they split. Get that Q up, especially given that market power was present!
And don’t assume that Beatle behavior remains invariant across different policy regimes. Lucas truly was a universal economist.
*The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe*
An excellent book by Martyn Rady, here is the passage most relevant to the history of economic thought:
A Norwegian economist and his wife have published a line of bestsellers in the field of economics written before 1750. Top is Aristotle’s Economics. Composed in the fourth century BCE, it is still available in paperback. Martin Luther’s denunciation of usury (1524) is number three. But there, in the top ten, is an unfamiliar name — Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (1626-1692), who was a government official in the duchy of Saxe-Gotha in Thuringia. Seckendorff’s German Princely State (Teutscher Fürsten-Staat, 1656) is a thousand-page blockbuster that went through thirteen editions and was in continuous print for a century. Although only ever published in German, it was influential throughout Central Europe, shaping policy from the Banat to the Baltic.
I enjoyed this sentence:
Besides his distinctive false nose (the result of a duelling accident), Tycho Brahe kept an elk in his lodgings as a drinking companion.
And yes the book does have an insightful discussion of Laibach, the Slovenian hard-to-describe musical band. You can buy it here.