Results for “best book” 2009 found
*Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950*, by Bruce Caldwell & Hansjoerg Klausinger
One of the best biographies of any economist, covers anything you might wish to know, and with conceptual understanding. This is a fantastic book and I am eagerly awaiting volume II. Mini-excerpt:
Hayek [at LSE] never really liked Mannheim, whom he spent some time with when he first arrived, trying to introduce him around and help him to get acclimated. This ended when, after listening patiently to Mannheim complain about the inadequacy of the English language for expressing his ideas, Hayek finally blurted out, “So much the worse for your ideas!”
You can pre-order here. Hayek, by the way, is an interesting polar case for any talent search algorithm. He was first interested in botany, and didn’t do anything in economics until he was 30 years old.
And I hadn’t known that Colette was the stepmother of Bertrand de Jouvenal (“On Power”), and had a five-year affair with him!
*Risky Business*
The subtitle is Why Insurance Markets Fail and What To Do About It, and the authors are the highly regarded Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Ray Fisman. The level is a bit above what could make this book a bestseller, but I consider that a good thing. The book in fact is a classic example of how to present economic research in readable, digestible form and should be regarded as such.
I do have a few qualms, but please note these are outweighed by the very high quality of the core material:
1. I think the authors underestimate how rapidly “Big Data” is shifting the information asymmetries away from consumers/policyholders. This is related to my recent remarks on AI.
1b. For reasons stemming from #1, insurance/surveillance/control, including from employers, will rise in importance as an issue, and soon. I don’t get a sense of that from reading this book. We might alleviate selection problems, while creating other difficulties including ethical dilemmas.
2. I would like to see more on moral hazard.
3. I also would want to see more — much more — on the public choice reasons why government insurance markets so often fail — the authors should consider their own title! Should the Florida government really be propping up insurance contracts and insurance markets to protect homeowners against climate change-related losses? No matter what your view, this kind of issue is under-discussed. How about the FDIC? Bailout-related moral hazard issues? Those are hardly “small potatoes.” I get that isn’t “the book they set out to write,” but still I worry that the final picture they present is misleading when it comes to market failure vs. government failure. Adverse selection is really just one part of insurance markets, but this book doesn’t teach you that.
3b. Isn’t excess liability through our court system another major reason why insurance markets fail? We needed a Price-Anderson Act, where government assumes a lot of the liability, to support our nuclear power sector, even though coal alternatives were riskier and more harmful, both short run and long run. In terms of actual importance, hasn’t this been a major, major factor?
3c. Are restrictions on “boil in oil” contracts (no matter what you think of them ethically) another factor in institutional failure here? Maybe that is one way of making America safe for bungee jumping. Or we can follow New Zealand, and limit liability here altogether. The interaction of insurance and liability law is a major issue, and we have not been getting it right.
4. The authors absolutely do consider “positive selection” (e.g., it is the responsible people who buy life insurance, thus leading to a favorable customer pool), but I would give it more emphasis. If you believe that income inequality, “deaths of despair,” and educational polarization are growing problems, this phenomenon likely is becoming more important.
4b. How about more concessions in the Obamacare analysis? For years I read that a weaker mandate would cause the system to collapse. Yet the Republicans significantly cut back on mandate enforcement and the system seems to be getting along OK, at least from that point of view. (In fact, politically speaking Trump arguably saved Obamacare.) What did everyone miss? Did they overrate adverse selection arguments and underrate positive selection? It seems that was a major failing of the economics profession, which if anything was more insistent on “the three legs of the stool” than policymakers were. The authors do cover this all at length, but they can’t bring themselves to note “we got down to 7-8 percent uninsured, the whole thing actually worked out OK, and the economists didn’t quite get it right.”
5. There are plenty of cases when expected “insurance” markets do not exist, and we cannot boil those down to adverse selection. Why don’t all those Bob Shiller proposals happen? (Is it really inside information about gdp? That seems doubtful.) Why aren’t there more prediction markets? Why have so many proposed futures contracts on exchanges failed? These all would seem to serve insurance-like purposes, among their other functions. Yet their supply seems skimpy, at least relative to an economist’s expectations. Why? Perhaps there is more to failed insurance markets than meets the eye.
I know authors can fit only so much into a book, but if I can fit this much into a blog post…I would like to see more! And I think that would result in a more realistic policy balance as well, and draw attention to major issues other than adverse selection.
Overrated or underrated?
Ramagopal asks: Peter Bauer, Mises, Joan Robinson
1. Peter Bauer is underrated. He was a brilliant development economist who wrote seminal early and detailed books on the rubber sector and also networks of West African trade. He also recognized the importance of the informal sector early on. He then moved into a more polemic mode, writing books on market-oriented development strategies and very critical of foreign aid. I believe at the time he was largely correct about foreign aid, though I would recognize also that since then the quality and effectiveness of foreign aid has improved considerably, most of all because the receiving governments have on average improved in quality.
His family had a coat of arms, linked above at his name.
I once met Bauer at a seminar at NYU, way back when. He reminded me of a character from LOTR and he had a thick mane of white hair. I believe Bauer was also one of the first well-known economists to come out as gay.
2. Mises is underrated. His 1922 book Socialism is still the best and also historically most important critique of socialism, ever. His earlier articles about the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism are among the most important economics articles, ever. Those are already some pretty important contributions, and yet he is often talked of as a crank, perhaps because in part some of his followers were indeed cranks.
Liberalism I quite like. His book Bureaucracy is underdeveloped but still pretty interesting, and his hypotheses about the logic of cascading interventionism, if not entirely correct, still are an important contribution to public choice. They do explain a lot of the data. Human Action is big, cranky, and dogmatic, but for some people a useful tonic and alternative to the usual stuff. I can’t say I have ever really liked it, and in an odd way the whole emphasis on “Man acts” undoes at least one part of marginalism. The early Theory of Money and Credit was a pretty good early 20th century book on monetary theory.
Hayek somehow ended up as “the reasonable face of classical liberalism,” but in fact Mises was far more politically correct by current standards.
Obviously there is a sliver of people who very much overrate Mises. Here is a guy who hardly anyone rates properly. I’m still sticking with considerably underrated.
3. Joan Robinson’s Theory of Imperfect Competition was a very important book, and it laid the groundwork for a lot of later thinking about market structure, both geometrically and conceptually. But she didn’t understand actual economics, was a Maoist, and seemed to like the regime of North Korea. So I have to say overrated. Her Accumulation of Capital also was no great shakes, though hardly her greatest sin. Her growth theory was far too Marxian, and far too fond of “Golden Rule” constructs, which are mechanistic rather than insightful as models ought to be. Her writings in Economic Philosophy were not profound. So she has one truly major contribution, but I can’t get past the really bad stuff.
Plod has a bunch of questions
From my request for requests, here goes:
– What does the NYT do well? And conversely what are they bad at?
– What is your theory on the rising lack of male ambition?
– Why do modern fantasy authors (Martin, Rothfuss, others) not finish their works?
– If you were chief economist czar of the US, what is the policy would you implement first? In the UK?
– Will non-12-tone equal temperament music ever become popular?
– What do you think will become of charter cities like Prospera?
I will do the answers by number:
1. The New York Times can publish superb culture pieces, most of all when they are not pandering on PC issues. Their music and movie reviews are not the very best, but certainly worth the time. International coverage is high variance, but they have plenty of articles with information you won’t find elsewhere. Some of the finest obituaries. The best parts of the Op-Ed section are indispensable, and the worst parts are important to read for other reasons. Perhaps most importantly, the NYT has all sorts of random articles that are just great, even if I don’t always like the framing. Try this one on non-profit hospitals.
On the other side of the ledger, the metro and sports sections I do not very much read (probably they are OK?). The business section has long been skimpy, and is not currently at its peak. Historical coverage with racial angles can be atrocious. The worst Op-Eds are beyond the pale in their deficient reasoning, and there are quite a few of them. On “Big Tech” the paper is abysmal, and refuses to look the conflict of interest issues in the eye. They just blew it on a new Covid study. The book review section used to be much better, I think mainly because it has become a low cost way to appease the Wokies.
2. Male ambition in the United States is increasing in variance, not waning altogether. But on the left hand side of that distribution I would blame (in no particular order): deindustrialization, women who don’t need male financial support anymore, marijuana, on-line pornography, improved measurement of worker quality, the ongoing rise of the service sector, too much homework in schools, better entertainment options, and the general increasing competitiveness of the world, causing many to retreat in pre-emptive defeat.
3. Male fantasy writers do not finish their works because those works have no natural ending. There is always another kingdom, a lost family member, a new magic power to be discovered, and so on. And the successful fantasy authors keep getting paid to produce more content, and their opportunity cost is otherwise low. Why exactly should they tie everything up in a neat bow, as Tolkien did with the three main volumes of LOTR?
4. For the United States, I would have more freedom to build, massive deregulations of most things other than carbon and finance, and much more high-skilled immigration, followed by some accompanying low-skilled immigration. For the UK I would do broadly the same, but also would focus more on human capital problems in northern England as a means of boosting economic growth.
5. Non-12-tone equal temperament music is for instance very popular in the Arabic world, and has been for a long time.
6. I have been meaning to visit Prospera, but have not yet had the chance to go. I expect to. My general worries with charter cities usually involve scale, and also whether they will just get squashed by the host governments, which almost by definition are dysfunctional to begin with. Most successful charter cities in history have had the support of a major outside hegemon, such as Hong Kong relying on Britain.
The economic contributions of Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke is best known for being Fed chairman, but he has a long and distinguished research career of great influence. Here are some of his contributions:
1. In a series of papers, often with Alan Blinder, Bernanke argued that “credit and money” are a better leading indicator than money alone. And more generally he helped us rethink the money-income correlation that was so promoted by Milton Friedman. This work was more correct than not, but since money as a leading indicator has fallen out of favor (partially because of Bernanke’s own later actions!), these contributions are seen as less important than was the case for about fifteen years. See also this piece on the (earlier) import of the federal funds rate as a measure of monetary policy. Ben’s body of work on money and credit was what first brought him renown.
2. Bernanke has a famous 1983 paper on how the breakdown of financial intermediation was a key component of the Great Depression. Earlier, Milton Friedman had stressed the import of the contraction of the money supply, but Bernanke’s work led to a much richer picture of how the collapse happened. Savers were cut off from borrowers, due to bank failures, and the economy could not mobilize its capital very effectively. This article also shows the integration between Bernanke’s work and that of Diamond and Dybvig. This piece has held up very well.
3. Bernanke has related work, with Gertler, Gilchrist and others, on how financial problems can worsen a business cycle. This work of course fed into his later decisions as chairman of the Fed. In yet other work, Bernanke showed how economic downturns can lower the value of collateral, thus squeezing the lending process and exacerbating business cycle downturns.
4. Bernanke’s doctoral dissertation was on the concepts of option value and irreversible investment. Modest increases in business uncertainty can cause big drops in investment, due to the desire to wait, exercise “option value,” and sample more information. This work was published in the QJE in 1983. I have long felt Bernanke does not receive enough credit for this particular idea, which later was fleshed out by Pindyck and Rubinfeld.
5. Bernanke wrote plenty of pieces — this one with Mishkin — on inflation targeting as a new means of conducting monetary policy. Those were the days! Much of the OECD lived under this regime for a few decades.
6. Here is Ben with co-authors: “We first document that essentially all the U.S. recessions of the past thirty years have been preceded by both oil price increases and a tightening of monetary policy…” Uh-oh!
7. Here is 2004 Ben on what to do when an economy hits the zero lower bound. Here is Ben on earlier Japanese monetary policy, and what he called their “self-induced paralysis” at the zero bound. He really was in training for the Fed job all those years. Here is Ben on “The Great Moderation.” Here is 1990 Ben on clearing and settlement during the 1987 crash.
8. Ben has made major contributions to our understanding of how the gold standard and international deflationary pressures induced the Great Depression, transmitted it across borders, and made it much worse. This work has held up very well and is now part of the mainstream account. And more here.
9. Bernanke coined the term “global savings glut.”
Here is all the Swedish information on the researchers and their work. I haven’t read these yet, but they are usually very well done. Here is Ben on scholar.google.com.
In sum, Ben is a broad and impressive thinker and researcher. This prize is obviously deserved. In my admittedly unorthodox opinion, his most important work is historical and on the Great Depression.
*In Search of Monsters to Destroy*
The author is my colleague Christopher J. Coyne, and the subtitle is The Folly of the American Empire and the Paths to Peace. Chris is a non-interventionist in foreign policy and I am not, but if you wish to read the best arguments for that position…this is your book.
You can pre-order here.
*Conversations with Goethe*
By Johann Peter Eckermann, imagine transcripts of podcasts from the 1820s, albeit edited. This book is described on the back jacket as “In 1823 he [Goethe] became friend and mentor to the young writer Johann Eckermann, who, for the last nine years of Goethe’s life, recorded their wide-ranging conversations on art, literature, science and philosophy.”
I find this book gripping throughout, though many parts are tough going if you are not up on the details of not only Friedrich Schiller, but also say Ludwig Tieck and Christoph Martin Wieland. If nothing else, it helps you realize how funny virtually all of today’s podcasts will sound (and read) someday.
You can order it here. Upon my reread, one striking feature of the dialogues is how much Goethe was obsessed with discussing and evaluating talent:
“Byron’s lofty status as an English peer was very damaging to him. Every talent struggles with the outside world — and it is harder still for someone of high birth and great wealth. A middling sort of condition is far more congenial to talent — which is why our great artists and poets come from the middle classes. Byron’s fondness for excess would have been far less dangerous to him if he had been o lower birth and humbler means. As it was, he had it in his power to fulfill his every whim, and that landed him in endless trouble. And besides, how could he, coming from the upper class himself, be impressed or inhibited by social rank of any kind? He said whatever was on his mind, and that brought him into ceaseless conflict with the world.
You will find talent discussions every few pages or more frequently yet.
The new translation is by Allan Blunden and is A+, noting that Goethe usually is impossible to meaningfully translate into English. This is amazingly the first new English translation in 150 years and it is the best sense we have of Goethe as a human being.
The text also has been an influence on my own Conversations with Tyler. The book is now quite oddly contemporary once again.
My Conversation with the excellent Walter Russell Mead
Here is the audio and transcript, here is the summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss how the decline of American religiosity has influenced US foreign policy, which American presidents best and least understood the Middle East, the shrewd reasons Stalin supported Israel, the Saudi secret to political stability, the fate of Pakistan, the most likely scenario for China moving on Taiwan, the gun pointed at the head of German business, the US’s “murderous fetishization of ideology over reality” in Sub-Saharan Africa, the inherent weakness in having a foreign policy establishment dominated by academics, what he learned from attending the Groton School, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How would you change or improve the training that goes into America’s foreign policy elite?
MEAD: Well, I would start by trying to draw people’s attention to that, over the last 40 years, there’s been an enormous increase in the number of PhD grads engaged in the formation of American foreign policy. There’s also been an extraordinary decline in the effectiveness of American foreign policy. We really ought to take that to heart.
COWEN: Do you think of it as an advantage that you don’t have a PhD?
MEAD: Huge advantage.
COWEN: How would you describe that advantage?
MEAD: I don’t really believe in disciplines. I see connections between things. I start from reality. I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual here. You need ideas to help you organize your perceptions of reality. But I think there’s a tendency in a lot of social science disciplines — you start from a bunch of really smart, engaged people who have been thinking about a set of questions and say, “We’ll do a lot better if we stop randomly thinking about everything that pops up and try, in some systematic way, to organize our thinking of this.”
I think you do get some gains from that, but you see, over time, the focus of the discipline has this tendency to shift. The discipline tends to become more inward navel-gazing. “What’s the history of our efforts to systematize our thinking about this?” The discipline becomes more and more, in a sense, ideological and internally focused and less pragmatic.
I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much in the intellectual weaknesses of a lot of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble, where they’re in this academic setting, and the rule . . . They become socialized into the academy, just as much as prisoners get socialized into the routines of a prison.
The American academy is actually a terrible place for coming to understand how world politics works. Recently, I had a conversation with an American official who was very proud of the way that the US had broken the mold by revealing intelligence about Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine, and pointed out how that had really helped build the NATO coalition against Russian aggression, and so on.
So far as he goes, it’s true. But I said, however, if you really look at the total message the US was projecting to Russia in those critical months, there were two messages. One is, “We’ve got great intelligence on you. We actually understand you much better than you think.” It was shocking. I think it shocked the Russians. But on the other hand, we’re saying, “We think you’re going to win quickly in Ukraine. We’re offering Zelenskyy a plane ride out of Kyiv. We’re pulling out all our diplomats and urging other countries to pull out their diplomats.”
The message, actually the totality of the message that we sent to Putin is, “You are going to win if you do this.”
And this, on what makes for talent in the foreign policy arena:
…you can’t know too much history. A hunger for travel. I think too many foreign policy types don’t actually get out into the field nearly as much as they should. Curiosity about other cultures. A strong grounding in a faith of your own, which can be a secular ideology, perhaps, in some cases, but more often is likely to be a great religious tradition of some kind.
A very good conversation. And I am happy to recommend Walter’s new book The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.
What should I ask Ken Burns?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is the beginning of his rather formidable Wikipedia entry:
Kenneth Lauren Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.
His widely known documentary series include The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), and Country Music (2019). He was also executive producer of both The West (1996), and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015). Burns’s documentaries have earned two Academy Award nominations (for 1981’s Brooklyn Bridge and 1985’s The Statue of Liberty) and have won several Emmy Awards, among other honors.
His forthcoming book is the lovely Our America: A Photographic History. So what should I ask?
What I’ve been reading
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.
What should I ask Mary Gaitskill?
I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993, 2006, 2012, 2020), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998, 2008). Her books include the short story collection Bad Behavior (1988).
I consider The Mare, Veronica, and Lost Cat (among others) to be some of the best and most insightful American fiction of recent times. She is um…frank, and has held a series of actual jobs in her lifetime, including stripper and sex worker. She was also a teenage runaway.
Here is the The New Yorker covering her new Substack. Here is a Guardian profile:
Mary Gaitskill’s fiction is often called cold, or even brutal, but I have always loved it for nearly opposite reasons: its tender attention to the complexities of human emotion, and the compassion it coaxes from clear-eyed perception.
So what should I ask her?
What I’ve been reading
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.
Thursday assorted links
1. “Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam.”
2. Markets in everything: “The classes cost around $100 per dog and are so popular that Mr. Will’s six-year-old business, Rattlesnake Ready, is booked solid into fall.” WSJ, interesting throughout.
3. There is no great stagnation in snake legs.
4. “IOWA STATE FAIR’S BIG BOAR CONTEST HAS ONLY 2 ENTRIES AMID SOARING INFLATION, HEAT.” Highly recommended.
5. Dwarkesh Patel on eternal growth.
6. Like it or not, the government is governing (NYT). Basically most of what you’ve read about Congress and American government over the last fifteen years turns out to be wrong.
7. Podcast with Sriram Krishnan of a16z, and with Aarthi Ramamurthy, largely about India. Which Indian city has the best food, which have been my favorite movies of 2022, and how did he and his wife meet?
What should I ask Katherine Rundell?
She is the author of the splendid new book on John Donne, reviewed by me here. More generally, here is from Wikipedia:
Katherine Rundell (born 1987) is an English author and academic. She is the author of Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won both the overall Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and has appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, Poetry Please, and Seriously….and Private Passions.
Rundell’s other books include The Girl Savage (2011), released in 2014 in a slightly revised form as Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms in the United States where it was the winner of the 2015 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction, The Wolf Wilder (2015), and The Explorer (2017), winner of the children’s book prize at the 2017 Costa Book Awards.
And this:
…all her books, and her play, contain a joke at Belgium’s expense…
She is also an avid roofwalker, and more. Here is Katherine eating a tarantula.
So what should I ask her?
*Vanishing Asia*, by Kevin Kelly
Three volumes, $281.57, totally worth it. Picture books! Asia only, the vanishing part of course. Very wide coverage of various regions, including parts of western Asia such as Georgia. And yes this is the same Kevin Kelly who is a Hayekian, tech commentator, and much more. It is thus one of the most conceptual picture books, noting the text is minimal and descriptive.
And it is not just the usual stuff, such as amazing old buildings or vistas of rice paddies and brightly colored festivals. Kelly is not afraid to hit you with 40 door photos in a row, all lined up in neat little rows.
Might this be one of the very best picture books? Based on 9,000 photographs and 50 years of travel, 40 of them spent taking photos, and none of it was paid for by other parties. They don’t make ’em like this any more. Recommended.
p.s. One trick of the book is that a lot of this stuff hasn’t vanished at all. Note the gerund!