Results for “best book” 1946 found
*The Time Travelling Economist*
The author is Charlie Robertson, and the subtitle is Why Education, Electricity and Fertility are Key to Escaping Poverty.
How come no one told me about this book before? Published in 2022 (in Switzerland), it is one of the best popular economics books of the last decade, and one of the best books on economic development period. People should talk about it more! And to be sure, that description “popular” is misleading. Like other good books in this genre, it is deeper and better than merely being “popular,” even if it does not itself present original research of the kind you might find in a journal.
Anyway, the core argument is reflected well in the subtitle, and here is one excerpt:
Electricity is an integral part of the investment story that all countries require to escape poverty and eventually progress to become rich. The commonly cited metric is that investment needs to be 25% of GDP and those that beat this, grow fast. In this chapter, we use electricity as a proxy for that investment target.
There are good insights throughout, for instance:
Many have high hopes for solar power in Nigeria, but one problem is keeping them secure. Solar panels might be at risk of theft to replace the expensive diesel generator that so many households have to rely on.
The author has considerable real world experience through his Global Chief Economist position at Renaissance Capital. Here is another good bit:
When fertility rates fall, country’s banking systems will get larger.
And:
A debt crisis is probably unavoidable in a bid to create jobs.
The author is bullish on Pakistan, North Africa, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda. For better or worse, some of those picks reflect the fact that “politics” does not feature directly in his key jumping-off points for growth. We will see.
There are various objections you can levy at this book, ranging from “lack of a fully specified model” (who has that anyway?) to “those factors are themselves endogenous to [fill in the blank].” I’ll just say that I have seen many a worse economic development book, and this one is not ideologically charged either.
You can order it here.
What I’ve been reading
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.
Thursday assorted links
2. Five trends that will shape urban Africa.
3. Is the Fed losing money on QE?
4. Do Asian-Americans have the world’s highest life expectancy?
5. On immigration (and authority) Daniel Klein is correct.
6. Can ChatGPT pass medical licensing exams? Speculative GPT thoughts. And “I taught ChatGPT a language.” And “The return of the Socratic method, at scale and on demand.” Get ready people! “Rewrite this article so it sounds like a human.” And Chat GPT recommends the best books on AI. Get with the program! Yes, I mean you. Only yesterday I found the beast very helpful in prepping questions for Glenn Loury (thanks Glenn, that was a great episode!).
7. Roman vs. modern concrete, updated and revised.
Top MR Posts of 2022
Here are the top MR posts by views from 2022. Biggest post was Tyler’s
1. Classical liberalism vs. The New Right
followed up by two posts by me on Biden’s student loan plan
2. The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think
3. Taxing Mechanical Engineers and Subsidizing Drama Majors
and further posts by me on FTX and the probability of a nuclear war.
5. What is the Probability of a Nuclear War, Redux
I said ProPublica was putting their reputation on the line with the lab-leak report but nevertheless I was too credulous. Much of the factual reporting remains correct, however. Lab leak is very much in play.
6. A “Safety Emergency” Happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November of 2019
Tyler comes in next with a post on criticizing other people in private.
7. How much should you criticize other people?
and two posts on the Russian-Ukraine conflict.
9. How did the IR community get Russia/Ukraine so wrong?
Finally Tyler offers some advice:
Rounding out the top were Best Books of 2022, What Caused the 2020 Spike in Murders and How to Elect Republicans.
What were your favorite MR posts of 2022. What should we revisit?
What I’ve been reading
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.
*The Disappearance of Josef Mengele*
A novel, one of the best books of the year, also short and readable. The author is from Strasbourg. “I’ve read enough about the Holocaust” is not a good reason to avoid iihs book. Here is a short review, and you can buy it here. How does in fact a sophisticated doctor become a Nazi and then frame that decision to himself? Definitely recommended.
Thursday assorted links
1. Why so few protests in Russia?
2. Did English case law boost the Industrial Revolution?
3. GMU thinkers as religious thinkers, and don’t forget RH…
4. Henry Oliver’s best books of the year list.
5. Building the World Trade Center.
6. Appreciation of James Lovelock.
7. More on Tether risk (WSJ).
8. GMU enters the world of cricket, the Indian century indeed.
*The Philosophy of Modern Song*
Yes the author is Bob Dylan, and I give this one a thumbs up. You can buy it here. Here is one bit:
A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom. Little Richard was speaking in tongues across the airwaves long before anybody knew what was happening. He took speaking in tongues right out of the sweaty canvas tent and put it on the mainstream radio, even screamed like a holy preacher — which is what he was. Little Richard is a master of the double entendre. “Tutti Frutti” is a good example. A fruit, a male homosexual, and “tutti frutti” is “all fruit.” It’s also a sugary ice cream. A gal named Sue and a gal named Daisy and they’re both transvestites. Did you ever see Elvis singing “Tutti Frutti” on Ed Sullivan? Does he know what he’s singing about? Do you think Ed Sullivan knows? Do you think they both know? Of all the people who sing “Tutti Fruitti,” Pat Boone was probably the only one who knew what he was singing about. And Pat knows about speaking in tongues as well.
And:
The Grateful Dead are not your usual rock and roll band. They’re essentially a dance band. They have more in common with Arie Shaw and bebop than they do with the Byrds or the Stones…There is a big difference in the types of women that you see from the stage when you are with the Stones compared to the Dead. With the Stones it’s like being at a porno convention. With the Dead, it’s more like the women you see by the river in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Free floating, snaky and slithering like in a typical daydream. Thousands of them….With the Dead, the audience is part of the band — they might as well be on the stage.
Or how about this:
Bluegrass is the other side of heavy metal. Both are musical forms steeped in tradition. They are the two forms of music that visually and audibly have not changed in decades. People in their respective fields still dress like Bill Monroe and Ronnie James Dio. Both forms have a traditional instrumental lineup and a parochial adherence to form.
Bluegrass is the more direct emotional music and, though it might not be obvious to the casual listener, the more adventurous.
This is one of the better books on America, and one of the best books on American popular song. But then again, that is what you would expect from a Nobel Laureate in literature, right?
*Indigenous Continent*
The author is Pekka Hämäläinen, and the subtitle is The Epic Contest for North America. Rich with insight on ever page, might it be the best history of Native Americans? At the very least, this is one of the two or three best non-fiction books this year. How is this for an excellent opening sentence:
Kelp was the key to America.
Here is another excerpt:
Spain had a momentous head start in the colonization of the Western Hemisphere, but North American Indians had brought Spanish expansion to a halt; in the late sixteenth century there were no significant Spanish settlements on the continent — only petty plunder regimes. North America was still essentially Indigenous. The contrast to the stunning Spanish successes in Middle and South America was striking: how could relatively small Native groups defy Spanish colonialism in the north when the formidable Aztec, Inca, and May Empires had fallen so easily? The answer was right in front of the Spanish — the decentralized, kinship-based, and egalitarian political regimes made poor targets for imperial entradas — but they kept missing it because the Indigenous nations were so different from Europe’s hierarchical societies. They also missed a fundamental fact about Indigenous warfare: fighting on their homelands, the Indians did not need to win battles and wars; they just needed not to lose them.
The general take is that pushing out the Native Americans took longer than you might think, and also was more contingent than you might think. The decentralized nature of North American Indian regimes was one reason why the Spaniards made more headway in Latin America than anyone made in North America.
To be clear, I am by no means on board with the main thesis, preferring the details of this book to its conceptual framework. Too often the author heralds the glories of a Native American tribe or group, and along the way lets it drop that they numbered only 30,000 individuals, as was the case for instance with the Iroquois. If you didn’t know the actual history of this world, and had read only this book, you would be shocked to learn that Anglo civilization was on the verge of subjugating one-quarter of the world. Or that England had learned how to “take care of Ireland” in the seventeenth century, and it was only a matter of time before similar techniques would be applied elsewhere. And it is not until p.450 that the author lets on how much technological progress the Westerners had been making throughout; somehow that part of the story is missing until the very end.
I cannot quite buy that “The Native Reservations were a sign of American weakness, not strength,” though I can see how they might be both (p.408).
Yet I think you can simply put all this aside and still get full value — and then some — from this book. Among its other virtues, it is an excellent treatise on the 17th century and its energetic, exploratory nature. Or for another example, I loved the p.152 discussion of whether Indians wanted the settlers to fence in their animals (the fences cut off travel paths for deer and other hunted animals, though the fences kept the settlers’ animals from destroying native crops). The discussions of equestrianism are consistently excellent.
In the first twenty years of the United States, fights with Indians absorbed 5/6 of overall federal expenditure (p.343).
Here is a good NYT story about the book and its reception. I would say that a Finnish white guy even tried to pull this off is a positive signal about its quality, at least these days.
As recently as 2019, his epic Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power was an MR “best book of the year.” You don’t have to buy the whole story, and so I conclude that Pekka Hämäläinen is one of the more important writers of our time.
*The Rise and Fall of the EAST*
The author is Yasheng Huang of MIT and the subtitle is Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today. Forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023. Excerpt:
For many years, I struggled to come up with a coherent explanation for the power, the reach, and the policy discretion of the Chinese state. There is coercion, ideological indoctrination, and probably a fair amount of societal consent as well.
Keju [the civil service exam system] had a deep penetration both cross-sectionally in society and across time in history. It was all encompassing, laying claims to time, efforts and cognitive investments of a significant swath of Chinese population. It was incubatory of values, norms, and cognitions, therefore impacting ideology and epistemology of Chinese minds. It was a state institution designed to augment the power and the capabilities of the state. Directly, the state monopolized the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society access to talent and preempted organized religion, commerce, and intelligentsia. The Chinese state in history and today is an imprinted version of this Keju system.
Chinese state is strong because it reigns without a society.
Among the other interesting features of this book, including many, are:
There is a very useful discussion of Sui Wendi, the man who reunified China (and is barely known in the West).
Just how much the exam system expanded in the 17th century, to support a larger and growing Chinese state.
Why Chinese bureaucrats in the provinces tend to be generalists and the ministerial officials tend to be specialists.
Oliver Williamson is applied and cited throughout.
“A state without society is a vertically integrated organization…Keju’s powerful platform effect crowded and stymied alternative mobility channels…the Keju was an anti-mobility mobility channel.”
“In the 1890s, China’s population literacy was only 18 percent, way below 95 percent of England and the Netherlands.”
Exam competition takes up so much of individual mind space. Furthermore the competition atomizes society and makes it harder to form the kinds of collective movements that might lead to democracy.
The author sees the 1980s as the truly revolutionary time in Chinese history.
“Throughout Chinese history very few emperors were toppled by their generals or senior functionaries, a sharp contrast with the Roman Empire.”
I could say much more. This is by far the best book on Chinese bureaucracy I have read, and probably one of the best books on China period. I am sure many of the claims will be contested, but the author tries in a very serious way to be explanatory and to actually answer the questions about China you care about. So few books even attempt that!
Addendum: Note that the author also wrote Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, another of my favorite books about China.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ian Morris, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History. None of the book is bad, and half is quite interesting. Think of the treatment as “Deep Roots for Brexit,” though willing to noodle over earlier and more interesting topics in history. From a good FT review by Chris Allnutt: “Morris succeeds in condensing 10,000 years into a persuasive and highly readable volume, even if there are moments that risk a descent into what he seeks to avoid: “a catalogue of men with strange names killing each other”, as historian Alex Woolf put it.” Now if only he would explain why their hot and cold water taps don’t run together…
2. Michel Houellebecq, Interventions 2020. Grumpy non-fiction essays, with plenty of naive anti-consumerism. You need to read them if you are a fan, but I didn’t find so much here of interest. I was struck by his nomination of Paul McCartney (!) as the most essential musician, with Schubert next in line. Mostly it is MH being contrary. He has earned the right, but he wasn’t able to make me care more.
3. Frank O’Connor, “Guests of the Nation.” One of the best short stories I have read, Irish. Can’t say any more without spoilers! 11 pp. at the link.
4. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest. Has anyone done a systematic accounting of which Vietnam era fictional works have held up and which not? Maybe this one gets a B+? Not top drawer Le Guin, but good enough to read, and better yet if you catch the cross-cultural references and all the anthropological background works.
5. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, some cheap paperback edition. I did a quick, non-studied reread of this, in prep for the new Cambridge University Press reissue edition due out June 30, which has excellent notes and I will study and reread in more detail. One of the very best books! Not only is the story fully engaging and deeply humorous, but it is one of the seminal tracts on progress (largely skeptical), a blistering take on political correctness, wise on the virtues and pitfalls of travel, and one of the first novels to truly engage with science and politics and their interaction. Straussian throughout. Swift is one of the very greatest thinkers and writers and his output has held up remarkably well.
James Joyce, entrepreneur
At the critical elevator pitch, Joyce whetted investors’ appetites with the opening gambit: Dublin, a European city of 350,000, had no cinema and two more cities in the same country, Cork and Belfast, were also without a cinema. (Joyce the hustler bumped up Dublin’s population to 500,000 for effect.) Ireland, with close to a million urban dwellers, was virgin trading soil ripe for far-sighted operators. For a man who was a better spender than saver who would experience money problems throughout his life, the contract Joyce negotiated reveals a canny financial operator, and a true salesman. He convinced the partners to give him 10 per cent of the equity and profits, although he didn’t invest a penny. He was also paid expenses and a wage. Hands were shaken, the deal was done, Joyce was off. The portrait of the artist as a young entrepreneur.
…the mind that wrote Ulysses was also the mind that opened Ireland’s first cinema.
Here is the full FT story. By the way, this being the 100th year of Ulysses, you should read that book if you haven’t already. It is one of the very best books! And it really isn’t that difficult. If you need to, just keep on going, don’t try to figure it all out…
David Theroux, RIP
I was saddened to hear of the sudden passing of David Theroux, the President of the Independent Institute. I was a professor of economics at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana when David approached me to be the research director (later Vice-President) of II. I had great colleagues at Ball State but was never happy about living in Muncie. Nevertheless, leaving academia was a big leap. My career at the time, however, was in the doldrums and when things aren’t happening it’s good to throw some variance into the mix…so I leapt. David and his wife Mary made my wife and I feel very welcome in Oakland. I remember fondly my young children playing in their garden in their beautiful house in the Oakland hills.
David was a great intellectual entrepreneur. He was the founding Vice President for the Cato Institute and the founding President of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. He started the Independent Institute on a shoestring budget in 1986, building it into a major institute that produced many important books and research articles.
Among the highlights of Independent’s extraordinary publications are Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs (1986, with a 25th anniversary edition in 2012); Antitrust and Monopoly, by Dominick Armentano (1990); Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Failure, by Randy Simmons (updated edition 2011); Out of Work, by Lowell E. Gallaway and Richard Vedder (1997); Entrepreneurial Economics, by Alexander Tabarrok (2002); The Empire Has No Clothes, by Ivan Eland (2004); Making Poor Nations Rich, edited by Benjamin Powell (2007); The Enterprise of Law, by Bruce Benson (2011); Living Economics, by Peter J. Boettke (2012); Liberty in Peril, by Randall Holcombe (2019); and many more.
All told, Independent Institute books produced under David’s direction received more than 50 prestigious book awards, including three Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prizes, the Templeton Freedom Award, two Mencken Awards for Best Book, eight Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Awards for Best Book, three Benjamin Franklin Awards, ten Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Peter Shaw Memorial Award, and three Choice Magazine Awards for Outstanding Book.
David spotted talent in other people, encouraged them, and made things happen. He was a prime mover in launching Bruce Benson’s important work on the law merchant and a big supporter of the great Robert Higgs (who started The Independent Review).
I learned a lot from David, especially about militarism and libertarian foreign policy, the marketing of ideas, and also about what it means to be an entrepreneur. I recall two instances in particular. The first was during the Microsoft trial when we had published the excellent book Winners, Losers & Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. II opposed the antitrust case against Microsoft, seeing it as waste of resources in a rivalrous industry (in retrospect, yup we got that one right). Larry Ellison at Oracle (a Microsoft competitor) didn’t like our work and hired detectives to buy the Independent Institute’s garbage and sift through it (yes, really!) to try to discredit us. The story become a page one headline in the New York Times (Independent Institute not really Independent!). I was worried about the impact on the Institute but David always saw the positive even in “bad news.” At the time I found this frustrating as this seemed to me like a failure to see reality but David had the entrepreneur’s faith that vision, a positive attitude, and hard work can make reality. He kept calm and steered us through the difficulties to further strengths. I was wrong. David was right. He made it happen. The second time was when II was launching its scholarships for low-income children to attend private schools in Oakland. I sketched out a careful, well-thought out plan to get us ready to go in a year. David said no, “I want it ready in six weeks!”. I thought this was insane. But we did it! No surprise that David was an entrepreneur and I was an academic. Ultimately, of course, I returned to academia by moving to GMU but not before learning many valuable lessons from David and my years at the Independent Institute.
He will be missed.
What I’ve been reading
1. Susanne Schattenberg, Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman. Can you have an interesting biography of a life and man that was fundamentally so…boring? Maybe. He ruled the world’s number two power for eighteen critical years, so surely he deserves more attention than what he has received. “Nevertheless, Brezhnev had dentures and only stopped smoking in the mid-1970s because his doctors told him his false teeth would fall out at some point if he didn’t.” And “Analysis of why Brezhnev’s children made themselves known largely for their drinking and scandals would fill another book.” I’ll buy that one as well.
2. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics. One of the very best books on Ireland and Irish ideas, and more broadly I can recommend virtually anything by Kiberd. Do note, however, that much of this book requires you have read the cited Irish classics under consideration. Nonetheless there is insight on almost every page, recommended.
3. Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville. A self-recommending biography of one of the greatest social science thinkers. Easy to read, and good for both the generalist and specialist reader. Note that it is a complement to reading Tocqueville, in no way a substitute.
4. Kevin Lane, The Inca Lost Civilizations. Short and readable and with nice photos, maybe the best introduction to this still underrated topic?
Paul Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics considers the broader implications of Smith’s thought from a “freedom as non-domination” perspective.
John E. Bowit, Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age. The early twentieth century, basically. Beautiful plates, good exposition, and if nothing else a lesson in just how far aesthetic deterioration can run. A picture book!
Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism is interior to my current knowledge set, but clear and I suspect for many readers useful.
Rainer Zitelmann’s Hitler’s National Socialism is a very thorough, detailed look at Hitler’s actual views.
James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington also serves as a better than average general history of the city.
How to find good TV shows
Chris asks:
You’ve written a lot about your reading habits in the past, but I’m curious to know more about how you find and watch TV shows. You’ve mentioned before that you watch very little TV (in explaining your productivity), and yet you speak highly of the shows you do watch. Do you have any strategies to find good TV, how to watch television “well”, how to avoid getting sucked in to mediocre TV, etc.? And, I’d be curious to know what specific shows you think are worth the time sink to watch.
All of this comes from my somewhat-conflicting desires 1.) To not waste time and 2.) To enjoy the best art there is, in all of its forms.
Here are my rather brutal answers, noting they probably are not helpful for most people:
1. Most TV shows are not good. The key problems are that too much quality scripting is required, and that the incentives are to try to get the show extended for another season. Plus too much of the audience “just wants something to watch.”
2. Most TV shows that your smart friends tell you to watch also are not good. See #1.
3. You should almost always watch a movie rather than a TV show. If you have to, watch the movie in hour or half-hour segments. Movies are better and smarter, at least if you can figure out which are the quality films. But that is not so hard, as standard critical opinion does OK there.
4. “The Golden Age of TV” doesn’t change any of this, though Hollywood movies have become worse, due to tent pole franchises and pressures for serialization, which give them some of the problems of television shows. At the margin, almost everyone should be watching more foreign films. Do you really know them all? How well do you know the best of African cinema? Iranian cinema? And so on.
5. I will try a TV show if two people I know, in the very top tier of smarts, recommend it. Even then I usually don’t like it. I thus infer there is at least a single dimension where I differ strongly from just about all my friends.
6. Could I name twenty TV shows that I think are worth watching, relative to the best movies you haven’t seen and the best books you haven’t read? Not sure. Attention is that which is scarce. But it shouldn’t be. Just pay better attention and read that book or watch that movie. There is also plenty on YouTube that beats TV shows, and if you are old you may not consume much YouTube content at all.
7. For sure, there are fifteen TV shows worth watching, but you really need to have very very strong filters. Whatever your filters may be, make them stronger. Don’t trust those friends of yours!
8. By this point, you are probably not very interested in knowing which are those fifteen shows.