Results for “best book” 2009 found
Saturday assorted links
1. An escalator made of cardboard (short video).
3. Orson Welles, The Immortal Story, 58 minutes long, made for French TV 1968, one of his best. Jeanne Moreau too, full of MIE themes, and as I view it a critique of the wealthy, more substantive than the usual.
4. Markets in everything: pay for the chance to heist mannequin parts from a mountain of mannequin parts.
5. Progress Studies 101, by Sagar Devkate.
6. A recruiter on why restaurants are having trouble hiring. Of course this means that right now is a relatively bad time to be eating out a lot — higher variance of outcomes and even well-known restaurants have become harder to predict.
7. Lots of Democratic economists think Summers is right but they are afraid to say it. Context from Jason Furman here.
My Conversation with Mark Carney
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, definitely recommended. Here is part of his closing statement:
COWEN: Last question. You wake up each morning. Surely you still think about central banking. What for you is the open question about central banking, where you don’t know the answer, that you think about the most?
CARNEY: I gave a speech at Jackson Hole on this issue, and I started — which is the future of the international monetary system and how we adjust the international monetary system.
I’ll say parenthetically that we’re potentially headed to another example of where the structure of the system is going to cause big problems for the global economy. Because it’s quite realistic, sadly, that we’re going to have a fairly divergent recovery with a number of emerging, developing economies really lagging because of COVID — not vaccinated, limited policy space, and the knock-on effects, while major advanced economies move forward. That’s a world where rates rise and the US dollar strengthens and you get this asymmetry, and the challenge of the way our system works bears down on these economies. I think about that a lot.
And this:
COWEN: If you’re speaking in a meeting as the central bank president, do you prefer to speak first or speak last?
CARNEY: I prefer — I tend to speak early. Yes, I tend to speak early. I’m not sure that’s always the best strategy, but I tend to speak early. I will say, one thing that’s happened over the years at places like the G20, I noticed, is the prevalence of social media and devices. The audience drifts away over time, even at the G20, even on a discussion of the global economy.
And from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, do note this:
CARNEY: …I think you’re absolutely right on that, there wasn’t. It is revealed that there wasn’t a liquidity trap.
Rooftops! Finally, on more important matters:
COWEN: Are the Toronto Raptors doomed to be, on average, a subpar NBA team due to higher taxes?
And:
COWEN: What’s the best Clash album?
CARNEY: Fantastic question. London Calling, and one of my best memories — I was very fortunate; they came to Edmonton when I was in 12th grade in high school. I went to the concert and that was fantastic, yes.
COWEN: I also saw them, I think in what would have been 12th grade had I been in school that year. But London Calling is too commercial for me. I much prefer the Green album, like “Career Opportunities,” “Janie Jones.”
CARNEY: Well, “I Fought the Law” was the best song at the concert. I have to say, they had got to Combat Rock by this time, which was relative — [laughs] Combat Rock was more commercial, I thought, than London Calling, although they threw it all out the door with Sandinista!
Again, here is Mark’s new book Value(s): Building a Better World For All.
The supply of motivation is elastic — Study Web
Study Web is the space students have constructed for themselves in response to the irl system that just isn’t working. Unable to find a place or person to turn to with their academic and career anxieties, they find internet strangers—strange kin—to speak to, or simply share the same space with, online. Lacking the intrinsic inspiration to study for hours each day, online advice and group accountability provide a solution. Feeling isolated, virtual study partners create a sense of fellowship. On Study Web, while stressed, students have accepted their lot—they’re not investigating the rightness or wrongness of the pressurized environment of the Gen Z student or asking whether college is worth it at all. 12-hour Study With Me videos are seen as something to aspire to rather than rebel from. Students accept the premise that school and studying are non-negotiables. Where they come from, where they live, their beliefs and value systems are not barriers to community-building; they suffer in common.
And Study Web is huge, and weird:
The Study Web is a constellation of digital spaces and online communities—across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, and Twitter—largely built by students for students. Videos under the #StudyTok hashtag have been viewed over half a billion times. One Discord server, Study Together, has over 120 thousand members. Study Web extends far past study groups composed of classmates, institution specific associations, or poorly designed retro forums discussing entrance requirements for professional programs. It includes but transcends Studyblrs on Tumblr that emerged in 2014 and eclipses various Reddit and Facebook study groups or inspirational images shared across Pinterest and Instagram. Populated mostly by Gen Z and the youngest of millennials, Study Web is the internet most of us don’t see, and it’s become a lifeline for students from junior high to college.
By Fadeke Adegbuyi, this is one of the best pieces I have read all year.
What I’ve been reading
1. Allen Lowe, “Turn Me Loose White Man”, two volumes and 30 accompanying compact discs. “Personally I accept the assumption that a great deal, if not all, of American music is rooted in forms that derive in some way from Minstrelsy.” Would you like to see that documented over the course of 30 CDs and almost 800 pp.? Would you like to know how early blues, country, gospel, jazz, bluegrass (and more) all fit together? Then this is the package for you. It is in fact of one of the greatest achievements of all time in cataloguing and presenting American culture. Here is a WSJ review.
2. Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. This book is the best introduction to this key Girardian concept.
3. Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography. I only read slivers and won’t finish it, because I just don’t need 800 pp. on Philip Roth. But…it’s really good. I like Picasso too, and Caravaggio (a murderer). I’ve heard, by the way, that this book will be picked up by Simon and Schuster and put back into print.
4. Martha C. Nussbaum, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation. There are so many recent books on these topics, you might feel a bit weary of them all, but this is one of the best. It is rationally and reasonably argued, from first principles, and focuses on the better arguments for its conclusions. It nicely situates the legal within the philosophical, it is wise on power vs. sex, rooted in the idea of objectification, and it has at least one page on alcohol.
5. Kenneth Whyte, The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise. How the consumer and auto safety movement helped to bring down GM.
6. Fabrice Midal, Trungpa and Vision, a biography of Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist leader. I enjoyed this passage: “He never hesitated to tell the truth, even if this meant provoking the audience. At a talk in San Francisco in the fall of 1970, he began by saying: “It’s a pity you came here. You’re so aggressive.””
And this passage: “Chögyam Trungpa might have appeared, at first, sight, to be very modern and up-to-date in his approach to the teachings. He had abandoned the external signs of the Tibetan monastic tradition. He drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes, and wore Western clothes. He had a frank often provocative way with words and ignored the normal conventions of a guru.” In fact he died from complications resulting from heavy alcohol abuse.
My Conversation with Pierpaolo Barbieri
Here is the audio, visual, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Pierpaolo joined Tyler to discuss why the Mexican banking system only serves 30 percent of Mexicans, which country will be the first to go cashless, the implications of a digital yuan, whether Miami will overtake São Paolo as the tech center of Latin America, how he hopes to make Ualá the Facebook of FinTech, Argentina’s bipolar fiscal policy, his transition from historian to startup founder, the novels of Michel Houellebecq, Nazi economic policy, why you can find amazing and cheap pasta in Argentina, why Jorge Luis Borges might be his favorite philosopher, the advice he’d give to his 18-year-old self, his friendship with Niall Ferguson, the political legacy of the Spanish Civil War, why he stopped sending emails from bed, and more.
Here is just one bit:
COWEN: Why did Argentina’s liberalization attempt under Macri fail?
BARBIERI: That’s a great question. There’s a very big ongoing debate about that. I think that there was a huge divergence between fiscal policy and monetary policy in the first two years of the Macri administration.
The fiscal consolidation was not done fast enough in 2016 and 2017 and then needed to accelerate dramatically after the taper tantrum, if you want to call it, or perceived higher global rates of 2018. So Macri had to run to the IMF and then do a lot of fiscal consolidation — that hadn’t been done in ’16 and ’17 — in’18 and ’19. Ultimately, that’s why he lost the election.
Generally speaking, that’s the short-term electoral answer. There’s a wider answer, which is that I think that many of the deep reforms that Argentina needed lack wide consensus. So I think there’s no question that Argentina needs to modify how the state spends money and its propensity to have larger fiscal deficits that eventually need to be monetized. Then we restart the process.
There’s a great scholar locally, Pablo Gerchunoff, who’s written a very good paper that analyzes Argentine economic history since the 1950s and shows how we move very schizophrenically between two models, one with a high exchange rate, where we all want to export a lot, and then when elections approach, people want a stronger local currency so that we can import a lot and feel richer.
The two models don’t have a wide acceptance on what are the reforms that are needed. I think that, in retrospect, Macri would say that he didn’t seek enough of a wider backing for the kind of reforms that he needed to enact — like Spain did in 1975, if you will, or Chile did after Pinochet — having some basic agreements with the opposition that would outlive a defeat in the elections.
And:
COWEN: The best movie from Argentina — is it Nine Queens, Nueve reinas?
BARBIERI: It is a strong contender, but I would think El secreto de sus ojos, The Secret in Their Eyes, is my favorite film about Argentina because of what it says about the very difficult period of modernization, and in particular, the horrors of the last military regime that marked us so much that it still defines our politics 50 years since.
Recommended.
The Economist on Patent Waivers
A good statement from The Economist:
We believe that Mr Biden is wrong. A waiver may signal that his administration cares about the world, but it is at best an empty gesture and at worst a cynical one.
A waiver will do nothing to fill the urgent shortfall of doses in 2021. The head of the World Trade Organisation, the forum where it will be thrashed out, warns there may be no vote until December. Technology transfer would take six months or so to complete even if it started today. With the new mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, it may take longer. Supposing the tech transfer was faster than that, experienced vaccine-makers would be unavailable for hire and makers could not obtain inputs from suppliers whose order books are already bursting. Pfizer’s vaccine requires 280 inputs from suppliers in 19 countries. No firm can recreate that in a hurry.
In any case, vaccine-makers do not appear to be hoarding their technology—otherwise output would not be increasing so fast. They have struck 214 technology-transfer agreements, an unprecedented number. They are not price-gouging: money is not the constraint on vaccination. Poor countries are not being priced out of the market: their vaccines are coming through COVAX, a global distribution scheme funded by donors.
In the longer term, the effect of a waiver is unpredictable. Perhaps it will indeed lead to technology being transferred to poor countries; more likely, though, it will cause harm by disrupting supply chains, wasting resources and, ultimately, deterring innovation. Whatever the case, if vaccines are nearing a surplus in 2022, the cavalry will arrive too late.
Elsewhere in this issue they draw on my work with Kremer et al.
The increase in capacity seen over the past year was brought about in large part because of government interventions, most notably Operation Warp Speed in America and the activities of the Vaccine Taskforce in Britain, which guaranteed payments and drove the expansion of supply chains.
These efforts splashed around a lot of money which, if none of the vaccines had worked, would have been lost. But with the benefit of hindsight it is now hard not to wish they had been more generous still. In March Science, a journal, published estimates from a group of economists of the total global economic loss that would have been avoided if enough money to produce vaccines for the entire world had been provided up front, rather than enough for most of the rich world. They calculated that if the world had put in place a vaccine-production infrastructure capable of pumping out some 1.2bn doses per month by January 2021, it would have saved the global economy almost $5trn (see chart).
Eric Budish of the Chicago Booth School of Business, one of the model’s authors, explains the situation using a plumbing metaphor: it is faster to lay down a wider-bore pipe at the start of a project than to expand a narrow one later. The rich world succeeded in producing effective vaccines remarkably quickly in quantities broadly sufficient to its needs: an extraordinary achievement. But the capacity of the system it built in order to do so created constraints that the rest of the world must now live with. That was a choice, not destiny.
Friday assorted links
1. “Unlike some of these contests, the winner isn’t chosen at random. Instead, “your level of enthusiasm for watching home improvement shows will be a strong factor in the selection process,” according to the contest website.” Link here.
2. Inequality amongst children.
4. Which incentives for vaccines are most effective for which groups? (NYT)
5. Magnus Carlsen edition: That was then, and this is now (link fixed).
Monday assorted links
1. Stapp and Dourado criticizing bitcoin. Better than the usual b.s.
3. How old are you? Recommended for all those above a certain age, but which age might that be? There is only one way to find out.
5. Johnny Rogan, one of the best biographers, has passed away.
6. “We find that the shutdown of Google News reduces overall news consumption by about 20% for treatment users, and reduces page views on publishers other than Google News by 10%. This decrease is concentrated around small publishers.” Link here.
My excellent Conversation with Shadi Bartsch
She is a Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, and recently published a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Here is the audio, visual, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Shadi joined Tyler to discuss reading the classics as someone who is half-Persian, the difference between Homer and Virgil’s underworlds, the reasons so many women are redefining Virgil’s Aeneid, the best way to learn Latin, why you must be in a room with a native speaker to learn Mandarin, the question of Seneca’s hypocrisy, what it means to “wave the wand of Hermes”, why Lucan begins his epic The Civil War with “fake news”, the line from Henry Purcell’s aria that moves her to tears, her biggest takeaway from being the daughter of an accomplished UN economist, the ancient text she’s most hopeful that new technology will help us discover, the appeal of Strauss to some contemporary Chinese intellectuals, the reasons some consider the history of Athens a better allegory for America than that of Rome, the Thucydides Trap, the magical “presentness” of ancient history she’s found in Italy and Jerusalem, her forthcoming book Plato Goes to China, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: You may not agree with this, but many readers I speak with tend to think that Homer is somehow deeper, more mystical, or just more fun to read than Virgil. What accounts for that perception and how might you challenge it?
BARTSCH: I think they think that because both of Homer’s epics are not, per se, about politics or governments. They don’t offer etiologies of a state. They don’t talk about history. They are stories in the true sense. They are about heroes in the true sense, not about some guy who’s pushed around the world by the gods, constantly getting into trouble, crying, wishing he didn’t have to go found Rome, etcetera.
Achilles — figure larger than life. His pride is everything to him. He stops fighting in the Trojan War because he’s been insulted. The drama is, what compels him to go back into battle after that insult?
Odysseus — a fairy tale of a man wandering from island to island, meeting ever stranger creatures, but eventually making it back home. It’s a great yarn. You don’t have to learn history to read these. You get involved in the psychology of the characters, their tragedies and their triumphs.
Nobody is really interested in getting involved in the psychology of the state and its triumphs. On the one hand, you’ve got a poem that’s an etiology for a particular government. On the other hand, you have two amazing stories. I can see how reading The Aeneid would be considered duller for some.
Excellent throughout, and again here is Shadi’s excellent translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.
*Partition: How and Why Ireland Was Divided*
By Ivan Gibbons, why can’t all non-fiction books be this good? At 148 pp. brief and to the point, perfectly clear, full of substance, and a model presentation. You can buy it here, headed for this year’s “best of” list.
Why I am not entirely keen on the Great Barrington Declaration and AIER
More people are asking me about my attitudes toward Great Barrington and AIER, including David Henderson in this post (which also has a good transcript of my remarks to Russ Roberts). Earlier I wrote a conceptual critique of the Great Barrington Declaration, but today I would like to make some more targeted remarks. I didn’t do this when speaking to Russ because I feel they require direct quotation and documentation, which one cannot easily do in a podcast. And in general I don’t like to write posts “attacking people” (way oversupplied on the internet), but in this case libertarian sympathies are so split that a kind of a wake-up call is needed.
Let me first say that if you are libertarian, and would like a libertarian response to the pandemic, and you find Alex and me not libertarian enough, read the Ryan Bourne book from the Cato Institute. You may not agree with everything in there, but it has no “gross errors” and no “biomedical weirdness.” And people, the Cato Institute really is libertarian. They once hired David Henderson as chief economist.
As for the AIER, read this Jeremy Horpedahl thread and click through appropriately, here is the Sam Bowman-produced part of the thread. Conspiracy theorist and shall we say “speculative thinker” Naomi Wolf is now a senior researcher at AIER, please do read her tweets. 5G conspiracy theories? Vaccine nanoparticles that make you travel back in time? “Not kidding” she wrote, and the general weirdness extends far beyond that, to some of her books as well. Or try this “externality denialism” from just a few days ago: “Your vaccine status makes no difference to others.” Her pinned tweet casts suspicion on Bill Gates, and refers to “global treason.”
I say it is a mistake to let such a group set the libertarian agenda or indeed any agenda, even if you favor very rapid reopenings and are very critical of lockdowns. I implore you to think very seriously about what is going on here.
Going back to the GBD proper, which again is sponsored by AIER, here is co-author Sunetra Gupta:
“What we’ve seen is that in normal, healthy people, who are not elderly or frail or don’t have comorbidities, this virus is not something to worry about no more than how we worry about flu,” professor Gupta told HT.
Nope, almost 600,000 U.S. deaths later. Or how does this Gupta claim look?:
‘Why would you arrest transmission?’ she asks. ‘To wait for a vaccine? You cannot get rid of it.’
What would Benjamin Netanyahu say? Or Gupta in May: “Covid-19 is on the way out.”
The best of them is probably Jay Bhattacharya, with whom I often agree, and who, as far as I can tell, has no track record of blatantly false predictions. Yet even he cannot avoid a tinge of biomedical weirdness.
Why was Bhattacharya on the advisory board of the anti-vax group Panda? I am reluctant to play the “guilt by association” game here, but I think there is a broader pattern of these writers simply being wrong about the science, and their associations reflecting that.
I agree with his WSJ critique (with Kulldorff) of vaccine passports. Still, he comes up with some literally true but misleading sequences such as:
The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others.
I wonder why cannot he bring himself to say that “the average social value of a 16-year-old getting vaccinated is strongly positive”? (And we are running significant tests to lower the remaining uncertainty, and if it is merely adenovirus platforms you worry about well say that.) Instead he has to walk around the issue and play down the value of near-universal Covid vaccination. You might think that is all the fault of the editorial chopping board, but it seems to be a broader and more consistent pattern with this group.
Take Hulldorff’s now-famous tweet “Those with prior natural infection do not need it [Covid vaccines]. Nor children.” “Need?” — OK, I get it, demand curves slope down. But again, his tweet is not nearly as good or as accurate a message as “the average social value of a 16-year-old getting vaccinated is strongly positive.” There is good evidence that the vaccines provide better protection than does natural infection, especially against the Covid variants, and it is established that infected younger persons can carry Covid to the unvaccinated, of which there will always be quite a few, most of all globally. Furthermore, non-vaccine methods of achieving herd immunity are looking worse, due to the spread of variants and areas such as Manaus, which seem to have high rates of reinfection. And have I mentioned that hospitalization rates for the young are rising? (We are not sure why.)
Is it so great that 38.9% of Marines are refusing to take the vaccine? (no). Or have these writers looked into the huge success that is Gibraltar?
Why take this weird, hinky attitude toward the science for no good reason? It’s as if — when it comes to vaccines — they deliberately talk in an Alice in Wonderland universe without self-awareness of that fact.
No matter what your associations may or may not be, getting people vaccinated with quality vaccines is the #1 issue right now and it is the path back to liberty most likely to succeed and prove sustainable. If you are not really enthusiastic about that, I think, frankly, that you are out to lunch.
What I’ve been reading
1. Susan Bernofsky, Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser. I believe you need to have read Walser first, but if so this is a far better biography than what you might have expected the English-speaking world to have produced. It is also an implicit portrait of where pre-WWI Europe went wrong, the history of micro-writing, and a paean to general weirdness, noting that Walser in both his life and writing is inexplicable to this day.
2. Andy Grundberg, How Photography Became Contemporary Art. How does a whole genre rise from also-ran status to a major (the major?) form of contemporary art? This is an excellent history with nice color plates and it is also a causal account. I liked this sentence, among others: “Surprisingly, the acceptance of color photography had happened earlier in the art world than in the so-called art photography world.” Polaroid had a significant role as well.
3. Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Amazon. A truly good and very substantive management book (I hear your jaw hitting the floor). Just that statement makes it one of the best management books ever. Really.
4. Tom Jones, George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life. A thorough biography of an 18th century Irish philosopher who is still worth reading. Berkeley also wrote on monetary theory and pioneered the idea of an abstract unit of account.
5. Ryan Bourne, Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through Covid-19. This book came out yesterday, I read it earlier, and here is my blurb: “A truly excellent book that explains where our pandemic response went wrong, and how we can understand those failings using the tools of economics.” It is published by Cato, a libertarian think tank, and it is a much better and more integrated and science-based account than what you might find from other groups, whether libertarian or non-libertarian.
How should you feel if you attentively finish Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment?
Cameron Blevis, Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, is a good book and on a more important topic than you might think.
My Conversation with the excellent Dana Gioia
Here is the audio, transcript, and video. As I mention in the beginning, Dana is the (only?) CWT guest who can answer all of my questions. Here is part of the summary:
Dana and Tyler discuss his latest book and more, including how he transformed several businesses as a corporate executive, why going to business school made him a better poet, the only two obscene topics left in American poetry, why narrative is necessary for coping with life’s hardships, how Virgil influenced Catholic traditions, what Augustus understood about the cultural power of art, the reasons most libretti are so bad, the optimism of the Beach Boys, the best art museum you’ve never heard of, the Jungianism of Star Trek, his favorite Tolstoy work, depictions of Catholicism in American pop culture, what he finds fascinating about Houellebecq, why we stopped building cathedrals, how he was able to effectively lead the National Endowment for the Arts, the aesthetic differences between him and his brother Ted, his advice for young people who want to cultivate their minds, and what he wants to learn next.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why is Olaf Stapledon an important writer?
GIOIA: It’s not a question I expected.
COWEN: How could you not expect that?
GIOIA: Well, first of all, I hope people know who Olaf Stapleton was. Tremendously influential, rather clumsy, visionary, early science fiction writer who wrote novels like Odd John and the First and Last Man. What Olaf Stapleton did was I think he was the first really great science fiction writer to think in absolutely cosmic terms, beyond human conceptions of time and space. That, essentially, created the mature science fiction sensibility. If you go even watch a show like Expanse now, it’s about Stapledonian concerns.
COWEN: He was also a Hegelian philosopher, as you know. My friend Dan Wang thinks Last and First Men is better than Star Maker. Though virtually all critics prefer Star Maker.
GIOIA: Michael Lind, the political writer, and historian, Stapledon is one of his formative writers. Star Maker is kind of an evolution of the Last and First Men. Odd John is kind of the odd, the first great mutant novel.
Definitely recommended. And I am very happy to recommend Dana’s latest book (and indeed all of his books) Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life.
Monday assorted links
1. More on why monoclonal antibodies are not being used enough.
2. The world record for number of drones put in the sky.
3. Noted economist and painter Robert Mundell has passed away. And earlier Krugman on Mundell.
4. More Scott Sumner movie reviews, some of the best content on the internet, mostly because they are true.
5. On-line book on Girardian social theory.
6. Vaccination lags in Ivory Coast.
7. Naval on NFTs.
What I’ve been reading
1. Devaki Jain, The Brass Notebook. What is it like to grow up in a Tamil Brahmin family, be molested by relatives and Nobel Prize winners, and go on to be an economist? Short and extremely readable. The personal tale is very charming, the politics (Nyerere and Castro, never repudiated) are not.
2. Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. This excellent book is exactly as you think it is going to be.
3. S.M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician. Memoir involving many of the 20th century’s top mathematicians and physics types, including von Neumann, Gamow, Banach, Edward Teller, and Ulam himself, among others. Scintillating on every page, as a historical chronicle, as biography, and as a look into how a brilliant mathematician thinks.
4. Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX. A fun and informative treatment of what the title promises. I hadn’t know that Musk met personally with the first three thousand employees of SpaceX, to make sure the company was hiring the right kind of people. He thought he could detect a good hire within fifteen minutes of conversation.
5. Matthew E. Kahn, Adapting to Climate Change: Markets and the Management of an Uncertain Future. I read this some time ago, it is just published, here is my blurb: “Are you looking for an approach that recognizes the costs of climate change, and approaches the entire question with an economic and political sanity? Matthew E. Kahn’s new book is then essential reading.”
The new Peter Boettke book is The Struggle for a Better World, which is his best statement of classical liberalism to date.