Recently Mentioned Books

I have many collections of gospel music, but might this be the best one?  The subtitle is Small Group Black Gospel 1951-1965 .

That is the new and entertaining book by David Graeber , probably you already have heard of it.  Here is a brief summary .

That is from the new and often quite interesting Martin Doyle, The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade its Rivers .

1. New David Yosifon book on corporate law .

Jan Assmann, The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus .  One of the best introductory works on the best and most important book ever written.

Heiner Rindermann, Cognitive Capitalism: Human Capital and Wellbeing of Nations perhaps covers too much ground, but is still a very useful 500 pp. plus survey of exactly what the title suggests.

Nick Polson and James Scott, AIQ: How People and Machines are Smarter Together , is a new and (believe it or not) original and very good take on this theme.

Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Quran and the Bible: Text and Commentary .  I won’t have the time soon to work through the thousand pages of this book, but it appears to be a major achievement and of very high quality.  Here is the book’s home page .  Here is a good piece by Reynolds on related topics .

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Spring , a comeback for Knausgaard.

The Virtue of Nationalism , by Yoram Hazony.  Falls into the “contrarian, but shouldn’t need to be contrarian” category.  It makes good points, but I felt it was interior to my knowledge set.

You can order the book here .  Here is my earlier NYT column on the economics of parking .

You can order the book here .

Those are from the new Paul Simon biography by Robert Hilburn .

Hail Bryan Caplan!  Again here is the link , and of course you should buy his book The Case Against Education .

This puzzle is from Steve Landsburg, who says “color me stumped” in his new and forthcoming book Can You Outsmart An Economist? 100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain .

This is all from Steven M. Gillon, Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism .

It always surprises me that the name of Anthony Downs is not mentioned more often in conjunction with the Nobel Prize in economics.  His An Economic Theory of Democracy is one of the best and most important books on public choice economics, and it is the major source for the median voter theorem. Yet now a new paperback copy of the book is not to be had for less than $100.  Downs also had major contributions to transportation economics (traffic expands to fill capacity) and housing and urban eco...

W. Kip Viscusi, Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society , is as you would expect full of good common economic sense.

There is Christopher Payne and Rob Barnett, The Economist’s Diet , by two economists and based on economic reasoning, noting that I wish never to offer opinions on diet books; this one is “micro habits and meta rules.”

I have yet to crack open The Structural Foundations of Monetary Policy , edited by Michael D. Bordo, John H. Cochrane, and Amit Seru.

Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright, Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code , is a good treatment of how the principles of blockchain and principles of the law may clash, overlap, or coexist.  It’s a good place to start on the notion that blockchains are fundamentally innovations in governance.

Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics is an important documentation of their core results.

Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create . Boyer is one of my favorite writers in the “social science tries to explain the previously underexplained anthropological practice” genre, but this one I thought lacked focus and doesn’t have an obvious enough pay-off.  I will try it again, however.

Sara Zaske, Achtung Baby: The German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children .  Es erinnert mich an meinen Freund Bryan Caplan aber auf deutsch.  Behind the link you will see how they changed the title for the American edition, I am giving you the better British title.

The top link above is for U.S. Amazon orders, due out in August, I was very happy to have ordered from AmazonUK .