Recently Mentioned Books

Due out in March, pre-order here .  The book also has Jon Elster, Timur Kuran, and Jonathan Haidt, dare I call it self-recommending?

Strongly recommended.  I was pleased to see that Publisher’s Weekly named Sujatha Gidla’s book as one of the ten best of 2017, you can order it here .

He is the author of the new and interesting Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials .  Most of the book is about millennials as the generation that invests in itself.  Towards the end he lays out a somewhat separate discussion of what a future dystopia might look like, I am very briefly summarizing his seven points, noting that some of the headings are my rewordings:

The subtitle is Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy , and the author is leading Syrian intellectual Yassin Al-Haj Saleh.  Imagine having a well-written book, totally conversant in the arguments of the social sciences, that set out to explain the Syrian tragedy to an intelligent reader.  Here is one typical bit:

5. I am most worried by the prominent center table at the entrance, which presents “Books with 4.8 Amazon stars or higher.”  I saw a book on mixology, a picture book of Los Angeles, a Marvel comics encyclopedia, a book connected to the musical Hamilton , and a series of technique-oriented cookbooks, such as Harold McGee, a very good manual by the way.  Isabel Wilkerson was the closest they had to “my kind of intelligent non-fiction.”  Neil Hilbon represented poetry, of course his best-known book...

My view is not exactly that of Bryan’s, but this will be one of the most interesting and important books of the year, pre-order it here .

Here is excellent New Yorker coverage of the book from Keith Gessen .  You can buy here on Amazon .

You can pre-order here .

That is from Eugen Weber’s classic Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 .

I am indebted to Sujatha Gidla for a useful conversation on this topic.  My formal Conversation with her will be up in a bit, I still recommend her book on caste, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India .

That is all from Randall Munroe’s What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd and Hypothetical Questions .

But if you are otherwise not so keen on this Brennan-Buchanan argument , what exactly are the grounds for opposing this?  It taxes the relatively wealthy, and it taxes income from wealth.  It taxes finance.  I haven’t heard anyone oppose the tax on the investment income of private foundations, other than diehard anti-tax types.  That tax has hardly vanquished the private foundation form.  On top of all that, university endowments seem to have long time horizons, and to play the g > r game pretty...

Here is a link to the podcast version of the chat, plus further explanation of my interview method for the two .  Better yet, you can order their new book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality .

Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs .  Covers African American bookstores, head shops, businesses in the women’s movement, and natural foods stores, a good revision of Milton Friedman on the social responsibility of business.

Jason Brennan, Bas van der Vossen, and David Schmidtz, editors, The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism , my blurb reads: “This is the best contemporary anthology introducing the reader to the basics of libertarianism.”

4. Augustine, Confessions , new translation by Sarah Ruden.  This is the most readable translation I have encountered.  While I cannot vouch for the accuracy, Ruden has very strong qualifications as a classical translator.

3. George William Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution .  The best book I’ve read on the Articles period, most of all a revision of Merrill Jensen.  Van Cleve details clearly and analytically why the Articles did a poor job on fiscal, trade, foreign policy, and Western settlement issues.

2. Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson .  This is a high quality work, as you might expect.  Still, I am numb from the oversupply of material on the Founding Fathers, and so I could read no more than a third of this one.  If only it had come out twenty years ago.

1. Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant .  Published in 2002, this sure sounds like 2017.  Your mileage may vary, but it has a strong, unique voice and it looks more relevant than ever.  It reminds me of the in-your-face directness of Amiri Baraka, another underrated figure who ought to be rediscovered just about now.  If you are going to read only one Dworkin book, this is the one.

This is an out-of-synch bonus episode, rushed out because I think their new, just-out book — The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Slow Down Growth, Enrich Themselves, and Increase Inequality — is so important.  You will find the podcast here , lots of rapid fire back and forth.

I will be having a Conversations with Tyler with Andy Weir, author of The Martian and assorted on-line works (many of which appear to be off-line at the moment).  He has a new book coming out, Artemis .  Here is Andy’s Wikipedia page .

I will be having a Conversations with Tyler with Andy Weir, author of The Martian and assorted on-line works (many of which appear to be off-line at the moment).  He has a new book coming out, Artemis .  Here is Andy’s Wikipedia page .

You can order the volume here .

I have read only a few hundred pages of it, and may not read it all, but am likely to read more than half of it.  Strongly recommended, it’s also one of the best books on American history period.  You can order it here .

Dani Rodrik’s Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy is a very good introduction to Rodrik’s basic ideas on trade.