Recently Mentioned Books

6. Julie Schumacher, Doodling for Academics: A Coloring and Activity Book .  It’s funny, for instance one panel has the heading “Find and color the many readers who will enjoy your dissertation.”  The images include a rat and a snake in the grass, but there aren’t even so many of those.

5. Johan Chistensen, The Power of Economists Within the State .  I haven’t read this one, but it appears to be a very interesting look at the role of economists within government, for the case studies of New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, and other cases (in less detail).  “Economists in government” remains an underappreciated topic, so I expect this book is a real contribution.

4. Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture .  An original and consistently interesting extended essay on how “World Music” is evolving in digital times.  A must-read for me, at least.

3. Mary Gaitskill, Somebody with a Little Hammer, Essays .  Short pieces, never too long, strong throughout, mostly on literature (Nicholson Baker, Peter Pan , Norman Mailer, Bleak House ) with some essays on movies too.  This will make my best of the year list, and she remains an underrated author more generally.

2. Historically Inevitable: Turning Points of the Russian Revolution , edited by Tony Brenton, contributors include Dominic Lieven, Orlando Figes, and Richard Pipes.  I, for one, often find it easier to learn history through counterfactual reasoning.  “What if they hadn’t put Lenin into that train?, and so on, and so this is my favorite from the recent spate of books on 1917 in Russia.

1. Mark Zupan, Inside Job: How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest .  This is now the very best book on how special interest groups subvert the quality of public policy.

The authors are Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, and the subtitle is Harnessing Our Digital Future .  Arguably McAfee and Brynjolfsson have become America’s leading authors of business/management books (with an economic slant).  This one is due out June 27, I am eager to read it.

Garry’s forthcoming book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins is just superb, and the podcast will be released around the time of book publication in early May.

For much of the 18th and early 19th centuries, under British rule, Indian economic performance was mediocre at best. It has been estimated that the yearly agricultural wage was higher in 1810 than in 1946. It’s difficult to prove how much of that decline was because of the British, but it is hardly a ringing endorsement.

That is the new and fascinating book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, with the subtitle Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are .  Here is one of many interesting bits:

Nadia Hillard’s The Accountability State: US Federal Inspectors General and the Pursuit of Democratic Integrity , is a thorough and useful account of what the title promises.

4. Kevin N. Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind .  If you read and profited from Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Success , this book is the next step.  Here are remarks by Robin Hanson on the book .

3. John F. Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform .  A very good and readable book on a much misunderstood topic.  Upon a close read of the data, it turns out the War on Drugs and private prisons are overemphasized as causes of overincarceration, whereas much of the actual blame should be placed on altered incentives for prosecutors.  Note that Pfaff also has a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in addition to his JD.

2. Dieter Helm, Burn Out: The Endgame for Fossil Fuels .  That’s not the right title, because most of this book covers the game rather than the endgame.  This is a careful and conceptual look at how different sectors of energy production are likely to evolve, taking good care to distinguish different parts of the world and stationary vs. mobile energy sources.

1. Philippe Desan, Montaigne: A Life .  Knotty, complex, and almost 800 pp., the bottom line nonetheless is that I will not liberate this book but rather keep it forever.  I’ve read only about 200 pp. so far, but it is one of the best guides to understanding its main topic, most of all when it comes to integrating how his written texts sprang from his actual life.

That is from the rewarding Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey , by Madeleine Bunting.

My take on all this is to prefer a higher-trust-in-experts equilibrium for its practical properties, yet without believing the trust actually is deserved, giving me again a slight affinity with Strauss .  Is there an equilibrium where a high level of trust can be maintained more or less forever?  Or is it like an optimal resource extraction problem, namely that most kinds of trust end up being cashed in, you just hope it was for some good purpose (public support for the bailouts to avoid another...

The subtitle of this new and fascinating volume is How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas .  Think of this as an update of Richard Posner’s work on public intellectuals, but explaining where a world of social media and higher income inequality and greater polarization has put us.  Wisely, Drezner does not idealize the milieu of Susan Sontag and the Commentary crowd, but still some things have become worse, due largely to the lack of trusted gatekeeper...

That is by Ray Fisman and Miriam A. Golden, an excellent book , the subtitle says it all.  And yes it does also cover how to stop or at least limit corruption.

That is from the quite good and surprisingly substantive Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today , by Ilana Gershon.

These chains of ideological influence can be remarkably indirect. For instance, it is commonly believed that the collapse of Soviet communism led to a softening of positions within the Irish Republican Army. It’s not that anyone ever expected the Soviets to intervene in the Irish conflict, but rather a role model of resistance had been taken away, and this ultimately made the peace process easier.

Here is the full piece , Mark is reviewing Aldo Schiavone’s The End of the Past .

That is from Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America , a book worth rereading in light of recent events.

My colleague Philip E. Auerswald has just published the very useful The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand Year History .

Jonathan Schwabish, Better Presentations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks , is specific in all the right ways, most of all when it comes to Powerpoint slides.