Recently Mentioned Books

Mitski, Puberty 2 , and Angel Olsen, My Woman .

Mitski, Puberty 2 , and Angel Olsen, My Woman .

Beyonce, Lemonade as a clear first choice.  Runners-up make it three women at the top:

5. Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis. Staying ahead of the Curve .  This is about how cities are failing the middle class throughout much of the world.  At the same time, suburbs are seeing a new poverty and urbanization is not always translating into rising living standards around the world.  This book is where the problems of urban economics “are at” right now.

4. Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund, Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game .  This book is a series of letters, mostly about soccer.  They are more substantive than you might be expecting, but still you have to love both Knausgaard and soccer to enjoy this one, on those I am only one for two.

3. Robert R. Reilly, Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music .  A highly useful and to the point guide to classical music for the periods you probably do not listen to.  It is strongest on the “intermediate” composers, such as Vagn Holmboe, Robert Simpson, and Edmund Rubbra.  It makes a persuasive case for the 17 string quartets of Heitor Villa-Lobos, we’ll see if that was $40 well-spent.

2. Michel Faber, Undying: A Love Story .  The pages are arranged like poems with stanzas, but it reads more like prose.  It is the moving story of the death of Faber’s wife by cancer, very short and interesting throughout.  So far published only in the UK.

1. Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds .  A super-fun but oddly uneven biography of Kahneman and Tversky, a meditation on the nature of collaboration, and a history of the early stages of behavioral economics (economics?) and for that matter a history of Israel in some of its early decades.  There are cameos from Rapaport, Thaler, Gigerenzer, and others.  Why did the Israelis take so readily to the idea of an economic psychology, compared to the Anglos?

I had never read The Jewish State before, so I was surprised to see how much economics it contained.  Here are a few points, most but not all economics:

You can buy it here .  Also useful, for different reasons, is the new book The Economics of Air Pollution in China: Achieving Better and Cleaner Growth , by Ma Jun.  It is funny (read: sad) how many people think the planet is at stake when it comes to climate change, and yet they will not deign to read a single book about air pollution in China.  Should they not read all of them?

You can buy it here .  Also useful, for different reasons, is the new book The Economics of Air Pollution in China: Achieving Better and Cleaner Growth , by Ma Jun.  It is funny (read: sad) how many people think the planet is at stake when it comes to climate change, and yet they will not deign to read a single book about air pollution in China.  Should they not read all of them?

Songs to fill the Void, and other works by American composers , most of all Virgil Thomson.

Miriam Makeba, Indispensable 1955-1962 .

Faransiskiyo Somaliland , Sahra Halgan Trio.  And on YouTube .

Tanbou Toulou Lou: Meringue, Kompa, Kreyol, Vodou Jazz & Electric Folklore from Haiti 1960-1981 , one of the best collections.  And here on YouTube .

Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Dois Amigos, Um Século de Música: Multishow Live , it is remarkable how fresh these guys still sound.

Arrived in my pile is Yuval Noah Harati, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow .

Guillermo A. Calvo, Macroeconomics in Times of Liquidity Crises is a useful book on sudden stops and related ideas.

Chris Hayes’s A Colony in a Nation , due out in March, he argues that racial equality really hasn’t improved much since 1968.

Marc Levinson’s An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy details what made the post World War II era so special in terms of its economics and income distribution and why it will be so hard to recreate.

I have only perused John H. Kagel and Alvin E. Roth, Handbook of Experimental Economics, volume 2 , but it appears to be an extremely impressive contribution.

My copy of Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy has arrived.  It is a very good statement of how political fragmentation and intensified intellectual competition drove modernity and the Industrial Revolution.

4. Miriam J. Laugesen, F ixing Medical Prices: How Physicians are Paid .  Will people still care about these issues for the next four years?  I hope so, because this is the best book I know of on Medicare pricing and its influence on pricing throughout the broader U.S. health care system.

3. Elsa Morante, History .  In America, this is one of the least frequently read and discussed great European novels of the 20th century.

2. Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa .  More for classical music and Ojawa fans than Murakami readers, this is nonetheless an easy to read and stimulating set of interviews for any serious classical music listener.  They are most interesting on Mahler.