Recently Mentioned Books

The author is Richard Baldwin and the subtitle is Information Technology and the New Globalization .  The new globalization is the vertical geographic spread of the supply chain, as enabled by information technology.  Think iPhone, the components of which are made in a number of different countries.  (By the way, here is a very good Adam Minter piece on why an American-made iPhone would be very difficult to pull off.)  The important form of trade today is data flows, which enable the export of “...

You can order the book here .

That is from Nathalie Ginzburg , from her book The Little Virtues .  Here is a copy of the essay (pdf).  Discovering Ginzburg over the last few weeks has been a revelation for me; she is surely one of the more underrated writers.  Here is Bookslut on Ginzburg .

Here you can order Fuchsia’s new and excellent book The Land of Fish and Rice .

2. Dan Ariely has a new book coming out, Payoff .

Here is the full review .  And just one point: I know many of you claim I have not predicted much of current goings-on.  It is true I did not expect Trump to win, but you will find many other predictions in this book, most of which are looking pretty good as of today.  Typically if I am writing material into a book I do not blog it, so that the material will be fresh to all of my readers.  If you order The Complacent Class , you will find very little of it already has shown up on MR , the chapte...

5. Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone [Dream of the Red Chamber], Penguin edition, vol.I.  I am not confident of my ability to follow along all of the longer plot lines, but it is more absorbing and readable than I had recalled from a much earlier attempt to read it.  And overall it does make upper middle class life in 18th century China seem more civilized than its counterpart in Europe.

4. Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia .  A revealing look into the mind of the author, but this one works only if you know and love her novels already.  Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes.  Here is a good NYT review .

4. Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia .  A revealing look into the mind of the author, but this one works only if you know and love her novels already.  Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes.  Here is a good NYT review .

3. Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language .  I hadn’t known that almost all Esperanto words are accented on the penultimate syllable (bad for poetry), the system of correlatives and “table words” can be quite difficult (“It also has nine groups of word endings, not only for place but also for time, quantity, manner, possession, entity, etc.”), and how much the entire movement was influenced by the intellectual climate of late 19th century Russian Jewish th...

2. Jeffrey Edward Green, The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy .  “There will always be some plutocracy, don’t get bent out of shape too badly” is my brief summary of this one.  This book could be more readable, but it is highly intelligent.

1. Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant .  Grant is still underrated, this book is highly readable and to the point and not to fusty.  Someone should get Paul Krugman (a Grant fan) to review this book.

Here is a Guardian review , John Banville in the FT raves about it , and here is The Paris Review .  I believe I ordered it on Amazon.uk , all five-star reviews by the way.  Here is the U.S. Amazon listing , with access to used copies, I am not sure when the American edition comes out.

4. Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry, due out in April you can now pre-order .

1. New Camille Paglia book coming out in March .

It is an edited collection, I have an essay on inequality in the volume.  Here is the Amazon link .  Here is the book’s home page , which includes a full, free pdf.  There are many famous contributors, including Jason Furman and Betsey Stevenson, Martin Feldstein, Justin Wolfers, Glenn Hubbard, George Borjas, Melissa Kearney, Casey Mulligan, and others.  Here is Strain’s introduction and an organization of the book in sections .  Self-recommending!

That is from new and useful Gaining Currency: The Rise of the Renminbi , by Eswar S. Prasad.

Minxin Pei, China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay , takes a close look at Chinese corruption, based on a detailed study of two hundred cases.

I have only browsed Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics , but it appears to be a quite interesting political economy take on the (non-optimal) transactional economies from having criminals so deeply involved in Indian politics.

William Mellor and Dick M. Carpenter II, Bottleneckers: Gaming the Government for Power and Private Profit , is a very useful look at how laws and regulation block progress and create barriers to advancement.

Forthcoming is Joe Quirk, with Patri Friedman, Seasteading: How Ocean Cities Will Change the World .  Comprehensive and readable, though I am not a convert.

3. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and its Demons .  Fresh and stimulating throughout, I found most interesting the parts of how the Commander in Chief role of the president evolved under Lincoln, and Lincoln as the first “media president.”  Highly relevant for current politics too.

2. Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama .  A 1950s Argentinean novel set in colonial times, and beloved by Roberto Bolaño; the introduction describes the author as “a would-be magical realist who can’t quite detach himself from reality.”  For fans of the disjointed tragic.  I very much liked it, but had to read the first half twice in a row to grab hold of what was going on.

1. Peter Ames Carlin, Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon .  I hadn’t known that Simon originally recorded the Hearts and Bones album with Garfunkel, but later erased his partner’s contributions to the songs.  Nor had I known that Simon produced a stripped-down, acoustic guitar version of “ Surfer Girl .”  For fans, the book is interesting throughout, and most of all the story is of an ongoing rivalry — with Art — that never became functional again once it collapsed.

The author is Julian Gewirtz and the subtitle is Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China .  I loved this book.  It is a tour de force on China, the theory of policy advising, and the history of economic thought, all rolled into one.  Here is one bit: