Recently Mentioned Books

That is from new and interesting Education Unchained: What It Takes to Restore Schools and Learning , by Erik Lidström, mostly from a Hayekian perspective.  The author claims, by the way, that the Finnish model has been declining since it has been made more student-centered and less teacher-centered.

Recommended, here is the Amazon link .  And here is Jason Kottke on the book .  And here is a good Malcolm Harris review .

1. The subtitle is A New Theory of Chinese History , and volume one has just been translated and published from the Chinese.

The book is due out in April .

I hope to report on other interesting sections of the book soon; it is due out in April .  Again, most business cycles in history have been real business cycles .

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is one of America’s leading public intellectuals . I would describe him as an offshoot of the Harlem Renaissance, and what he and I share in common is a fascination with the character of Mycroft Holmes, the subject of Kareem’s latest book — and that of course, is Sherlock Holmes’s brother.

2. Novelist : I draw a blank, sorry people…Does it count that Joe Haldeman ( The Forever War ) was a product of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop?  There must be other examples as well.

His latest entry into this debate [over stagnation], The Rise and Fall of American Growth , is likely to be the most interesting and important economics book of the year. It provides a splendid analytic take on the potency of past economic growth, which transformed the world from the end of the nineteenth century onward.

The author is Sam Bowles and the subtitle is Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens .

The subtitle of Thomas Leonard’s new and excellent book is the apt Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era .

That is the title of the new and forthcoming Robin Hanson book, due out in May .  I was asked to supply a blurb, and offered two possibilities.  One was:

5. Heather Boushey, Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict .

4. Despina Stratigakos, Where are the Women Architects ?

3. Michel De Vroey, A History of Macroeconomics: from Keynes to Lucas and Beyond .

2. Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History .

1. Rowena Olegario, The Engine of Enterprise: Credit in America .

Definitely recommended, you can buy it here .

This is probably one of the most useful things you will learn from MR all year.  It is from Maria Konnikova’s new book The Confidence Game :

That anecdote is from McKay Coppins, The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party’s Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House , a fun read with lots of background information I did not know.

6. James Baldwin, Collected Essays .  My favorite Baldwin, not the novels.  The biggest surprise in here is his film criticism, most of all the short essay on Bergman, or on Porgy and Bess.  Here is an Atlantic piece appreciating Baldwin as a movie critic .  Or how about this sentence?: “He [Langston Hughes] is not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable.”

5. Amiri Baraka, SOS Poems 1961-2013 .  Is he actually one of America’s better poets?  Imagine a mix of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, and the Black Panthers.  Truly original and full of energy, here is his NYT obituary .

4. Timur Vermes, Look Who’s Back .  I don’t usually read books with “the Hitler gimmick,” but this recently translated German novel caught my eye in a London bookstore.  Imagine that Hitler comes back (an unexplained plot twist), no one believes it is “the real Hitler,” and he is given his own TV show as a kind of crank celebrity imitator.  It’s an interesting meditation on the commercial trivialization of evil, and how the modern world can process virtually any kind of message.  Relevant for Am...

3. C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary .  Many people consider this the best book on cricket ever written.  I cannot judge that, but it is a stellar sports book, colonialism book, and most of all a Caribbean Bildungsroman (Trinidad), definitely recommended to anyone with interests in those areas.  Beautifully written, I read this one to prepare for Kareem .

2. R.W. Johnson, How Long Will South Africa Survive?: The Looming Crisis .  A stunning yet deeply pessimistic book about why the country is doing so badly.  The rot seeps more badly than I had realized.  The corruption, collapse of the legal system, and dismantling of the use of the government public to spend on public goods all are out of control and getting worse.  Recommended.  A bit idiosyncratic, but conceptual and original throughout.

1. Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist .  A wild memoir, full of tales of bipolar, murders in Jamaica, study at Harvard, marijuana, knee symmetry as a key variable in sprinting success, and the Black Panthers.  It has sentences like “Best way to put it, nobody fucked with Ernst Mayr.”  From one of the leading evolutionary biologists, recommended if you are up for the offbeat and the exotic and not obsessed with coherence .  Burial instructions are included.