Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6797 mentions, ordered by most recent.
That is the new book from Lanny Ebenstein , I found it well-written and useful. You can read about Henry Simons, the Cowles Commission, Hayek, Jacob Marschak, of course Milton Friedman, and much mmore. Friedman, by the way, originally had intended to become an actuary.
That is from Emmanuel Todd, Who is Charlie? , pp.162-163. Here is my previous post on the book .
That is from new and intriguing Mark Twain in China , by Selina Lai-Henderson.
That is from Anna Katharina Schaffner’s review of Rosenfeld’s Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture , September 11th issue of the TLS.
5. Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction . What makes some people very good at forecasting? Self-recommending, here is a good Q&A with Tetlock . The real question of course is why isn’t everyone working on this?
4. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Inequality . A very short book, but longer than the blurb I wrote for it: “Economic equality is one of today’s most overrated ideas, and Harry G. Frankfurt’s highly compelling book explains exactly why.”
3. J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy . A running dialogue between Coetzee and a psychotherapist, some of it is interesting. Some of it. But after the early sections on the dangers of storytelling, I got bored. Surely at some point empiricial psychology deserved a mention.
2. Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 . I read only about a fifth of this one. I thought it was a very high quality treatment of how German citizens perceived WWII, and also quite readable. It didn’t match my interests at the moment, but I am happy to recommend it.
1. Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help . Profiles of people who are obsessed with helping others. That is a wonderful premise for a book, somehow for my taste it didn’t run quite deep enough. Still, many people will like this one a great deal.
The way the movie is good is almost the opposite of the way the book is good, so re-gear your expectations. It is the most convincing portrayal of a planet I have seen in cinema. (Planets, by the way, create erotic bonds stronger than those of actual marriages.) I enjoyed the homage shots to Bruce Dern and Silent Running , Brian De Palma’s underrated Mars film too. The horizon images of earth toward the end come as an ecstatic jarring relief. They are, by the way, aiming for the China marke...
You should all buy and read Dani’s new book, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science , which I can recommend wholeheartedly and which I wrote a blurb for.
The subtitle is 1923-1968: The Idealist , and the author is Niall Ferguson. This is really an impressive book and we all should be envious that we did not write it ourselves.
Brink Lindsey is the editor, and I am one of the experts (is anyone an expert on economic growth?), here are the other contributors , and that is also a link to the underlying on-line symposium. It is a $6.99 ebook on Amazon . Here is Cato’s home page for the ebook .
His new book is…different. Think of it as a guide to dating and mating for males, but unlike the pick-up artists he (with Max) focuses on the separating rather than the pooling equilibrium. That is, he advises men to actually be better men, and not just to send clever signals, and so the subtitle is Become the Man Women Want . Hard to argue with that, right?
The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
By Barry Cunliffe, due out in November . I’m counting the days…
No, not Dani Rodrik, the guest for tomorrow’s Conversations with Tyler chat, rather Elias Canetti . As prep for Dani at 3:30 tomorrow (live stream), I thought I should read some more Canetti. Here are a few maxims from his The Secret Heart of the Clock :
I learned something from every page, you can buy the book here .
I recommend L. Randall Wray’s Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist , forthcoming in November. Minsky isn’t so readable, but Wray is. I’ve just started my review copy, I hope to report more on it soon.
Jennifer Mittelstadt’s The Rise of the Military Welfare State is a useful history of how a social welfare state for the military was first created, for recruitment purposes, and then later dismantled.
Tom Gjelten’s A Nation of Nations is an interesting “immigration history” of Fairfax County. I enjoyed Deirdre Clemente’s Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style .
Tom Gjelten’s A Nation of Nations is an interesting “immigration history” of Fairfax County. I enjoyed Deirdre Clemente’s Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style .
3. Michael White, Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir . Nominated in the non-fiction National Book Award category, I actually enjoyed reading this one, all of it except the parts about…Vermeer. It’s better as a memoir of alcoholism and divorce, interspersed with visits to art museums.
2. Elmira Bayrasli, From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places . A well-written, completely spot on analysis about how the quality of the business climate needs to be improved in emerging economies, and about how much potential for entrepreneurship there is. If economists were to do nothing else but repeat this message, the quality and usefulness of our profession likely would rise dramatically.
1. Deep South , by Paul Theroux. It’s OK enough, but Theroux’s best writing was motivated by bile and unfortunately he has matured. Still, he can’t get past p.9 without mention Naipaul’s “rival book” A Turn in the South . My favorite Theroux book is his Sir Vidia’s Shadow , a delicious story of human rivalry and one of my favorite non-fiction books period.