Recently Mentioned Books

2. Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation .  Have you ever wondered how recipes, fashion, fonts, and comedians’ jokes function without strong intellectual property protection in the classic sense?  We have needed a book on that and now we have one, this is both fun and instructive.

1. The Seventh Day , by Yu Hua.  This is perhaps my favorite of all the contemporary Chinese novels I have read: “Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest.”

By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission , due out in May, here is some summary:

Here is a 552 pp. NBER book on all of these issues, I have not read it but it is on its way in the mail.  Try also this Robert E. Hall piece (pdf), he notes a “capital catastrophe” occurred in the mid-1970s, furthermore he considers what rates of capital accumulation might be consistent with a high value for intangible assets.  That piece of the puzzle has to fit together too. This excellent Baruch Lev paper (pdf) considers some of the accounting issues, and also how mismeasured intangible asset...

Here is a 552 pp. NBER book on all of these issues, I have not read it but it is on its way in the mail.  Try also this Robert E. Hall piece (pdf), he notes a “capital catastrophe” occurred in the mid-1970s, furthermore he considers what rates of capital accumulation might be consistent with a high value for intangible assets.  That piece of the puzzle has to fit together too. This excellent Baruch Lev paper (pdf) considers some of the accounting issues, and also how mismeasured intangible asset...

Read Sher, Harry Frankfurt’s excellent forthcoming book On Inequality , Derek Parfit on equality and priority (pdf) and Huemer on Parfit (pdf).  Read about prioritarianism more generally .  I come away from these writings with the view that the current moral focus on inequality is a flat-out mistake in moral philosophy, analogous to how the philosophers sometimes make mistakes in economics.  That’s right, not a difference in values but a mistake .  (The difference in values, to the extent there ...

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception .

File under “Arrived in my Pile”!  You can order it on Amazon here .

Colin M. MacLachlan, in his splendid Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture , reports:

That is all from “MIT’s Rise to Prominence: Outline of a Collective Biography,” by Andrej Svorenčík.  There are various versions of that article here , the jstor version here , and it is reprinted in MIT and the Transformation of American Economics , edited by E. Roy Weintraub.

That excerpt is from Andrew G. Walder’s China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed , my previous post on this excellent book is here .

That is the new and excellent book by Andrew G. Walder .  Here is one excerpt:

3. The new edition of David Boaz’s The Libertarian Mind is out.

2. Charles C.W. Cooke’s The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future is all the rage right now.  Books which attempt to redefine or carve up the political spectrum aren’t exactly my thing, but this one is well-written and vital.  Here is a Reason interview with Cooke .  Here is a NYT interview with Cooke .

1. I enjoyed my page browse through Becoming Steve Jobs , which seems fun, readable, and informative, but it’s not what I feel like reading right now.  But if you think you might want to read it, you probably should.

That is from Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America .

That is the new Ian Bremmer book, with the subtitle Three Choices for America’s Role in the World .  It can be Indispensable America (our postwar role), Moneyball America (pick priorities and accomplish them), or Independent America (limited foreign policy aspirations but lots of nation-building at home and trade abroad), and Ian prefers the latter — “I believe it’s time for Americans to redefine our value to the world.”  Most of all he thinks we have to choose, and articulate the reasons for ou...

This is from his Polemics book :

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant: A Novel .  It has a beautiful air of mystery and profundity, but by p.120 I still didn’t care.  Some of you will like this a lot, but I put it down to pick up some other book which I will not finish.

Richard Roberts and David Kynaston, The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC .  This is an important book for the historian, but it is not written for the eye of the economist.

Edward Mendelson, Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth Century Writers .  Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Kazin, William Maxwell, Bellow, Mailer, Auden, and O’Hara.

James McPherson, The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters .

There is a new version of the Mahabharata , in blank verse rather than prose, translated/created by Carole Satyamurti .  I’ve only read an initial sliver of it, but dramatically and linguistically it is very effective.  This is a beautiful edition, and deserves serious consideration as a purchase for just about every library.  I have yet to see any significant reviews of the work.

That is from the new and noteworthy The Korean Economy: From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future , by Barry Eichengreen, Wonhyuk Lim, Yung Chul Park, and Dwight H. Perkins.

5. The strongest version of Shambaugh’s argument is that there is no “core” to the internal coups, a’ la Gordon Tullock’s book Autocracy .  You get too many internal coups, or too many incipient internal coups, and the public square is required to impose structural equilibrium on the problem.  Maybe so, but that requires lots of claims about the internal dynamics of Chinese politics, and the lack of internal coup stability mechanisms.  The cited evidence by Shambaugh does not seem to bear direct...