Recently Mentioned Books

The authors are Nobel Laureates George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller and the subtitle is The Economics of Manipulation and Deception .  It’s a popular take on how markets trap you and your preferences in places you don’t want to be.  Self-recommending of course.

That is the new — well sort of new — Thomas Piketty book .  It was first published in France in 1997 and then updated several times through 2014, though we are told most of the book has kept its original structure.  It is a good, short read and will appeal to anyone with an interest in Piketty and “that sort of thing.”  The full-blown g > r model is not here, but you can see Piketty edging into being Piketty, with plenty of talk about capital-labor substitutability.

The book is Crazy Rich Asians , and the author is Kevin Kwan , who grew up in Singapore and also Texas.  It is a fun and popular “beach read” in its own right, but also more subtle and sociologically intriguing if you know a bit about Singapore.  I found it difficult to put down and it even made me laugh in a few places, which few novels do.  By the way, the female protagonist is an economics professor at NYU.

That was my response to reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me .  We all overinvest in non-diversified mood affiliation portfolios, so why not read someone else’s non-diversified mood affiliation portfolio from a less common point of view?

That is from Jim Goodman’s The Exploration of Yunnan , a useful and appealing book about one of the world’s most attractive regions.

From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places , by Elmira Bayrasli .

Murat Iyigun has a new book out titled War, Peace & Prosperity in the Name of God .  I haven’t read it yet, but Timur Kuran’s blurb seems helpful:

That is the new book by Jason F. Brennan and Peter Jaworski .  I like my own blurb for it:

4. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend .  This writer has been called a “female Neapolitan Knausgaard,” arguably a deliberate oxymoron.  It took me my second read through to “get it,” which I suppose means I am not the natural target audience.  But I am very glad I gave it that second read, and this is in fact the female Neapolitan Knausgaard, in four volumes by the way.

3. Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty: A Novel .  To the point and lots of fun.  A recently divorced woman travels to Morocco and surprises start to happen.  Occupies that intriguing space between “not deep” but also “not superficial.”

2. P.W. Singer and August Cole, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War .  More of a speculative exercise than a traditional novel — what if the Chinese could beat the Americans? — but still a fun read and a book that people are talking about at high levels.

1. Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy .  Most of all, Learned how much hard work and ingenuity was behind the MP3 standard, in any case a good and useful book.

5. Harry G. Gelber, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 B.C. to the Present .  No, this isn’t the best Chinese history book.  But it is the one most written in a way that you will remember its contents, and in this context that is worth a lot.

4. Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking .  He is one of the best non-fiction essay writers, and he remains oddly underrated in the United States.  It is no mistake to simply buy his books sight unseen.  I think of this book as “happiness for grumps.”

2. John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom .  The usual dose of pessimism, with a choppier argument and a slightly larger typeface than usual.  It induced me to order Mr. Weston’s Good Wine .  In any case, I’ll still buy the next one, engaging with John Gray if nothing else has become a ritual.  I once predicted to Jim Buchanan that John would end up converting to Catholicism, but I still am waiting.

1. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: on Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy .  Don’t judge Graeber by his mistakes or by how he responds (doesn’t respond) to criticism.  This one is still more interesting to read than most books.  In fact, most of us quite like bureaucracy.

Eric Rauchway, The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace .

That is from Philip T. Hoffman’s new and interesting Why Did Europe Conquer the World? , here is the book’s home page .  Hoffman does note, however, that if we count empires the Spanish empire was during that time larger than China.

Do read the entire article, and while you’re at it Adam Minter’s Junkyard Planet .

Here you can buy The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy .

I would someday like to read a Big Data paper on what predicts which neologisms will fail .  In any case, that information is from Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s new book The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century , for fans of Browne only but yes I am one.

By the way, the fourth edition of Doug Irwin’s trade book is coming out .

No further information on those markets is offered, do any of you know more about this?  The passage is from Huan Hsu’s new and noteworthy The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China .  It’s not so much a book about porcelain, rather it is an excellent look at China and also the idea of a quest to discover one’s family history, recommended.

In any case, my clear first choice pick is Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers , which I started reading a few days ago.  Here is the first sentence of the Amazon.com review:

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is in the running, as are John Le Carre, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.  Here is a discussion of Dickens, Orwell, and other classics .  Here is a jstor-gated survey of the topic .  There are plenty of novels about universities, very few of which I can endure.