Recently Mentioned Books

3. Colm Tóibín , On Elizabeth Bishop .  A good example of a book I wish was longer than it was, it is shorter than its 199 pp. might indicate.  As a poet I much prefer Bishop to her correspondent Robert Lowell; their letters collection by the way makes for superb reading and drama.

2. Philip Glass, Words Without Music .  “A lot of Einstein on the Beach was written at night after driving a cab.”  An excellent memoir of both Glass’s early life and the New York creative world up through 1976 or so.

1. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania , by Erik Larson.  My favorite of his books, fun and readable as you would expect, many interesting details including what happens to you in water at 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

I will second the recommendation.  Michael is a political scientist at UCLA, and this volume is one of the most important social books of the last fifteen years.  He shows the importance of “common knowledge” in explaining social phenomena, namely we create rational rituals so that others can see we are acting in concert with them.  It’s all about public ceremonies, parades, dances, and meetings.  It’s also why good Super Bowl commercials can be so effective.  The work dates from 2001, but it se...

That is the new book by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, the subtitle is Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors .  The basic message is that North Korea is far more (black) marketized — and more corrupt — than most outsiders realize.  Here is one representative passage:

Here is part of the answer, consistent with what I argued in my book What Price Fame? :

But as you can see from the above description, a significant chunk of readers will reject the book’s premise, language, and topics altogether.  I think it is very, very good, you can order it here .

That is from Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox, Running From Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned Off to Politics , a fascinating and also readable book.

For the specialist I can heartily recommend Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock , by Stephen W. Kress and Derrick Z. Jackson, Yale University Press.

6. Robert P. Murphy, Choice, Cooperation, Enterprise and Human Action .  If you want a clear, well-written, 2015-based, non-obscure, non-Galician version of Ludwig Mises, this is your book.

5. The Greening of Asia , by Mark l. Clifford, a genuinely useful and informative book about some of the most important environmental dilemmas, very even handed and a model of clarity.

3. Stanley G. Payne and Palacios, Franco: A Personal and Political Biography .  This is readable, reasonably comprehensive, and unlike many competing books shows clearly that Franco, whatever his flaws may have been, was no buffoon.  A useful corrective to the usual treatments, even if many readers will feel the authors go too far in their sympathies for Franco.

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.