Recently Mentioned Books

In 100 Years, Leading Economists Predict the Future , edited by Ignacio Palacios-Huerta.

Steven D. Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith, Rethinking Housing Bubbles: The Role of Household and Bank Balance Sheets in Modeling Economic Cycles .  They present a bank balance sheet account of the Great Recession, with a good deal of background coming from the experimental economics direction.

Peter de Keyzer, Growth Makes You Happy: An Optimist’s View of Progress and the Free Market .

Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What To Do About It .

The longer article , by Georgina Adam, cites the Thompson estimate that there are about seventy-five “superstar” artists who regularly earn in seven figures.  And here is the new Georgina Adam book Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century .

1. The new Edward Hugh eBook .

His discussion of the importance of the legal system is also very good.  You can buy the book here .

I have written a review of this book, subtitled The Great Housing Disaster , for the Times Literary Supplement of 13 June 2014.  As I explain in the review, he tried to write a book about housing problems in the UK without accepting the Avent-Yglesias analysis that legal restrictions on supply are a big part of the problem.  Rather than looking to supply and demand, Dorling instead tries to blame “inequality, selfishness and hoarded extra bedrooms.”  It doesn’t succeed.  Here is an excerpt from ...

6. Jenny Davidson, Reading Style: A Life in Sentences .  Why do we fall in love with some sentences rather than others?  This book is consistently insightful into classic (and sometimes not so classic) fiction.  For whatever reason, I agree with her about various novels to a remarkable degree.  Here is Jenny’s daily read .  Here is her blog .  This book induced me to order Stephen King’s Needful Things , which I have never read.

5. David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke .  Clear, thorough, and to the point on its stated topic.

3. Sudhir Vadaketh, Floating on a Malayan Breeze: Travels in Malaysia and Singapore .  A Singaporean travels through Malaysia to discover what divides their two countries and what ultimately unites them too.  I read this one straight through.  File under “great books you’ve never heard about.”  Honest and frank throughout.

2. Louise Lawrence, Children of the Dust , excellent, short and highly readable post-apocalyptic story, think of it as a precursor (1985) of some of today’s YA popular fiction, it should be turned into a movie.  I’ve ordered two more of hers.

1. Alan Macfarlane, Thomas Malthus and the Making of the Modern World , Kindle edition.  It starts off slow, but overall an excellent short look at Malthus as an underrated thinker and a theorist of the cultural and demographic preconditions of capitalism.

Michael wrote all of that and more in his book Cybernation: The Silent Conquest in…1962.

Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies .

Daniel W. Drezner, The System Worked: How the World Stopped Another Great Depression .

Austin Frakt and Mike Piper, Microeconomics Made Simple: Basic Microeconomic Principles Explained in 100 Pages or Less .

Pierre Michel-Menger, The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement Under Uncertainty .

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics .

4. Ralph Nader, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State .  I am supposed to interview Nader soon, and so I am reading up on his history, he has become an oddly undervalued figure, remembered mainly for his spoiler role in Gore vs. Bush.  Here is a piece on Nader’s ostensible “turn to the right ,” that is not how I would describe it, as with Krugman I see continuity from a person who is basically a moralizing conservative with a crusading zeal.  And who woul...

2. Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression , graphic edition, the illustrations work very well.  I have only paged through it.

1. Gendun Chopel, Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler , introduction by Thupte Jimpa and Donald S. Lopez Jr.  A very learned Tibetan scholar travels to India and records his hyper-structured impressions of what is obviously a more modern and economically developed land.  Yet India is also the original homeland of Buddhism and as such a source of obsession about the distant past.  Brilliantly rendered, the manuscript reads like a source that would have inspired Borges.  Every now and...

Yet another scenario, as Kroszner and I had outlined a long time ago , is for currency to evolve out of existence, as it is slowly displaced by assets of higher return and greater convenience, such as electronic payment media.  This does not involve transition problems, but it takes a long time.  In recent times currency if anything has been a growing part of the U.S. money supply.

That is the new and excellent book by Adam Phillips, in the US available on Kindle only .  Here is one bit:

Goffman’s book is superbly researched and extremely well-written and it may well be the best social science book of the year so far.  You can buy it here .  And I didn’t even cover the very best part of On the Run in my column, namely the author’s account of her own personal experiences doing the research, read it carefully.