Recently Mentioned Books

As I have stressed in Average is Over , improved measurement of worker value is very likely to increase income inequality.  When contributions are relatively vague, the natural tendency is to have weak egalitarian norms and relatively egalitarian pay structures.  When relative contributions are more clear, pay structures will follow, in the longer run dragging norms along with them.

That is the new banking book by Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber and the subtitle is The Political Origins of Banking Crises & Scarce Credit .  I went to review it, but came back to the thought that I liked Arnold Kling’s review better than what I was coming up with, here goes:

2. Joel Slemrod and Christian Gillitzer, Tax Systems .

1. Michael Szenberg and Lall Ramrattan, editors, Secrets of Economics Editors .

You will find related ideas in my book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures .  And here are by the way are my previous posts on horse nationalism .

That is the new book by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi and the subtitle is How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again .  As the title suggests, the argument focuses on household debt and also its subsequent effects on aggregate demand.  Here is one bit:

He was the director of Babette’s Feast and he just passed away at age 95.  What stuck with me most from that movie, and what is one of my favorite sentences ever, Axel himself cited upon receiving an Oscar:

5. Alen Mattich, Killing Pilgrim , Euro noir, but written by a financial journalist.

4. Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving ?  Parts of this book were interesting, but I think if I were a Muslim women I would have found it offensive, including the title.  What if someone wrote a book “Does Tyler Cowen Need Saving?” and decided “no.”  But then multiply by more than 500 million.  I can think of better questions to ask.  The author means well but the provocative title is a representation of what is in essence a re-colonialising the object of study.  Here is another, very d...

3. Scott Phillips, University of America: A Non-Linear Blueprint for Higher Education in the 21st Century .  A new and interesting short eBook on reforming higher education:

2. Richard Marshall, Philosophy at 3 a.m.: Questions and Answers with 25 Top Philosophers .  They are all smart, most of the interviews are fun, and pretty early on in this book you realize they are not going to get anywhere at all.

2. Thursday night, a dialogue between me and Megan McArdle about her new book .

That is the new book by Benjamin Baumer and Andrew Zimbalist and the subtitle is Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball .  It is an excellent and well-written look at where sabermetric knowledge stands today, here is one excerpt:

That is from Greg Clark’s new and noteworthy The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility .  Here is Kevin Drum on the book .

You can buy the book here .  Here is a previous MR post on the book , there will be more to come.

That is a new and important book by David Weil and the subtitle is Why Work Became so Bad For So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It .  I take the author’s main thesis to be that corporations have, in the interests of efficiency, focused increasingly on “core competencies.”  That has led to an outsourcing of non-core jobs and the commoditization of those jobs, outside the sphere of benefits, workplace community, investing in workers, and caring about worker morale.

Here is Dylan Matthews interviewing Gregory Clark about his new book The Son also Rises :

3. Arnon Grünberg , Mit Haut und Haaren .  This Dutch novel, now translated into German, is partially set in the economics department at George Mason University, circa the turn of the millennium.  A quick browse revealed one scene with a character clearly based on Andrew Sellgren, I wonder who else shows up?  The author is best known for writing Tirza , however.

2. Dale W. Jorgenson, Richard J. Goettle, Mun S. Ho, and Peter J. Wilcoxen, Double Dividend: Environmental Taxes and Fiscal Reform in the United States .

1. The Myth of Achievement Tests: the GED and the Role of Character in American Life , edited by James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries, and Tim Kautz.

Of course I want Brahms’s German Requiem, the Rudolf Kempe recording .  I am afraid, however, that I (in some form) will last longer than Spotify does.

That is the new Robert M. Gates book , which of course has been widely reviewed.  I was very impressed with this work.  I read it as a meditation on the question of what kinds of martial virtue (or lack thereof) are possible in our contemporary age, updating Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch through the medium of the reigns and rules of the two Bushes, Cheney, Rice, Obama (most of all), Hillary, Biden, and of course Gates himself with a bit of Petraeus tossed in.

I believe that is not a good characterization of Barro’s views and it is also an object lesson in the importance of the Ideological Turing Test .  I would cite not only this piece, but also forty years of journal articles, many of which study the importance of nominal shocks and demand, albeit without (in general) using textbook AD-AS terminology.  Indeed, Barro working with Herschel Grossman is one of the founding fathers of quantity-constrained Keynesian sticky-price macro and he is still citi...

Here is Bruce Caldwell’s introduction to the volume, for e-purchase .  The book’s table of contents is here .  Here is our MRU course on Friedrich Hayek .

That is the new University of Chicago Press volume of Hayek’s collected works, this time volume 15 .  It is the best single-volume introduction to Hayek’s thought, if you are going to buy or read only one.  It has the best of the early essays, as you might find in Individualism and Economic Order , and then the best later essays which build upon those earlier insights.