Recently Mentioned Books

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.

You can buy the book here .

This is one of the best books on contemporary China, maybe the best.  The subtitle is Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China .  Osnos is the former New Yorker correspondent in the country for five years up through 2013.  Here is one excerpt:

The subtitle is Decline and Renaissance in the Twentieth Century , and the authors are Robert E. Gallamore and John R. Meyer.  John Meyer passed away in 2009 and this volume is a finished version of his last major work.

That is from an advertisement for Antony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See .

Cass Sunstein, Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State .

David Colander and Roland Kupers, Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up .

George J. Borjas, Immigration Economics .

Jean Pisani-Ferry, The Euro Crisis and its Aftermath .

The author is Don Thompson and the subtitle is Back Stories and Peculiar Economics from the World of Contemporary Art .  It is a very enjoyable book on the economics of the contemporary art world, here is one bit:

You can buy the book here , and here is a Questia link to the text .  And here is his 1966 book The Automation Hysteria .  It seems he had the temperament of a debunker.  I don’t know much about Terborgh, but for a while he was a private sector economist and also a research economist at the Fed .

You can buy the book here , and here is a Questia link to the text .  And here is his 1966 book The Automation Hysteria .  It seems he had the temperament of a debunker.  I don’t know much about Terborgh, but for a while he was a private sector economist and also a research economist at the Fed .

That is the new and truly excellent book by George Prochnik , think of it as a selective biography focused on themes of exile, perversion, Brazil, and suicide.  Excerpt:

It is The Society of Equals , by Pierre Rosanvallon , and it is a transatlantic look at how the notion of inequality has changed over the last three centuries.  It strikes me as the sort of book Crooked Timber would have a symposium on.  Here is one good bit: