Recently Mentioned Books

Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left .

Last night I read the new and excellent Michael Pettis book Avoiding the Fall: China’s Economic Restructuring .  It is the single best treatment I know for understanding the dilemmas of the current Chinese economy and the need for restructuring.  My favorite bits are those comparing the current Chinese economy to the Brazilian growth of the 1960s and 70s, also investment-driven, and lasting longer than most people thought possible, and culminating in the crack-up of the 1980s, which turned out t...

One intriguing side of Shiller is his advocacy of derivatives and prediction markets to help individuals better hedge risk.  On that see Shiller’s book Finance and the Good Society .  Shiller for instance would like to see explicit futures or forward markets in gdp, and individuals could hedge with those markets to bet against bad business prospects.  One also can imagine laborers insuring their future income by transacting in indicators of economic health.  Shiller has raised the idea of using ...

It’s good — really — and it is called The Signature of All Things .  I also find the book was nearly ideal for a long plane flight.  It has enough ideas to keep one’s interest, as I find that truly schlocky fiction bores me after a short while (it is better for short flights than for long ones).  But it is also easy enough to read and the print is suitably large.

She is one of my favorite authors.  If you are looking for one place to start try Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories , but all of her books are worth reading.  As writers go, she falls into the “behavioral” camp, so to speak.  Here is a story on Alice Munro retiring , as of earlier this year.  Here is an associated slide show .  I liked this article about her decision to retire .  She was 37 when her first collection of stories was published, her first story was publish...

6. Dwight H. Perkins, East Asian Development: Foundations and Strategies .

5. Brigitte Granville, Remembering Inflation , and

4. Jonathan Franzen, editor, The Kraus Project .  The Karl Kraus texts in German are energetically written, but one remembers how cantankerous and idiosyncratic he was.  The Kraus translated into English doesn’t work and probably the works are untranslatable.  The Franzen in English is cringe-worthy.  The Michael Hofmann review in TNYRB is one of the best book reviews I have read, ever, gated here .

2. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony .  This is a remarkably good, serious, detailed, and documented work on what we (possibly) know about the Gospels, if we read them through the lens of being eyewitness testimony.  Anyone interested in The New Testament should read this book.

1. Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants .  Not thrilling, but a well-informed, readable book, full of good information, about a part of the world which is growing in importance rapidly.

6. Dwight H. Perkins, East Asian Development: Foundations and Strategies .

5. Brigitte Granville, Remembering Inflation , and

4. Jonathan Franzen, editor, The Kraus Project .  The Karl Kraus texts in German are energetically written, but one remembers how cantankerous and idiosyncratic he was.  The Kraus translated into English doesn’t work and probably the works are untranslatable.  The Franzen in English is cringe-worthy.  The Michael Hofmann review in TNYRB is one of the best book reviews I have read, ever, gated here .

2. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony .  This is a remarkably good, serious, detailed, and documented work on what we (possibly) know about the Gospels, if we read them through the lens of being eyewitness testimony.  Anyone interested in The New Testament should read this book.

1. Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants .  Not thrilling, but a well-informed, readable book, full of good information, about a part of the world which is growing in importance rapidly.

The Left laments the income gap, and proposes various forms of social welfare that will cushion the blow, all the while even more enthusiastically constructing the meritocratic society and populating government and leading thinkeries with Ivy League “winners.” These button-down hipsters increasingly accumulate in a select number of urban echo-chambers described most recently by Charles Murray , where they lament the rise of a growing underclass while sipping $7 lattes. These social policies are ...

The Left laments the income gap, and proposes various forms of social welfare that will cushion the blow, all the while even more enthusiastically constructing the meritocratic society and populating government and leading thinkeries with Ivy League “winners.” These button-down hipsters increasingly accumulate in a select number of urban echo-chambers described most recently by Charles Murray , where they lament the rise of a growing underclass while sipping $7 lattes. These social policies are ...

Quite possibly it is Gladwell’s best book.  His writing is better yet and also more consistently philosophical.  For all the talk of “cherry picking,” the main thesis is that many qualities which usually appear positive are in fact non-monotonic in value and can sometimes turn negative.  If you consider Gladwell’s specific citations of non-monotonicities to be cherry-picking, you’re not understanding the hypothesis being tested.  Take the book’s central message to be “here’s how to think more de...

5. Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography .  Perhaps the most frequent sets of questions I receive from readers have to do with a) time management (try here and here ), b) low-skilled jobs, c) future inflation, and d) Leo Strauss.  (Bitcoin was once on that list, no more.)  This book will answer your questions on the latter, and there are few other good sources on Strauss.  But it’s more than that, it is a splendid work of intellectual history, wide-ranging an insightful on every...

4. Steve Lehto, The Great American Jetpack: The Quest for the Ultimate Personal Lift Device .  The title says it all.

3. Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924 .  A 1000 pp. plus tome — readable throughout — on exactly what went wrong in the Weimar era, a work unlikely to be surpassed, good on both the politics and the economics.

2. Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth, Prometheus Shackled: Goldsmith Banks and England’s Financial Revolution after 1700 .  This book argues that the financial revolution led to a reallocation of resources toward war and other public purposes, away from private investment, and that such shifts were partially responsible for the slow growth of living standards in the eighteenth century.

1. Richard A. Posner, Reflections on Judging .  I’m not seeing this book receive enough attention.  It is written in a somewhat fragmented manner, but it is an important and stimulating look at how growing social and economic complexity and the increased specialization of knowledge make the current organization of judgeships increasingly problematic.  Furthermore the opening “legal autobiography” offered by Posner is fascinating and it could be turned into a longer book of its own.

Jeremy Adelman, Hirschman’s biographer, is the editor behind this one, and you can pre-order your copy here .  It contains many of Hirschman’s best known essays, with an afterword by Amartya Sen and Emma Rothschild.

It is here in excerpts , mostly about Average is Over , but with some twists, here is one part: