Recently Mentioned Books

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.

For more on related points, read Charles’s new and excellent book The Upside of Down , not to be confused with Megan McArdle’s new and excellent The New Up Side of Down , a single space can make all the difference in the world.

6. Short Term 12 , set in a foster home, is in fact a good movie.

3. Handbook of the Digital Creative Economy , edited by Ruth Towse and Christian Handke.

2. Why Government Fails So Often and How it Can Do Better , by Peter H. Schuck, the author is largely a Democrat by the way.

1. Big Ideas in Macroeconomics: A Nontechnical View , by Kartik B. Athreya.

Many of you have been asking me about the forthcoming Thomas Piketty book .  I am writing a 2500-word review of it for…elsewhere…so mum’s the word until then.  For now I’ll just say it is a book to buy, read, and indeed study.  Here is one good piece on the book from The Economist .  It’s already a splendid year for the published word.

1. MIE: weird Japanese toothpastes .  And here is a Swiss nihilist toothpaste .

By the way, I have been watching Boys Over Flowers lately, a Korean drama (it’s also on Hulu).  Think of it as a mix of Heathers, Mean Girls, and Clueless, but set in a posh Korean high school, with lots of “Average is Over” value.  There is definitely income-elasticity of demand in Korean drama, even if there is not much price-elasticity.  There is also plenty on matching models, moral hazard, status competition, and repeated games, and not always with cooperative solutions.

Given the suddenly prominent role of Freestyle chess in economics, Big Data, and the social sciences (see also The Second Machine Age ), I hope this event receives some of the media attention which it deserves.

I am likely to use A Separation and Memories of Murder as two of the movies, along with a new release depending on schedule.

I am likely to use A Separation and Memories of Murder as two of the movies, along with a new release depending on schedule.

That is the forthcoming book by Megan McArdle and the subtitle is Why Failing Well is the Key to Success .  I think this book will be a big deal.  It is extremely well written, engages the reader, is based upon entirely fresh anecdotes and research results , and develops an important point.  I look forward to seeing it make its mark.

That is the new forthcoming Levitt and Dubner book, due out May 13 .