Recently Mentioned Books

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:

4. John Durant, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health .  A useful overview of its topic, with an influence from Art DeVany, but you will not find recipes for either “grubs” nor “worms” here.

3. Clare Jacobson, New Museums in China .  Good text but mostly a picture book, I loved this one.  Stunning architecture, no art, full of lessons in multiple areas, think of it as a Straussian picture book with beauty on its side too.

2. Damien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade .  How often does a book have both a good title and subtitle these days?  The authors are more pessimistic about China long-term than I am, but nonetheless this is a very interesting take on The Middle Kingdom.

That is Daniel Alpert’s book and the subtitle is Overcoming the Greatest Challenge to the Global Economy .  I found this a fun and interesting read and I agreed with more of it than I thought I would.  I’ve stressed numerous times that some of the dilemmas of our current day can be understood through nineteenth century parallels and also through the writings of the classical economists.  So why not pull Thomas Chalmers and Malthus out of the closet and worry about a general glut of goods and ser...

That is the new book by Frank Dikötter, the subtitle is A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 , and it is a prequel to his earlier Mao’s Great Famine .  His books are superb documents of the tyrannical age he studies.  Here is one excerpt:

You can pre-order the book here .

Recommended, and you can pre-order the book here .  Here is my earlier post, “ The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol .”

There is an entire chapter in Average is Over suggesting that trade effects on U.S. wages, in the negative direction, are stronger than many economists think, through factor price arbitrage, and that the topic deserves further investigation.  But it turns out my discussion did not go far enough in the direction of attributing observed wage changes to trade, and because of this paper, and because of Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, I hereby revise my views accordingly.

That is from Arthur Herman , reviewing Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control .

As I argue in Average is Over , marketing — in the broad sense of that term — is a growth sector for the future.  You might recall that three years ago he was charging only $15 per pencil .

All of those estimates are from a very interesting book by Vaclav Smil and Kazuhiko Kobayashi, Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts .

4. Paul Krugman is right , the Girardian Orphan Black is a very good TV show.  And here is Krugman on Tobin and tapering .

You can buy the book on Amazon here .  On Barnes and Noble here .  On Indiebound.org here .  And from Penguin here .  The Diane Coyle review is here .