Recently Mentioned Books

I very much liked Neil Powell, Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music .  Also very good is Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century .  They are both also useful for understanding English intellectual life during the 20th century, most of all Auden but even Keynes and also the broader history of homosexuality in England.  Both are already out in the UK, where I picked them up earlier in the year, and both will make my best of the year list in late November.

The quotation is from Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending , and the underlying research is here .  I believe this hypothesis does not apply to me, nonetheless I am glad to season two of Borgen does not arrive until later in June .  I am never tempted by binge viewing, and in general I do not like to watch two episodes in a row.

The quotation is from Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending , and the underlying research is here .  I believe this hypothesis does not apply to me, nonetheless I am glad to season two of Borgen does not arrive until later in June .  I am never tempted by binge viewing, and in general I do not like to watch two episodes in a row.

3. Robert Kuttner, Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity versus Possibility .

2. Hugh White, The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power (that link is for Kindle, the US Amazon link for the hardcover version is not yet available it seems).  A book about what is possibly the world’s #1 issue.

1. Stephen H. Axilrod, The Federal Reserve: What Everyone Needs to Know .  A short introduction to the topic, from OUP.

The full story is here .  Here is commentary from Salam and Sanchez .  And I have just received the new book by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving , an analytical treatment written by two economists.

I continue to read from Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis Theory and Technique .  Here is another bit of interest:

You can buy Season one here , and season two is coming out soon .

You can buy Season one here , and season two is coming out soon .

That is from Bruce Fink’s often quite interesting A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis Theory and Technique , which I suppose also doubles as management advice.

Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks , by Paul Frijters with Gigi Foster.

Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea , the Korean conflicts in broader global perspective.  Good advance reviews, looks interesting on a browse.

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography .  I’ve browsed some of it, it looks really quite good, noting that in general authorized biographies bore me.

Edmund Burke: The First Conservative , by Jesse Norman.

2. Stanislaw Lem’s major non-fiction work is now in English , Amazon link is here .  I have ordered it of course.

Krugman’s own words on the topic were “huge swings in the exchange rate have had only muted effects on anything real,” to cite one claim out of numerous similar passages.

Portugal is also a victim of what is called “ the gravity equation ,” namely that distance hurts the prospects for trade and in a manner which is strongly non-linear.  Think about the map or failing that read Saramago’s The Stone Raft — Portugal is close to other eurozone countries and to some (relatively poor) parts of Africa, otherwise it is pretty far from most places.

It is also odd that Hutton mentions robots and automation.  My next book considers those factors in great detail, but you won’t find either term or variants thereof in the index of The Great Stagnation .  Nor do I have the dual worry that both everything will be automated and there is nothing left to automate, as stated by Hutton.

I also argue in the book that the internet is the next transformational technology, and that it is already here, though it needs some time to mature and pay off.  I devoted an entire separate book to this theme, namely The Age of the Infovore , which suggests that for autistics and other infovores massive progress already has arrived.

Such views make for a convenient target, but that is not close to what I wrote in The Great Stagnation .  For instance on p.83 you will find me proclaiming, after several pages of details, “For these reasons, I am optimistic about getting some future low-hanging fruit.”  Those are not Straussian passages hidden like the extra Nirvana audio track at the end of Nevermind .  The very subtitle of the book announces “How America…(Eventually) Will Feel Better Again.”

Such views make for a convenient target, but that is not close to what I wrote in The Great Stagnation .  For instance on p.83 you will find me proclaiming, after several pages of details, “For these reasons, I am optimistic about getting some future low-hanging fruit.”  Those are not Straussian passages hidden like the extra Nirvana audio track at the end of Nevermind .  The very subtitle of the book announces “How America…(Eventually) Will Feel Better Again.”

TV viewing for this summer will likely include the full-length version of Fanny and Alexander , the Danish political thriller Borgen , and season two of Enlightened .

TV viewing for this summer will likely include the full-length version of Fanny and Alexander , the Danish political thriller Borgen , and season two of Enlightened .

TV viewing for this summer will likely include the full-length version of Fanny and Alexander , the Danish political thriller Borgen , and season two of Enlightened .