Recently Mentioned Books

2. Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America .  Two of the takeaways from this book are a) the United States had a more statist approach to electricity infrastructure than did most of Europe, and to its advantage, and b) we didn’t let lots of people accidentally being electrocuted stop progress, again probably to our advantage.

1. David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity .  The typewriter and the bicycle revolutionized India early in the twentieth century

That is from the new Lynda Obst book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the NEW ABNORMAL in the Movie Business .  The book is poorly written but sometimes of interest for those who follow this topic.

That is from the forthcoming useful book by Richard S. Grossman Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them .  For the two relevant Robert Paul Thomas pieces (jstor) see here and here .

The author of this interesting work is Juan Cole and the subtitle is Invading the Middle East .  Here is one excerpt:

That is from George Gilder’s new Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing Our World . reviewed by Arnold Kling here .

3. Vaclav Smil, Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing .

2. F. H. Buckley, editor, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law .

1. Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America .

That is from Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, The Amish , which is an excellent social scientific look at what we outsiders know about Amish communities.

That is from Terry Eagleton’s Across the Pond: An Englishman’s View of America , which is sometimes amusing.

3. Why apes cannot pitch , and there will soon be a new Bruno Latour book , two of them in fact .

3. Why apes cannot pitch , and there will soon be a new Bruno Latour book , two of them in fact .

Peter Orszag considers that possibility in his recent column .  About one in four bartenders has some kind of degree.  Orszag draws heavily on this paper by Beaudry and Green and Sand, which  postulates falling returns to skill.  It’s one of the more interesting pieces written in the last year, but note their model relies heavily on a stock/flow distinction.  They consider a world where most of the IT infrastructure already has been built, and so skilled labor has not so much more to do at the m...

You can buy my book An Economist Gets Lunch here .

5. The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith .  The Amazon link is here .

This is from the latest book by Christopher M. Davidson, After the Sheikhs :

You can buy the book here .

“It’s better than it looked,” Mr. Cowen said. “Technological progress comes in batches and it’s just a little more rapid than it looked two years ago.” His next book, “ Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation ,” is due out in September.

Here is a useful New York Times review .  Here is the author’s blog , which is about being a sociopath, or about pretending to be a sociopath, or perhaps both.  Here is the book on Amazon and note how many readers hated it.  I say they just don’t like sociopaths.

5. The Fragrance of Guava , Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez.  This book gives a very good sense of how the author sees his life’s work as fitting together, and why the short fiction and Autumn of the Patriarch are important.

4. Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia .  A very detailed, readable, highly useful, and economically sophisticated account of how they got from the mess they had back then to the mess they have right now.

3. Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man .  For such a long book about a topic I don’t wish to read any more about, this is compelling.  It has many excellent sentences, such as “Nixon is a Market ascetic, and politics is his business.  On it he lavishes an intensity of dedication that is literally consuming.”  Every President should have a book this good about him.

2. Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York .  A useful historical look at how fiscal stimulus gets translated into actual urban policies on the ground, well documented and also surprisingly readable.

1. James Salter, All That Is .  Excellent set pieces from a strong writer with a cult literary following, but for me the story as a whole didn’t add up to much interesting.  I did finish it, however.