Recently Mentioned Books

2. Elliott Carter passes away at 103 ; here is my favorite Carter CD .

That’s the new book by Casey Mulligan , and the subtitle is How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy .  To get to the point, it’s quite good.

He taught me Ph.d Micro I at Harvard, so it’s too bad he wants to wreck both Spain and Europe, and for so little in return.  Didn’t one of his theorems suggest this was a bad idea?  It’s not as if Catalonia is treated like Tibet.  (Haven’t I spent a few nice days walking around Barcelona in my time?  Didn’t Air Genius Gary Leff get a decent meal at El Bulli? Didn’t they once make a young people’s movie about the place in which no one has to do any work?)  Don’t we have bigger problems to worry a...

Mary Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think .  And here is chapter one on-line (pdf).

Here is Rodriguez’s eBook guide to happiness .  For pointers I thank Cass Sunstein and also Angus.

In any case that excerpt is from Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Khanho Shin, From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy .

Here is a further Mark Bittman column on GMOs , arguing against GMOs on the grounds that they lead to greater use of chemicals and pesticides.  I would start with quite a simple point, namely to the extent there is a problem with chemicals and pesticides (as there may be with or without GMOs), let’s regulate that problem directly.  Somehow that option is not put on the table as an alternative to what is widely recognized as a rather dubious referendum .  In any case, I posed the question about G...

That is the new eBook edited by Kurt Schuler and Andrew Rosenberg.  I cannot open the file they sent along to me, but Amazon summarizes:

Read the whole thing.  You can buy Tim Congdon’s book here .  Here is my final take on the book itself:

The editor is David Beckworth and the subtitle is The Causes and Cures of the Great Recession .  Contributors include Lawrence H. White, Scott Sumner, George Selgin, Jeff Rogers Hummel, Bill Woolsey, Nicholas Rowe, and Beckworth himself, with a strong representation from market monetarism.  My blurb reads: “David Beckworth rapidly has become one of the most influential writers in monetary economics and his wonderful book…offers some of the most important new ideas in the field.”

7. Gary B. Gorton, Misunderstanding Financial Crises: Why We Don’t See Them Coming .

6. Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics , by Robert Fogel, Enid Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, and Nathaniel Grotte.

5. Roger Scruton, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism .  I like Elinor Ostrom as much as the next guy, and this book is well-written, but I am not persuaded by the argument that environmental issues fundamentally can be handled on a local level.  At least a few important ones cannot.

4. Derek S. Hoff, The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History .  Good survey of early 20th century debates on population and birth rates and eugenics; these topics are making a comeback.

3. James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, Meaningful Work and Play .  He really is an anarchist, left-wing at that, but I couldn’t quite find a central core here, much as I admire his other books.

2. Frances Ashcroft, The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body .  One of the remaining popular science topics which has not been exhausted by popular books and so this volume is both instructive and entertaining and comes across as fresh.

1. Among Others , by Jo Walton.  I loved this book.  It won a Nebula Award, but is more about the power of books than being a work of science fiction per se.

The subtitle is A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars and according to Paglia “The format of the book is based on Catholic breviaries of devotional images, like Mass cards of the saints.”

That is from Seoul: A Window into Korean Culture , a very good book by Choi Joon-sik.

I put this one in the jaw hits floor category, and for more than one reason.  (Sheila ran the FDIC during the financial crisis and her book is titled Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself ).

You also should read the new (short) book out by Nicholas Eberstadt, A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic , which came to my attention quite recently.

I am a big fan of this book.  The Amazon link is here , and the Kindle edition should be coming in less than a week.

That is from Nate Silver’s new and excellent The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t .  The profile of Robin Hanson appears on p.201.

Paglia’s new book is here .  For the pointer I thank Alex T.

10. Painter : Contemporary art is a rich vein for South Korea. This catalog is one good place to start.