Recently Mentioned Books

1. Movie .  If I had to pick one, I might opt for Old Boy .  The deeper point is that you should watch them all.  If it is a Korean movie, and you can get your hands on it (as a non-Korean), it is probably excellent.  This is a remarkable regularity and a good selection filter for exploring. This list is one place to start but not to stop. The Host is a fun spoof of monster movies and Shiri is a gripping thriller.  Watch any Korean movie which Scott Sumner recommends.  Even some of the clunkier ...

1. Movie .  If I had to pick one, I might opt for Old Boy .  The deeper point is that you should watch them all.  If it is a Korean movie, and you can get your hands on it (as a non-Korean), it is probably excellent.  This is a remarkable regularity and a good selection filter for exploring. This list is one place to start but not to stop. The Host is a fun spoof of monster movies and Shiri is a gripping thriller.  Watch any Korean movie which Scott Sumner recommends.  Even some of the clunkier ...

1. Movie .  If I had to pick one, I might opt for Old Boy .  The deeper point is that you should watch them all.  If it is a Korean movie, and you can get your hands on it (as a non-Korean), it is probably excellent.  This is a remarkable regularity and a good selection filter for exploring. This list is one place to start but not to stop. The Host is a fun spoof of monster movies and Shiri is a gripping thriller.  Watch any Korean movie which Scott Sumner recommends.  Even some of the clunkier ...

1. Movie .  If I had to pick one, I might opt for Old Boy .  The deeper point is that you should watch them all.  If it is a Korean movie, and you can get your hands on it (as a non-Korean), it is probably excellent.  This is a remarkable regularity and a good selection filter for exploring. This list is one place to start but not to stop. The Host is a fun spoof of monster movies and Shiri is a gripping thriller.  Watch any Korean movie which Scott Sumner recommends.  Even some of the clunkier ...

That is the new Harvard Business Review Press book by Joshua Gans , Amazon link here, $3.99, recommended.  Here is Joshua’s blog .

You can buy the book here .

As you may know, the Supreme Court starts hearing oral arguments on affirmative action on October 9th.  I have not much followed the empirical debate on affirmative action, but it seems to me this is likely the best recent book on the “anti” side.  On the pro side, you can read The Shape of the River, by William Bowen and Derek Bok .

The authors are Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and the subtitle is How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It .

1. New BBC show on Hayek (Friedrich) , and the new Camille Paglia book on art and images .

That is from the new and excellent book by Samuel Arbesman, The Half-Life of Facts:Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date .

I would have thought Karl Marx was the origin, or perhaps one of the utopian socialists.  Any better ideas?  Maybe this expensive book can tell us .

Here is one appreciation , here is Wikipedia .  You should read Roll, Jordan, Roll , if you have not already.

That is from the new, excellent and to the point Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity , by Lester R. Brown.

That is the new book by Rob Atkinson and Stephen Ezell .  It is far more mercantilist than I feel comfortable with, yet it is full of information and argumentation, and it is a book one can profitably engage with.  Here is one excerpt:

That is the new Jason Brennan book , which has yet to arrive on my doorstep.

Here is more .  File under “ Makers vs. Takers .”  Here is Will Wilkinson on making vs. taking .

From the new James R. Flynn book :

James R. Flynn recommends this paper, by Fox and Mitchum, in his new book :

There is also an excellent recent essay by Jeremy Grantham on agriculture (pdf), too pessimistic in my view but still more right than wrong.  For an interesting look at why future gains from GMOs may be limited, at least in the short run, read R. Ford Denison’s Darwinian Agriculture .  Nature already has done a lot of the optimization.

The source is Frank Dikötter, Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China , which is also a good book.  Wikipedia offers a more complex story about the possible inventors , with some candidates for the inventor being Japanese.  In any case, I had thought of it as a more ancient device than it turns out to be.

The author is Robert D. Kaplan and the subtitle is What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate .  I thought it was an excellent and also highly readable book, though without agreeing with every claim or the rather relentless method.  Here is one excerpt:

2. Par Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan .

1. Wesley R. Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China , and

9. Favorite Neil Young album : Everybody Knows this is Nowhere .

4. Novelist : Margaret Atwood, especially Cat’s Eye .  I used to like Robertson Davies, but somehow his novels have not stuck with me.