Recently Mentioned Books

4. Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination .  In the waning of Franco's time, how did Spain turn away from military rule and toward democracy?  Can a mediocre man make a difference in history simply by retreating at the right moment?  Can a political life boil down to a single response, under gunfire at that?  Half of this book is brilliant writing, the other half is brilliant writing combined with obscure, hard-to-follow 1970s Spanish politics (doe...

3. César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter .  Commonly portrayed as an Argentina eccentric, he writes a few short books each year and over time he has accumulated the reptutation as one of the most important contemporary Latin writers.  Broadly in the Borges tradition, scattered and philosophical, there is little downside to giving him a try.

2. Adrian Johns, Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age .  A very good book on the history of radio, but the real bonus is the history of economic thought section, covering what Coase, Hayek, Arnold Plant and others thought of the BBC in its early years and how that related to debates over The Road to Serfdom .  I hadn't know that some of the British pirate stations of the 1960s were inspired by Hayek.  Plus it's only $4.68 in hardcover.

1. Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned .  A series of generational tales from a Danish fishing village, starting with the 1864 conflict against Germany.  The WSJ loved it , the Danes loved it, eight Amazon readers loved it, and I liked it quite a bit at first.  Eventually I was wandering in a "tweener" novel — serious enough not to be stupid, yet not enough giddy fun to be a page turner, not serious enough to be deep, and ultimately a European novel of ideas by the numbers.  Some of you are likely t...

The author is Adrian Tinniswood and the subtitle is Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the 17th-Century Mediterranean .  Excerpt:

The author is Charles Kenny and the subtitle is Why Global Development is Succeeding — and How We Can Improve the World Even More .

The topic is The Great Stagnation , find the dialogue here .  My favorite part was when we both discussed why we find David Ricardo an interesting thinker.  One way of summing up TGS is to cite local diminishing returns and yet longer-run increasing returns, though right now we're on the diminishing segment of that curve.  Ricardo got the first part right, and it took the world some number of decades to prove him wrong about the longer run.  TGS is a book set in the traditions of classical econo...

That quotation is from Simon Fairlie's quite interesting Meat: A Benign Extravagance .

The authors are Randall S. Kroszner and Bob Shiller, the subtitle is Reflections Before and Beyond Dodd-Frank , and the volume consists of a paper by Shiller (let’s democratize and humanize finance) and a paper by Kroszner (“ don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater “) and lots of transcribed discussion.  Here is one excerpt from George Kaufman:

You'll find it here , it's about The Great Stagnation .  I thought it was a very good dialogue.  It focused on the areas where you might expect Russ Roberts to disagree with the main argument, and we covered a lot of meaty territory, including a good discussion of Julian Simon and the political economy of admitting that growth has slowed down.

That is from Oliver Bullough's Let Our Fame be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus .

3. Jonathan Bendor, Daniel Diermeier, David A. Siegel, and Michael M. Ting, A Behavioral Theory of Elections .  The point is to predict both turnout and voting behavior (hard to get both right at once in a model), and the authors a computational model on top of all of that.  I have long been wanting more behavioral public choice.

2. Bengt Holmstrom and Jean Tirole, Inside and Outside Liquidity .  This is a take on what follows from the imperfect pledgeability of corporate assets, by two of the world's leading economic theorists.

Addendum : Here is my book on government support for the arts , and the proper roles of the aesthetic and political in liberal thought.

The critical responses to The Great Stagnation prefer to attack median income measures and in general they are reluctant to talk about total factor productivity.  Yet we are pointed very much toward the same conclusion.  My first post on TGS also considered these issues and you will find some relevant Charles Jones papers here .

The excellent Brink Lindsey pointed my attention to this fascinating book, subtitled The End of Economic Growth and the Beginning of Human Transformation (like many subtitles, that one is an exaggeration), wirtten by C. Owen Paepke and published in 1993.  A brief book summary is here .

The author is Frank Brady and the subtitle is Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall — from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness .  It is sure to make my list of the best books of 2011 and it requires no real knowledge of chess.  Here is an excerpt on the rationality of the young Fischer:

1. Here is one passage from The Great Stagnation : "Since 1989, the size-adjusted and size – unadjusted measures have been rising at roughly the same rate , and post-1979 the difference between the size-adjusted and the size-unadjusted median income measures is never more than 0.3 percent."  For more on this, see Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008/2009 , chapter one.

1. Here is one passage from The Great Stagnation : "Since 1989, the size-adjusted and size – unadjusted measures have been rising at roughly the same rate , and post-1979 the difference between the size-adjusted and the size-unadjusted median income measures is never more than 0.3 percent."  For more on this, see Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008/2009 , chapter one.

In my conversation with Tyler about his new and much-debated book, The Great Stagnation , I was particularly struck by his explanation (at around 21:30) for how he came to embrace the idea that we are experiencing an innovation slowdown. His remarks about Julian Simon are also very noteworthy.

6. Richard B. McKenzie, Predictably Rational: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics .  The subtitle says it all, and the cover inverts the colors on the Dan Ariely book.  Here is a short McKenzie piece on the book and here is Mario Rizzo on the book .

5. New readings on the Euro include Paul Krugman's essay , Philipp Bagus, The Tragedy of the Euro , and Matthew Lynn, Bust: Greece, the Euro, and the Sovereign Debt Crisis .

5. New readings on the Euro include Paul Krugman's essay , Philipp Bagus, The Tragedy of the Euro , and Matthew Lynn, Bust: Greece, the Euro, and the Sovereign Debt Crisis .

4. Jeffrey Friedman, editor, What Caused the Financial Crisis .  Of all the books on the crisis, this one is arguably the most conceptual.  The authors of the essays include Stiglitz, John Taylor, Acemoglu, and Richard Posner.

3. Martin Gilman, No Precedent, No Plan: Inside Russia's 1998 Default .  This is not the definitive study it could have been, but it is a start toward writing a serious economic history of a still-neglected period.