Recently Mentioned Books

The author is Deirdre McCloskey and the subtitle is Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World .  It is on the cultural and intellectual foundations of the Industrial Revolution and I am convinced by the major thesis.  Here is one version of it:

The author is Timur Kuran and the subtitle is How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East .  My previous and longer discussion of Timur is here .  Here is a short excerpt from the book:

That is from David E. Cartwright's recent Schopenhauer: A Biography .

That is from the fascinating book Honeybee Democracy , by Thomas D. Seeley.  Here is the book's home page .  Here is a good review of the book :

The subtitle is Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms and the author is Nassim Taleb.  Here are three of his aphorisms:

That is from the interesting and new The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads , by Ammon Shea.

The author is the highly intelligent Roger Congleton (my colleague) and the subtitle is Constitutional Reform, Liberalism, and the Rise of Western Democracy .  Here is the home page summary:

6. One of my favorite non-fiction books is Nancy Scheper-Hughes , Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil , highly recommended.

Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch [Rayuela]

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis , by Jose Saramago

V , by Thomas Pynchon.

The Obscene Bird of Night , by José Donoso

Cryptonomicon

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell , by Susannah Clarke

Underworld , by Don DeLillo

I still think that The Sensory Order is Hayek's most overrated book, though many call it his most underrated book, which in my view is where the overratedness comes from.  I know the recent talk about "neural nets" and the like and you can claim Hayek was a precursor of the idea of the mind as an organ of classification.  I simply think this is an empirical book more or less written in the 1920s about a field which has changed dramatically in the last ten to fifteen years, never mind in the last...

2. Individualism and Economic Order , Counterrevolution of Science , and in particular Hayek's critique of rationalist constructivism, of which the EU and the euro are prime current examples.  If you wish to know why the euro is failing, or why not every Obama policy will work out, this is the #1 place to go.  The euro project was even driven by the French and resisted by the English, exactly as Hayek's approach would have predicted.

2. Individualism and Economic Order , Counterrevolution of Science , and in particular Hayek's critique of rationalist constructivism, of which the EU and the euro are prime current examples.  If you wish to know why the euro is failing, or why not every Obama policy will work out, this is the #1 place to go.  The euro project was even driven by the French and resisted by the English, exactly as Hayek's approach would have predicted.

The author is Larry Witham and the subtitle is How Economics Explains Religion .  It's a good book, and my favorite passage was this:

Here is Timur's home page .  You can buy the new book — which I strongly recommend – here .  Here is the book's home page .  Here is a related podcast .  Here is a video of Timur .  Here is a picture of Turkey:

His first book Private Truth, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (one of the best economics books of the last twenty years) is about how societies can stick with screwed up beliefs and defend them publicly, yet without everyone being evil or stupid, even if they sometimes sound as such.  It has major implications for the theory of revolution, and sudden flips of opinion, yet I read it as a defense of [fill in the blank] society. His work with Sunstein on availabilit...

I am still impressed by having watched Lars von Trier's Antichrist .  I believe no one (at least no male) can watch that movie straight through, for reasons which I cannot explain on a family blog (though perhaps it will someday be part of TSA procedures?).  Yet more than a month later I continue to think about the good parts of the movie and I am not overall a von Trier fan.  The film is dedicated to Tarkovsky.

7. Robert Alter, translator, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes .  He is my favorite Biblical translator and this is a sure thing, I will read this one.

7. Bethany McLean and Joseph Nocera, All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis .  Alex liked it, Arnold Kling liked it, and I like it too.  It is more conceptual than most of the crisis books.