Recently Mentioned Books

3. Irish Food & Cooking , by Biddy White Lennon [a great name to write a book like this, no?] and Georgina Campbell.  Don’t laugh, this book is a revelation.  It’s selling on Amazon for $49.95 and in the front of my Borders for $5.99.  If you need to start taking Irish cooking seriously, this is step #1.

2. Alvin Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America .  I’m not actually reading it, it’s just sitting here, intimidating me with its length.  It looks very good but you’re reading a blogger long fixated upon Gene Clark.

1. Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life and Legacy of the Byrds’ Gene Clark , by John Einarson.  I loved this book though partly for idiosyncratic reasons.  Failed creative wonders make for memorable stories plus of course I saw Clark perform many times.  There are many ways to kill yourself and this book outlines one of them.

That is from Kenneth J. Gergen’s often quite interesting The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life .

The authors are G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot and the subtitle is Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s .  Everyone interested in social change, or for that matter American political history, should read this book.  It doesn’t unearth new material but it is a good summary of what is known.  The jacket flap sums it up:

It was a bargain, I say.  Here is my review of Don Thompson’s excellent The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art .  Here is one excerpt from my review:

Richard Tuck , of course, is a Professor of Government and Harvard and a historian of early modern political thought. This book has many complicated philosophic arguments, here are bites of three of them:

How many popular economics books offer a message which is (mostly) true, non-trivial, and understandable?  Michael Heller’s The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives satisfies that troika.  The key message is that the "tragedy of the anti-commons" is often a bigger problem than the better-known tragedy of the commons.  The tragedy of the anti-commons arises when too many veto rights are exercised.  Here is one simple example:

5. The Race Between Education and Technology , by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz.  This is the most important book on modern U.S. inequality to date; here is my previous coverage of their ideas .  I’m still waiting for Paul Krugman to write a critique but right now their core hypothesis is looking strong.

4. The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America , by Maury Klein.  This is a big, clunky book with lots of poor exposition.  It also covers a vital era — the real Industrial Revolution — which has remained oddly neglected by too many economic historians.

3. Empires of Trust: How Rome Built — and America is Building — a New World , by Thomas F. Madden.  This book is avowed pro-Roman, pro-American, and sees strong parallels across the two regimes; part of the thesis is that neither wanted to build an empire but had to.

2. The Third Domain , by Tim Friend.  An overview of archaea , those odd life forms that survive where nothing else can.  A fascinating look at a still mysterious topic.  It’s not as well written as the top-drawer popular science books but since you probably know little or nothing about the topic the amount you will learn is high.

1. Government and the American Economy: A New History , no editor but the book is dedicated to Bob Higgs by Price Fishback.  Imagine essays by economic history luminaries, mostly classical liberals, covering many different eras of American economic history.  For some this is a gold mine.

I’m mostly on board (and read the broader post) but, in addition to mentioning Latinos, I’ll suggest two revisions.  First, on #3 I doubt if the stagnation of American lower education is the result of insufficient dollars.  It is notoriously difficult to find a convincing link between educational expenditures and educational quality and I don’t think that is econometric problems.  On #6 I never saw most of the Reagan Republicans as especially prudish or socially conservative; that was just a lie...

That is from Adam Phillips, in the new book Intimacies .

I’m guest-blogging for Penguin just a bit, to promote the paperback edition of Discover Your Inner Economist .  Here is my post on why you should throw books out .  Natasha, alas, does not agree and sometimes she pulls them out of the trash and scolds me.  But here is an excerpt in my defense:

3. Convenience yield , an excellent introduction; by the way Jeffrey Williams is a good author on the intuitive properties of futures and forward markets as they relate to storage.

The subtitle is "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" and the Amazon link is here .  Their favored policies include the following (with varying degrees of enthusiasm/utopianism on their part):

That is from Bob Cialdini’s Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive ; here is my previous post on the book .  And here is why motivational posters don’t work .

That is from Stefan Collini’s often quite interesting Common Reading: Critics, Historians, and Public .

Here is the Amazon link .  Here is the author’s home page and blog , which has an excellent Raymond Chandler quotation.

That is Gilles Deleuze and it is the front quotation in the new novel Atmospheric Disturbances , by the very beautiful Rivka Galchen .  The key premise of this novel is that a 51-year-old psychiatrist suddenly believes that his wife has been replaced with an exact look-alike; he refers to her as the Simulacrum.  I read it straight through.  Here is an interview with the author .

Here is Ezra Pound’s Usura Canto , here is a link to Russell Roberts’s The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity , available for pre-order.  Can you guess which one has the better economics?  In fact Russ’s book is the best attempt to teach economics through fiction that the world has seen to date.

And of course the English language paperback edition of Inner Economist , just out and only $10 on Amazon, can be found here .

That’s the Portuguese-language version of Discover Your Inner Economist , the Amazon link is here .  Here are various Portuguese-language web sites about the book .  I am pleased to be represented in the Lusaphone world, as Portuguese is a very beautiful language, even when the topic is economics.  Oddly Natasha insists that, heard at a distance, Portuguese sounds a great deal like Russian.