Recently Mentioned Books

Elsewhere in the world of fiction, I found the "philosophical" European bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog precious and unbearable; I couldn’t get to page 30.  The new John Updike novel, The Widows of Eastwick , has been mostly panned, but I agree instead with this very positive NYT review .

Elsewhere in the world of fiction, I found the "philosophical" European bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog precious and unbearable; I couldn’t get to page 30.  The new John Updike novel, The Widows of Eastwick , has been mostly panned, but I agree instead with this very positive NYT review .

That is by Paul Eluard, translated by Ted Hughes .  I’ve still been very much enjoying Letters of Ted Hughes .

That is by Paul Eluard, translated by Ted Hughes .  I’ve still been very much enjoying Letters of Ted Hughes .

That’s about the 1920s.  It is from Matthew P. Fink’s quite interesting and useful The Rise of Mutual Funds: An Insider’s View .

3. Robert J. Samuelson, The Great Inflation and its Aftermath .  It’s remarkable that no other major book to date has covered this critically important topic.

Often people ask for me background reading about the financial crisis.  I recommend blogs first and foremost but still people wish for a brief primer.  Well, I can recommend a 1200 page primer, namely Marcia Stigum’s The Money Market , now in its fourth edition.  It provides comprehensive coverage of all the major institutions in…the money market.  When I used to teach monetary economics at the Ph.d. level, I made all of the students read this entire book (in an earlier and slightly shorter edit...

I can’t decide if that is a very good or a very bad title.  Nonetheless the book itself is excellent.  The author, Rose George, stresses:

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal .  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction. Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism .  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internation...

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal .  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction. Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism .  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internation...

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal .  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction. Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism .  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internation...

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal .  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction. Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism .  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internation...

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal .  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction. Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism .  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internation...

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal .  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction. Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism .  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internation...

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal .  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction. Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism .  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internation...

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal .  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction. Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism .  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internation...

Here is my review of Conscience of a Liberal .  That book argued that politics and policy can reshape the distribution of income in a more egalitarian direction. Peddling Prosperity is one of the best-written economics books, ever, as are also The Age of Diminished Expectations and Pop Internationalism .  The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims.  The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internation...

That is from Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture , the current favorite to win the Booker Prize this Tuesday.  I read it on the flight back from London and enjoyed it very much.

The subtitle is The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis and the author is Rowan Jacobsen.  Many books on biodiversity have bad economics but this book has very good economics:

That passage is from Charles Ellis’s The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs .  This book gets better and better, as you keep on reading it.  Definitely recommended.

Ah, remember that topic?  Ezra Klein does.  The book is called Health Care Reform Now ! and the author is CEO at Kaiser Foundation Health Plan.  That may not sound like an encouraging combination but in fact this is one of the most intelligent health care policy books around.  The analysis of cost inflation, lack of early care, and billing for procedures is perceptive throughout.  The policy proposals involve electronic medical records for everyone, legally required health insurance, enforcing t...

5. Samuel Johnson: A Biography , by Peter Martin.  This is only the third best biography of Johnson (Walter Jackson Bate is #2) and it is still one of the best books of the year.  What does that say?

4. Geoffrey Heal, When Principles Pay:Corporate Social Responsibility and the Bottom Line .  The main point is that socially responsible behavior is often profitable for business in the long run.  I know that doesn’t sound like such a compelling message right now, but this is a highly intelligent and now a sadly neglected book.

3. White Heat: The Friendship Between Emily Dicksinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson , by Brenda Wineapple.  Yes, this is a very good book.  But it has the same problem that most other Emily Dickinson books have.  Her poems are so short you can fit them into a narrative and they are so strong they tend to overwhelm any non-fiction context they are put in.

2. The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art , by Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser.  Put together a collaborating art historian, a first-rate microeconomist, an interest in signaling and a preface by A. Michael Spence and this is what you get.