Recently Mentioned Books

4. Popular music : I can’t think of much…Boz Scaggs doesn’t count nor does Peter Frampton.  Lonnie Mack’s The Wham of That Memphis Man! is one of the least known great albums.  Doris Day is a very good singer and do see Pillow Talk if you don’t already know it.

2. Director : Wes Craven remains underrated; I still like his The Serpent and the Rainbow , among others.  I can’t think of a notable movie set in Ohio, can you?

5. The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth , by the noted law and economics scholar Robert C. Ellickson.

4. The Mirrored Heavens , by David J. Williams.  A science fiction story for people who take the idea of space elevators for granted.

3. Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust , by Elena Panaritis .  An update on the debates on Hernando de Soto and the associated land and property issues.

2. Global Catastrophic Risks , edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic; so many smart, virile young men, all writing about destruction .

1. Red State Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do , by the consistently impressive Andrew Gelman.

Again, that is from Ammon Shea’s excellent book .

I have no idea if it is correct.  It is from the often quite interesting Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions , by Brian Hayes.

That’s from Ammon Shea’s superb Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages .

4. Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations , by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel.  This is a very good summary of what is known about corruption.

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...