Recently Mentioned Books

Admittedly copyright issues are being superimposed on this scenario at the same time, so the net assessment of current music trends is complex.  But when there is uncertainty about consumer tastes, falling output can be a strong Pareto improvement.  (It’s just like how having lots of dates is not necessarily the sign of a happy love life.)  Less music is being produced, but we’re getting more of the stuff we want .

When blogging I try to keep book rehash to a minimum.  But tonight I cannot resist making a point from Good and Plenty :

As long as we are on the topic of very good books, there is a new and very nice hardcover edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations .

How to Read The Bible , by James Kugel.

5. Favorite Henry Purcell recording : The Complete Odes and Welcome Songs , and no, eight discs of this music is not overkill.

2. Philosopher : Francis Bacon.  I’m not a Straussian but he really does have hidden and deep meanings.  Read Perez Zagorin on Bacon for a guide to the complexity of it all.

1. Mystery writer : Eric Ambler, most of all A Coffin for Dimitrios ; the villain is pathetic, not fearful, and this is most of all a study in collective mythmaking.

I was supposed to speak on Discover Your Inner Economist , but this was the morning after Google announced its backing of the lunar landing prize .  They asked me about that, and here is what they got for an answer .

5. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life , by Mark Francis.  It’s the best intellectual history I’ve read since McCraw’s Schumpeter book, and did you know that he and George Eliot had a non-consummated fling?  It’s a highly specialized topic, so I can’t recommend this book to everyone but I loved it and no you don’t need to care about Spencer the libertarian.

4. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke .  The NYT gave it a rave, lead review , as did The Washington Post and other sources.  So far it is being framed as the major American novel of the year.  It’s an almost anachronistically modernist in its structure and seriousness.  And is there really anything more to say about the Vietnam War?  First I was bored but then I reread the first 150 pages and now I love it.

4. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke .  The NYT gave it a rave, lead review , as did The Washington Post and other sources.  So far it is being framed as the major American novel of the year.  It’s an almost anachronistically modernist in its structure and seriousness.  And is there really anything more to say about the Vietnam War?  First I was bored but then I reread the first 150 pages and now I love it.

3. Bill Clinton, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World .  Should we resent that this book is essentially a campaign prop for Hillary?  Still, it was better than expected.  It’s not deep but it does stress the virtues of commercialization and the profit motive.  Less surprisingly, globalization and micro-finance are portrayed as positive forces as well.

2. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism , by Ha-Joon Chang.  This is a less subtle version of the "free trade isn’t always best" arguments made by Dani Rodrik.  Reread my post The New Attack on Free Trade .

1. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States , by Stephen Mihm.  This book offers interesting tales of 19th century counterfeiters — an understudied topic — but it is too quick to slush together counterfeiters, capitalists, and Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man .  I read about 80 pages, some of you will wish to read more.

That’s by Barry B. LePatner and the subtitle is How to Fix America’s Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry .

I wondered whether that can be said of Naomi Klein’s new The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism .  Still, at some fundamental level I liked this book.  Perhaps I still had the Greenspan memoir too fresh in my mind, but at least this text is alive.  Yes she refuses to admit that Chilean reforms, however horrible the accompanying atrocities, did represent a success for market economics .  Yes she misstates the role of Milton Friedman in just about everything.  Yes she suggests that bl...

This new book is by sometimes Slate.com columnist and U. Penn economist Joel Waldfogel, of "Deadweight Loss of Christmas" fame.  The subtitle is "Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want."

5. Composer : Carl Ruggles – his 16-minute Sun Treader is one of the most underappreciated pieces of great American music.

Both are from the quite engaging All the Money in the World — How the Forbes 400 Make — And Spend — Their Fortunes , by Peter W. Bernstein and Annalyn Swan.

That is from Shannon Brownlee’s new Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer , which should be read by anyone interested in health care economics.  I have a few points:

That is the new book by James R. Flynn .  He suggests the following:

Yes indeed, Steven Pinker has a new book out .

Do you know the literature on irreversible investment and option value ?  Under plausible parameter specifications, you need a benefit-cost ratio of 3 to 1 or more before it makes sense to proceed with the irreversible investment.  Otherwise it is better simply to wait.  That’s not 1.3 to 1, that’s 3 to 1.

Get the book here .

Don’t forget Dani Rodrik has a new book coming out: One Economics, Many Recipes .  I don’t agree with all of it, but it is a valuable correction to the hubris of many other writers.