Recently Mentioned Books

That is from the very interesting Industrial Policy in an Era of Globalization: Lessons from Asia , by Marcus Noland and Howard Pack.  This book is a good rebuttal to the claim that Asian economic success was fundamentally driven by industrial policy.  I thank a loyal MR reader who sent me this book, as a supplement to exchanges with Dani Rodrik.

2. The Guardian reviews Discover Your Inner Economist , here ; I liked the part when he called it "extraordinary."

8. Rap music : Schooly D, The Adventures of Schooly D , remains one of my favorite rap albums.

7. Jazz : Art Blakey, Keith Jarrett ( The Koln Concert , or his Shostakovich ), Erroll Garner, Earl Hines, and George Benston was good at the very beginning.  Stanley Clarke is amazing to hear live.  Wow.  And that’s not even counting jazzmen who played long stints in Philly, such as John Coltrane and Sun Ra.

7. Jazz : Art Blakey, Keith Jarrett ( The Koln Concert , or his Shostakovich ), Erroll Garner, Earl Hines, and George Benston was good at the very beginning.  Stanley Clarke is amazing to hear live.  Wow.  And that’s not even counting jazzmen who played long stints in Philly, such as John Coltrane and Sun Ra.

6. Popular music : Todd Rundgren was remarkably talented, never quite fulfilled his promise, but Something/Anything remains a wonderful double album.

5. Writer : John Updike, or Benjamin Franklin.  John O’Hara never clicked with me, though he was my grandmother’s favorite after Shakespeare.  I’ll pick The Coup as my favorite Updike; I don’t think he’s written a good novel in a while.

1. Eugene Ormandy recording : He introduced me to so much in classic music and somehow I felt he would never let me down; I’ll pick either his Beethoven 5th and 6th or his Shostakovich 10th .

1. Eugene Ormandy recording : He introduced me to so much in classic music and somehow I felt he would never let me down; I’ll pick either his Beethoven 5th and 6th or his Shostakovich 10th .

I’ll write more soon about the implicit theology in Discover Your Inner Economist .

Here is the full discussion .  Yes that Levy is my colleague David Levy , who has been a major influence on our department, most of all through his book The Economic Ideas of Ordinary People .

You will find meditations on this topic, and others, in Clay Gordon’s inspiring Discover Chocolate: The Ultimate Guide to Buying, Tasting, and Enjoying Fine Chocolate .

That is from The Book of General Ignorance , an interesting compilation of not so well known facts.

That is from Dana Thomas’s really quite interesting Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster .  Thomas believes that the Japanese are so infatuated with luxury goods because they wish to brand themselves in what otherwise pretends to be a "classless" society.

You can get Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier played this way , but to my ears it is not a revelation.  Of course unequal temperament (not my preferred terminology) has struck back through popular music, whether it be bent blues notes, pedal steel guitar, and the drone tunings of My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth.  Oddly the author doesn’t mention this.  Listeners want variety, and simply "pegging the scale" does not control the real sound which results, just as in um…macroeconomics.

How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) , by Ross W. Duffin, is a cranky but fascinating look at how music went astray:

I’ll be doing the first post on Greg Clark’s A Farewell to Alms this Tuesday, try to read the first 112 pages.  In the meantime, here is a review from The Economist .

Playboy reviews Discover Your Inner Economist .  Excerpt:

The subtitle is The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control , and the book (here is its home page ) has more on the latter than the former.  The author, economist Philip J. Cook, produces a wide range of reasonable arguments that alcohol is too cheap on the supply side, given its social costs.

This new book by Alan Krueger , full of first-rate empirical work, punctures many myths about terrorism.  For instance poverty does not breed terrorism, once you look at the data.  Here is the book’s home page .

I’d like to soon start the MR BookForum on Greg Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World .  I hear you’re all getting your copies now.  Ideally I’d put up the first post within 5-10 days, noting that the first session will be setting and overview.  You won’t need to have started the book by then.  Are you in fact all getting your copies from Amazon or elsewhere?

I believe that Mailer has become a quite underrated writer, especially his Harlot’s Ghost .  But wife-stabbing is not the main reason why he has failed to win the prize.

My new book Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist offers a chapter on how to help other people.  In the book I suggest several principles:

That is from Chris Goodall’s How to Live a Low-Carbon Life: The Individual’s Guide to Stopping Climate Change .  Just imagine, when it comes to the number of players in this game, the guy doesn’t mention whether the appropriate model should use a countable or a non-countable infinity.  Often it makes a big difference for the result.

That is from India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy , a truly excellent book by Ramachandra Guha, well over 800 pages and yes it will be finished.