Recently Mentioned Books

I view Discover Your Inner Economist as largely Thomist and more Catholic than anything else.

The guy who heard that — I won’t tell you his name — is reading the audiobook CD book and audiocassette versions of Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist .

The guy who heard that — I won’t tell you his name — is reading the audiobook CD book and audiocassette versions of Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist .

I saw this and thought I should buy the book — Kate Christensen’s novel The Great Man — just because I liked the cover.  As an experiment, I deliberately did not scan the contents or read the blurbs on the back.  The title isn’t very descriptive either.  I then bought the book.

5. Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire , by Alex von Tunzelmann.  Yet another high quality book on modern Indian history, here the theme is the departure of the British, the establishment of modern India, and of course partition.

4. Tristram Shandy , by Laurence Sterne.  On this rereading, I am obsessed by the notion that it is actually Uncle Toby who is Tristram’s biological father.  In any case this book has held up very well.

3. Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969 , by Dan Nadel.  Some of the best evidence that comic books are valuable art.

2. Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming , by Chris Mooney.  The lower your social discount rate, the more you should worry about (growth-reducing) storms, and the less you should worry about one-time adjustments, such as moving islanders to a mainland.  In other words, you should worry about storms.

1. A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium , by Robert Friedel.  A very good treatment of the history of Western technology, although it is not accessible reading for most non-specialists.

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: