Recently Mentioned Books

3. Ross Clark, Not Zero: How an Irrational target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won’t Even Save the Planet) .  Quite a good book, well-argued, and avoids the craziness and “denialism” that plague some of the other efforts in this direction.

2. Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England .  As with World War II, you can’t read enough books about 17th century England.  This new book has excellent coverage of the English Civil War, and overall the different fights between factions.  Political conflicts take center stage, though there is some coverage of the scientific revolution, the rise of commerce, and colonialization.  Still I found this very useful and also easy to read, if perhaps a bit dull on the...

1. Tara Zahra, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars .  A good book about anti-global sentiments in earlier times, most of all the 1920s, covering a broad span of countries, the flu pandemic, anti-Semitism, and gender (was globalization pro- or anti-woman, according to earlier thinkers?).  Does not make you feel better about current times.

You can buy it here .  There should be many more books just like this one, but for different topics — take note!

Of course not all of those predictions have come true, but many have or others are on the verge of realization.  The subtitle of the book is Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation .

p.104, here is the book (by me).

You can buy it here .  Here are various reviews .

Useful is The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India , by Manan Ahmed Asif.

There is also Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors that Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration, and Everything in Between .

Bill Hammack, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans .  From an engineering perspective.

There is Daniel Akst, War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance .

4. Philip Bowring, The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State is a good overview and in general I favor explanatory, country-specific books.  Once again, low productivity in agriculture is a big problem.

3. Philip K. Howard, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions .  I am not sure about the “unconstitutionality” point, but the rest of this critique is right on target.  Is this the next frontier for supply-side progressives?

2. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe .  On the thinkers who have influenced him, including Adam Smith, Hayek, Berlin, Popper, and Ortega y Gasset, among others.  All of the chapters I quite liked.  The story of the meeting of Berlin and Akhmatova I had not known.  Not consummated, but intensely erotic and unforgettable for both of them.

1. Trevor Latimer, Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism .  I say the correct answer here is culturally specific.  Nonetheless this is a good and useful book marshaling arguments against localism and in favor of centralization, including with respect to the value of liberty.

The author is Charlie Robertson, and the subtitle is Why Education, Electricity and Fertility are Key to Escaping Poverty .

Born in the Scottish Highlands, and yes she is also the daughter of historian John Keay.  I am a fan of her books , many on British architectural history  or for that matter the crown jewels, but most recently The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (or this link ) about the 17th century interregnum.  Here is her home page .  Here is Anna on Twitter .  And this :

Born in the Scottish Highlands, and yes she is also the daughter of historian John Keay.  I am a fan of her books , many on British architectural history  or for that matter the crown jewels, but most recently The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (or this link ) about the 17th century interregnum.  Here is her home page .  Here is Anna on Twitter .  And this :

I had not known that the Falklands Island Company still controls so much in the Falklands.  Recommended, due out in May .

Bryan Caplan asked me to read this book, and Alex Epstein was kind enough to provide me with a copy of it.  The subtitle is Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas — Not Less .

The author is Jerry Z. Muller, and I am sorry I did not have the chance to read this book last year when it came out.  Taubes is one of the most underrated deep thinkers, and this is the definitive biography of him.  Think of Taubes as a mid-twentieth century Germanic-Jewish but also partly Christian thinker who tried to integrate philosophy, theology, and science, yet without ever committing to a serious enough level of written investigation to have a chance of pulling that off.  He nonetheless...

That is by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Tho Pham, and Oleksandr Talavera, and it is a new piece in the American Economic Review .  This game of course has just started, and countermeasures will at some point arrive.  You may recall I discussed exactly these possibilities in my 2013 book Average is Over .

The subtitle is A Journey Across the Himalaya Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China .  This is the first great book of 2023, at least that I have seen.  Bravo!  Travel books are hard to summarize, but I will note that most of them are bad or at best mediocre .  They assume you care about the author’s adjectives, or that the interesting nature of experienced events will translate automatically to the page.  This work, in contrast, is a wonderful blend of fact, history, political obser...

You can buy the book here , note the American title is slightly different.

Due out in May, you can pre-order here .