Recently Mentioned Books

I can’t pretend to evaluate the more controversial claims of the author, but at the very least I learned a great deal reading this book and it has stimulated my interest in the topic areas more generally.  You can buy it here .

And yes the book does have an insightful discussion of Laibach , the Slovenian hard-to-describe musical band.  You can buy it here .

Recommended.  And here is Kevin’s new book Excellent Advice: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier .

I will be doing a Conversation with him, in honor of the new edition of his Animal Liberation .

And Is Social Justice Just? , edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne.

I will not have time to read Chris Wickham’s massive tome The Donkey & the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180 , but surely it is worthy of note and it appears to be a major achievement.

There is Shanker A. Singham and Alden F. Abbott, Trade, Competition and Domestic Regulatory Policy: Trade Liberalisation, Competitive Markets and Property Rights Protection .

Simone and Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion , the authors lay out what their version of a pro-natalist world and philosophy would have to look like.

Lionel Page, Optimally Irrational: The Good Reasons We Behave the Way We Do , argues that many behavioral “imperfections” in economics are in fact rational in a broader perspective.

I have only browsed Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism , but it seems to be a very good and serious treatment of its chosen topics.

Peter Attia, with Bill Gifford, has now published Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity .

Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, Superman Brainiac , Superman wins, but is that plausible?  Yes.  The writers note there is too much that Brainiac cannot control, most of all on Earth.

Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income , is a good history of ideas on the basic concept.

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? The authors are skeptical on the actual settlement of space, and so am I, so I am glad this book exists.  I hope somebody proves them wrong, but that is not my bet.

Claire Hughes Johnson, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building is that rare thing — a good and also useful management book.  She was COO at Stripe, this is a Stripe Press title, and I was happy to see it make the WSJ bestseller list.

Marcel Proust, The Seventy-Five Folios & Other Unpublished Manuscripts .  Early drafts of In Search of Lost Time, fragments, but still of interest to Proust lovers.

An excellent book, the author is Sebastian Edwards, and the subtitle is The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism .  This is the only book on this topic where I feel I am finally getting to the bottom of what happened.  Here are a few points:

That is from the Pierre Azoulay and Danielle Li essay “Scientific Grant Funding,” in the new and highly useful NBER volume Innovation and Public Policy , edited by Austan Goolsbee and Benjamin F. Jones.  (But according to the book’s own theories, shouldn’t the book be cheaper than that?)

The subtitle of the work is Essays in Political Irrationality .  Definitely recommended, buy it here .  Fittingly, the dedication of the book is “To Alex Tabarrok, a captain of reason in a sea of political irrationality.”

I will be doing a Conversation with him, and he has a new book out Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI , co-authored with GPT-4.  But I can ask him about anything!

…of the Bank of England, in the eighteenth century.  Brought to you by Anne L. Murphy in her new book Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England .  This book is a remarkable achievement, as it truly does recreate the rhythms of a typical day in the life of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street:

Due out May 13 , this book is the documentation, definitely recommended, especially for the skeptics.

Definitely recommended, with numerous interesting parts.  And I am very happy to recommend Anna’s latest book The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown .

The marshaled evidence is convincing, and I will be blogging more about this book.  While some stiff competition is coming, this could be the most important economics and policy book of this year.  And yes it is remarkable that such a book is so needed, but yes it is.  And here is Melissa on Twitter .

A new and great book , authored by Melissa S. Kearney of the University of Maryland.  The subtitle is How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind , and here is one excerpt of the summary points: