Recently Mentioned Books

There is Julian Gewirtz, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s .  Somehow this book felt naive to me.  Yes, many Chinese paths were discussed in the 1980s, but the system nonetheless had an underlying logic which reasserted itself rather brutally…

When I first saw the title of Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism , I thought it was some kind of satire, or perhaps GPT-3 run amok.  Nonetheless some of the book is a serious economic history of the 1920s and its fiscal and credit policies, and you should not dismiss it out of hand.  That said, mechanisms such as the supposed “logic of capital accumulation” are assigned too much explanatory power.  The book also will convince you th...

Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole, and Other Living Treasures is a series of short, fun takes on strange animals including the wombat (runs faster than Usain Bolt) and the pangolin, among others.  Good for both adults and children.

I read only a small amount of Philip Short’s Putin , at more than 800 pages.  It seemed entirely fine, and useful, and surely the topic is of importance.  Yet I didn’t find myself learning conceptual points from it, or even new details of significance.  In any case it is now the biography of Putin, and some of you will want to read it.

Perry Mehrling’s Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System is a definitive biography, and also a good look at the “rooted in academia but mostly in the policy world” branch of macro and finance that was so prominent in the postwar era.

Paul Scharre, Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence .  This book bored me, but here I mean that as a positive statement.  It bored me because I knew a lot of the content already, and that is because this is such important content that I have put a lot of time into trying to know it. Both the author and I thought it was very important to know this material .  AI and the military is right now is a critical issue, and this is the book to read in the area.  Whether or not y...

The subtitle is Why Insurance Markets Fail and What To Do About It , and the authors are the highly regarded Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Ray Fisman.  The level is a bit above what could make this book a bestseller, but I consider that a good thing.  The book in fact is a classic example of how to present economic research in readable, digestible form and should be regarded as such.

Addendum : Here is decent NYT coverage , with some photos, so far there are oddly few substantive reviews.  However Garett Jones in his wisdom likes it too , don’t forget he has a new book coming out in two weeks.

4. Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years .  (I enjoyed the new Mondrian biography by the way.  Mondrian is one of my heroes.)

I am happy to recommend this book, you can buy it here .  I am also happy to recommend the new book by Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams , New Yorker coverage here .

I am happy to recommend this book, you can buy it here .  I am also happy to recommend the new book by Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams , New Yorker coverage here .

3. Joan Robinson’s Theory of Imperfect Competition was a very important book, and it laid the groundwork for a lot of later thinking about market structure, both geometrically and conceptually.  But she didn’t understand actual economics, was a Maoist , and seemed to like the regime of North Korea .  So I have to say overrated .  Her Accumulation of Capital also was no great shakes, though hardly her greatest sin.  Her growth theory was far too Marxian, and far too fond of “Golden Rule” construc...

Liberalism I quite like.  His book Bureaucracy is underdeveloped but still pretty interesting, and his hypotheses about the logic of cascading interventionism, if not entirely correct, still are an important contribution to public choice.  They do explain a lot of the data. Human Action is big, cranky, and dogmatic, but for some people a useful tonic and alternative to the usual stuff.  I can’t say I have ever really liked it, and in an odd way the whole emphasis on “Man acts” undoes at least on...

2. Mises is underrated .  His 1922 book Socialism is still the best and also historically most important critique of socialism, ever.  His earlier articles about the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism are among the most important economics articles, ever.  Those are already some pretty important contributions, and yet he is often talked of as a crank, perhaps because in part some of his followers were indeed cranks.

2. Mises is underrated .  His 1922 book Socialism is still the best and also historically most important critique of socialism, ever.  His earlier articles about the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism are among the most important economics articles, ever.  Those are already some pretty important contributions, and yet he is often talked of as a crank, perhaps because in part some of his followers were indeed cranks.

1. Peter Bauer is underrated .  He was a brilliant development economist who wrote seminal early and detailed books on the rubber sector and also networks of West African trade .  He also recognized the importance of the informal sector early on.  He then moved into a more polemic mode, writing books on market-oriented development strategies and very critical of foreign aid.  I believe at the time he was largely correct about foreign aid, though I would recognize also that since then the quality...

5. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Revolution & Dictatorship , is an interesting take on why (some) authoritarian regimes have proven so durable: “As this book has shown, revolutionary assaults on powerful domestic and foreign interests often trigger a reactive sequence that, over time, lays a foundation for authoritarian durability.  Early radicalism generates violent and often regime-threatening counterrevolutionary conflict.  Regimes that survive these conflicts tend to develop a cohesive elit...

4. Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia .  A decent introduction for those who are not so well-informed.

3. Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 and ‘the miracle on the Vistula. ‘  And Adam Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe .  These are obvious reads at the moment.

3. Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 and ‘the miracle on the Vistula. ‘  And Adam Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe .  These are obvious reads at the moment.

2. Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool .  Fiction, about 66 pp., excellent, I read it as a modern re-do of Rousseau’s Emile but I doubt if anyone else sees it that way.

1. Yoram Hazony, Conservatism: A Rediscovery .  An intriguing if unconvincing book.  Imagine the United States of America but without the natural rights and liberty emphasis in its background.  Does Hazony favor a kind of Christian Israel for us?  Nonetheless easy to read and a point of view that deserves at least one book.  I am pleased that Hazony is a fan of John Selden .

You can pre-order here .

You can order it here .  Upon my reread, one striking feature of the dialogues is how much Goethe was obsessed with discussing and evaluating talent:

A very good conversation.  And I am happy to recommend Walter’s new book The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People .