Recently Mentioned Books

3. A sense of terror from difference , as mirrored both in Burke’s aesthetics of the sublime and the voyages in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels .  Everyone is running around deeply afraid of “the other,” and this concern surfaces also in Burke’s fears for the French aristocrats.  The enthusiasms of the French revolutionaries reminded Burke all too much of the earlier Irish civil wars and rebellions and massacres, even though in both cases he knew the privileges of the nobles were not deserved.  Swift...

2. Edmund Burke , 1729-1797.  Burke has been underrated as an economist, see the recent book by Greg Collins on Burke’s economic thought .  Here is a short essay on Burke’s conservative case for markets .

Jorge Almazán Studiolab, Emergent Tokyo: Designing The Spontaneous City , very good for those who care.  The book also provides excellent visuals on how the city actually is laid out.  Do note that much of the Tokyo of the 1980s and 90s is disappearing, due to high-rise towers.  Visit while you can!

4. Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle, 1789-1797 , edited by Daniel B. Klein and Dominic Pino.  It is sometimes forgotten that the great Irish thinkers of the 18th century (Swift, Berkeley, Burke, Sterne, etc., and don’t forget Shaftesbury wrote there) are really not so far behind the Scots.  Yet when do you hear talk of an Irish Enlightenment?  This much-needed book assembles excellent quotations from the wisdom of Burke.

3. Lane Kenworthy, Would Democratic Socialism be Better? No.  “My conclusion is that capitalism, and particularly social democratic capitalism, is better than many democratic socialists seem to think.”  The notion of writing a book that argues clearly and directly for a correct conclusion remains vastly underrated!  That said, I worry a bit this book is ignoring what is upstream and what is downstream.  If a socialist claimed “Cuba is better than Haiti,” would it really work to shoot back “The N...

2. Chris Blackwell, with Paul Morley, The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond .  Obviously an interesting story in its own right, and well-written as well.  I also found this a good take on talent search.  First, if you come across a very talented cluster (in this case Jamaican reggae), never stop supporting it and working with it!  Sounds trivial, but it runs against the spirit of our age.  Second, if you ever have a chance to work with a very talented person (people), just do it.  Yes, try t...

1. Andrea G. McDowell, We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush .  An important law and economics study of an “anarchistic” episode, going much deeper than some earlier accounts on matters involving Native Americans, fairness of trials, dispute resolution, miner-mining company interactions, and more.

By Mark Koyama (my colleague) and Jared Rubin, with the subtitle The Historical Origins of Economic Growth .  I am now home and am united with my copy.  It is the single best treatment on what the title promises!  You can buy it here .

This new book by Katherine Rundell, now out in the UK but still pending in the United States for September , is one of the very best studies of an individual poet I ever have read.  The book’s style is so energetic and so carefully crafted as a whole, it is difficult to excerpt from.  What is striking to me is that the blurbs are from super-smart people, and they all are literally accurate (has that ever been the case?). So for instance Claire Tomalin wrote:

That is from the new and excellent Anthony Beevor book, Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 .

4. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest .  Has anyone done a systematic accounting of which Vietnam era fictional works have held up and which not?  Maybe this one gets a B+?  Not top drawer Le Guin, but good enough to read, and better yet if you catch the cross-cultural references and all the anthropological background works.

1. Ian Morris, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History .  None of the book is bad, and half is quite interesting.  Think of the treatment as “Deep Roots for Brexit,” though willing to noodle over earlier and more interesting topics in history.  From a good FT review by Chris Allnutt: “Morris succeeds in condensing 10,000 years into a persuasive and highly readable volume, even if there are moments that risk a descent into what he seeks to avoid: “a catalogue of men wit...

Yale University Press is republishing Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities , with a new introduction by Ed Glaeser.

Matthew is now a venture capitalist as well and he has a forthcoming and already much-discussed book The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything .  Here is his home page and here is Matthew on Twitter .  So what should I ask him?

Michael Magoon’s From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement is a very good introduction to the importance of progress and material wealth in history.

5. David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals .  An extended history of U.S. slavery, focusing on regional differences, for instance Carolina Gullahs vs. New Orleans vs. Mississippi.  As you might expect, the broader story is integrated with that of the particular African origins of the slaves as well.  A strong book, recommended.

4. Paul Mango, Warp Speed: Inside the Operation that Beat Covid, the Critics, and the Odds .  Written by an HHS insider and participant, this is kind of cheesy and fanboyish.  But probably it should be!  For one thing, the book gives you a sense of just how much talent was involved in OWS, an under-discussed lesson.  On p.69, you can learn that they repeatedly considered human challenge trials and learn their question-begging reasons for refusing to do them.

3. Evan Lieberman, Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa After Apartheid .  An interesting book, and one which contains a lot of useful information.  Yet the author works too hard to avoid recognizing just how badly matters have gone.  Overall, incomes are down and the racial wealth gap has not improved…and that is after getting rid of one of the most inefficient economic systems of all time, namely apartheid.  For sources try this and this , among others.  The income gains you can find ar...

2. James Poskett, Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science .  A useful account of what the title promises, with a look at contributions from pre-conquest Mexico, China, and other non-Western locales.  Maybe the book pushes the non-Western theme a little too much at points, but this is basically a sane and readable account, and most of the cross-cultural connections are valid rather than strained.

1. Dan Werb, The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronavirus and the Search for a Cure .  An excellent book on the history of coronaviruses more generally, with much of the strongest material coming on how earlier coronavirus investigations fed into the progress we have made on Covid-19.  Recommended, not just what all the other Covid books are telling you.

Here is the full coverage with interview .  And you can order the book here from Amazon .  I haven’t read it yet, but this is surely self-recommending…

For a long time, there was no one book that could explain, compare, and evaluate these theories for non-experts. That’s changed: How the World Became Rich , by Chapman University’s Jared Rubin and George Mason University’s Mark Koyama, provides a comprehensive look at what, exactly, changed when sustained economic growth began, what factors help explain its beginning, and which theories do the best job of making sense of the new stage of life that humans have been experiencing for a couple brief...

The big question is what drove this transformation. Historians, economists, and anthropologists have proposed a long list of explanations for why human life suddenly changed starting in 18th-century England, from geographic effects to forms of government to intellectual property rules to fluctuations in average wages .

COWEN: There is a crude view in popular American society — even possibly correct — that, simply, American society is too legalistic. There’s that book, Three Felonies a Day . If you have expired prescription medicine in your cabinet, you’re committing a felony. People who are very smart will just tell me, “Never talk to a cop. Never talk to an FBI agent.” I’m an upper-class White guy who’s literally never smoked marijuana once, and they’re telling me , “Don’t ever speak with the law.”

More recently Chris Blattman, who is also very able and very smart, wrote in February that Putin probably was not going to attack.  Chris has just published a very well-received major book titled Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Path to Peace .  Chris does not pretend he is a Ukraine/Russia expert (“I know very little about Ukraine or Russia”), but he does command the literature on war and violent conflict with very real authority.