Recently Mentioned Books

The author is Ha-Joon Chang, and the subtitle is A Hungry Economist Explains the World .  This is an economics of food book with a Korean emphasis, and arguing in favor of protectionism and industrial policy, in line with the author’s earlier works.  Here is one excerpt:

You can pre-order here .  Hayek, by the way, is an interesting polar case for any talent search algorithm.  He was first interested in botany, and didn’t do anything in economics until he was 30 years old.

That is from a new paper by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt. Althoff is on the job market from Princeton, Reichardt is a third-year student from LSE.  Also a reminder that Garett Jones’s new book on Deep Roots, The Culture Transplant , is about to come out…

12. I see the Swiss Enlightenment as centered in Albrecht von Haller , a mid-18th century poet ( Die Alpen ), scientist, polymath, and naturalist.  I see the Swiss Enlightenment as focusing on two themes: a) coming to terms with a naturalistic rather than theological understanding of the beauties and world around them, and b) constructing an idealized narrative about Switzerland itself and its history and lifestyles.  See also Salomon Gessner and Johann Jakob Bodmer .  Can you count the Rousseau...

That is from the new and very good Jon Hilsenrath book on Janet Yellen .

Yes the author is Bob Dylan, and I give this one a thumbs up.  You can buy it here .  Here is one bit:

The author is Jon Hilsenrath, and the subtitle is The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval .  I very much enjoyed this book and read it straight through without stopping, and so I am happy to recommend it heartily.  Most of all it is a wonderful account of the economics profession and its evolution over the last few decades.

I don’t regret having spent more than $100 on these five CDs (could have been fit on two discs!), but Coase’s theory of durable goods monopoly was nonetheless foremost in my mind.

Roger D. Congleton, Solving Social Dilemmas: Ethics, Politics, and Prosperity is a good book on classical liberalism and how it is embedded in stories of the historical evolution of cooperation.

Michael Pritchard, FRPS, A History of Photography in 50 Cameras is very useful and very good, exactly what it promises, good photos too (better be good!)  I think of photography as one of those innovations that started 20-30 years earlier than I might otherwise have expected, had I not known the historical record.  1839 for basic daguerreotype , that is impressive.

Peter H. Wilson, Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 .  I thought I would love this lengthy tome (913 pp.), and it is quite a catalog, and impressively objective to boot.  Yet something is missing, and I skipped around and ended up putting it down with few regrets.

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.