Recently Mentioned Books

The FDA usually follows a rigid process of interacting with the drug companies it regulates.  Normally, it can take months for a company to schedule an in-person meeting with the FDA.

The author is Peter Loftus, and the subtitle is Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World .  An excellent book, here is one very short excerpt:

Kissinger offers two explanations for this troubling silence. The first lies in the evolution of meritocracy. (Full disclosure: He mentions a book I have written on this subject). The six leaders were all born outside the pale of the aristocratic elite that had hitherto dominated politics, and particularly foreign policy: Adenauer and Sadat were the sons of clerks, Thatcher and Nixon were the children of storekeepers, Lee’s parents were downwardly mobile. But theirs was a meritocracy with an ari...

His new book is The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People .

4. Mustafa Akyol, Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance .  Progress Studies for Muslims?  Akyol, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, argues that the values of the Western Enlightenment had Islamic counterparts in the broader sweep of history, and that it is possible to win them back.

3. Hugh Eakin, Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America .  John Quinn is the hero of this story.  Who’s he?  He was a wealthy Irish-American lawyer on Wall Street in the early part of the twentieth century.  He supported James Joyce, the various Yeatses, the later-famous Irish playwrights, Irish painters, and Pound and Eliot, all before they became accepted and then famous.  What a talent spotter.  He simply sent them money.  He was also very early on the Picasso and Henri Rousseau bandwago...

2. Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe, editors, Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South .  Many of the individuals essays here are quite interesting, such as the coverage of Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala, how Montenegro became a neoliberal outpost of sorts, Rothbardianism in Brazil, or the career of Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson of Iceland.  But the book would be much better if it reversed its mood affiliation and turned these essays into tributes.  There is a fair amount o...

1. Ann Mari May, Gender and the Dismal Science: Women in the Early Years of the Economics Profession .  A good history of the injustices suffered by women in the earlier years of American economics.  It also serves indirectly as a good history of early journals, early academic practices, and the ongoing professionalization of American academia.

Is science really a source of social alpha? Well, science gave the world mRNA vaccines, though not to all societies at the same time. The U.S. and UK cashed in early there, in large part due to their domestic scientific achievements. Science helps keep the U.S. defense establishment strong. Superior science also was essential to the building of the United States as a wealthy, developed nation. If you are hoping that we cure cancer, or limit the problems of climate change, those issues too rely o...

The author is James Belich, and the subtitle is The Black Death and the Rise of Europe .  This is a fascinating but not entirely persuasive book.  In any case it is one of the books to read this year.  Here is a summary sentence:

The author is Raymond B. Craib and the subtitle is A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age .  This is really two books in one.  The first is a quite useful and well-researched history of various libertarian attempts to ease the costs of political exit, or sometimes to obtain exit altogether.  He is well-informed about the 1972 Michael Oliver attempt to set up the libertarian “Isle of Minerva,” nearby to Tonga.  The King of Tonga nixed it, but even Rothbar...

Here is a NYT obituary , here is a Guardian appreciation .  Here is Brook’s Wikipedia page .  He was one of the very greatest talents of our time.  He was most of all a theatre director, and so most of his output I have never seen.  I can report that his filmed Mahabharata ( 5.5 hours on YouTube ) is one of the great creations.  He and his co-workers spent eight years on the project.  I also give his King Lear , again on film, an A+.  At Lincoln Center I once saw his staging of The Magic Flute (...

5. New Deirdre McCloskey book .

The author is William C. Kirby and the subtitle is Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China .  The shocker is that this is actually a good book .  In contrast, hardly any books on these topics are good .  This book is substantive on virtually every page, the author actually understands how universities work, and, get this… you have to read the book to know what is inside it .  The material covers why early German universities became so successful, why they declined and sta...

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.