Recently Mentioned Books

COWEN: I have some questions about other topics. You have some highly regarded books about hedge funds and about the Fed. In the late ’90s, the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management — was that a kind of original sin that just set us on a path of bailing more things out at higher and higher price tags? Should we have just let LTCM fall?

And that is with rights of free migration.  That is from Brendan O’Leary, A Treatise on Northern Ireland, volume 3, Consociation and Confederation , a very good series of books I might add.

That is all from my forthcoming book with Daniel Gross Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World .  Most of the chapter of course is devoted to how to get the most out of an interview.  Due out May 17, you can pre-order here for Amazon , here for Barnes & Noble .

3. Pavel Kolesnikov, Bach, Goldberg Variations .

2. Daniil Trifonov, Silver Age , two CDs of Russian music.

1. Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Beethoven Symphony number nine .

I have not had a chance to read Bruce Clark, Athens: City of Wisdom , a history of the city through the ages, but it looks good.

I agree very much with Tim Kane’s new pro-immigration book The Immigrant Superpower: How Brains, Brawn, and Bravery Make America Stronger .

My colleague lives his words, here is Todd B. Kashdan The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent & Defy Effectively .

Tom G. Palmer and Matt Warner, Development with Dignity: Self-Determination, Localization, and the End to Poverty is a good classical liberal short book on economic development.

Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern .  A little slow to start, but a good book on how China used technological innovation to adapt Chinese characters to the advent of the typewriter and the telegraph.  The danger to the Chinese language seems entirely to be past.

David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City .  Yes this is Dublin only, but still one of the best books on Irish history I know.

Here goes , I had a blast chatting with Cardiff, most of all we revisited my 1998 book In Praise of Commercial Culture and discussed some of the major issues facing commerce, the arts, and progress.  In some ways that book is the initial root of “Progress Studies,” at least from my side of the equation.  And my study of 15th to 18th century patronage, as was necessary to write that book, gave rise to later plans for Emergent Ventures and Fast Grants, in conjunction with others of course.  Recomm...

Jason K. Stearns, The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo .  There should be more conceptual books on this topic, and this is one of them.  Haven’t you wondered why this war drags on for decades, without resolution?  Start your quest for an answer here.

For those who are interested, I can recommend Strauss, Spinoza, & Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith , edited by Jeffrey Bloom, Alec Goldstein, and Gil Student.

Simone Dietrich, States, Markets, and Foreign Aid is a good book about how national ideology shapes practices of aid-giving.

I very much enjoyed Edward Shawcross, The Last Emperor: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World .  Covers mid-19th century France and Mexico of course.

Don Thompson, The Curious Economics of Luxury Fashion I found a fun and useful book.

I enjoyed Oliver Roeder, Seven Games: A History (covers chess, checkers, backgammon, bridge, Go, etc.).

James G. Clark, The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History , is likely to be highly relevant four or five years hence.

Erich Schwartzel, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy is clear and to the point.

One thing I liked about reading this book is I was able to narrow down my disagreements with Bryan to a smaller number of dimensions.  And to be clear, I agree with a great deal of what is in this book, but that does not make for an interesting blog post.  So let’s focus on where we differ.  One point of disagreement surfaces when Bryan writes :

The author is Bryan Caplan and the subtitle is Essays on the World’s Greatest Market .  It is a collection of his best blog posts on labor markets over the last fifteen years or so.  A Bryan blog post from 2015 gives a good overview of much of the book, which you can read as pushback against a lot of doctrines held by other people, including the mainstream:

I was just shooting from the hip when I questioned the housing bubble view that was so popular after 2006.  Credit should go to Kevin Erdmann , who produced a mountain of evidence against the bubble hypothesis in two very impressive books on housing.  His view, which was once highly contrarian, has now been completely vindicated.  Indeed, I don’t see how any fair-minded person reading his books could still believe in the housing bubble theory.  Unfortunately, he’ll probably be ignored.  The medi...

6. Paul Krugman is coming very close to admitting a) “real estate bubble” was not the best formulation, and b) Kevin Erdmann was right .