Recently Mentioned Books

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.

Here is Will’s home page .  Will also has an exciting new book coming out, namely What We Owe the Future .  So what should I ask him?

Halik Kochanski, Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945 .  So far I have had time only to browse it, but it appears to be both excellent and definitive.

Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson is a good book about the Enlightenment publisher who interacted with Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Benjamin Franklin, Priestly, Fuseli, and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others.

Fernanda Melchor, Paradais is a new Mexican novel that has received a lot of attention.  I thought English was “not good enough for it,” though the slang and format would challenge my Spanish.  If you can read this properly in Spanish, I suspect it is excellent.

Serhi Plokhy, Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters is exactly what the subtitle promises.

3. Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis, Poems .  A lovely bilingual edition, covering her less-known post-Holocaust poetry.  The quality is still very high and the page display is excellent.

2. David E. Bernstein, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America .  A scathing and unfortunately spot-on indictment of America’s schemes of racial classification.  So often those schemes turn out to be racist themselves.  The Hmong cannot count as an “underrepresented group” because they are Asian!?  Come on, people.  There is no good way to do this work, and I am pleased to see David pointing this out so effectively.

1. Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle .  She covered 3000 miles in the 1960s, and as she notes in the introduction: “Epictetus put it in a nutshell when he said, “For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.”  Self-recommending.  But don’t be fooled by the title — hardly any of the narrative takes place in India .

In one way, however, this is an unusual book — there is remarkably little “of Ben” in the book.  To be clear, Ben already has published his personal memoir .  Still, if most of this book had been written by someone else, I would not have known.  Or maybe that is what it means to “put Ben in this book.”  Imagine Elon Musk writing a book on rocketry and focusing on the rockets.

I am pleased to have received an autographed copy of this very carefully done work .  I think it is (by far) the best treatment of what the Fed has been up to since the 1970s, at least on the monetary policy front.  There really isn’t anyone who would know better than Ben, keeping in mind he was not only Fed chair but also a top, possibly Nobel-quality monetary economist and also economic historian.  The clarity and writing quality are high.

I am reminded of some of my monetary theory writings with Kroszner in the late 1980s.  He and I wrote one essay, later published in our book , on how indirect convertibility may not be entirely stabilizing.  Let’s say you peg an asset at the value of one dollar, but redeem that asset in terms of gold bars rather than dollars.  You offer the redeemer enough gold bars to be equal in value to a dollar.