Recently Mentioned Books

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 .

Here is the full Brendan Borrell piece in The Atlantic , excellent throughout.  And don’t forget Brendan’s new and exciting book The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine .

Due out May 17, you can pre-order here for Amazon , here for Barnes & Noble .

The book just came out in France, here is more information .  Is Houllebecq best at 736 pp.?  I guess we’ll find out.  In French, on Kindle .  And in German .  When in English?  I have ordered it in German, though I am not sure when I will get to start much less finish it.

Modern Ireland 1600-1972 would be the place to start, and it is a book you can read more than once.  Here is an excellent Guardian profile of Foster , worth reading in its own right.  So what should I ask him?

From the excellent John List, the subtitle is How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale .

Also new is David Autor, David A. Mindell, and Elisabeth B. Reynolds, The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines .

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in Her Time is a comprehensive study of its chosen topic.  It doesn’t focus on the conceptual issues of liberalism that I care most about, but it is nonetheless by far the most detailed study out there.  Translated from the German.

Edmond Smith, Merchants: The Community That Shaped England’s Trade and Empire .  There are some good recent books on the East India Company, this useful work looks at the phenomenon more generally.  The Muscovy Company was chartered in 1555, and survived until 1917, at which point it was turned into a “charity.”  Also of relevance for recent charter city discussions.

3. John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand .  An excellent book, I have more to say about it and also Stewart’s life, but you’ll have to wait for my CWT with Stewart himself.  Stewart himself seems to like it, and he praised how the author’s archival research corrected many of his own faulty memories.

2. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 .  I fear this book will become increasingly relevant, as it is a good introduction to what appear to be a number of growing hotspots.  The 1569 Lublin Union created a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  How did that matter, how was it the ethnic issues in that region never were settled, and have we recreated a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth today?  This book is good on all those questions and more.

1. Michael S. Nieberg, When France Fell: the Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance .  It is difficult to find WWII material that is both interesting and fresh, but this book qualifies.  It is a look at how America processed the fall of France in 1940, and suddenly realized the whole thing was for real and that dangers to the homeland were not trivial.