Recently Mentioned Books

The question, then, is which prediction markets might prove most useful. Nobel Laureate economist Robert J. Shiller has promoted the idea of prediction markets in GDP, but most people face major risks at a more local, less aggregated level. One of the risks I face, for example, concerns the revenue of the university where I teach. This year enrollments rose slightly even though U.S. GDP fell sharply. So a GDP-based hedge probably is not very useful to me.

5. Ian Leslie, Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes .  A good popular science book on exactly what the title promises: “In this book, we’ll learn from experts who are highly skilled at getting the most out of highly charged encounters: interrogators, cops, divorce mediators, therapists, diplomats, psychologists. These professionals know how to get something valuable – information, insight, ideas—from the toughest, most antagonistic conversations.”

4. Jason L. Riley, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell .  I liked this book OK enough, and certainly read it with interest, but somehow it never brought Sowell to life for me (I have never met him), nor did it illuminate the work enough (what did Sowell claim about Say’s Law anyway?  And why?  Why is his book on late-talking children important for understanding his broader body of work?  Why was he so hawkish on foreign policy?  What might he have gotten wrong?).  The most interesting parts a...

3. Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh, The History of Sexuality, Volume 4 , published posthumously just now.  I only pawed through this one a bit, but it really didn’t seem so interesting.  I still think of The Order of Things , Discipline and Punish , and The Birth of the Clinic as Foucault’s best and most enduring books.

2. Ruth Goodman, The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything .  Most books of this ilk are good either on the super-micro or super-macro scale, but this volume succeeds on both levels.  Under Queen Elizabeth I, London became the first place to move away from burning peat, wood, and dung in homes to burning coal.  How did that supercharge the later Industrial Revolution?  How did it matter for household chores and for that matter recipes?  Recomme...

1. Kevin Donnelly, Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics, & the Average Men of Science, 1796-1874 .  The Belgian Quetelet was one of the pioneers of applying statistics to the social sciences, and he had a long-running and fascinating career obsessed with astronomy, crime, opera, jokes, and short essays, among many other things.  He developed the notion of an “average man” in a statistical distribution, the error curve as a distribution formula, and much more.  The concept and measurement of BMI come...

Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University and well-known for her writings on women in science. Her forthcoming book, Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton’s London Caree r , details the life of the titan of the so-called Scientific Revolution after his famous (though perhaps mythological) discovery under the apple tree. Her work emphasizes science as a long, continuous process composed of incremental contributions–in which women throughout history have taken a crucial part–rathe...

5. What I really had to teach was methods for hard work to improve your game consistently over time.  That might include for instance annotating a game or position “blind,” and then comparing your work to the published analysis of a world-class player, a’ la Alexander Kotov’s Think Like a Grandmaster .  I did try to teach that, but the demand for this service was not always so high.

7. For me at least the Andrew Farrant book on Hayek and Mill and liberalism was priced at zero for Kindle .

The author is Robert Paarlberg and the subtitle is Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat .  This book is a refreshing change of pace from most of the other food books, which tend to be illiterate on the economic side.  Here is one excerpt:

I will be doing a Conversation with her, most of all about her forthcoming and very good translation of Virgil’s Aeneid .  She is a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, and here is Wikipedia :

That is from James Shreeve’s The Genome War , here is more detail from the NYT in 1999 , and for the pointer I thank Patrick Collison.  Of course that is the same Afeyan Noubar who co-founded Moderna and now chairs it, here is my earlier CWT with him .

Claire Lehmann of Quillette fame and others have edited the new Panics and Persecutions: 20 Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age .

4. Margarette Lincoln, London and the 17th Century: The Making of the World’s Greatest City .  Is it so terrible to read another book about the world’s greatest city?  The emphasis is on London as a city of war, turmoil, and crime, rather than triumphalism.  It will be a shame when the English language of that era is no longer intelligible to us without a translation, because currently it is our very closest connection with a fundamentally different worldview.

3. Marie Favereau, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World .  The subtitle is maybe misleading, because this is the book that corrects all the other books with subtitles like “How the Mongols Changed the World.”  Yes they were somewhat globalized and also religiously tolerant, but Favereau fills in the rest of the details, and furthermore outlines the concept of “the horde” as a mode of governance.  I am hardly an expert in this area, but this seems to be the recommendable book on the Mongo...

2. Zachary Karabell, Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power .  A very useful treatment of an undercovered institution, and one spanning many different eras of American history.  Lots about early 20th century Nicaragua, plus this is the private investment firm that stayed private.

1. Honor Moore, Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury .  An excellent book on “what it was like back then.”  Plus the daughter-mother memoir often is neglected by male readers, and this is one place to start.  The mother ends up diagnosed with cancer at age fifty, and furthermore her war hero and Bishop husband turns out to be actively bisexual.

The subtitle is A New Monetary History of China , and the author is Jin Xu.  This is the first book this year to go straight to my “best books of the year list,” here is one excerpt:

You can pre-order here .  Here is further information , and a link to audiobook information.  Via Michael Rosenwald .

Benjamin Friedman has been a leading macroeconomist since the 1970s, whose accomplishments include writing 150 papers, producing more than dozen books, and teaching Tyler Cowen graduate macroeconomics at Harvard in 1985 . In his latest book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism , Ben argues that contrary to the popular belief that Western economic ideas are a secular product of the Enlightenment, instead they are the result of hotly debated theological questions within the English-speaking Protes...

4. Bryn Rosenfeld, The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy .  When is it the middle class that contributes to the resilience of autocracy, rather than its breakdown?  A very interesting book, highly relevant to China among other places.

3. Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth .  The Oumuamua book, by the former chair of the Harvard astronomy department.  I am not able to judge the scientific claims about comets, light refraction, travel spin, and the like, but too much of the book felt like “argument from elimination” to me.  “Well it can’t be this, and can’t be that, and thus it is likely to be…”  That works well for phenomena we understand!  But it can lead you into dangerous traps when ...

2. David M. Carballo, Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain .  I never tire of books on this topic, but that should tell you something about the topic, right?  This one is written by an archaeologist, and you can think of it as unearthing the different layers of Aztec culture more effectively than most competitor books.

1. Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live .  A pathbreaking book that unearths and presents part of the “hidden” history of economics, in this case as practiced largely by women, and often black women at that.  Think of it as the science and craft of Beckerian household production but with a managerial emphasis.  If you like books on paths not taken, this one is for you.

That is from the new and important The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution , by Yang Jisheng, who himself participated in the Cultural Revolution.