Recently Mentioned Books

Here Ilya provides basic information about the book .  Here you can pre-order it on Amazon .

There is much more at the link, an excellent Conversation.  Here you can order Garett’s book 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust the Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less .  You can read the introduction to the book on-line .

That is the new book by Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei .  It is perhaps not so novel to students of Jean Bodin and medieval political thought, or say Chinese history, but still the book crystallizes a moment and I consider its publication a matter of note.  Here is one short bit:

That is the new, forthcoming Joe Henrich book, due out September 1, pre-order here .  Here is my 2016 CWT with Joe Henrich .

That is a Lydia Davis short story (yes, the whole thing) from her excellent book Samuel Johnson is Indignant .

John G. Matsusaka, in his new Princeton University Press book Let the People Rule: How Direct Democracy Can Meet the Populist Challenge , calls for the introduction of referenda at the national level in the United States.  For instance he favors advisory referendums called by Congress, advisory referendums called by petition, advisory referendums required for specific issues, binding referendums for required issues, or called by petition, and constitutional amendments, proposed by petition (but ...

Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War , is not a secret history, but it is a good general overall introduction to its chosen topic.

John Took’s Dante is the book to read on Dante after you’ve read all the other books (an interesting designation, by the way, I wonder how many areas have such books?  In most cases, if you’ve read all the other books you shouldn’t bother with the next one!).

Neil Price, A History of the Vikings: Children of Ash and Elm .  I have only browsed this book, yet it appears to have much more information about the Vikings than other books I know, yet without getting squirrelly.  That said, I find it difficult to connect books on the Vikings with the broader conceptual narratives I know, and thus I do not retain their content very well.  So I am never sure if I should read another book on the Vikings.

Laurence Louër, Sunnis and Shi’a: A Political History of Discord .  Captures the complexities, and in fact pulls the reader away from the usual tired dichotomy.

1. Lane Kenworthy, Social Democratic Capitalism .  A very smart, well-written, well-argued book, and an argued book indeed it is.  As the title suggests, Kenworthy tries to persuade the reader to embrace social democratic capitalism, but with an emphasis on what government can do, not the market.  One rebuttal: responding to the Swiss experience requires far more than the two short paragraphs on pp.105-106, and furthermore Switzerland has done very well in many sectors above and beyond being a f...

Here is my first CWT with him , I will be doing another, based in part around Ross’s new book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success , reviewed by me enthusiastically here .  So what should I ask him?

I am pleased to announce that Martin Gurri is joining Mercatus as an affiliated scholar.  As you probably may know, Martin is the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium , one of the more important and more prophetic social science books of our time.

Definitely recommended, you can order it here .

Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties .  This is both a very old thesis, but these days quite new, namely the claim that 1965 and the Civil Rights movement created a “new constitution” for America, at variance with the old, and the two constitutions have been at war with each other ever since.  It will be one of the influential books “on the Right” this year, I already linked to this Park MacDougald review of the book .

Michael E. O’Hanlon, The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War Over Small Stakes .  A very useful practical book about what options a U.S. government would have — short of full war — to deal with international grabs by China or Russia.  There should be thirty more books on this topic (#ProgressStudies).

Economists , Photographs by Mariana Cook, edited with an introduction by Robert M. Solow.  Self-recommending.  Interestingly, I recall an old University of Chicago calendar of economist photographs, still buried in my office somewhere, with pictures of Frank Hyneman Knight, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, and others.  At least in terms of personality types, as might be revealed through photographs, the older collection seems to me far more diverse.  Or is the homogenization instead only in terms of ph...

Jennifer Delton, The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism .  Why don’t more books fit this model: take one topic and explain it well?

Conor Daugherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America .  Coming out in February, this is a very good book about the YIMBY movement and its struggles, with a focus on contemporary California, written by a NYT correspondent.

Randy Shaw, Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America .  A YIMBY book, with good historical material on San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other locales involved in the struggle to build more .

Here is the audio and transcript .  Yes we talked a great deal about Ezra’s new book on polarization , but much more too:

You can buy the book here , here is Wikipedia on Tarde .

The authors are Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman, and the subtitle is Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy .  This is the most comprehensive, definitive attempt to respond to paternalism and nudge that I have seen, written from a (mostly) libertarian and partially Austrian perspective.  Excerpt:

The subtitle is Selected Essays 1997-2019 , here is one excerpt:

4. Yuval Levin (NYT): “In one arena after another, we find people who should be insiders formed by institutions acting like outsiders performing on institutions.”  And the new book is A Time to Build .