Recently Mentioned Books

5. “Many Amish are moving north, leaving their historic districts in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana for relatively cheap farmland in the deindustrializing Rust Belt and the prairie out west. This means they are farming colder, rockier ground and need plows that are stronger and more pliable. At the same time, different Amish communities have different sorts of religious proscriptions—some reject rubber wheels, for example, while others embrace them—so Pioneer offers roughly 90 different options....

1. The most checked out books of all time from the New York Public Library .  #1 is The Snowy Day , by Ezra Jack Keats.

Peter Andreas, Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs , does a good job of restoring drugs and alcohol to their rightful place in the history of war.

Maxine Eichner, The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored). There are so many anti-market books floating around these days, but this one is more likely to be true than most (the book is not as exaggerated as the subtitle).  The author takes too much of a “kitchen sink” approach for my taste, and doesn’t carefully enough consider trade-offs (U.S. as Finland is not actually a dream), but still I would rather spend time with this book than most of...

Lindsay M. Chervinsky, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution traces how Washington created a cabinet more than two years into his first term, and modeled after the military councils of the Continental army.

Laurence B. Siegel, Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance .  A Julian Simon-esque take on the nature and benefits of economic growth and progress.

Chris W. Surprenant and Jason Brennan, Injustice For All: How Financial Incentives Corrupted and Can Fix the US Criminal Justice System .  A good and clear introduction to exactly what the title promises.  Possible reforms are “End Policing for Profit,” “Stop Electing Prosecutors and Judges,” “Required Rotation of Public Defenders and Prosecutors,” and others.

I will be doing a Conversation with him, in part around his forthcoming book 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust the Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less , see earlier MR commentary .  Garett has another, earlier book The Hive Mind , numerous noteworthy articles, and he is my longstanding colleague.

I will be doing a Conversation with him, in part around his forthcoming book 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust the Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less , see earlier MR commentary .  Garett has another, earlier book The Hive Mind , numerous noteworthy articles, and he is my longstanding colleague.

6. I will cite again the philosophical framework of my book Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals .

2. Earlier in history, a strong state was necessary to back the formation of capitalism and also to protect individual rights (do read Koyama and Johnson on state capacity).  Strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets.  This includes keeping China at bay abroad and keeping elections free from foreign interference, as well as developing effective laws and regulations for intangible capital, intellectual property, and the new world of the internet.  (If you’ve rea...

I won’t “give away the plot,” but suffice to say it is about the rise of the West, the Malthusian model, group selection in history, why development takes so long, and related big topics.  Oh, and it does tie in to and draw upon Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem , just in case you were wondering.

You can pre-order the book here .

His new book is coming out in January, and the subtitle is The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class . I will get to the details shortly, but my bottom-line review is “Not as controversial as you might think,” but do note the normalization at the end of that phrase.

Toby Ord’s forthcoming The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity is a comprehensive look at existential risk, written by an Oxford philosopher and student of Derek Parfit.

Gordon Teskey, Spenserian Moments , The Master is finally receiving his poetic due.

4. Juan Du, The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City .  An actual history, as opposed to the usual blah-blah-blah you find in so many China books.  The author has a background in architecture and urban planning, and stresses the import of the Pearl River Delta before Deng’s reforms (Shenzhen wasn’t just a run-down fishing village), decentralization in Chinese reforms, and fits and starts in the city’s post-reform history.  Anyone who reads books on China should consider this on...

3. Ryan H. Murphy, Markets Against Modernity: Ecological Irrationality, Public and Private .  The book has blurbs from Bryan Caplan and Scott Sumner, and I think of it as an ecological, historically reconstructed account of the demand for irrationality as it relates to the environment, interest in “do-it-yourself,” and the love for small scale enterprise.  Interesting, but overpriced.

2. Richard J. Lazarus, The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court .  A genuinely interesting and well-presented history of how climate change became a partisan issue in the United States, somewhat broader than its title may indicate.

1. Ben Cohen, The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks .  An intelligent popular social science book covering everything from Stephen Curry to Shakespeare to The Princess Bride, David Booth, Eugene Fama, and more.  I am not sure the book is actually about “the hot hand” as a unified phenomenon, as opposed to mere talent persistence, but still I will take intelligence over the alternative.

Due out in January, you can pre-order your copy here .

As for historic cinema, I am very glad I purchased the complete Blu-Ray set of Ingmar Bergman movies , spectacular transfers and the American viewer can watch the true, complete version of Persona for the first time.

DUFLO: You know that book, Bringing Up Bébé ?

On the classical music front, Jean-Paul Gasparian’s Chopin CD is one of the best Chopin recordings ever, which is saying something.

Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again: A Novel .