Recently Mentioned Books

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 .

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...