Recently Mentioned Books

Hail Bryan Caplan!  Again here is the link , and of course you should buy his book The Case Against Education .

This puzzle is from Steve Landsburg, who says “color me stumped” in his new and forthcoming book Can You Outsmart An Economist? 100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain .

This is all from Steven M. Gillon, Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism .

It always surprises me that the name of Anthony Downs is not mentioned more often in conjunction with the Nobel Prize in economics.  His An Economic Theory of Democracy is one of the best and most important books on public choice economics, and it is the major source for the median voter theorem. Yet now a new paperback copy of the book is not to be had for less than $100.  Downs also had major contributions to transportation economics (traffic expands to fill capacity) and housing and urban eco...

W. Kip Viscusi, Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society , is as you would expect full of good common economic sense.

There is Christopher Payne and Rob Barnett, The Economist’s Diet , by two economists and based on economic reasoning, noting that I wish never to offer opinions on diet books; this one is “micro habits and meta rules.”

I have yet to crack open The Structural Foundations of Monetary Policy , edited by Michael D. Bordo, John H. Cochrane, and Amit Seru.

Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright, Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code , is a good treatment of how the principles of blockchain and principles of the law may clash, overlap, or coexist.  It’s a good place to start on the notion that blockchains are fundamentally innovations in governance.

Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics is an important documentation of their core results.

Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create . Boyer is one of my favorite writers in the “social science tries to explain the previously underexplained anthropological practice” genre, but this one I thought lacked focus and doesn’t have an obvious enough pay-off.  I will try it again, however.

Sara Zaske, Achtung Baby: The German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children .  Es erinnert mich an meinen Freund Bryan Caplan aber auf deutsch.  Behind the link you will see how they changed the title for the American edition, I am giving you the better British title.

The top link above is for U.S. Amazon orders, due out in August, I was very happy to have ordered from AmazonUK .

The author is Nick Chater and the subtitle is The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind .  I found this to be one of the most interesting books on the mind I have read.  Overall the message is that your hidden inner life ain’t what you think:

Due out in August .

That is all from David Reich’s superb Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past .  Here is my earlier post on the book .

Their main point is that social tactics used in interventions abroad tend to come back and haunt us at home.  I am not nearly as non-interventionist in foreign policy questions as they are, but still I wish their perspective would receive a much broader hearing.  You can buy the book here .  Here is the book’s home page .  Here is a video related to the book .

Here you can buy her just-published book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming .  You cannot follow her on Twitter.

That is the new book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, due out September 4, you can now pre-order it here .  Here is my earlier Conversation with Jonathan .

The author is Edward Tenner and the subtitle is What Big Data Can’t Do .  Overall, I prefer to read Tenner on engineering more narrowly construed, but still I found some novel and interesting ideas in this book, as you might expect.

I spotted several intellectual and emotional fallacies in Zadie Smith’s Feel Free: Essays .

Self-recommending is Richard Sylla and David J. Cowen, Alexander Hamilton on Finance, Credit, and Debt .

Ge Zhaoguang, What is China?: Territory Ethnicity Culture & History is the result of a China scholar considering all the questions suggested in the subtitle.  I was not ever astonished, but it is about time we all read more books by the Chinese about China.

I have only browsed Fawaz A. Gerges, Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash that Shaped the Middle East , but it looks quite good.

David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India .

Michael J. Piore and Andrew Schrank, Root-Cause Regulation: Protecting Work and Workers in the Twenty-First Century is an interesting book, written under the premise that the Continental model of labor safety and labor market regulation is a good thing, including for Latin America.