~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (23)

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary: Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer celebrated for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures such as Susan Sontag and Clarice Lispector. His latest book, which details a twenty-year love affair with the Dutch masters, is one of Tyler’s favorite books […] The post My excellent Conversation with Benjamin Moser...

1985 — World oil production will fall below world needs 1990 — North America will no longer be a reliable source for food export 1995 — The nations of the world will meet (unwillingly) in a Global Congress to tackle seriously the problems of population, food, and energy. 2000 — Under global sponsorship, the construction […] The post Isaac Asimov predictions from 1981 appeared...

Maybe by less than people had thought, here is a new ReStat paper by Gillian Brunet: I use newly-digitized contract data on U.S. war production spending over 1940-1945 to analyze the macroeconomic effects of U.S. military spending in World War II. I find personal income multipliers of 0.34 over two years and 0.49 over three […] The post Did World War II pull America...

Three big volumes, about 1800 pp., these books reprint the true classics behind the origins of economic thought.  These are the best works of economics published before Adam Smith, and essentially they founded economic science.  The originals were edited by the classical economist John Ramsay McCulloch, but they now have been reprinted by Classical Liberal […] The post *Scarce and Valuable Economic Tracts* appeared...

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her.  She runs a geopolitics firm, hails from Bulgaria, is in my view broadly classical liberal, focuses on conflict in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, and is very active on Twitter. Here is Velina on LinkedIn.  She does not seem crazy. So what should I ask her? The post What should I ask Velina Tchakarova? appeared first...

That is the new and very useful book by Carola Binder, mostly a very good economic history.  Here is one excerpt: The [Nixon price controls] were seen as necessary to support the third component of the Economic Stabilization Program, an expansionary fiscal package that included tax reductions to promote business recovery.  The Council of Economic […] The post *Shock Value: Prices and Inflation in...

An auction house has withdrawn 18 ancient Egyptian human skulls from sale after an MP said selling them would perpetuate the atrocities of colonialism. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, believes the sale of human remains for any purposes should be outlawed, adding that the trade was “a gross […] The post Thwarted markets in everything, antiquities remain...

Wu Bingjian, better known in the west as ‘Houqua’, or sometimes ‘Howqua’, was the most successful Chinese merchant of his day.  As leader of the Cohong (gonghang), the guild of Chinese traders that had been authorized in the late 18th century by the Qing court to oversee trade with Western merchants at Canton (Guangzhou), he […] The post Who was the wealthiest man in...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the intro: Out of curiosity, I recently cracked open The American Economy in Transition, published in 1980, edited by Martin Feldstein and including contributions from… Nobel-winning economists [Samuelson, Friedman, Kuznets], successful business leaders and notable public servants. Though most of the essays get it wrong, […] The post Economists’ predictions from 1980 appeared first...

The author is Kathleen Duval, and the subtitle is A Millennium in North America.  This is an excellent book.  Here is one excerpt, strung together by me from three separate pages: By 1400, the cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam were abandoned.  People continued to live nearby and, in many cases, continued to use […] The post *Native Nations* appeared first on Marginal...

He is one of the greatest of living American historians, here is from Wikipedia: Alan Shaw Taylor (born June 17, 1955) is an American historian and scholar who is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A specialist in the early history of the United States, Taylor has written extensively about the colonial […] The post What should I ask Alan Taylor?...

With a group of friends I was having a chat about the merits of the current vs. past America.  Battle of the Ancients and Moderns!  I generally favor current times, but not unconditionally.  So I promised them a list of what I missed from the past.  To be clear, these are personal judgments, not claims […] The post What I am nostalgic about appeared...

Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia.  We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian history across the whole period.  It has four major features.  The first is the survival of something called Iran, as both […] The post Michael Cook on Iran appeared first...

The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell.  A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt: The First Republic is sixteen years of unrelenting chaos, one that sets the scene for the fascist state that follows it. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal goes through eight presidents […] The post *The Carnation Revolution* appeared first on...

An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular: Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral […] The post Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT* appeared first...

Nnow though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago.  To most men, if course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age.  In […] The post *Star Maker*, by Olaf Stapledon appeared...

The subtitle is Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, and the author is David van Reybrouck.  An excellent book, and I found two points of particular interest in it.  First, just how weak and incomplete was the Dutch colonization of Indonesia for centuries.  Second, just how complicated and rapidly changing was the postwar […] The post *Revolusi* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION....

Here is an outline of part of my lecture.  I presented “free trade” (NB: it wasn’t totally free), the classical gold standard, and some modicum of free immigration (not everywhere) as three successful and mostly stable pillars of 19th century classical liberal achievement.  Of course that was for limited parts of Western Europe and North […] The post Some triumphs of 19th century liberalism...

You know, the 1961 #1 hit by Gary U.S. Bonds?  I’ve been thinking about this question for months.  I feel a good amount is at stake.  If songs such as Quarter to Three (or done live with dancers) are still great, our assessment of early times risesconsiderably.  But if they are dispensable throw-aways, the history […] The post How good a song is Quarter...

In 1927, George and Ira Gershwin put on a musical satire about trade and war entitled Strike Up the Band.  The plot centres around a middle-aged US cheesemaker, Horace J. Fletcher of Connecticut, who wants to corner the domestic dairy market.  When Fletcher hears that the US government has just slapped a fifty per cent […] The post The Gershwins on free trade (that...

Here is the link, I am reviewing a bad book on the Clinton administration (A Fabulous Failure, by Lichtenstein and Stern).  Here is one excerpt: Clinton-era welfare reform is another area where many commentators go astray, and Lichtenstein and Stein are no exception. The Clinton pronouncement “I have a plan to end welfare as we […] The post My TLS essay on the Clinton...

That is my podcast with Cardiff Garcia, now on-line and with transcript too.  Cardiff proposed a novel approach: Who is the Magic Johnson of economics? Who was the Adam Smith of basketball? On this fun and oddball episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff speaks with Tyler Cowen, economist and author of GOAT: Who is the […] The post If econs could hoop — The...

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is one outdated bit from his home page: Benjamin Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice […] The post What should I ask Benjamin Moser?...