Friday, August 13, 2010

What I'm reading

In case you care...

- Ryoo and Rosen. 2004. "The Engineering Labor Market", Journal of Political Economy - boning up on the literature for the NBER chapter on the engineering labor force. It's a good read.

- Volume One of Joseph Dorfman's The Economic Mind in American Civilization (1966). I'm maybe a third of the way through - got held up by this article revision and a proposal at work (which has turned into a proposal at home in evenings and in the morning). I'm coming into the late colonial period. Just worked through some fascinating experiments with paper money in New England. Highly, highly recommend this book to anyone that has an interest in American history and economics. It reads like a history book - it's not simply a history of thought (although it is that).

- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time". Re-reading this with a new appreciation. Since the last time I read it, I got S.T. Joshi's "original text", which was recently discovered and edited. Apparently Lovecraft wrote it up and had a friend type it up for him to submit. There were discrepancies between this original version and the published version.

- My own paper on the 1920-21 depression as well as rereading what Powell (2009), Woods (2009), and Murphy (2009) wrote on it. I'll hopefully get a chance to revise this this weekend and send it back in - very exciting stuff.

4 comments:

  1. Oakrent, "Last Call"

    Richter, "Pictures of a Socialistic Future" (just finished)

    Gregory, "Lenin's Brain..." (just finished)

    McCraw, "Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction"

    Cohen, "Athenian Economy and Society"

    Rabelais, "Gargantua & Pantagruel" (which deeply influenced one of my favorite novels - Sterne's "Tristram Shandy")

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  2. I've read about half of Higgs's book on the American economy between 1865-1914, with intentions on finishing it next week. But, unfortunately, the 1,000 oversized pages of Reisman's "Capitalism" are occupying most of my time.

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  3. Any way you can make your paper accessible to us plebes*?

    *I take it hasn't been published as of yet?

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  4. It has not been published yet, but hopefully the turnaround won't be excessive. My goal is to have it resubmitted to them this weekend. I have a longer, rougher version of it up on SSRN:

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1591030

    This includes a discussion of two important issues that I had to cut out of the final paper because it was getting a little long, and they were somewhat tangential to my main point:

    1. The disagreement over why Strong raised interest rates in 1920 (to butress gold reserves or kill the inflation), and

    2. Harding's Conference on Unemployment

    On Steve Horwitz's advice, the final version is much more oriented towards "we should be cautious about this new narrative that's emerging from a few guys" rather than "we shouldn't believe this Austrian version" - advice that I think probably made the difference between acceptance and rejection.

    Often, the most current issues have free content online - I'll of course post that when the time comes. I don't think I'm going to repost my newest version to SSRN at this point in the process, though.

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