I am reading this

...if I am not in the waves, sipping some wine, or fishing

More to the bookshelf...

I went to the used bookstore after work today and picked up two books: Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution, and a collection of J.A. Hobson's essays (Hobson was an underconsumption theorist from the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

From Baltimore, I got six volumes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that belonged to my great-grandfather.

I also got several histories of Maryland including:
Rivers of the Eastern Shore
The Amiable Baltimoreans
Baltimore in the Eighties and Nineties [1880s and 1890s]


A nice hardback copy of The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (so now I can jettison my crumbling copy of a lot of his stuff that I picked up at some point)


Kon Tiki - one of my favorite books. I also have a crumbling paperback and now I can replace it with a nice hardback.


A three volume history of World War I, published in 1919


A biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

And a 1923 edition of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, another favorite.

I also got three maps of the Maryland interstate highway system from 1951.

The books associated with the constitutional convention that I hoped to get to weren't in the boxes that I went through. I did, however, get a chance to look through a lot of old photos of my grandparents' families from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. I also got to mess around with an old Kodak camera made in 1917. Between that, talking a lot with them, and eating at their favorite sandwich shop it was a good Saturday.

I think it's time to grab some books I don't make much use of from the shelf and donate them to the public library book sale... circle of life and all that...

Two new books

I was at the library yesterday, and dropped by their book sale. I picked up two:

1. Kenneth Boulding's "Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, Religion, and Ethics". I haven't read much Boulding before, but I read some of the essays in here last night and enjoyed them very much. One of the ones I read was called "An Economist's View on the Manpower Concept" (1954), which was interesting because that's largely what my NBER paper is about - it addresses these concerns from so-called "manpower studies" that suggest we're going to have a great shortage of scientists and engineers. The same chicken-little concerns were there in the fifties, and Boulding refutes them well. Most economists have addressed the concerns well - virtually every study over the last sixty years that I'm aware of has been in agreement on that point. So that's interesting and Boulding is a talented writer - but towards the end he gets into another issue that I've been thinking of but hadn't heard anyone provide my perspective on before: the question of, if we're looking to achieve some social or public objective that requires professional labor - whether we should subsidize supply or demand for that labor. It seems to me that the demand side makes much more sense, and Boulding agrees - but a lot of people focus on labor supply policies here (even people I'm usually positively disposed towards on these issues - like Richard Freeman). In the essay, Boulding compares labor supply policies to the draft, and says of the draft that "it is unquestionably the most disastrous social invention of the past two hundred years, and I find it difficult to forgive the French for inventing it." He also has an essay called "Economic Libertarianism" (1965), which I haven't read in its entirely. I can fully endorse his framing of the argument in the initial paragraph: "I shall try to look at what I call the limits of libertarianism, particularly in regard to the role of exchange in the organization of society. I think freedom is a bit of a red herring here. The really crucial question is the role of exchange as an organizer. This is what the economic liberals, if we can call them that, care about. It is both the successes and the limits of this role of exchange which represent the real issue."

2. I also got a publication by the National Research Council called "Scientists, Engineers, and Track-Two Diplomacy: A Half Century of U.S.-Russian Interagency Cooperation". It's a history of American and Soviet scientific interaction throughout the Cold War, and afterwards. One of hte most interesting looking parts of the book is the appendix - which has lots of documentation of some of the initial treaties which set these exchanges and relations in motion. One of the things they include in it is a list of requests for exchanges - the Russians would say how many Russian scientists they wanted to study certain topics in the U.S., and for how long, and the Americans would request the same. It gives you a sense of the priorities of each regime, and also where they perceived they were at a disadvantage.

New Acquisition

I just ordered Rob Shimer's Labor Markets and Business Cycles (2010), and I may be reading it next (it might turn out a semester back in the swing of graduate level economics would help me digest it better, though). I expect Shimer's work to be a jumping off point for my dissertation, particularly the material on wage rigidity. Wage rigidity does not play a big role in my view of macroeconomic fluctuations, but (1.) maybe it should - particularly for the more typical downturns which I'm likely to see more of in my lifetime than more atypical downturn that we're going through now, (2.) even if I stay unconvinced of the importance of wage rigidity, I ought to work on it because this is a quite dominant perspective in the field right now. This may take me into using the sexy LEHD data that everybody loves but I'm concerned that (because it only provides earnings and not wage rates), the plain Jane CPS might end up being more useful for me. Anyway - I have a rough brain storm of the types of ideas I might look into, and reading and familiarizing myself with this book seems like an important start.

Book acquisitions, and some funky market psychology

This was bad... I don't need to be buying books right now, but the closing Border's down the street from work was just too tempting.

I got Keynes's Essays in Persuasion. Most of it is essays on monetary topics, and most are from the 1920s. I'm especially excited to read his open letter on the franc (which, based on the first page, I think may reveal some parallel's to Jefferson's reaction to Hamilton) and a piece he wrote in response to an H.G. Wells novel (I'm not sure which one). He was apparently an H.G. Wells fan.

Second, I got Martin Luther King's Where Do We Go From Here?. This is the last book he wrote before he was killed. I referenced this book in this post on the macroeconomics of the black community. King talks about full employment policies and the guaranteed income in here, although I'm not sure how prominent a role that discussion plays in the book.

Mr. Keynes and Dr. King - not a bad haul.

*****

I have to say - anyone who was in that Border's store today has got to question traditional neoclassical economics just a little. Everything in the store was 20% off (except magazines, which were 40%), which is nice but not huge. Nevertheless, the store was packed. I counted a forty person back-up in the line, despite the fact that they had twice as many cashiers working as usual. This was also about 1:30 in the afternoon, so it was not a traditional lunch-hour busy period (although it could have caught the tail end of that). The demand elasticity for a retail bookstore in a major city is simply not that high. Something psychological is going on here that we don't talk about in traditional economics.

Reading update...

I was dragging my feet a little towards the end, but I finally finished Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I highly recommend it. It's a very functionalist, pragmatic understanding of science (unbelievably pragmatist in flavor - it was a good one to read right after reading The Metaphysical Club). I wish he contrasted his project with that of Popper earlier because I think people get the wrong idea in comparing the two. Kuhn is not interested in epistemology. When he finally picks up Popper towards the end of the book, he points out that he had only used the word "truth" once in the whole book (and that was when he was quoting Francis Bacon). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is not about establishing truth - it is about the process by which a common set of understandings, definitions, theories, etc. (a "paradigm") emerges historically to be productive in explaining observed phenomenon. It is about the emergence, endurance, and reformation of distinct ways of talking about and understanding the world.

I've started reading a somewhat more obscure book - David M. Hart's Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921-1953. I think it's fairly well known in the science and technology policy community, but it's not a landmark book like Kuhn. Very good so far - he's trying to take the whole Vannevar Bush story of the emergence of science policy in the mid-forties, and stretch it back to Hoover's time as Commerce Secretary in the twenties, and incorporate a lot of other actors and factions that are usually excluded from the traditional Vannevar Bush narrative.

Thoughts on The Metaphysical Club

I just finished The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand. I can't recommend it highly enough - a truly enjoyable book. It is an intellectual history of American Pragmatism, written as a biography of four men: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, C.S. Peirce, and John Dewey. There is a considerable amount of history in it too - Boston abolitionism, the Civil War, the coming of Darwinism to America, the Pullman Strike, and a big chunk of the history of American higher education. This made for a very engaging read - part intellectual history, part biography, and part history. I would like to write a book like this one day.

I've had a sympathy with American Pragmatism for a while. Kate had the book John Dewey: The Political Writings from a political philosophy class back at William and Mary, and I've effectively appropriated it and browsed through it for years now. I've always been attracted to Dewey. I never knew as much about the others, though. This book both firmed up and raised questions about my relationship to Pragmatism. There's a lot I like and a lot I don't like in each of these figures. I've also started to try to familiarize myself with Rorty. I take him much the same way I take Peirce (although Rorty himself preferred James). Rorty strikes me as technically being closer to right than the others, but I do see why people consider him a nihilist. He asks the question "well who is interested in truth anyway?" to which I want to respond "I'm interested in truth, even if I agree with you it's elusive!". Where Peirce gets the contingency of our insights right, but then is too optimistic about where all that leads, I think Rorty gets the contingency of our insights right, and then is too pessimistic (even if he insists he isn't). Rorty did not come up at all in the book, which was interesting - even in the epilogue where the author discussed the role of Pragmatism in the post-war period. I suppose that would have opened up a whole other can of worms.

I should say the other thing that I like about Rorty is that he brings in two others that I've always admired - Foucault and Heidegger. I've been marginally familiar with and generally impressed with Foucault since my time studying sociology at William and Mary. Heidegger has been of more recent interest, and I can credit Evan with introducing me to him (Evan also gave me this book, btw). I just recently found out Rorty explicitly connects Foucault and Dewey on rights and coercion. That was tremendous to learn, because I've made that connection myself for a while now, but I've never been especially sure about it. It's good to know that a celebrated philosopher came to the same conclusion. Rorty is also nice because he accepts a late logical-positivism (as long as it is sufficiently chastized about its own limitations). He sees value in the logical positivists who were more introspective in that sense (just as he sees value in Heidegger for doing the same with phenomenology). I have always enjoyed Bertrand Russell, so that's nice to see in Rorty (even though he's obviously abandoned analytic philosophy in important ways too). Ultimately, philosophically I'm still floating about, but I definitely see a coalescence with the Pragmatists.

There are absolutely unmistakable connections between the Pragmastists and Keynes in terms of action under uncertainty. I checked A Treatise on Probability (1921), and Keynes cites Peirce a few times. Gladys Parker Foster writes about the compatibility of Keynes and Dewey here. I've recently become very interested in Foster and her late husband - he especially wrote a lot about the American contribution to economic thought, and while I haven't gotten a great grasp of his views yet, he seems to suggest there was a lot in American thought that paved the way for a broad acceptance of Keynes. What's even more exciting is that he's identified many of the points I remark on - Jeffersonianism, the frontier, etc.

I'm not sure what I'm reading next - I'll decide by tonight. Possibly The Road to Serfdom, although I'm not sure I'm in the mood. Maybe The State and Economic Knowledge, which has been tempting me for a while. Maybe Forged Consensus which has also been tempting me for a while. Maybe Cycles of Unemployment, a short book by William Berridge from 1923 on the causes of unemployment. Maybe The Eerie Silence, about detecting extraterrestrial life - just for a lighter read. I feel somewhat adrift... not sure what it will be.

What does it mean to own Mein Kampf?

So one of the things that's been interesting is to hear reactions to Loughner's reading list, particularly the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf duo. There have been some interesting reactions ranging from "those two don't make sense together" to "of course they do - they're all socialism so he's a left-winger".

I own the Communist Manifesto, all three volumes of Capital, and several other Marx and Engels volumes, as well as one old philosophical volume by Lenin that I picked up at a library book sale. Marxist books, for some reason, are pretty easy to own and buy, and nobody would see Marx on my shelf and assume I'm a communist (those who would assume that probably already thought I was a communist when they saw Keynes on my shelf... I keep my Keynes much more accessible and within arms reach than my Marx).

But Mein Kampf is different. People don't just have Mein Kampf lying around, you know? But that introduces a very interesting question - what would or should one think if they saw Mein Kampf sitting on someone's shelf? I think it would be somewhat surprising and something of a novelty, but I don't think most people would assume you're a closet neo-Nazi. There's kind of a weird taboo about that one, although it's never completely beyond the pale. And yet when we see it on Loughner's list, the assumption is he had it because he agreed with it. Is that true at all? Who knows. It's doubtful anyone will forcefully probe the issue.

I, for one, have been interested in buying Mein Kampf before from the bookstore, but I couldn't quite bring myself to getting it. I was especially interested in picking it up after reading Adam Tooze's book on the Nazi economy, but I never managed to get it to the checkout line. There's something weird about buying that book. And yet it offers a window into the mind of one of the most destructive and important figures of the twentieth century. It should be a book that people want to objectively devour, just like non-communists will familiarize themselves with Capital. I'm not sure there's anything else to say about the matter except that "Nazis are different".

Do any readers own Mein Kampf? Has anyone read any substantial portion of it? What about the Zweites Buch? How did you acquire it? Did you just waltz into the Barnes and Noble and unflinchingly bring it to the check-out?

Three New Acquisitions

The Metaphysical Club, which I will start reading very soon.













Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs, on arguments over technological unemployment.

And Cycles of Unemployment in the United States, 1903-1922. This book was published in 1923. It was the winner of an essay prize held by the Pollak Foundation in 1921 for an essay that best treats the problem of unemployment. The Pollak Foundation was headed by the well known amateur economists, Foster and Catchings.

Evan fighting the good fight...

...for small independent book-sellers.

I think as economists we get too caught up in our own logic sometimes. Markets optimize... what exactly? Well they optimize the allocation of scarce resources by using privately held, subjective information on the relative value placed on those resources.

As a social institution, the power of the market to optimize in this way is deeply impressive and important to human progress. But the resources that are allocated are the building blocks of other cultural institutions, and so "efficient" allocation has important cultural consequences. Its eminently reasonable and rational to act on the basis of those cultural consequences, even if you embrace market efficiency as an important social good.

Before reacting negatively to these sorts of appeals against dominant market players, I think its important to keep these competing concerns in mind and remember that we are embedded in a social fabric that is considerably broader than the allocative efficiency concerns that economists normally think about (and which, even if we restrict our attention to allocative efficiency, aren't always best solved with markets).

What I'm reading...

I need to write these short articles on populism soon, so my reading has shifted gears towards that material.

- I had a great anniversary weekend in Williamsburg with Kate. As usual, I woke up relatively early and enjoyed reading about three quarters of Norman Pollack's The Populist Response to Industrial America (1962) in front of a roaring fire. This is an excellent book - its stated goal is to provide an intellectual history of Populism, drawing mainly from Populist presses in the mid-west. His primary argument is that Populism was not, as many argue, a reactionary, conservative, or regressive movement. Rather, it was radical and embraced industrial development. I'm mainly reading this book for Pollack's treatment of technological unemployment (one of the longer entries I'm writing on is on technological unemployment). The story seems to be mixed here - Populism certainly had a sense of technological unemployment, but they primarily blamed social arrangements that they suggested didn't channel "labor-saving technology" into lower work hours and higher wages.

- I'm still reading Friedman and Schwartz's Monetary History. It's very good. Jonathan cautioned that it was essentially an encyclopedia and not worth reading on its own. I've found that there's a lot of very thoughtful, very clear analysis that accompanies the mountains of data. It's certainly not a gripping read, but there is a clear narrative to it. I'm actually starting to think about how monetary trends in the immediate post-Civil War period might relate to the post-WWI and 1920-21 depression period. I'm mostly reading this for the entries as well - so I'll probably put it down when I get to the Great Depression chapters (I've read the Depression chapters before - some other time I'll finish off the rest of the book).

- I've read a series of good articles, also mostly on Populism entry topics. Luca Einaudi's From the franc to the 'Europe': the attempted transformation of Latin Monetary Union into a European Monetary Union, 1865-1873, and Marc Flandreau's The French Crime of 1873: An Essay on the Emergence of the International Gold Standard, 1870-1880 have both provided invaluable information on the International Monetary Conferences.

- I've also recently read Giuseppe Fontana's The transmission mechanism of fiscal policy: a critical assessment of current theories and empirical methodologies (Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics), for an idea that's stewing in my head on empirical tests of fiscal stimulus. I think Fontana critiques the empirical approaches well, but I would have framed it all slightly differently.

It will probably be more Populism on my reading list until the end of the year - I want to read Hofstadter's essay on Coin's Financial School, and Coin's Financial School itself if I have time. I also want to read Friedman's The Quantity Theory of Money - A Restatement. And, as with Friedman and Schwartz, probably pick up the third volume of Dorfman's The Economic Mind in American Civilization to read relevant chapters that address Populist economic thought.

For the New Year, we shall see...

New Acquisitions...

So I was at the public library's book sale room this past weekend and at Second Story Books today and have a few new acquisitions.

1. First, for fifty cents at the library I finally got a copy of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. "Seminal" is a designation that is applied too liberally to books, but this one probably qualifies. I haven't read any of Bailyn's books before, but I also own The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century.

2. At Second Story Books I found Herbert Hoover: The Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914-1923, a conference volume from the Herbert Hoover Centennial Seminars. This was the first volume from the seminars. I recently got the second volume (without knowing there was a first) in Boston. That one is called Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice 1921-1928. So now I have a quite thorough coverage of Hoover's activities in the early 1920s - which is quite hard to find. Most of what is available on Hoover addresses the Depression (the other Depression, that is). And guess who authored the chapter "Hoover's 1919 Food Diplomacy in Retrospect"? None other than Murray N. Rothbard! I've read the preface to the second volume that I had acquired previously already, and it sounds like a very thoughtful, thorough book. I'm quite excited to have both of these now. As far as I can tell these are the only two volumes.

3. Also at Second Story Books, I was excited to find a first edition of Edward Ruppelt's 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (an online version is available here). I only know a little about Ruppelt, but I'm eager to learn more. Ruppelt was a part of the government's Project Bluebook which in 1952 was tasked with studying the UFO phenomenon. Ruppelt approached the issue seriously and tried to rigorously assess what sightings could be explained and what couldn't. He fought against the common term "flying saucer" at the time and popularized the term "unidentified flying object" to reduce the sensationalism around the phenomenon and emphasize the fact that it was fundamentally unexplained. The book looks like it will provide an account of the Blue Book years and the way that they weeded through and addressed different sightings. I haven't written an alien post for a while, but I think people have a sense of my interest in this. First, of course, UFOs could really be aliens. It doesn't get much more spectacular than that prospect. Second, UFOs always provide a fascinating exercise in epistemology and method. How do we know what we know about them? What don't we know? When is evidence credible? Can we reason through what is probable or improbable? How do we reason through these phenomena when we have no basis for assessment? Finally, the dawn of the UFO age in the late 40s and early 50s represent the beginning of an important era in human, but especially American history when we started to understand ourselves in the context of a much, much wider cosmos. I find that cultural shift interesting from a historical perspective.

*****

For anyone in the D.C. area, I wanted to (1.) promote Second Story Books because it's a great store, and (2.) especially promote the DuPont Circle location in D.C., which was where I went. They have a ton of Liberty Fund books scattered all over the store that were not there when I was there last time. There is a lot of good seventeenth century English stuff, a lot of colonial writings, many Mises volumes, Mandeville, some Grotius, some Tullock, etc. I didn't end up getting any of it but there is a truck-load of it. Either Liberty Fund had a big sale or some local guy that had a bunch of Liberty Fund books sold his library to them - I'm not sure, but it was pretty cool that they had all that.

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.

My Thoughts on Garrison

So I recently finished Garrison's Time and Money and I wanted to share a few reactions. First, it was a very good book and I recommend it. As far as I can tell, he's faithful to Hayek's vision on the macroeconomics of the capital structure, but I haven't read Hayek on that so I can't say for sure. Regardless, he certainly offers a well articulated vision of his version of the macroeconomics of the capital structure.

A major portion of his project is expressing Keynesianism and Monetarism in a Hayekian framework and comparing the three. Thinking through each in this way is very good I suppose, and I shouldn't criticize the effort (only the execution) - but I think many of my concerns about the execution are directly derived from the requirements of engaging in that sort of effort in the first place. To put Keynes in Hayek's framework, Garrison does away with a lot of what makes Keynes unique. How is this a proper analysis of Keynes? Some thoughts:

- Garrison assumes away a lot of the distinctiveness of Keynes, and then proceeds to blame Keynes for the shortcoming. For example, on page 158 after talking about an increase in uncertainty, Garrison writes "For the economy to avoid falling into the interior of the PPF, the funds released from the investment-goods sector would have to be absorbed in the economy's consumer-goods sector. This reallocation of resources, however, is already implicit in the movement along the unshifted supply of loanable funds: less saving; more consumption". The reason why he's able to make this assumption, of course, is that he completely omits any discussion of the relationship between uncertainty and liquidity preference until the next chapter. He talks about depressed investment demand in one chapter, without liquidity preference, and then he talks about liquidity preference in the next chapter, without depressed investment demand. It's no wonder that in the first chapter on Keynes the economy stays at full employment! It was liquidity preference that Keynes thought would drive the economy out of full employment!

- Separating the process of investor uncertainty from liquidity preference on pages 158-159 allows Garrison to scoff at the Keynesian notion that the interest rate will remain unchanged (i.e. - too high) in response to a declining demand for loanable funds. He critiques this and the depiction of the labor share of income - the "assumed structural fixity" of the two, as he calls it - without realizing (or at least without acknowledging) that it is precisely Hayek's assumed structural fixity (i.e. - no shift in the supply of loanable funds) that Garrison uses to pin Keynes to the PPF and completely nullify all of Keynes's insights. The only critique Garrison has of the stable labor share of income is directly related to this. His critique is that the labor share of income would not be stable because the interest rate changes. But the only reason why the interest rate changes in this chapter is because Garrison completely omits discussion of liquidity preference until the next one! Garrison is right that a baseline level of liquidity preference is a structural concern that can legitimately be treated separately. He's wrong to ignore the fact that additional liquidity preference goes hand in hand with the investor uncertainty that caused the leftward shift in the demand for loanable funds.

- In his chapter going over liquidity preference (the second chapter on Keynes), Garrison explains Keynesian policy recommendations in a way that sets him up, several chapters down the road, to declare that Milton "we're all Keynesians now" Friedman is closer to the Austrians than to Keynes. In Figure 9.2, I think Garrison captures Keynesian liquidity preference well. The fact that he expresses it in a loanable funds market is irksome (Keynes was strenuous about the fact that the interest rate was determined in the market for money and not the loanable funds market), but it works OK. Output is below the PPF for precisely the reasons Keynes highlighted. But for some reason, a couple pages later in figure 9.3 where he's explaining Keynesian policy, the policy shift isn't from below the PPF to the PPF and classical full employment (as Keynes said) - it's from the PPF beyond the PPF to an unsustainable production level. Where did that come from? I have no idea. Keynes, the man who wanted to use policy to re-create classical conditions (the reason why I think he bears a reasonably close resemblance to the German ordoliberals) becomes Keynes, the man who doesn't recognize the existence of a PPF and wants to spend, spend, spend.

- Which brings me to another concern... Garrison's PPF is not the usual PPF. It is not an impassable technological frontier, it is a "sustainable output" frontier. That can get tricky at times - watch out for it.

- Finally, when Garrison discusses Friedman's plucking model he insists that it is inconsistent with Keynes (who he thinks oscillates above and below the PPF, as I mentioned earlier), but that it is consistent with Austrianism. It's actually a very interesting section where Garrison makes the case that malinvestment does not imply overinvestment, and turns the traditional Austrian boom-bust cycle into a bust-boom cycle that is consistent with Friedman's plucking model. It was intriguing - I'll let other Austrians decide how convincing the argument is. Nevertheless - the idea that Keynes is not consistent with the plucking model follows from Garrison's distortions of Keynes that I mentioned above. I think it also (though less necessarily) follows from the assumption that the baseline from which the economy is "plucked" is a full employment baseline. I'm not sure why you would assume from the outset that that is the case. Garrison says "well, Keynes thinks we're always below full employment so we obviously can't be plucked from full employment". I would simply respond "I would have thought that the baseline level of liquidity preference is fairly steady, so what we're being 'plucked' from is a stable-growth, sub-optimal path that is below full employment". He doesn't even consider the prospect (i.e. - he assumes his own conclusions by assuming that what we're being plucked from is a full employment growth path). This was the only truly surprising part of the book. When he introduced the plucking model, I was sure he would say "Keynes is consistent with Friedman here, and they both ignore the Austrian insights which is why Austrianism contradicts this". Nope. He ended up saying "Keynes is inconsistent with Friedman on the plucking model, but Austrians are consistent because our boom-bust model is actually a bust-boom model". That approach genuinely surprised me.

Much of the rest was very good - my biggest concern was the two chapters on Keynes (and even those were quite good overall). I provided other thoughts on Garrison in this post.

I know it's probably hard to get much out of this as a simple blog post, but it's a way for me to get my thoughts written down, and perhaps people can refer back to this if they read Time and Money. Next on my list, I think, is the first of Joseph Dorfman's three volume series on "The Economic Mind in American Civilization". This one covers the period from 1606 to the founding. Joseph Dorfman was Murray Rothbard's advisor. If someone has a better suggestion before I come home from work and start reading that, let me know :)

Book reviews...

I've actually found time to read recently, for the first time in a long time - so I am swiftly nearing the end of my book on the 1848 revolutions. Next is Roger Garrison's Time and Money - I suppose you might call it a non-technical formalization of Hayek's Prices and Production. That should go fairly quick too, because I have a long flight to Paris in a week and a half. I've been paying attention to some book reviews to see what I want to read next.

Colossus, by Michael Hiltzik, looks like a very interesting study of the Hoover Dam.

Ed Glaeser provides a really great review of Joel Mokyr's new book on the Industrial Revolution in England, called The Enlightened Economy. Mokyr cites the Enlightenment as the primary source of the Industrial revolution, although Glaeser is skeptical of leaning too hard on that conclusion.

Recently I've been doing a little more independent research on the work that my great grandfather did presiding over the Maryland Constitutional Convention in 1967 (this is sort of an ongoing, open-ended research project of mine). The new state constitution failed in 1968, in no small part because of the disruption caused by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the subsequent riots in Baltimore, which were vigorously quelled by then governor Spiro Agnew (his response to the riots would put him on the presidential ticket with Nixon). The nebulous plans in my head are to one day write something about the failed constitution (perhaps for the 50th anniversary in eight years?), and I'm realizing that King's death is going to be essential for framing it. To that end, this review of a book on James Earl Ray, King's killer, looked interesting. Hellhound on His Trail, by Hampton Sides, traces a wandering Ray across the United States after he escapes from prison in 1967. He makes a few stops to (believe it or not) actually campaign for George Wallace as he tracks King across the country.

Here, Peter Osnos shares the news that the famous Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington is being sold. Its owners are getting very old and need to pass the torch. I haven't been yet, but I really need to stop by - it's supposed to be great.

I have a few other books I'm likely to read after Garrison. I've read a lot of economics this spring, so I think I'm going to turn back to history. Carl Becker's 1909 classic, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York: 1760-1776 is at the top of the list. Becker provides an important appraisal of the clash of economic and social interests that eventually culminated in the decision to push for independence in New York. Becker's work set off a considerable amount of subsequent interpretation and debate by Charles Beard, Forrest McDonald, Bernard Bailyn, and more recently guys like Woody Holton. I've had a deep interest in the revolutionary period and the early republic for a long time, and I feel like I have to read this literature at some point - Becker seems like the best place to start.

Also on the short list are Friedman and Schwartz's Monetary History of the United States, although that is so long I probably won't take that up next. I've been meaning to read Rhy Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia: 1740-1790. Perhaps the first volume of Joseph Dorfman's The Economic Mind in American Civilization. Also looking at Jacob Cooke's Tench Coxe and the Early Republic.

What We're Reading

I've seen a few bloggers update their readers on what they've been reading. Seems like a good exercise, particularly if we're reading relatively obscure stuff.

Daniel

I just finished reading Bertrand Russell's Freedom vs. Organization, which is basically a history of Europe from 1815-1914. What I liked about it was that it combined intellectual history and more traditional history. The chapters were very thematic. Malthus, Ricardo, Owen, James Mill (not John Stuart, oddly), and Marx were covered in depth, with others making appearances. It was largely about the breakdown of the conservative order, the liberal and/or nationalist orders that emerged from that, and the impending breakdown of that world order with WWI.

I just started Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution, which should be self-explanatory. If it isn't clear, I'm trying to read up on my 19th century history. I read a lot from the late 18th and early 19th century, and I've recently read more about the 1920s and the depression, and I'm trying to fill in the gap. This is very good so far, although I'm not very far into it. Getting a great portrait of Metternich painted for me right now.

After this I'll read either J.R. Hicks's Value and Capital, which I've been meaning to read for a while, or the first volume of Joseph Dorfman's The Economic Mind in American Civilization (Dorfman, as I understand it, was Murray Rothbard's dissertation advisor). I wasn't aware of that when I got this three-volume set.

In terms of articles and other stuff, I've been reading some Orwell, Achebe, and Wittgenstein for a fleeting idea I had about language. May or may not return to it. I've also been reading up on aggregate labor supply issues (Hall, Prescott) for a new paper I'm working on about job creation tax credits.

Evan

During the past few weeks my reading has revolved around a course I'm taking in the history department at UChicago on structures of knowledge in modern Europe. Most of this has been selections rather than full books. I did work through all of Foucault's History of Sexuality v.1, however, and a sizable portion of Discipline and Punish, both written during his genealogical period (1976 and 1977, respectively). I'm sorry to say that this was my first real interaction with Foucault, but I was utterly impressed and do hope to get into some more of his work before too long. My interests have recently shifted much more to the sort of historicization of knowledge with which Foucault's projects are identified, and his work has been a real contribution to my current thinking on this process (I've discussed some of these issues at my other blog... this was written before I had any interaction with Foucault). I've also just finished part of Andrew Abbott's The System of Professions. Abbott is a Chicago sociologist and another writer worth your time; he's done a lot with questions of method and exploring academia from a sociological perspective. This book is his 1988 study that presents a theory of professional knowledge. His main concern is to counter previous professionalization theories that inadequately account for variation amongst the professions, and to present an account based on competition for jurisdictions of professional knowledge. Alongside Abbott, we read two essays by Pierre Bourdieu, again my first interaction. In both "Intellectual Field and Creative Project" and "The Field of Cultural Production", Bourdieu examines the structures of recognition and reception for cultural and artistic work. From all of these readings, I'm gaining an appreciation of the genuinely useful work of social theory, but also a frustration at the depth of the literature that needs to be engaged for any serious benefit of it. From the vantage point of my studies in theology, the task is daunting considering I have my own disciplinary literature to work with.

I also just recently finished Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, one of my few non-research related readings of late. My wife was shocked that I was actually reading a book with so many prizes and so much critical acclaim attached to it, and it's true that this isn't my normal material... usually I'm blissfully ignorant of what's on the wider cultural radar and sort of make my own way with the problems that I'm working on at the moment. Paths crossed in this case, however, as I'm trying to read more on pragmatism; this is the philosophical background of my doctoral adviser at Chicago and I've recently formed a strong interest in it through his influence. The book was a delight to read, covering important intellectual figures between the Civil War and World War I who were central to what's now called "pragmatism". One thing that struck me as I went along, however, was that Menand spoke much less explicitly about pragmatism than I would have expected. There were as many pages devoted to Darwinism or probability as there were to any straightforward account of pragmatism. I appreciated this approach, as it resisted any temptation to lump figures into a monochromatic school of thought. This was an account of biographies and intellectual trends forming a broad web of development during a pivotal time in American history, and the telling of it all was as seamless as it was diverse.

Daniel's Top Ten Books

Several prominent bloggers have been publishing a list of the top ten books that influenced them most. Recently, Greg Ransom at "Taking Hayek Seriously" has produced a similar interesting list of F.A. Hayek's biggest influences (many of which are available for free online). I thought this whole exercise was kind of dumb when people started doing it, but ever since whenever I've thought of a book I've liked I've had a nagging desire to publish a list, so I put most of this together this weekend. I'm still pretty young, and I hope my ideas are still being formed - so I hope this list changes over time. But for now, here it is, in no paritcular order:

1. The End of Laissez Faire, by John Maynard Keynes: I like to tell people that The End of Laissez Faire is a geneaology of Liberalism. Over the years I've been familiarized with tidbits of a lot of political philosophy, but this book pulled them all together for me and showed me the big picture: how the various strains of liberalism are connected, and how many intellectual movements in the late 19th century bastardized liberalism (primarily Marxism and laissez faire fundamentalism).

2. Micromotives and Macrobehavior, by Thomas Schelling: This showed up on a couple bloggers' lists, and I agree. I didn't really get the importance of macroeconomics before this book (which is pretty impressive, since it's not even about macroeconomics proper). Schelling opened my eyes to the pervasiveness of the "fallacy of composition"/"ecological fallacy" in economics. You simply cannot generalize from individual to group behavior.

3. Durable Inequality, by Charles Tilly: Strongly influenced the way I think about inequality and discrimination. I'm eternally grateful to Deirdre Royster (formerly of William & Mary) for introducing me to this book.

4. The Elusive Republic, by Drew McCoy: Shaped my understanding of the founding fathers. Convinced me that (1.) they viewed the world in a completely different way than we do today, (2.) they were not of one mind - there is no position of "the founders" on anything, and often individual founders changed their positions over time, and (3.) the Hamilton-Jefferson dichotomy we always think of today is caricatured almost to the point of uselessness.

5. Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, by Garry Wills: Shaped my understanding of Jefferson and human liberty. It goes line by line through the Declaration of Independence, and discusses the intellectual origins and background of each position taken in the document. It ends up being a history of the revolutionary period, an account of Jefferson's own thought, and an intellectual history of the Scottish Enlightenment all in one volume.

6. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes: Doesn't get everything right, but provides the basic framework for how I think about the economy. Keynes made many technical innovations on the classical model, but he also emphasizes the importance of caution and empiricism, as well as common sense in economic policymaking. Easily the greatest economist since Adam Smith. Possibly greater than Adam Smith (if for no other reason than Keynes innovates where Smith synthesizes... although Keynes synthesizes some too).

7. The Origins of Virtue, by Matt Ridley: I learned Dawkins through Ridley. This has powerfully shaped my understanding of evolution and the human condition, particularly as it applies to human social organization. I know evolutionary psychology isn't accepted in all quarters, and I don't take Ridley's arguments hook, line, and sinker. But I do think they are generally good arguments.

8. Marxism: For and Against, by Robert Heilbroner: A big influence on how I think about intellectual movements that I disagree with. Heilbroner demonstrates the right way to dispute a position without villifying the proponent of that position, and how to acknowledge good arguments while maintaining a more foundational disagreement. On top of all that, it simply helped me to understand Marxism better.

9. A Leap in the Dark, by John Ferling, and Washington's Secret War and The Perils of Peace, both by Thomas Fleming: These are all histories of the revolutionary period and aren't notable in and of themselves, but Ferling and Fleming both write about history in a way that has strongly influenced the way I think about history: specifically, they take seriously the fact that historical actors don't know what is going to happen in the future, and that this has an enormous impact on their decision making. It seems simple, but when it gets pointed out to you in specific instances, you realize how often we analyze things with 20/20 hindsight. More historians need to think like this. Ferling highlights this phenomenon more explicitly than Fleming (you can practically derive that thesis from his title - A Leap in the Dark).

10. Underwriting Democracy, by George Soros: Soros, for all the combustibility of his political and financial activities, taught me a lot about how humans think and how that shapes society - specifically, what he calls "reflexivity". It's not a concept original to him, but I think he explains it especially well (I believe Robert Merton has written a lot on it, and Soros specifically cites Kurt Godel and Karl Popper as his influences - he studied under Popper at the London School of Economics). The idea is essentially that markets and society in general tend towards disequilibrium and reorganization because prediction and action can lead to changes in market or social fundamentals that alter what is being predicted or acted upon. You can think of it as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applied to society. Others have remarked on it, I learned it first and best from Soros. Soros himself wrote about reflexivity more exlcusively in his 1987 classic, The Alchemy of Finance, which I haven't read. But he does devote a good third of Underwriting Democracy to the theory. Much of the rest of the book is about how he's supported civil society in Eastern Europe.