Bookmarks (280) clear filters

1. Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live.  A pathbreaking book that unearths and presents part of the “hidden” history of economics, in this case as practiced largely by women, and often black women at that.  Think of it as […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

Bureaucratic politics is a politics of privilege.  By 1956, the wages of the highest-ranking party and government personnel were set at 36.4 times those of the lowest rank.  (By way of comparison, the highest wage in the “corrupt” Nationalist government in1946 was 14.5 times that of the lowest wage.) That is from the new and […] The post China fact of the day appeared...

Dana is what I call one of the world’s information billionaires.  For more specifics, here is part of his Wikipedia page: Michael Dana Gioia (/ˈdʒɔɪ.ə/; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet and writer. He spent the first fifteen years of his career writing at night while working for General Foods Corporation. After his […] The post What should I ask Dana Gioia?...

To see how much the sanitary and medical revolutions have changed the risks of global interaction, examine what kills Americans abroad these days: cardiovascular events including heart attacks account for 49 percent of all deaths, injuries for a further 25 percent, and infectious diseases other than pneumonia for just 1 percent…even travel to pathogen-rich environments […] The post That was then, this is now,...

1. Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820.  One of the best books on the history of Enlightenment science, in addition to the core material it focuses on how the leading researchers went about creating public audiences for their investigations and for the scientific questions that interested them.  Indirectly, it […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

That is the new book by Tim Harford, due out February 2. Here is the Amazon bit: From “one of the great (greatest?) contemporary popular writers on economics” (Tyler Cowen) comes a smart, lively, and encouraging rethinking of how to use statistics. The post *The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her.  Here is part of her Wikipedia entry: Sarah Helen Parcak is an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and remote sensing expert, who has used satellite imaging to identify potential archaeological sites in Egypt, Rome, and elsewhere in the former Roman Empire. She is a professor of Anthropology and […] The post What should I ask Sarah Parcak?...

1. David M. Friedman, The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrell, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever.  This book doesn’t seem so well known, but it should be essential reading for those obsessed with life extension.  It helps explain why the idea has not been historically popular for some time, and why it might […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

Maybe it is different for you, but when I search Amazon for “D.M. Knight, Science and Spirituality”, I get this mess — no listing of the book! If I pop the same into Google, the Amazon listing for the book comes up third. So more and more I am using Google to search on Amazon […] The post Amazon search is failing us appeared...

Most of it was about China, but here was my favorite part: The key to reading Proust is not to pay too much attention to the plot. It’s of no great import, and one has to get used to abrupt shifts. In this way the novel is like Moby-Dick, which can shift from the politics […] The post Dan Wang’s 2020 letter appeared first...

Here is the summary: On this special year-in-review episode, producer Jeff Holmes sat down with Tyler to talk about the most popular — and most underrated — episodes, Tyler’s personal highlight of the year, how well state capacity libertarianism has fared, a new food rule for ordering well during the pandemic, how his production function […] The post Jeff Holmes does a CWT with...

Here is a selection of the most popular MR posts of 2020. COVID was a big of course. Let’s start with Tyler’s post warning that herd immunity was fragile because it holds only “for the current configuration of social relations”. Absolutely correct. The fragility of herd immunity Tyler also predicted the pandemic yo-yo and Tyler’s […] The post Most Popular MR Posts of the...

1. Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, and Kevin Coldiron, The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis.  If you are looking for the most current version of Austrian Business Cycle theory, this is it.  Doesn’t mean it is right. 2. Abigail Tucker, Mom […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

Politico: When workplaces went remote and suddenly Zoom allowed co-workers new glimpses into one another’s homes, what New York Times writer Amanda Hess dubbed the “credibility bookcase” became the hot-ticket item. …Books by the Foot, a service run by the Maryland-based bookseller Wonder Book, has become a go-to curator of Washington bookshelves, offering precisely what […] The post Markets in Everything–Zoom Books appeared first...

Ayub Khan ended the political turmoil to become the country’s first military ruler in 1958. He revived the economy, carried out agrarian reforms, provided stimulus to the industry and encouraged foreign investment.  State-backed capitalism and alliance with the US powered a ‘golden age’ of high growth rates under Ayub Khan’s reign. The growth was significant […] The post That was then, this is now...

By Mark Lawrence Schrad. From the Amazon summary: This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you’ve never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. I have been reading the galleys, I will blurb it, it […] The post *Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global...

I will be doing a Conversation with her, here is part of her Wikipedia page: Patricia Fara is a historian of science at the University of Cambridge. She is a graduate of the University of Oxford and did her PhD at the University of London… Her areas of particular academic interest include the role of portraiture and art in the […] The post What should I ask Patricia Fara?...

Many professors at universities routinely quizzed their students too, although not as commonly as faculty at smaller colleges did.  [In 1910]…a questionnaire of University of Chicago faculty revealed that 25 of 122 replying professors gave some kind of quiz each day; 31 gave them each week, and 10 others did so every other week.  The […] The post That was then, this is now...