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Nixonland: One, Two, or Many Americas?
Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland is a terrific book. It’s a fascinating history of American society and politics from 1965 to 1972, woven together in a compelling and exceptionally well-written narrative. I...
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Outliers, Opportunity, and Luck
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell relates a series of stories — about Canadian hockey players, Bill Gates, the Beatles, Jewish lawyers, Chinese schoolchildren, and others — which reveal that It is not the...
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“The tyranny of dead ideas”
Matt Miller’s new book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, is very good. I agree with a great deal of what he has to say. On what Miller thinks is our most important problem, though, the book falls a little...
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Flourishing in a sea of information
Life is getting much better in an important respect. That’s the message of Tyler Cowen’s book Create Your Own Economy. The gain is in personal enjoyment. The driver is new information and communication...
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The conscience of a modern conservative
“In my opinion, we are past the point where tax cuts can fix what ails us. Large tax increases will be necessary to pay for all the promises that have been made. Instead of opposing them entirely,...
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Why does England lose?
Soccernomics (U.K. title: Why England Lose) is an attempt by Simon Kuper, a sports journalist, and Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist, to understand the world’s most popular sport based on data...
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Inequality as a social cancer
Income inequality makes a lot of things we care about worse, according to a new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Looking...
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The science of basketball
Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball is part extended sports column, part scholarly tome. The mixture works well. Simmons has taken advantage of the massive increase in available historical information...
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The great decoupling
Tyler Cowen’s e-book The Great Stagnation offers a novel explanation of the slowdown in U.S. median income growth since the 1970s. Here’s his causal model: Innovation —> economic growth —> median...
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We’re all dependent on government, and it has long been thus
Nicholas Eberstadt’s “A Nation of Takers” argues that too many Americans have become dependent on government benefits. Over the past half-century, he notes, the share who receive a government cash...
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