On Fridays I tuck some worthwhile weekend reading in your book bag. It’s an optional assignment that will make you a better person. First, see if you can guess the city in our fourth photo challenge. Nobody said these would be easy and I’m thinking this one won’t be, so here are three photos of this country’s capital city. Answer at the bottom.
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First, I read websites like LRB here, so you don’t have to read things like this review of a book titled Hayek: A Life:
You know that thing they say, if somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money? That makes me think of Friedrich Hayek. They can win Nobel prizes for proving spooky action at distance, but where is a scientist who can successfully defend an equation in which entanglement with market fundamentalists like Hayek = greed?
Hayek has an entire cadre, even generations of sturdy apologists. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reckons that, “in Hayek himself, one infers that the driving motivation is not greed or even well-being so much as a propensity to truck and barter, where this deal-making is not only a means to an end but somehow also something we do for its own sake, because making deals is what our kind of social animal was born to do.”
Social animals such as we are born to truck, barter and work for CEOs who make four hundred times of our pay. Self evident. That’s just Darwinian stuff. Or Lamarckian nowadays, now that time has speeded up and all.
Here is the aggregated CEO to worker compensation ratio for the 350 largest publicly owned companies in the United States from 1965 to 2021:
It is just plausible that Mr. Hayek gathered supporters early in his career, declaiming from a poor Montenegrin immigrant child’s shoe shine stand three doors down from Café Landtmann in Vienna. I rather like the image.
In fact, stop me now: I didn’t come here to winge about Hayek and his heirs, but just look again at the most incriminating corner of that chart. That was the Clinton years, see Matt Stoller, below.
But enough. Those “Very Short Introductions books are good. An 840 page Hayek bio? Eh. Still I admire the authors Messrs Caldwell and Klausinger for their discipline, and Mr. Rée, who wrote the review, if he read the book.
Friedrich Hayek is a towering figure in his field though, and one wants to be well enough read to be conversant in basic economics, so here - before our breezy weekend reading - is a stack of books that could leave you smart enough to intimidate your dinner partner. Stuff you should read:
There’s a ton of biographies of John Maynard Keynes to choose from, but I read and enjoyed The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter. • An accessible pair books by Nicholas Wapshott titled Keynes Hakek and Samuelson Friedman introduce you to four important economists. • A handy reference is titled 50 Economic Classics, complied by Tom Butler-Bowdon, short texts from Adam Smith to Paul Krugman. • John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The Affluent Society at the dawn of the Kennedy era. • The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, “makes a rather important point, that the economy has always been embedded in society, and when we try to disembed it from society and treat it like an independent institution, then we’re really going to run into trouble,” as Dani Rodrik writes. • Globalists, the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism is a 2018 work by Quinn Slobodian which leans toward the academic and pairs well with the more recent The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle. • Finally, Slouching Toward Utopia, by J. Bradford DeLong is a new big picture overview of the twentieth century. • Just arriving this week is Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Maybe or maybe not a word on that tomorrow.
I’m not claiming to have read all of them all, but I have them and like, say, working on a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, they’re good for dipping in and out of for short visits. (Especially the Polanyi book, which I think no one has even claimed to have enjoyed reading.)
Somehow this brings to mind The Transformation of the World, a Global History of the Nineteenth Century by Jürgen Osterhammel, which, now I mention it, is right here on a shelf beside me in a place of honor from which it seldom moves, all 1,167 pages of it. It was said Angela Merkel tucked it in her beach bag one year or other for summer reading. For my part, it’s been here on my ‘I really do mean to read these’ shelf for quite a while now, and I may even quote a sentence or two from it one day. Maybe. But don’t wait up.
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Let’s continue with what we came for, some weekend reading:
In the spirit of what has turned to an economics theme, two articles to start: First, from BIG by Matt Stoller, Bill Clinton Has Left the Building. Stoller says “It feels a bit like we are entering a time machine back to the pre-1980 model of politics, when it was a normal to disdain monopolies.”
And next The Third Magic by Noah Smith from the Noahpinion. Brad DeLong, one of the economics authors above, raved about this article.
Now for the normal people stuff, some fine weekend reading:
If you have more time than just to click through, have a thoughtful look at Drawn to War, A Ukraine Journal by George Butler, published by the Pulitzer Center.
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Try Getting a Passport in Pakistan
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What Happened Down There? On Bolsonaro’s Long Shadow. It says anti-democratic forces have long been at play in Brazil
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Scientists are abandoning conventional thinking to search for extraterrestrial creatures that bear little resemblance to Earthlings. The Search for Extraterrestrial Life as We Don’t Know It
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Stories about animal agency will always have a home on CS&W. Here we learn that a lungful of air is like a multifunction toolkit for humpback whales. For Humpbacks, Bubbles Can Be Tools.
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He’s trusted to repair some of the world’s most fabled — and expensive — instruments. How does John Becker do it? The Violin Doctor.
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The Nobel Peace Prize winner who launched a genocidal war in his own country. The Religious Zealot Presiding Over Ethiopia’s Five Conflicts.
So there are nine articles for weekend reading and a whole shelf of books. Enjoy fine weekend reading suggestions every Friday here.
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The answer to today’s photo quiz: it’s Riga, capital of the Baltic nation of Latvia. The obviously Stalinesque building at the top of the page is exactly that, one of those “Stalin’s gift to _____” buildings, now serving as the Latvian Academy of Sciences. Next time you’re in town, visit the embassy district for its Art Nouveau architecture, comme ça:
There are a few more photos in the Latvia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
See you tomorrow for a look back at the week to figure out what just happened.