Tyler CowenRecommended Books

“A look at how to translate ideas from Singapore’s health care system into the United States. It overreaches, but still a useful overview and analysis.”

“Captures the complexities, and in fact pulls the reader away from the usual tired dichotomy.”

“Probably the best history of the company we're are going to get, at least for the earlier years of the company. Even the jabs at the company seem perfunctory, for the most part this is quite objective as a treatment.”

“John Took’s Dante is the book to read on Dante after you’ve read all the other books (an interesting designation, by the way, I wonder how many areas have such books In most cases, if you’ve read all the other books you shouldn’t bother with the next one!).”

“Why is a book the most important organising medium for talking about or reading about the internet Weinberger is a guy who gets this – that the internet is a way of ordering or not ordering reality, that you stack things in a pile, that it appears to be very chaotic, that this is a fundamental change in information processing and it’s not in every way booklike or driven by narrative. I think Weinberger is an important and underrated thinker – this is a book that is easy to comprehend and is also fun. I don’t think it’s made the big splash of Clay Shirky or Sherry Turkle or some other people, but if you want my list of five then it’s got to be on it.”

“This is both a very old thesis, but these days quite new, namely the claim that 1965 and the Civil Rights movement created a “new constitution” for America, at variance with the old, and the two constitutions have been at war with each other ever since. It will be one of the influential books “on the Right” this year.”

“A YIMBY book, with good historical material on San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other locales involved in the struggle to build more.”

“I have only browsed this book, yet it appears to have much more information about the Vikings than other books I know, yet without getting squirrelly. That said, I find it difficult to connect books on the Vikings with the broader conceptual narratives I know, and thus I do not retain their content very well. So I am never sure if I should read another book on the Vikings.”

“The new James C. Scott book, Against the Grain, is wonderful”

“That is the new book by Dietrich Vollrath, strongly recommended, it is a primer on the current state of knowledge about economic growth. Tightly argued, and a remarkable amount is covered in 216 pp. of regular text. More books should be like this, it actually tries to teach the reader something! And succeeds. Definitely recommended.”