Of Golf, Capitalism and Socialism

Of Golf, Capitalism and Socialism

By Armen A. Alchian

A puzzle has been solved. Despite their intense interest in sports, no golf courses exist in the Socialist-Communist bloc. Why is golf solely in capitalist societies? Because it is not merely a sport. It is an activity, a lifestyle, a behavior, a manifestation of the essential human spirit. Golf's ethic, principles, rules and procedures of play are totally capitalistic. They are antithetical to socialism. Golf requires self-reliance, independence, responsibility, integrity and trust. No extenuation is granted misfortune, mistake or incompetence. No second change. Like life, it is often unfair and unjust, with uninsurable risks. More than any other sport, golf exploits the whole capitalist spirit.

And along these lines

59 Is the New 30

Mankiw's frosh reading list

For those blog readers who might be interested in what the seminar will be reading, here is the list of books:

• The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner
• Spin-Free Economics, by Nariman Behravesh
• Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman
• Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, by Arthur Okun
• Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
• The Return of Depression Economics, by Paul Krugman
• Animal Spirits, by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller
• The Myth of the Rational Voter, by Bryan Caplan
• Economic Gangsters, by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel
• The Price of Everything, by Russell Roberts

Truly Productive People

Truly Productive People

Government's Track Record in the Insurance Business

Government's Track Record in the Insurance Business

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From Boyes over on Liberty

Boyes uses a recent Paul Krugman op ed to take a look at the current discourse about the proper role of the government. This is an instructive and very important debate as it illuminates the basic tradeoff between liberty and security.

A free market is, by nature, dynamic. This constant change leads to what has been referred to here and in the past as Creative Destruction. I often point to failure as one of the most positive elements of a free market. The freedom to fail, a fundamental element of liberty, has any number of positive consequences. As the trial and error process of progress unfolds, information is the essential grease that lubricates the process and key information is to know what does not work, what is inefficient, what causes wealth destruction - and the flow of information is so much faster under a spontaneous order that is characterized by individual actors operating on their own set of preferences and knowledge.

That said, the issue of the role of government is at the heart of a free society - liberty carries with it responsibility and institutions both formal and informal are very important to facilitating exchange, these rules of the road reduce transactions costs and potential violence. My thinking is leading me to believe that informal rules are much more significant than are formal rules and, if the formal rules are in conflict with prevailing informal institutions, there will be negative impacts upon decision making and economic welfare.

What does this all mean today? I have a sense that the "many" in our society today have made a trade off for security at the expense of liberty. That is, in return for government support, many individual decision makers are willing to accept lower future growth and greater future obligation.

I am reminded of the following:

Larry Reed at the FEE asserts:

1. Government can provide you with absolutely nothing except that which it has first taken from somebody else.

2. A government big enough to give you want you want, is big enough to take everything you have.

3. A free people are not economically equal, and an economically equal people are not free.

Bill makes this first point very clearly - the political decision to increase deficits through spending is taking current income and current and future wealth from one group of society and transferring it to another. This is the opposite of voluntary exchange. Exchange that is mutually voluntary is a positive sum process leading to wealth creation - the government mandated exchange we see in deficit spending, deficit financing and monetary actions to further debase the currency are negative sum.

But the impact extends far beyond the arena of current and future standard of living - what is happening is a conscious trade off to engage in negative sum arrangements in order to achieve a sense of security - which is ultimately doomed.

This leads to Reed's second point - this is no longer a slippery slope, it is a point that we all need to consider - a government that is big enough to take citizen property through taxation and transfer to factions that are supportive of the executive (various industries, NGOs, labor organizations and community organizations) has power.

Our founding fathers were aware of the, excuse this, power of power, and were concerned enough to consciously make every effort to limit the accumulation and expansion of power at the federal level. Both this consciousness and actual limit have eroded over time - if we think of the ultimate expression of power, it would be to reunite the economic sphere with the political sphere - allowing one group or one person (a dictator/totalitarian) to make decisions dictating outcomes in both areas. In fact the areas are no longer distinguishable and perhaps this leads to a deterioration of society from the open access state back to the natural state or the primitive state (North et al). Or to use Adam Smith's view - a movement from the commercial society back to agricultural or pastoral or hunting.

What also colors the trade off between security and liberty that seems to be at the heart of this discussion is the notion of equity - Reed's final point.

The expansion in scope and breadth of government is motivated, in part, by this very misguided and misplaced sense of equity.

For some reason, over time we have misplaced the sense of equality from:

1. Equality under the law - that is, we are all treated the same in our encounters with the institutions (*formal and informal) of the law (Hayek's view of law). So, if Boyes and I are both accused of theft (a manifest violation of property rights) we are brought before the court and treated the same way.

This has been replaced by

2. Equality of outcomes - Boyes and I have the right (we should post about the inflation of rights and that impact on liberty) to the same, exact salary.

Boyes asks us to consider the ultimate negative sum nature of expansive government.

MPS New York 2009

The End of Globalizing Capitalism?

Classical Liberal Responses to the Global Financial Crisis


The Mont Pelerin Society: A Mandate Renewed

Moral Rules Are To Check Power

Moral Rules Are To Check Power

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How to rebuild a shamed subject

The reconstruction of economics needs to start with the universities. First, degrees in the subject should be broadly based. They should take as their motto Keynes’s dictum that “economics is a moral and not a natural science”. They should contain not just the standard courses in elementary microeconomics and macroeconomics but economic and political history, the history of economic thought, moral and political philosophy, and sociology. Though some specialisation would be allowed in the final year, the mathematical component in the weighting of the degree should be sharply reduced. This is a return to the tradition of the Oxford Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) degree and Cambridge Moral Sciences.

Teaching and Learning Economics with Technology

Teaching and Learning Economics with Technology

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel: Review of George Selgin's Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 (University of Michigan Press, 2008)

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel: Review of George Selgin's Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 (University of Michigan Press, 2008)

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The Cause of the Scottish Enlightenment

The Cause of the Scottish Enlightenment

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The Minimal State

I just returned from a Liberty Fund Seminar where we examined self ownership or property rights in our selves. I was quite surprised to find that even people there are reluctant to question the role of government in providing defense, so-called public goods and externalities, and others. The problem is that once you admit there is a role for a state, you have a difficult if not impossible task in limiting the state. Read The Cult of the Presidency by Gene Healey and you will realize how the state feverishly works to grow, particularly in times of war and crises. In reading Hume or Mill, Locke or James Buchanan, I think you must continually question whether they have in mind some aspect of life they desire others to follow and thus fall into the fatal conceipt of assuming what they want must be good for society.

Thanks to Austrian Economists

The aid agency nobody knew existed is even worse than nobody realized

Aid Watch
Just Asking that Aid Benefit the Poor

The aid agency nobody knew existed is even worse than nobody realized

by William Easterly

I recently saw a June 2009 World Bank (Independent Evaluation Group) evaluation of the Global Forum for Health Research, an 11-year-old international organization that had received $56 million (through 2007) in official aid funding, about half from the World Bank. The Global Forum’s mission is “demonstrating the essential role of research and innovation for health and health equity, benefiting poor and marginalized populations.”

Gates and the 1st amendment

There is a serious problem in this country: Police are overly sensitive to insults from those they confront. And one can hardly blame the confronted citizen, especially if the citizen is doing nothing wrong when confronted by official power. This is, after all, a free country, and if "free" means anything meaningful, it means being left alone--especially in one's own home--when one is not breaking the law.

Sgt. Crowley had every right to check on what was reported as a possible break and entry. But as soon as he realized that the occupant was entitled to be in the house, he should have left. He admits in his own police report that he was indeed able to ascertain Professor Gates' residency and hence right to be in the house.

As for Professor Gates' inquiries into the officer's identity and badge number (as Gates describes the confrontation) or his tirade against the officer (as Crowley reports), the citizen was merely--even if neither kindly nor wisely--exercising his constitutional right when faced with official power. Even if Professor Gates were wearing a "Fuck You, Cambridge Police" jacket, the officer would have been obligated to leave the house without its occupant in handcuffs.

The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier

Subject: ASET Book Club Event - August 2009

Thursday, August 27

The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier
5:45 p.m. - 7:15 p.m.

RSVP by Friday, August
The authors emphasize that ownership of resources evolves as those resources become more valuable or as establishing property rights becomes less costly. Rules evolving at the local level will be more effective because local people have a greater stake in the outcome. This theory is brought to life in the colorful history of Indians, fur trappers, buffalo hunters, cattle drovers, homesteaders, and miners. The book concludes with a chapter that takes lessons from the American frontier and applies them to our modern "frontiers"-the environment, developing countries, and space exploration.

"Government can not efficiently do these things."

My colleague Bill Boyes blogs over on Liberty in response to Megan McArdle's view of the safety standards:

"Government can not efficiently do these things."

I tend to read the evidence on standards in much the same way. That is standards are a cost the are imposed, rather than a response that emerges. As such, this type of tops down approach falls victim to The Fatal Conceit.

I cannot envision a standard writer would would have the knowledge in order to construct a standard to ensure safety. The regulatory burden then, is much greater than the overt cost, it includes the perverse consequences that result from the "crowding out" of decentralized agents and the process that allows solutions not designed to emerge.

But I think Bill's comment leads us to a much bigger concern - the increased scope and scale of government action in civil life. As I suggest, this increased scope and scale does tend to have the effect of eroding the underlying motivation for participants to seek solutions and to internalize the costs of their own behavior. I suppose I am trying to argue that the government efficiently does replace private and civil association as a fully functioning component of society, leaving behind a vacuum to be filled by the centralized power.

To the Higgs perspective, and I agree, that the imposition of standards is perhaps, short of war, the most effective way that the government can increase it power.

"How Wars, Plagues, and Urban Disease Propelled Europe’s Rise to Riches"

"This column explains why Europe’s rise to riches in the early modern period owed much to exceptionally bellicose international politics, urban overcrowding, and frequent epidemics."

Cruel windfall: How wars, plagues, and urban disease propelled Europe’s rise to riches, by Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, Vox EU: In a pre-modern economy, incomes typically stagnate in the long run. Malthusian regimes are characterised by strongly declining marginal returns to labour. One-off improvements in technology can temporarily raise output per head. The additional income is spent on more (surviving) children, and population grows. As a result, output per head declines, and eventually labour productivity returns to its previous level. That is why, in HG Wells' phrase, earlier generations "spent the great gifts of science as rapidly as it got them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life" (Wells, 1905).

How could an economy ever escape from this trap? To learn more about this question, we should look more closely at the continent that managed to overcome stagnation first. Long before growth accelerated for good in most countries, a first divergence occurred. European incomes by 1700 exceeded those in the rest of the world by a large margin. We explain the emergence of this income gap by a number of uniquely European features – an unusually high frequency of war, particularly unhealthy cities, and numerous deadly disease outbreaks.

Rhetoric and Persuasion

Rhetoric and Persuasion
From the Washington Post:

President Obama has framed the health-care debate in Washington as a campaign against insurance companies whose irresponsible actions, he repeatedly says, must be reined in to control costs and improve patient care. In North Carolina this week, he told an audience that the existing system "works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn't always work well for you."

The message is no accident, as the president's chief pollster made clear in a rare public speech last month. Joel Benenson told the Economic Club of Canada that extensive polling revealed to the White House what many there had guessed: People hate insurance companies.

"Take the public plan, for example," Benenson said. "Initial reaction to it wasn't as positive as it is now. . . . But we figured out that people like the idea of competition versus the insurance company, and that's why you get a number like 72 percent supporting it."

It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower

Michaela Wrong’s gripping latest book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, is the antidote for anyone who knows the weariness of wading through the jargon of implementation plans and institutional treatises on governance and anticorruption. It’s the anti-boredom serum, the potion that brings you the real consequences of what happens when those plans are ignored.

Trilemma

This is a technical paper - but the issue of "trilemma," or "impossible trinity" -- a country simultaneously may choose any two, but not all, of the three goals, monetary independence, exchange rate stability and financial integration is important.

Click here.

How American Health Care Killed My Father - The Atlantic (September 2009)

How American Health Care Killed My Father - The Atlantic (September 2009)

The author confirms the central role that incentives and institutions play in this market (as in all markets).

All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

and

We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.

Research Papers dealing with Growth by Charles I. Jones

Research Papers dealing with Growth by Charles I. Jones

“Prices Must Be Free To Tell The Truth”

“Prices Must Be Free To Tell The Truth”

MV=PQ: A Resource for Economic Educators: Slideshows for Use in the Classroom

MV=PQ: A Resource for Economic Educators: Slideshows for Use in the Classroom

Health-Care Lies

Health-Care Lies

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Incentives

Bill Boyes over on Liberty blogs the relationship between incentives and performance.

Incentives matter. I think Boyes highlights a key application in economic reasoning, one that I have been reflecting on in the context of my summer reading as well as the current expansion of the state in our country.

Incentives come from the institutional framework of society. These institutions, as Douglass North tells us, can be formal or informal, and they are important in shaping the incentives that shape behavior. Boyes does a great job of exemplifying the impact of incentives and incentive changes in this post.

However, I am interested in the process by which both the institutions and the incentives change. In rereading North's challenging book - Understanding the Process of Economic Change - I encountered his concept of adaptive efficiency. North argues that the emergent and evolutionary process that characterizes change is shaped to a large extent by the degree of adaptive efficiency embedded in a society.

In addition, he argues that while formal institutions can be changed very quickly (the example that Boyes provides us - or the current effort to change the "rules of the game" for health care) while informal institutions (norms, beliefs, values, and shared cultural constructs) change very slowly, in his words this change is incremental and gradual.

So, what we seem to be seeing in contemporary political debate in the US is an effort to quickly change a formal institution in the face of no change in informal institutions. Stated differently, current political leaders seem to be attempting to share formal institutions in a way that conflicts with informal institutions.

This also seems to illustrate the adaptive efficiency of our society - that is a flexibility that encourages trial and error and failure. To the extent that the current political movement fails, there has been a higher order outcome and, tragedically, vice versa.

The relationship between Economics, Values and Organizations is the topic of a collection of essays that I might recommend.

So, Boyes challenges us to consider the impact of an attempt to change formal institutional structure in a rapid, tops down manner. I can't help but think about the alternative implied by Boyes - the emergent and evolutionary development of institutional structures described by Hayek.

Douglass North - Economic Performance Through Time

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/north-lecture.html


Arnold Kling on Adaptive Efficiency

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=061807A

Benjamin Friedman - The Moral Consequences of Growth

Nathan Rosenberg - How the West Grew Rich

Opposing view - Megan McAardle
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/08/did_big_government_save_us_fro.php

A Microeconomist

A Microeconomist’s Protest

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Paulson’s Calls to Goldman Tested Ethics

Gary Becker writes

So legitimate reasons exist for concern about the speed and strength of the recovery of the American economy. However, I worry much more about various regulations, spending, and controls being introduced by the present Congress and by President Obama than by intrinsic difficulties in the American economy.

Steve Horwitz

Two Recent Publications Available Online

My two recent papers published in The Independent Review are now available online.

“Fascism: Italian, German, and American,” review of Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, The Independent Review, 13 (3), Winter 2009, pp. 441-46.

and

“Wal-Mart to the Rescue: Private Enterprise’s Response to Hurricane Katrina,” The Independent Review, 13 (4), Spring 2009, pp. 511-28.

Enjoy.

Arrow on the Increasing Cost of Healthcare

Arrow on the Increasing Cost of Healthcare

The Nobel laureate Ken Arrow:

Oh, why health costs increase? The basic reason why health costs increased is that health care is a good thing! Because today there is a lot more you can do!

The Harmony of Interests in Practice

This is what markets are all about at the end of the day: the harmonization of the self-interest of actors via decentralized coordination. That harmonization allows us to live in peaceful cooperation and extend the benefits of Mises' Law of Association to more and more of humanity. A computer calling me to remind me to refill my prescription might seem like a little thing in the broader scope of human accomplishment, but it symbolizes the real processes that have made possible the levels of peace and prosperity that we have.

http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2009/07/the-harmony-of-interests-in-practice.html

Anarchy and Development: An Application of the Theory of Second Best

Anarchy and Development: An Application of the Theory of Second Best

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Hurrying Into the Next Panic?

Hurrying Into the Next Panic?
By PAUL WILMOTT
Published: July 29, 2009
On top of an already dangerously influential and morally suspect financial minefield is now being added the unthinking power of the machine.

Economic Principals

David Warsh continues to write about a story that seems to be ignored by the profession and the press.

A major reason is Harvard University’s Russia scandal. Summers’ temperament and his policies at Treasury, both under Robert Rubin and as secretary himself, and how they might have contributed to the financial meltdown, would weigh in the balance, too. From a distance of twelve years, the Russian episode may seem musty with age. Who cares what happened when Harvard undertook its mission to Moscow in the brief heyday of the Russian robber barons?

To recap: a young Harvard professor, Andrei Shleifer, a Russian émigré, is hired by the US Agency for International Development in 1992 to advise the government of Boris Yeltsin on behalf of the US government. In 1997, Shleifer is caught investing in the Russian economy (and trying to set up his wife in a government-licensed business there) and fired by USAID. For the next eight years, he is shielded, at least to some extent, by his friend and mentor, Larry Summers, first at the Treasury Department, then as president of Harvard.


In 2004, a Federal judge finds Shleifer and Harvard to have committed civil fraud and orders Harvard to repay. Two years later, when Summers is asked to resign the Harvard presidency, his conduct in the affair is described as one of the reasons. When he returns to Washington as senior advisor to President Obama, listed among his brain trust is none other than Nancy Zimmerman, Mrs. Andrei Shleifer.

MV=PQ: A Resource for Economic Educators: Economics and the Great Depression

MV=PQ: A Resource for Economic Educators: Economics and the Great Depression

Tim Schilling, the blog author writes:

I ran across (somewhat belatedly, I admit) an essay on the History Now website. Historian David Kennedy (author of Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929 - 1945) discusses some of the fundamental problems leading up to the Great Depression, as well as some of the challenges faced by Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt.

Hurrying Into the Next Panic?

Hurrying Into the Next Panic?

War on Drugs . . . drugs won.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs,

Peter Blair Henry

Peter Blair Henry of Stanford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about economic development. Henry compares and contrasts the policy and growth experience of Barbados and Jamaica. Both became independent of England in the 1960s, so both inherited similar institutions. But each pursued different policies with very different results. Henry discusses the implications of this near-natural experiment for growth generally and the importance of macroeconomic policy for achieving prosperity. The conversation closes with a discussion of Henry's research on stock market reactions as a measure of policy's effectiveness.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/07/peter_henry_on.html

Property and Environement Research Center

PERC

THE FORECAST:   More cool weather for Montana. More articles, op-eds, policy studies, and forums for PERC. PERC's executive director Terry Anderson and Richard Sousa of the Hoover Institution have an op-ed at Forbes.com offering some pragmatic solutions to national problems that do not require more government intervention. PERC research fellow Alison Berry has published a new Policy Series, Two Forests Under the Big Sky comparing the management of the US Forest Service with that of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes on two similar Montana forests. The tribes came out ahead for timber production and ecological value. Berry summarizes some of her findings in a brief podcast.   Buy local is the rallying cry for food, however, Pierre Desrochers, a PERC Julian Simon fellow, says buy global. Buying food locally is a "well-meaning marketing fad" that is a distraction from real and serious issues, says Desrochers, an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Read his newspaper article and complete study [PDF]. Joe Sehee, a 2007 PERC enviropreneur, is working to expand green burials and reinvent burial grounds as landscape-scale conservation efforts. The Green Burial Council is co-sponsoring the first ever educational conference for those interested in working in the green burial field. The event is scheduled for September 10-11 at the Foxfield Preserve in Ohio. Registration is open. Former PERC media fellow Wycliffe Muga of Mombasa reports in African Business [PDF] magazine on FME efforts that could help slow the desertification of Sub-Saharan Africa. Milton Friedman Legacy of Freedom Day is Friday, July 31. PERC, along with 50 other organizations across the country, is holding a celebration to include a brief talk and refreshments. The public is welcome. Please join us at the PERC office, 2048 Analysis Dr., Ste A, Bozeman, at 11 a.m. For more information, call Michelle: 406-587-9591. Wishing you an awesome August, Linda Linda Platts Director of Media Relations PERC 2048 Analysis Drive, Suite A Bozeman, MT 59718 406.587.9591 406.586.7555 (fax) www.perc.org We value your privacy. If you would prefer not to receive our news in the future, send a blank message to unsubscribe@perc.org.

Summer 2009 Reading

Douglas Irwin - Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade, Free Trade Under Fire

Both books are excellent, the first provides an historical overview of the pre and post Adam Smith debate about the foundations for mercantilism (protectionism) and free trade. Irwin traces much of the thought back to classical works of philosophy.

David Landes The The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to Present

Wealth and the Poverty of Nations was an outstanding read (must for economic historians). This book is tougher going but worth it as Landes goes into significant detail. If time is an issue, I would recommend Mokyr.

Joel Mokyr The Levers of Riches

I loved reading this book - Mokyr does a wonderful job, well let me quote from this Amazon review:

"Mokyr has demonstrated, yet again, that he is one the best economic historians around. His book is a treasure trove of facts and insights about technological progress often overlooked in other accounts. Further, his argument that economics might do well to adopt the methodology of evolutionary biology instead of the standard application of Newtonian physics is cogent and convincing."--Howard Bodenhorn, St. Lawrence Univ.

"Joel Mokyr is a first-rate scholar who has read a wide body of literature. The book is very well written, lively and engaging. It is closely reasoned and well executed"--Nathan Rosenberg, Stanford University

"Joel Mokyr likes telling his story and he tells it well; his book makes for good reading and rereading, and this in itself sets him apart from many of his fellow economic historians."--The New York Times Book Review

According to Joel Mokyr, economic growth is the result of four distinct processes: Investment (increases in the capital stock), Commercial Expansion, Scale or Size Effects, and Increase in the Stock of Human Knowledge (which includes technological progress proper as well as changes in institutions). Throughout his brilliant book, he correlates technological creativity with economic progress throughout classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and then into the later 19th century.

Eric Rauchway Blessed Among Nations

Thomas Sowell A Conflict of Visions

Sowell at his best. This analysis of the constrained and unconstrained visions is clear and direct. He relies heavily on Adam Smith and William Godwin for illustration.

Adam Smith: Theory of Moral Sentiments, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Lectures on Jurisprudence, Wealth of Nations, Essays on Philosophical Subjects

This reading is a delight. I was invited to a Liberty Fund colloquia on Smith in July, 2009.

Laird Bergad - The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States
Fiction

Michael Gruber Tropic of Night

Gruber's first novel. I really enjoyed The Book of Air and Shadows, this one not so much. I will try his newest book The Forgery of Venus.

David Liss A Conspiracy of Paper

I am pleasantly surprised - I could not finish The Coffee Trader and his latest The Whiskey Rebel received negative reviews, but this is wonderful. I have the sequel - A Spectacle of Corruption on order.

John Sanford - Rules of Prey

Sanford's first Lucas Davenport and I am so glad I got to read the beginning.

Daniel Simmons Drood

Wow, talk about an unreliable narrator. A very intense exploration of . . . addiction, obsession, jealousy and . . . Charles Dickens. Excellent historical fiction - made me realize how little I know about this period, Dickens and Dicken's fiction. Very long, but worth it. I have - The Terror, on my reading list.