Burt Malkiel's favorite business books; Joel Kotkin on U.S. resilience; Armin Rosen on human rights realism; David Epstein on athletes' heart attacks; Joseph Politano on measuring rent inflation
Arnold Kling predicts a soft landing! Our many worldview disagreements aside, it's this openness to unexpected evidence that keeps me coming back here.
I never thought that people would forgive what happened during covid, but they did.
It seems to me that elections are decided by moderates views on “the current thing” around election time. Since the media mostly determines what the current thing is, and the media favors the left, this is generally a huge advantage.
Sometimes the media chooses wrong (emphasizing covid in 2021).
Sometimes the media really hates a specific democratic candidate (like Hillary).
But Biden is going to get a pass. My guess, unless it results in nuclear war, is that victory in ukraine will be the current thing next cycle.
I don’t see how the right could change the current thing. So far they don’t seem willing to engage in a fundamental struggle over education (school vouchers) or family formation (child tax credits, etc).
If you’ve got no vision, you aren’t going to be able to change the conversation.
You already got at several of my favorites, but I'd wholeheartedly recommend the following as well:
Barbarians at the Gate -- A thrilling overview of the issues of mergers and acquisitions & the capacity for takeovers to transform staid companies "Who won?" "The Shareholders"
The Hardware Hacker -- a great tutorial on the manufacturing ecosystem in China and a deep dive into hardware manufacturing issues.
The Bankers New Clothes --- will transform the way you think about bank capital. Measuring capital & determining the correct level of bank capital remains a key issue at the center of financial regulation. Much popular understanding of capital is wrong, This book will show you why.
The Halo Effect -- teaches a simple but critical lesson about management best practices: you can't just study the best performing firms, you need to study the bad ones too in order to understand what differentiates them & then you have to worry about endogeneity and selection.
Not strictly a business book, rather a guide to the "business" of personal financial responsibility, but one I've gifted to each of my g'kids as they obtained their first full-time, entry-level "real" job, is "Greed Is Good," by Jonathan Hoenig. Although a titch dated (published in 1999), and although the title is a bit off-putting, its lessons are the basics of personal financial independence: living-beneath-one's-means, consistent bit-by-bit saving, accumulating emergency funds & then funds to to invest, avoiding unproductive debt, presented in plain, youthly, entertaining language.
Hoenig's main theme is that the accumulation of money, of wealth, in and of itself, is not a goal, but simply a tool, the means to the goal of having choices in one's life: handling financial emergencies; choosing what to wear, where to live, what to drive, what to eat; access to leisure time pursuits, etc.
...an irreplaceable tool to manage one's life, rather than being subject to the whimsies of life.
Arnold Kling predicts a soft landing! Our many worldview disagreements aside, it's this openness to unexpected evidence that keeps me coming back here.
Arnold, Please consider leading a book discussion over Zoom about Information Rules, by Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro. Thank you!
I hope it's as slow as Argentina's. 75 years later and still alive
I think you’re right about Biden.
I never thought that people would forgive what happened during covid, but they did.
It seems to me that elections are decided by moderates views on “the current thing” around election time. Since the media mostly determines what the current thing is, and the media favors the left, this is generally a huge advantage.
Sometimes the media chooses wrong (emphasizing covid in 2021).
Sometimes the media really hates a specific democratic candidate (like Hillary).
But Biden is going to get a pass. My guess, unless it results in nuclear war, is that victory in ukraine will be the current thing next cycle.
I don’t see how the right could change the current thing. So far they don’t seem willing to engage in a fundamental struggle over education (school vouchers) or family formation (child tax credits, etc).
If you’ve got no vision, you aren’t going to be able to change the conversation.
Small typo:
> As for the economy, financial markets seem to be predicting a soft lending
I presume you mean "soft landing" (or I missed the intentional pun)
You already got at several of my favorites, but I'd wholeheartedly recommend the following as well:
Barbarians at the Gate -- A thrilling overview of the issues of mergers and acquisitions & the capacity for takeovers to transform staid companies "Who won?" "The Shareholders"
The Hardware Hacker -- a great tutorial on the manufacturing ecosystem in China and a deep dive into hardware manufacturing issues.
The Bankers New Clothes --- will transform the way you think about bank capital. Measuring capital & determining the correct level of bank capital remains a key issue at the center of financial regulation. Much popular understanding of capital is wrong, This book will show you why.
The Halo Effect -- teaches a simple but critical lesson about management best practices: you can't just study the best performing firms, you need to study the bad ones too in order to understand what differentiates them & then you have to worry about endogeneity and selection.
Not strictly a business book, rather a guide to the "business" of personal financial responsibility, but one I've gifted to each of my g'kids as they obtained their first full-time, entry-level "real" job, is "Greed Is Good," by Jonathan Hoenig. Although a titch dated (published in 1999), and although the title is a bit off-putting, its lessons are the basics of personal financial independence: living-beneath-one's-means, consistent bit-by-bit saving, accumulating emergency funds & then funds to to invest, avoiding unproductive debt, presented in plain, youthly, entertaining language.
Hoenig's main theme is that the accumulation of money, of wealth, in and of itself, is not a goal, but simply a tool, the means to the goal of having choices in one's life: handling financial emergencies; choosing what to wear, where to live, what to drive, what to eat; access to leisure time pursuits, etc.
...an irreplaceable tool to manage one's life, rather than being subject to the whimsies of life.