Best non-fiction books of 2013

Best non-fiction books of 2013

World Inequality Is Down

World Inequality Is Down

Daron Acemoglu at Five Books recommends . . .

http://fivebooks.com/interviews/daron-acemoglu-on-inequality

Our ASET book club read two of the five books on this list.

Why do public school teachers send their own children to private schools at a rate 2X the national average?

Why do public school teachers send their own children to private schools at a rate 2X the national average?

Naomi Klein v Joseph Stigliz

One of my colleagues (an historian) was given a copy of Naomi Klein's, Shock Doctrine, as a read to critique neo classical economic reasoning, by an economics faculty in my department.

Below is the e mail I sent to that colleague.

Glad to work with you on the scholarship for our department.

I apologize for this intrusion - I am delighted you are reading a critique of neo classical economic analysis - although I would have recommended Joseph Stigliz, nobel winner, rather than the Canadian journalist. Stigliz is more critical than Klein and Globalization and its Discontents, one of his excellent books, is as accessible as her work and grounded in real economic science. Stigliz has the advantage of restraint and a great deal of economic knowledge in his critique of capitalism and neo classical economic reasoning and of Milton Friedman. There is a substantial cost in reading a text by a seasoned and talented journalist who possesses a limited knowledge of the the topic that is under attack.

On the opposite side of the debate, a great book by William Baumol is much more nuanced and, in the end, effective in the critique of market theory and neo classical economic reasoning. To steal from Churchill, neo classical economic analysis is incomplete and poor social science, it is just much better than the alternative.• •Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, co-authored with Robert Litan and Carl J. Schramm, 2007.

This blog post is also a swell way to balance the rather vitriolic prose of Klein.

http://www.coordinationproblem.org/2013/11/institutions-matter-but-fixing-economics-requires-more-than-just-saying-that.html

Wassily Leontief and Larry Summers on technological unemployment

Wassily Leontief and Larry Summers on technological unemployment

Here is a very interesting piece from 1983 (jstor), Population and Development Review, it is called “Technological Advance, Economic Growth, and the Distribution of Income,” here is one excerpt:

In populous, poor, less developed countries, technological unemployment has existed for a long time under the name of “disguised agricultural unemployment”; in Bangladesh, for instance, there are more people on the land than are needed to cultivate it on the basis of any available technology. Industrialization is counted upon by the governments of most of these countries to relieve the situation by providing — as it did in the past — much additional employment. If I may put this into my own terminology, Leontief is suggesting that at some margins fixed proportions mean many agricultural laborers, or would-be laborers, are ZMP or zero marginal product.

Haven’t you ever wondered how some traditional economies can have unemployment rates which are so high? Those are “structural” problems, yes, but of what kind?

By the way, Brad DeLong cites Larry Summers on ZMP workers:

My friend and coauthor Larry Summers touched on this a year and a bit ago when he was here giving the Wildavski lecture. He was talking about the extraordinary decline in American labor force participation even among prime-aged males–that a surprisingly large chunk of our male population is now in the position where there is nothing that people can think of for them to do that is useful enough to cover the costs of making sure that they actually do it correctly, and don’t break the stuff and subtract value when they are supposed to be adding to it.

Human Capital Report