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This book of essays edited by the excellent Diane Coyle was published on 15th September 2012; the Amazon page is here. Diane also has a column posted on Vox.
I have a very short note in it but many of the other entries are fuller and more rewarding to read.
Dans Le Nouvel Economiste du 13/09/12 (Emmanuelle Auriol est également citée):
I’m delighted to have been able to take part in the new Social Science Bites series of podcasts by the excellent Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds, the brains behind the very successful Philosophy Bites series.
Listen to the podcast here.
My interview and selection of Five Books is online at The Browser
A (loosely) political novel in which, through a series of accidents, a fashion model is elected president of an imaginary former Communist country
Download the pdf here
A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carré. Published by Knopf in 1986, now available in a Penguin reprint.
I read this book when it first came out and thought it a masterpiece. I re-read it recently with some trepidation, fearing I would be embarrassed by my earlier enthusiasm. I needn’t have worried: it remains a brilliant novel by any standards, and the character of Rick Pym, the protagonist’s father, is unforgettable.
Buy here.
“Soviet Power Plus Electrification: what is the long-run legacy of communism?” (with Wendy Carlin and Mark Schaffer), available here, published in Explorations in Economic History 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2012.07.003
Abstract
Two decades after the end of central planning, we investigate the extent to which the advantages bequeathed by planning in terms of high investment in physical infrastructure and human capital compensated for the costs in allocative inefficiency and weak incentives for innovation. We assemble and analyse three separate types of evidence. First, we find that countries that were initially relatively poor prior to planning benefited more, as measured by long-run GDP per capita levels, from infrastructure and human capital than they suffered from weak market incentives. For initially relatively rich countries the opposite is true. Second, using various measures of physical stocks of infrastructure and human capital we show that at the end of planning, formerly planned countries had substantially different endowments from their contemporaneous market economy counterparts. However, these differences were much more important for poor than for rich countries. Finally, we use firm-level data to measure the cost of a wide range of constraints on firm performance, and we show that after more than a decade of transition in 2002-05, poor ex-planned economies differ much more from their market counterparts, in respect to both good and bad aspects of the planning legacy, than do relatively rich ones. However, the persistent beneficial legacy effects disappeared under the pressure of strong growth in the formerly planned economies in the run-up to the global financial crisis.
A transit of Venus took place in the early hours of Wednesday 6th June (CET)), beginning at 00.03.53 and ending at 06.55.24. There will not be another transit in our lifetimes.
The photograph above was taken in Minneapolis (hat tip Wikipedia)
More details, including viewing techniques and locations, are available at the Transit of Venus Project, one of the activities of the excellent organization Astronomers Without Borders.
Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New theory of Human Cruelty, by Simon Baron-Cohen. Published April 2011 by Allen Lane.
A book that sets out to demystify cruelty, avoiding the label “evil” that explains nothing and merely satisfies our demand to express outrage. Provides a compelling account of the factors in the brain that determine when individuals will suffer from an empathy deficit, which at extreme levels may enable behavior of shocking cruelty. But the effects of empathy deficits may work themselves out in a variety of ways. In the book’s most novel and intriguing development, Baron-Cohen compares the kind of empathy deficit that leads to cruelty with the empathy deficits visible in the autistic spectrum, and which are not typically associated with anything of the kind. This measured, rigorous “compare and contrast” approach both acknowledges how much work remains to be done to understand empathy deficits and their consequences, and shows us how much better we can understand them using scientific methods.
Buy here.
Here, the part on The War of the Sexes runs from the 23 minute point and lasts for 11 minutes
