Marginal Revolution

Assorted links

1. A new way of learning history of economic thought

2. Tim Harford recommends ten books

3. How to breed callousness: send a doctor to school

4. Via Greg Mankiw, tax rates on the middle class are falling

5. Dan Ariely says we are predictably irrational on Obama

6. Rate busters?

Which work of American liberal political thought has held up best?

Having said A, one must say B.  Ezra Klein poses this question and receives many responses.  I'll nominate William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy, Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, Richard Rorty on cruelty, Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice, and Harold Cruse's Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.  Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail deserves consideration although it does not exactly fit the category.  Rachel Carson wrote an important book but not really a good book.  Carol Gilligan is an interesting dark horse selection.

Jane Jacobs, by the way, might win either prize if you are allowed to count her as either a conservative or a liberal.  But which is she?  John Dewey and Walter Lippmann are two other figures who could be nominated for either prize.

If you think this list beats the conservative one, you are right.  Note, however, that the conservative list excluded economics (and libertarians), which is where most of the contributions have come on the Right over the last fifty years.  Plus the all-important Chicago School focused on ideas and articles, not books.  So the comparison is not as lopsided as these posts, taken alone, might indicate.

Just a few weeks ago, Bryan Caplan and I decided that Rawls's Theory of Justice wins the prize for "least Hansonian book ever."  For all the evident philosophic care, in the final analysis Rawls was just making stuff up.

What are your nominations?

Addendum: Thinking back, Wilson's On Human Nature might be a good pick for the conservative prize, even though I do not believe Wilson is himself a conservative.

Who hates inequality?

Chimpanzees are highly sensitive to inequity, and typically refuse to continue in interactions in which they get less than a social partner. However, chimpanzees from stable social groups do not respond negatively in situations in which their partners received better rewards, whereas chimpanzees from less-established groups show rejection rates as high as 60 percent.

Here is the full story, interesting throughout; the hat tip is to Mark Thoma.

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

That's from one review of the newly translated Roberto Bolaño book.  (Might it have been titled "Conservative Fascism"?)  This work is not a structured narrative but rather a series of impressionistic portraits of how easy it is for some people to slip into being horrible and stay that way.  Imagine a fictional bestiary of creepy aesthetes who are playing at human relationships, sleepwalking through their dreamlike yet trivial obsessions, and in the meantime pledging allegiance to tyranny.  Literature is a "surreptitious form of violence" throughout.

Here are excerpts from other reviews.  At this point it goes without saying that everything by Bolaño is essential reading; however you may find many parts baffling if you don't have a strong background in things Latin American.