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What I've Been Reading
1. Government and the American Economy: A New History, no editor but the book is dedicated to Bob Higgs by Price Fishback. Imagine essays by economic history luminaries, mostly classical liberals, covering many different eras of American economic history. For some this is a gold mine.
2. The Third Domain, by Tim Friend. An overview of archaea, those odd life forms that survive where nothing else can. A fascinating look at a still mysterious topic. It's not as well written as the top-drawer popular science books but since you probably know little or nothing about the topic the amount you will learn is high.
3. Empires of Trust: How Rome Built -- and America is Building -- a New World, by Thomas F. Madden. This book is avowed pro-Roman, pro-American, and sees strong parallels across the two regimes; part of the thesis is that neither wanted to build an empire but had to.
4. The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America, by Maury Klein. This is a big, clunky book with lots of poor exposition. It also covers a vital era -- the real Industrial Revolution -- which has remained oddly neglected by too many economic historians.
5. The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. This is the most important book on modern U.S. inequality to date; here is my previous coverage of their ideas. I'm still waiting for Paul Krugman to write a critique but right now their core hypothesis is looking strong.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 4, 2008 at 06:19 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Re: Rome and the US,
I don't see why it has to be either/or. They wanted to build an empire because they had to, and they had to build an empire because they wanted to.
It was in their self-interest to attain greater geopolitical security, which could only be attained through empire. And while some pursued empire as means, others likely thought that empire in itself was good for a whole host of reasons.
Posted by: Publius at Jul 4, 2008 9:15:50 AM
Re: Re: Rome and the US.
The comparison between the Roman empire and the American empire is quite clever.
It reminds me what French historian Paul VEYNE wrote about Roman imperialism: the Romans didn't conquer the all mediterranean world because of some "wil zur macht", but, basically, because, since the war against Hannibal, they were scared out of their skins. They first wanted to secure the mediterranean region, and then, as the Greeks were too fidgety, they eventually had to conquer the regions they wanted to secure. Also the parallel between mediterranean pirats in the first century bC and today's terrorists is interesting.
But just one thing: it is not because the intentions of the Romans were in the first place to secure the mediterranean world that they didn't, in the end, at least in the first century before Christ, plundered the regions they had conquered (cf. the publicans.)
Posted by: Fernand Baurdel at Jul 4, 2008 9:53:04 AM
Re: Education
Are we shifting from a place of competition for jobs due to low supply of capital to competition for workers?
If so, will companies now be forced to internalize some of the costs of education?
Will the competition aspects of schooling be displaced by the training? Will more hands-on training be demanded by students and employers and lessen the emphasis on ranking, grading, and certification?
The universal complaint amongst engineers is that on the job they never get to use what they learned in school. Technology or no, how could schools keep up with the exact needs of business without direct input by employers?
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 4, 2008 10:36:30 AM
Is there any data on where we start to get diminishing returns on college educations as a society?
Several of my friends got liberal arts undergrad degrees (political science, history, psychology) from a good state university, and wound up in jobs that made no use of their college education, other than maybe as a way to make sure they were smart and non-flaky enough to graduate college. I wonder how the world was made better by their needing those college degrees to get those (basically clerk) jobs. Perhaps they benefited from the college education, but they also spent quite a bit of money and stayed out of the workforce for four more years.
Posted by: albatross at Jul 4, 2008 11:26:41 PM
Tyler,
You linked to your old NYT column in which you wrote:
"College graduates have been gaining relative to high school graduates. But competition from immigrant labor accounts for only 10 percent of the change in the wages of unskilled workers, relative to the skilled, since 1950.
"Starting about 1950, the relative returns for schooling rose, and they skyrocketed after 1980. The reason is supply and demand. For the first time in American history, the current generation is not significantly more educated than its parents. Those in need of skilled labor are bidding for a relatively stagnant supply and so must pay more."
But you're ignoring competition from the children of illegal immigrants, who by 2005 made up a sizable fraction of young people without college degrees. After all, foreign born Latinas in California currently average 3.7 babies per lifetime.
You need to read the important 2008 book "Generations of Exclusion" by sociologists Vilma Ortiz and Edward E. Telles of the UCLA Chicano Studies Department. They tracked first to third generation Mexican Americans from 1965 to 2000, plus their children and grandchildren. They found no evidence that American-born Mexican Americans are narrowing the education gap. For example, in 2000, only 6% of fourth generation Mexican-Americans born during the Baby Boom had college degrees.
You should also read Heckman's 2007 paper on high school graduation rates, which have gotten worse since their peak around 1970 (and that's ignoring immigrants who didn't grow up in America).
I know it will be hard for you read the new evidence on illegal immigration and admit you were wrong, but you're an honest enough man that you are going to admit it sooner or later, so why not do it now?
Best wishes,
Steve
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jul 5, 2008 2:29:42 AM
RE: Rome
I don't know if the following BS from the Amazon review is just the reviewer's thought, or it actually reflects the book:
"Taking readers on a dramatic tour of the Roman Republic, a golden era before the depravities of the Caesars and late Empire..."
Boy, if that's not a myth. It's the same myth that Brutus, Cicero, et al spun. The Roman Republic was far from a golden age long before the Gracchi were murdered.
Posted by: SocraticGadfly at Jul 5, 2008 2:44:23 AM
