Note: Michael Bijak will be guest blogging here this summer, focusing primarily on the topics of economics and philosophy. This is his first post.
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Summer is here and it’s time to relax whether you plan to spend your days on a beach or in the office. Why not unwind with some unorthodox economics? After all, reading is a great way to keep your mind sharp while blowing off steam.
While I enjoy a good novel, lately I’ve been immersed in non-fiction as part of my economics degree. I never want to pick up a microeconomics textbook again, but some books like Illiberal Reformers kept me up late like a child with a new video game. These books combine captivating analysis with story-like prose and just may change the way you see the world.
Did you know Martin Luther King had more guns than you? Neither did I. Impress your friends at the water cooler with these tasty informational tidbits and more.
Check out the list of books and I guarantee you’ll learn something they didn’t teach you in school:
1. How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness – Have you ever thought about how you perceive your little finger in the context of the lives of millions? Adam Smith did. Economist and author Russ Roberts shows us that economics is more than cost curves and optimizing objective functions.
In fact, Adam Smith, regarded as one of the first economists, wrote a book on why we behave the way we do and it wasn’t The Wealth of Nations. Smith attempts to answer this in his lesser-known book; The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For example, Smith once asked whether the death of millions in china would have a greater impact on the psyche of the average Englishman than if he were anxiously awaiting the amputation of his little-finger the next day?
Roberts creates an original story that encapsulates the spirit of Smith in a style for the modern reader’s enjoyment. (Bonus: Listen to Matt Lewis’ interview with Russ Roberts about the book.)
2. Illiberal Reformers: This is an informative and thoroughly entertaining read for those who want to understand how American Liberals became ‘illiberal’. Leonard restates the Hayekian mantra that social progressives are not evil, but rather misguided. The book hearkens back to the age when titans such as Rockefeller and Carnegie ruled and the industrial transformation of America was in full swing. This era of unprecedented commercialization was not without its warts—monopoly and rent-seeking were the rule, not the exception.
Soon, Laissez-faire was no longer and the regulatory state was born. The ascendancy of the regulatory state was the product of the progressive’s unabashed faith social engineering—itself a product of the significant leaps in the sciences of the time. However, these progressives weren’t all that progressive when you take into account their motivations were heavily intertwined with racist ideology.
Although I already knew of America’s brief fling with eugenics and racial-pseudo-science, I was unaware that the progressives were behind it. These initiatives were among a laundry-list of progressive programs that sought to disenfranchise minorities, immigrants, and women. For example, Leonard claims the minimum-wage was devised to prevent immigrants from taking jobs from the “more productive Anglo-Saxon men”. This book will change the way you perceive ideological labels. The original meaning of liberal was much closer to today’s libertarian. If I am correct about Leonard’s philosophy, we hope that the liberals today become more liberal.
3. Social Democratic America: This is the how-to guide for transforming the United States into a Scandinavian-style social democracy. Written by University of Arizona sociologist Lane Kenworthy, he is known for using statistical and analytic work on income and wealth distribution.
Kenworthy’s intent is to justify his assumption that the United States may well be on its way to becoming a social democracy. He does this outlining the current state of affairs and his proposed solutions to inequality. He believes that the discrepancy in economic security is the root of inequality and that our current institutions prevent the lower quintile from achieving this. Additionally, he sees our political framework as an undesirable hindrance to progress.
This is where I digress. Initially I sympathized with his desire to reform entitlements given his research is reliable. I can see how providing universal benefits may be more efficient than the current piecemeal arrangements.
However, we fundamentally disagree on A) the purpose of government and B) the economic framework used to calculate the problem and solution. Kenworthy states explicitly that the question we ought to ask is not how much government, rather how to utilize government. This is evidently a product of the mindset that government is an omnipotent and benevolent singularity, capable of picking up where the market lets off. He fails to take into account that government consists of persons susceptible to the same human condition as us all, up until the section on the challenges of policy implementation and partisan politics Kenworthy and I did not agree on much.
Although I find his ends admirable yet misguided, he hits the nail on the head when he highlights the obstruction resulting from group polarization. We can see how the small extreme cohorts of each party serve to bifurcate our alignments and crowd out Middle America’s beliefs. This is what he means by political “cohesiveness”. He also examines the question of voting in a way that implies that our choices are limited and not truly ours.
It is true that most of the important decision making in policy occurs before the voter reaches the ballot box. In fact, Kenworthy states that these policies can get pushed through without public support. He still does not accept less government as a solution to this, nor does he see value in the checks on government’s ability to whisk through unfavorable policy. It seems his solution is to give the people what they want and not what they need. In the end, his paternalistic aspirations for government outweigh his virtue in support for political reform. Nonetheless, Social Democratic America is a thought-provoking and entertaining read.
4.This Non-violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit following the tumultuous Alabama Bus Boycott. He was denied. No doubt due to the racist government institution of the time. In fact, he was one of the many civil-rights activists who embraced their right to bear arms.
Professor and former activist, Dr. Charles E. Cobb Jr. witnessed the violence inflicted on the non-violent protesters and now tells us how guns made the civil rights movement possible in This Non-Violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed. The eponymous quote is what a Mississippi farmer and local NAACP leader, Hartman Turbow told Martin Luther King Jr. upon meeting him in 1964. Faced with the constant threat of domestic terrorism, the activists used their second amendment right to great effect—the effect of deterrence.
Cobb posits that without the capability to deter violence, the movement would have certainly been brutally crushed, as had previous demonstrations that we have all but forgotten. Filled with historical fact as well as captivating anecdotes, This Non-violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed will keep you turning the pages.
One such anecdote, oft quoted by Stokely Carmichael was of escorting an elderly Black lady to the polls in rural Alabama– “she had to be 80 years old and going to vote for the first time in her life…. [T]hat ol’ lady came up to us, went into her bag, and produced this enormous, rusty Civil War-looking old pistol. ‘Best you hol’ this for me, son. I’ma go cast my vote now.’”