Books I read in 2024

Better late than never

From The Last Cruze, by LaToya Ruby Frazier.

Joe Studwell, How Asia Works. Arjun recommended this to me some years ago; I finally read it this year because I assigned it to my economic history class. It’s one of the best things I’ve read on late industrialization in Asia — it can comfortably go on the shelf with Alice Amsden’s Asia’s Next Giant or Chalmers Johnson’s MIT and the Japanese Miracle, and in fact I’d recommend it over them, both because it’s more current, and because this is a topic that really benefits from a comparative perspective. One thing I particularly appreciated was his emphasis on the critical importance of land reform as a precondition for industrialization, both because of the greater efficiency of small farms in the labor-surplus context of early industrialization, and because of the need to close off land ownership as an alternative to investment in industry.

Thomas A. Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America. A comprehensive history of the development of price-level statistics in the United States, which I read in the course of doing work on the money book. It’s an excellent work of narrative history which is equally attuned to the concrete work of producing price statistics, the theoretical questions of what they are intended to represent, the political stakes of debates over them, and the concrete purposes for which they are used. It’s a pretty specialized topic, admittedly, but if it’s one that you’re interested in, then this is the book to read.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital. I first read these many years ago in college, but reread them this year because the 13-year old still likes being read aloud to before bed and serious history is what he is into. The books are as good as I remembered; I would recommend them to anyone interested in how the modern world took shape in 19th century Europe. Hobsbawm’s communist politics aren’t overt, but they’re what make the books work: That everything builds toward the Russian Revolution gives them their propulsive force, rather than just being a catalogue of one thing after another.

Annie Ernaux, Exteriors and The Years. I read these this year, after reading her A Man’s Place last year. I didn’t find either of these quite as beautiful or as moving as that one, but they’re still great books. The Years uses a second person narration to seamlessly blend a personal narrative with the shared experience of a generation; I wonder, would this work for anyone who wasn’t born in the immediate postwar years?

Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism. This is another book I read because I assigned it for my economic history class. It worked perfectly for that purpose, both because it is a survey of the whole economic history of the United States from the 16th century to the present, and also because it has a strong central theme — the changing forms and meaning of capital as an organizing principle of economic life.

You can tell it was written by a historian rather than an economist — there are many more reproductions of painting and photos than there are charts or tables. Levy is a somewhat eccentric writer, and makes some quirky choices about how he approaches his topic — there’s a whole chapter based around a close reading of Melville’s “Confidence Man” as an illustration of the importance and difficulty of trusting strangers in a more mobile and urbanizing society, and the chapter on the civil war and reconstruction spends more time on how the war was financed than on changing labor relations in in the postwar South. But for anyone looking for a comprehensive economic history of the United States, I would very much recommend it.

Justin Torres, We the Animals. Laura recommended this one — the author is a friend of a friend. It’s a powerful, but lighthearted and poetic, book about growing up Dominican and gay in upstate New York. Like Ernaux’s The Years, it gets some its effect from the fuzziness of the protagonist, which gradually shifts from the three brothers collectively to the narrator alone.

Peter Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History. This book I also assigned to my economic history class, which was a mistake. If the book came out today, its garbled content would be a sure sign of AI slop. Did you know that enclosure in early modern England refers to a government requirement that all landowners put fences around their fields, which smaller landowners could not afford to do? (It does not). Do not read this book.

Joshua Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. This book, by the author of the magnificent Working Class New York, is one more that I read because I assigned it my economic history class. It tells the history of the factory through half a dozen iconic sites, from early 19th century Lowell, to early 20th century River Rouge, to Shenzhen today. While the broad outlines of most of the stories are broadly similar to what you would find in other histories of industrialization (the River Rouge chapter has considerable overlap with Levy’s chapter on the same topic) there’s also a lot here that was new to me, especially thanks to Freeman’s focus on the factory buildings themselves. One of the central themes of the book (which I touched on in a blog post) is how similar the experiences of factory work have been over the past two centuries, even when the broader social context is very different.

Stephen Marglin, Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First Century General Theory. I read this book partly because I recalled being very impressed years ago hearing Marglin give a talk based on the material in it, and partly in order to use parts of it in my graduate macro class. It turned out not to be helpful for that purpose, which is not a knock on the book — it’s just that with this kind of dense material you have to really focus on it if you are going to use at all.

The book presents itself as an effort to rewrite the theory of the General Theory in the language of contemporary economics. One thing I greatly appreciate about it is how attuned Marglin is to the real-world questions — both in Keynes’ time and today — that the theory must speak to. His central claim is that while the logic of Keynes’ argument does not work as he presented it, it does work when rewritten in terms of explicitly dynamic models. For this reason, much of the book is a deep dive into dynamics and various out-of-equilibrium adjustment processes, something that economists more often gloss over to focus on the ultimate equilibrium position. It makes a big difference, for instance, if we think firms that find themselves with excess inventory respond by reducing prices or by reducing output.

I have mixed feelings about the book. I certainly share Marglin’s conviction that Keynes offers profound insights into the capitalist process, which need to be reformulated to connect with modern debates. And the book’s discussions of different adjustment dynamics is brilliant and original. But I am not sure that the latter helps much with the former — Marglin’s “rescue” of Keynes is not, to me, very satisfactory.¹ So while there is a lot of great stuff in here, the book as a whole seems a bit less than the sum of its parts.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles. Laura assigned this to a class, so it was around the house and I picked it up. What a weird and engrossing book. Even though it’s imagining a future that now lies well in the past, it doesn’t feel dated because Mars, here, is just an allegory for the American West.

Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. I’ve always been fascinated by evolutionary biology, and evo-devo in particular. Among other things, it seems to me there’s a striking parallel between orthodox economic theory and the simplistic version of Darwinian evolution we’re taught in high school (and that’s now beloved of YouTube explainers.) The development of complex new forms is fundamentally different from movement toward an optimum within a given space of phenotypes — a difference highlighted by the kind of research into development described here. Evolution is not about selection between random genetic variation, but the result of preexisting systems that allow for the creation of complex forms, into which genes are just one input, often interchangeable with inputs from the environment or the organism’s own behavior. The best book I’ve read on this topic remains Mary West Eberhart’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution; but I learned a lot from this one too.

David Graeber, Pirate Enlightenment. This posthumously published book explores the mixed pirate-Malagasy communities in 17th century Madagascar, drawing on a handful of contemporary sources and later anthropological work on Madagascar (including Graeber’s own). The central concern is the same as in The Dawn of Everything: the existence of politics in premodern societies, in the sense of conscious, collective choices about how society should be organized; and the priority that many of these choices seemed to give to preserving freedom from personal domination or compulsion. I freely admit to being a big Graeber fan, but I was often quite irritated by the previous book; I think the picture is more convincingly drawn on the smaller canvas here.

A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman. I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to audiobooks while cooking and cleaning, and I find that narrative history and biography works very well for that format. This is a perfectly serviceable biography, covering all the important events in Bismarck’s life and career, providing the historical and political context, and engaging, sometimes critically, with the existing literature, while keeping to a reasonable length.

I have to say, the biggest impression I came away with is that Bismarck must be one of the most boring people ever to have played such a central historical role. Every major decision he made was, in Taylor’s telling, purely tactical, oriented to whatever short-term problem he was most concerned about at the moment. (The crowning of Wilhelm as Emperor of Germany, far from being the secret agenda of the war with France, was, in this telling, a last-minute improvisation to ensure that Prussia’s North German allies didn’t drop out of the war.) Once the immediate crisis was dealt with, he just kind of sat around waiting for the next one. Bismarck was, evidently, an educated and intelligent person; but you get the impression that as the avatar of the Juncker class, he aspired to stupidity as a positive virtue.

Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, translated by Tom Nairn. Another political biography I listened to as an audiobook. It’s an outstanding biography; written in the 1980s, when many of Gramsci’s contemporaries were still around, it draws on interviews by the author as well as the usual archival sources. A lot of the interest comes from the fact that Gramsci was located so precisely at one of the hinge-points of the 20th century; can you believe that he and Mussolini personally debated, on the floor of the Italian parliament, the class basis of fascism and whether it could be considered revolutionary? But Gramsci is also sort of the anti-Bismarck, not only in his personal background and the political project he helped lead, but also because he personally is a complex and fascinating individual who its delightful to spend time with, even in the mediated form of a biography. After I finished it, I had the thought: If a genie offered me an hour anywhere at any time in history, I’d like to spend it at Gramsci’s home in 1926, while he played with little Delio.

Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth. I read almost all of Munro’s books 15 or so years ago. I picked this collection up again after the story about her daughter’s abuse at the hands of her husband came out, to see if they read differently. They do, a bit. Mothers who abandon their children, or who overlook or ignore some danger to them, are a recurring theme in Munro’s work, and that hits a bit differently now. But mostly rereading them just convinced me, again, that Munro is the greatest contemporary writer of short fiction. This collection is one of her better ones, I think (there are always a few duds); it particularly highlights one of Munro’s other recurring themes, the presence but inaccessibility of the divine in the world, which we can perceive only as a kind of negative space around it, an absence or hole. (In this collection, the title story and “Pictures of the Ice” are two outstanding examples.) Anyway, I stopped watching movies by Woody Allen and Roman Polanski many years ago. And while I loved the Sandman comics, and my kids loved Fortunately the Milk (which I suppose should also be on this list), I wouldn’t bring a Neil Gaiman book into my home now. But reasons good or bad, I don’t feel that way about Alice Munro.

Eric Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. One astonishing thing you learn from books like this is how much writing survives from over three thousand years ago. It’s a like a whole other history before history, as far before ancient Rome as Rome is from us. What I like about this book in particular is how well it does the most important thing about writing about ancient civilizations — paying constant attention to how we know who we do know, and to how much we don’t and probably never will know. The book does not offer any definite answer its central mystery — why so many of the interconnected Mediterranean civilizations of the 2nd millennium BC collapsed around the same eponymous year — but to me that’s a virtue rather than a flaw.

Matt Strassler, Waves in an Impossible Sea. Strassler’s blog is the best thing I know on the internet for explaining fundamental physics to a general audience in a rigorous way. (His recent series on quantum interference is a tour de force.) So I was very excited when this book came out. I’m sorry to say I was rather disappointed. Strassler has an admirable commitment to avoiding shortcuts, or what he call “phybs”, and carefully works his way up from the most fundamental concepts (what is a field? what is a force?) in the most rigorous but nontechnical way. Unfortunately, clarity and precision come at the expense of breadth and depth; I can’t say I learned much of anything new from the book. Well, again, I am a religious reader of his blog; but then, you’d think that’s who his readers would be? Anyway, I definitely recommend his blog; if you’re interested in fundamental physics but don’t know anything about physics (I’m not sure how much overlap there is between those circles?) then you might also want to read the book.

Branko Milanovic, Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War. I read this because Tim Sahay and I were going to interview Branko about it, which ended up not happening. It’s an erudite and gracefully written book, as you would expect; but there’s something a bit off about it. As he acknowledges, income inequality as we think about it today was not really a concern for most of the authors he is writing about, particularly the earlier ones. So asking how they would answer our questions can lead to a weirdly off-center perspective, focusing myopically on the few instances where they discussed inequality in something like modern terms. It’s symptomatic that the chapter on Marx includes two full pages discussing whether Marx misquoted a single sentence from Gladstone on the distribution of wealth in England.

I’m a great admirer of Branko’s work, but this is not the book of his that I would recommend to people.

Jerusalem Demsas, On the Housing Crisis. I assigned this for a class I taught last fall on “the economics of New York”. I wanted something that would make the straightforward supply argument on housing costs, and this fit the bill. If you follow housing debates, you won’t find much new here. It’s a collection of her opinion pieces, mostly for The Atlantic; if you don’t have a subscription and can’t get past the paywall, I guess that might be a reason to buy this book.

Patrick Condon, Sick City: Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land. I assigned this for the same unit in the same class, as the other side of the argument. The housing market is extremely segmented and landlords have a great deal of market power, so housing costs have nothing to do with supply — that’s the position here. (This particular book also has a bit about covid.) Personally, I think both sides of this debate have valid and important points, which both of them then wrongly elevate into absolute truths. But that is a topic for another time.

John Scalzi – Old Man’s War and The Collapsing Empire. The 13 year old, who enjoys science fiction as well as history, picked up one of these. Yeah, they’re not suitable for a 13 year old. I ended up reading them both. I can’t say I liked them very much. A lot of familiar sci-fi tropes recycled, without anything much new being added that I can see. But I read them to the end despite not really liking them, so they evidently work on a basic what-happens-next level.

1. Marglin’s idea is that Keynesian unemployment can be understood as a situation where nominal wages are falling, but prices are falling just as fast so the labor market does not move toward clearing. This might have been true in the early 1930s, but it obviously won’t do as a general theory of unemployment, which is not normally accompanied by deflation. And even in the ‘30s, the biggest impact of falling prices was on the financial system, not keeping real wages too high.