Newmark's Door

Alex Tabarrok's mostly favorable review of a new book.

Nate Hilger’s [sic] has written a brave book. Almost everyone will find something to hate about The Parent Trap. Indeed, I hated parts of it. Yet Hilger is willing to say truths that are often not said and for that I would rather applaud than cancel.

Hilger argues that the problems of poverty, pathology and inequality that bedevil the United States are not primarily due to poor schools, discrimination, or low incomes per se. The primary cause is parents: parents who are unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world. Since parents can’t teach the necessary skills, Hilger calls for the state to take their place with a dramatic expansion of not just child care but collective parenting.

Favorable review of Amity Shlaes's new book, Great Society: A New History.

Book review:

Seven Deadly Economic Sins is a must read for the general public, policymakers, and students of economics who wish to gain an understanding, at a philosophical level, of the economic fallacies that continue to circulate in common thought and among certain policymakers, along with a convincing rebuttal of each, placed in the context of why getting it right matters for human progress.

To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men: People are entitled to their opinions and I'm entitled to think that banning or challengig these two books is just . . . stupid.

Related: "Here Is The Difference: The Left Is TOP DOWN, The Right Is Bottom Up".

I haven't read the two Tetlock books, but there on my ever-expanding list.

I haven't read it, but Howard Zinn richly deserves a good debunking.

Well, you know, according to the old saying, what the road to hell is paved with.

Highly favorable review of a short--200 pages--"elementary economics book we’ve been waiting for," Visible Hand.

(Three other good choices I'd recommend for those looking for such a book are Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, Paul Heyne's The Economic Way of Thinking, and Harold Winter's Trade-Offs: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning and Social Issues.)

This interested me because the five-paragraph essay being taught in high schools and (I think) freshmen comp courses has always seemed to me to be a Potemkin Village of writing and teaching it is probably counterproductive. It seems the author, John Warner, thinks so, too.

(It looks to be a reprint of a whole book. Which would mean the link is surely a copyright violation. If you want to pursue the author's argument, I urge you to buy a copy of the book.)

I'll quibble a bit with Charles Murray and "a lot of others". Of the ones I've read I think A Conflict of Visions is his best book.