Damn right I'm going to post in June. And it's a triple book report.
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed
First of all, it was a relief to read any finance book just to get the taste of The Black Swan out of my brain (exhaustive summary: Nassim Nicholas Taleb is awesome and everybody else sucks, except Mandelbrot. It does have a hefty notes section that I could stand to take another look at though).
Second of all, it was all the better that this book is excellent. It takes a personal view of the events leading to the Great Depression by focusing on the lives of the central bankers of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. It is also a highly readable tutorial on the monetary background of the Depression. I quite enjoyed the description of the Wall Street bubble as a vortex, sucking up all the world's gold and causing deflation and recession in Germany well before the crash.
I was itching to read about an economic disaster, and I bought this to pass the time while we wait for something good on the current mess (This week's The Economist has some reviews but concludes we're still waiting. Maybe I should pick up Galbraith or Friedman and Schwartz for a comparison -- but I'm sure those are less readable.)
Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
This is one of those books that people write when their political party is on the ropes, or perhaps unconscious with a fractured skull. Those always involve a long list of policy proposals to win the voters back again and usher in a new era of prosperity, and the title is a clear indication that this is no exception. But perhaps more interesting in this one is the historical analysis.
In the view of these authors, it all comes down to families. The New Deal, they claim, was a political success in no small part because while fiscally liberal, it was socially conservative. They point to specific rules, such as the WPA's prohibition against women working if they had able-bodied husbands. By spending money in certain ways, the government enforced the norms of family life, trading freedom for stability and the foundation for postwar prosperity. But now the norms have changed and neither party has been willing to make a new new deal to support families again. Families are slower to form and quicker to break up, and individuals are asked to take on much more personal financial risk. Some of these changes are actually nice for the privileged yuppie, but they're awful for the working class. Douthat and Salam are clear on this: they think the working class is in deep trouble.
This all leads to interesting conservative spin on familiar centrist proposals. For example, since lengthening commutes keep people away from their families, we should invest both in telecommuting infrastructure and in more roads, especially with smart traffic- and hour-based toll rates. They're also willing to bet on the green-collar job. There's also some stuff I hadn't heard before, such as moving a big chunk of the welfare budget into wage subsidies. And of course there's a health care section. There are a lot of moving parts but you've heard them before: tax some of the employer-provided benefits and move the deduction to individuals, government reinsurance when one person's expenses exceed a certain level, require some individual savings toward health care.
In the end I have to wonder if this is really a conservative book. The family-oriented argument certainly ought to appeal to conservatives, but for precisely that reason I could imagine Bill Clinton or Barack Obama using the same lines when they're in full triangulation/reach-across-the-aisle mode. The trouble with this kind of book is that in your zeal to sound reasonable, you propose a list of ideas that could be adopted and sold by either party. They even credit Brad DeLong for the most complicated part of their health care plan. It's nice to know that our politics haven't really driven us that far apart, but does the lack of red meat doom this kind of aggressive reasonableness?
Interestingly, while the authors of course mention foreign policy in their historical review, they write nothing of it after that, aside from a few paragraphs about immigration. This is a source of domestic policy wonkery only.
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
I read The Chronoliths a few years ago and loved it. It's a tale of how the world could change if we all lost faith in the future, and I found it very creepy and a little too believable*. I then read Darwinia and it stuck with me a bit less, but it was familiar in that the world was shaken by an apocalyptic event and the protagonist had to go on a journey of personal discovery.
So I'm both happy and sad to see Spin is about an apocalyptic event that seems to steal the future of Earth, leaving the characters to sort through it from their personal perspectives. Wilson is very, very good at this but I start to wonder what else he can do. I prefer The Chronoliths, but this one sets up a sequel, which is sitting somewhere in arm's length as I write this.
*My own chronoliths are those blood-curdling Medicare cost projections, but that's another post. Or maybe the middle of this post again.