Books for January

Hey, just wanted to point out the new books in the bookshelf.

I've finished Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy and I have a review of it two-thirds of the way done — I'll post it once I get a chance to polish it up. I also had an interesting e-mail exchange with the author which I'll post about (I love this Internet thing, have I said that before?)

I'm about halfway through Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists which is pretty interesting, but not breath-taking. They're saying important stuff about the threats to capitalism of the well-to-do trying to protect their entrenched interests, and they say it well, but it doesn't exactly capture the imagination.

I've read one chapter (the one on Hayek) in The Mind and the Market but I'm looking forward to the rest. It's very well written and puts the ideas of modern economists in the historical and intellectual context in which the people lived – part biography, part history of ideas. The chapter on Hayek was a good summary of the ideas from the The Road to Serfdom and The Consitution of Liberty but it added some great details from his life in Vienna and the anti-liberal movements that made his "classical liberalism" originally untimely.

I posted below about Walter Russell Mead's article on the Jacksonian tradition in foreign policy. And now I've got his Special Providence cued up to read next.