Books

On December 13, 2011 the Asset Building Program hosted Professor Sheldon Garon, author of Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. While economists often claim people save according to universally rational calculations — saving the most in their middle years as they plan for retirement and saving the least in welfare states — there are substantial differences in savings rates across high income countries. For example, Europeans save at relatively high rates despite generous welfare programs, while Americans save little, despite weaker social safety nets. The assumption that generous social benefits will provide a disincentive to save doesn’t hold up.

Dwight Macdonald, the greatest American hatchet man, applied his merciless craft also to himself. When he collected his essays, he added footnotes, appendices, and other forms of addenda taking issue with his own writings.

This may be the most long-awaited single-volume biography ever. In 1981, the renowned cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis approached the pre-eminent cold war diplomat George F. Kennan about writing his life story. Kennan, who was 78 at the time, turned over mountains of papers, diaries, letters, even dream notebooks, on the condition that the book not be published until after he died. Who knew that he'd live to be 101, or that Mr. Gaddis would take more than a half-decade after his subject's death to finish writing?

The Asset Building Program is co-hosting an event Monday, November 7^th with the Pension Rights Center and AARP to discuss concepts put forth in Ellen Schultz’s book Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers. The event will feature the book’s author Ellen Schultz, Phyllis Borzi of the Employee Benefits Security Administration at the Department of Labor, Donald Fuerst from the American Academy of Actuaries, Karen Ferguson from the Pension Rights Center, Michael Calabrese from New America, and David Certner from AARP.

This Thursday October 27, 2011, the Asset Building Program and Economic Growth Program are co-hosting an event featuring the work of Robert Frank, professor of economics at Cornell University and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos. Frank’s book The Darwin Economy seeks to complicate our views on a few of the basic tenets of economic thought: the role of competition in the free market and the theory of the invisible hand.

The workout my credit card gets at Amazon is structured so I won't get repetition fatigue: I keep my reading list balanced between the highbrow and low, the fiction and non, the popular and the below-the-radar, the new and the old. Yet there is one realm I have long neglected: science fiction. Despite a youthful binge in Arthur C. Clarke, particularly the Rama books, I disdained science fiction for many years, considering it too short on humanity and too long on pointless technical specs.

Until Thursday, 88 out of 100 people who bothered to fill out Nobelprize.org's survey, had never heard of the Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer. 

Back in the day, when bad guys used telephones, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would listen in with wiretaps. As long as phone companies cooperated—and they had to, by law—it was a relatively straightforward process. The Internet, however, separated providers of communications services—Skype, Facebook, Gmail—from those running the underlying infrastructure. Thus, even if the FBI obtains a suspect's traffic data from their Internet service provider (ISP)—Comcast, Verizon, etc.—it may be difficult to make sense of it, especially if the suspect has been using encrypted services.

Until very recently books about cybercrime came in two forms. Some authors—the majority of whom had a national-security background—thought it their moral obligation to warn civilization of the impending arrival of an "electronic 9/11," a "Digital Pearl Harbor" or a "cyber-Katrina"—a catastrophe that no stock exchange or central bank would survive unscathed. Others—predominantly computer experts and academics—opted for a more humdrum approach, producing dry tomes full of impenetrable jargon.

In 1990, Daniel Yergin published "The Prize," a magisterial history of oil. Not the typical stuff of best-sellers, it became one anyway based on timeliness (coinciding with the first Gulf War), the originality of Yergin's thesis and his eloquence of expression. It was a top-to-bottom historical reappraisal of the late 19th and 20th centuries.