2022 in Books

December 30, 2022

It was a good year for reading: I have not read so many pages since my first semesters of college in 2015.

I spent much of this year thinking about, in Tyler Cowen’s phrase, the “production function” of famous intellectuals. Where do their ideas come from, and what is required to catapult an idea from a single mind into the world?

1. The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (Leo Damrosch, 2020). Afflicted by depression, the bachelor Samuel Johnson forms a weekly dinner club of convivial and interesting friends. The club later grew to include such luminaries as Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith.

2. The Magician (Colm Toibin, 2021). A dramatic account of the life of the German author and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann.

3. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynman, 1985). Scientific insight comes from childlike wonder and play.

4. Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Problem of Scientific Credit (Till Duppe and E. Roy Weintraub, 2014). Economists – and few others – may find this history of interest.

5. Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham, 1915). This novel is underrated. Some of its best scenes describe the mental gymnastics employed by a group of art students in Paris who dream of greatness despite continued evidence of their own mediocrity.

What I learned

• Parts of Kansas are populated by the descendants of the so-called Russian Mennonites, a German-speaking group that originally fled to Russia under Catherine the Great in 1763 to avoid service in the Prussian military. By 1870, however, the Russian government was reconsidering the special status of the Mennonite farmers, and they fled again to North America. From Great Plains by Ian Frazier (2001).

• Most open-source software projects are not large, decentralized creations like Linux. Instead, they are small, modular, and centrally directed by one or a few maintainers. They function more like Twitch streams than Wikipedia. From Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal (2020).

• Robust population growth and limited farmland have forced the Amish to expand into small-scale manufacturing, construction, and service industries. Despite this economic transition, retention rates remain high. From The Amish by Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt (2013).

• Many eastern states derived a substantial portion of their revenues from a tax on banks during the 1800s. Some states taxed bank capital directly: Massachusetts collected a 1 percent tax on bank capital that generated more than half of its ordinary revenue between 1820 and 1860. Other states, such as Pennsylvania, owned stock in state-chartered banks. Thus, Massachusetts sought to maximize the total size of the banking industry by encouraging entry, while Pennsylvania looked to maximize the profits of its chosen champion by restricting entry. From The Interaction of Taxation and Regulation in Nineteenth Century U.S. Banking by John Joseph Wallis, Richard E. Sylla, and John B. Legler, collected in The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy.

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