Is it REALLY time for Socialism, Leonard Cohen and the Yom Kippur War, and more.
Econlib Newsletter June 2022
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Dear friends,
Happy summer! What does summer mean for you? Time on the beach? Time in the mountains? Time to just...be? Whatever it is, we're glad you've chosen to take Econlib along for the ride. And we've got plenty of suggestions for reading and listening all through the dog days of summer.Â
This month we have another new Liberty Classic, new book reviews, a new podcast, and more. Some highlights from the past month's conversation at EconLog are below, along with a short list of some of the other stuff we're reading.Â
Having read and reviewed Piketty's 2014 Capital In the Twenty-First Century, I—a Hayekian liberal—have long known that Piketty is a man of the far left, and I have no trouble dealing with even gaping ideological differences. What hurt my economist’s head was trying to make sense of a worldview that would approach plausibility only in an alternate universe in which the most basic principles of economics, as I understand them, don’t apply. Read More.
The Entrepreneurial Justice of the Market Process:
A View from Israel M. Kirzner’s Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice. By Rosolino A. Candela
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Israel Kirzner is best known for his explication of the entrepreneur’s role in generating social coordination in the market process. Entrepreneurship, according to Kirzner, is the propensity to discover previously unnoticed profit opportunities in an open-ended world of uncertainty... The importance of his work is not only reflected in its policy implications, but perhaps more importantly, in its moral implications regarding the institutional basis of a market economy: the right to private property and the distributive justice of income that flows from it.  Read More.
From Prometheus to Arcadia: Liberals, Conservatives, the Environment, and Cultural Cognition By Pierre Desrochers
In this new review, Desrochers traces the convoluted historical relationship of liberals and conservatives to the environmental movement. “… shouldn’t conservatives embrace environmentalism in light of their devotion to the preservation of the existing order? Shouldn’t progressives be inherently supportive of economic growth and technological change in light of their emphasis on reason over tradition?”  Read More.
The World's Got Talent By Arnold Kling
What's the best way to find talent today? In this months review, Kling looks at the new book from Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross. In short, personality matters. How to assess personality from the point of view of employers is trickier.  Read More.
EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious
Matti Friedman on Leonard Cohen and the Yom Kippur War
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In October 1973, an unhappy Leonard Cohen was listening to the radio in his Greek island home when he heard that Israel was at war. He headed to Tel Aviv, exchanging a personal and creative crisis for a national one. Absent a plan and even a guitar, Cohen wound up serenading Israeli soldiers at the front. Journalist Matti Friedman talks about his book Who by Fire with EconTalk host Russ Roberts and explains how a songwriter and a nation were transformed in the crucible of war. Explore more.
We obviously love podcasts here at Econlib, and we know you do, too. So we wanted to make sure you knew that our sister site, AdamSmithWorks, recently released a new podcast, The Great Antidote. While the topic of each conversation varies, host Juliette Sellgren asks each guest a terrific question:Â What's one thing that young people today don't know that they should know? The responses are fascinating... You'll find a lot of EconTalk favs in Juliette's collection; here are some highlights:
