Books

I have been looking forward to this podcast. It dropped today. I was too busy “at work” (I work from home on Wednesdays) to listen. Then in the evening I wanted to tell my kids that I could not sing “Wheels on the Bus” another time for them because I had a podcast I really wanted to listen to. Of course that doesn’t really work with a toddler. The upshot is that I’ve only listened to half of it.

Here’s a quote that I thought was interesting

There could be a lot of benefits to that. I went to Ireland. It was the last international trip I took. It’s a beautiful country, very successful in a lot of ways, but obviously, a really empty country. If you’re working on a book about a billion Americans while going across from Dublin to Galway, I could not help but be struck. It’s like, “Where is everybody here? Couldn’t we do more?”
Matt Yglasias

One of the interesting questions when you think about packing more people into prosperous countries is why must we focus on making congested cities larger. There really is a lot of land around.

I know of “blighted” neighborhoods near me that already have streets and ample parking and just everything that you could want except rich neighbors. The shrinking cities in cold places seem like the ideal candidates for where more people could go.

I haven’t read Matt’s new book. I do not endorse it, since I don’t know what is in it. However, I like the fact that he has a vision, and I’m excited to read it.

For now, I will not write blog posts on the weekend. This weekend I made a little progress reading through (500+ page) The Price of Peace about John Maynard Keynes. This is not an economics textbook, although you will come away from it with a better understanding of “Keynesian economics”. The author presents the most intriguing parts of a life that could fill both a salacious tabloid and a respectable financial newspaper.

Here’s a story that surprised me:

Previous chapters describes Keynes’ involvement in winning World War I. He had a literal seat at the table for negotiating resulting peace and reparations agreements. Before the war, intellectuals from central Europe were exchanging ideas with Keynes at Cambridge University.

The horrific WWI pitted some of these Cambridge friends against each other, since some were British and others happened to be born in Hungary or Austria. Some died and never got to re-join the conversation. Brilliant Ludwig Wittgenstein ended up on a POW camp near Italy after the war.

Keynes used his government privileges to get Wittgenstein’s manuscript shipped out of the POW camp and into the hands of Bertrand Russell of Cambridge. This led to the English-language publication of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922. According to The Price of Peace, Keynes’ own work on philosophy was completely eclipsed by Wittgenstein’s book. The book that might easily have ended up burned or thrown in the garbage of a POW camp.

Would Keynes and Wittgenstein blog if they were alive today? Would they have produced brilliant books, or would they be too distracted by Reddit and video games?