Books of the Year – 2022
AEI's annual symposium
Every year, the American Enterprise Institute publishes short blurbs of its fellows’ favorite books. Here are the excellent suggestions of thirty-some AEI colleagues. And here are four of my own.
Bret Swanson — Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
In Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley expand on the pathbreaking work of William Nordhaus and his famous “price of light” paper. They popularize the concept of “time prices” and extend it empirically to a wide range of commodities and basic products. The time price of a good is the amount of labor required to buy it. By using nominal prices and nominal incomes at every point, time prices might (1) better capture the full scope of productivity gains (both lower prices and higher wages) and (2) avoid arguments over traditional inflation measurements and methodologies, such as the consumer price index (CPI).
Tupy and Pooley conclude that, worldwide, “the effort required to buy one basket of commodities in 1980 bought 3.5 baskets in 2018.” The book’s forward by George Gilder is much more than a bonus chapter.
The material superabundance of the last few hundred years may, however, be masking current social pathologies and thus threats to future superabundance. No one has offered a more compelling hypothesis for our haywire politics than Mattias Desmet. In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Desmet builds on philosopher Hannah Arendt and offers a framework for thinking about how authoritarian movements emerge. The key is “mass formation” — a kind of hypnosis which can grip vulnerable populations and lead even large groups of normal people to commit terrible acts. Why, over the last few years, did censorship, propaganda, and even forced medical experiments explode in the supposedly free West? You will find the roots of this dangerous reversal — and the one known antidote — in Desmet’s provocative book.
In The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, Aaron Kheriaty, MD, plunges deeper into the particular failures of pandemic policy and just-around-the-corner bio-authoritarianism. Dr. Kheriaty was not only a medical professor at the University of California-Irvine, he was also its head of ethics. When he offered highly ethical (and, it turns out, correct medical) advice on the pandemic, UC fired him. Emerging bio-science can deliver amazing health benefits — but only if we recommit to unequivocal medical freedom for both individuals and physicians.
These threats of scientism against sanity and superabundance call us to review the fundamentals of social harmony and prosperity, suggesting we read Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger.
Merry Christmas!