David Frum's Top Book Recommendations

David Frum

By 1984, conservatives had won a lot of important arguments about public policy. But there are real problems in the mid 80s for Americans that conservatives don’t have the answers to and one of them is the urban crisis that started in the 50s and 60s and was only getting worse. Welfare dependency was getting worse; there was a new problem of homelessness that was very shocking to people living in big population centres. This was regarded by many people as a big indictment of the new, more open economy. This book is not exactly social science: in many ways it is a work of imagination. It relies on what he calls his ‘thought experiments’, where he invites you to look at problems from very different angles and other people’s points of view. He suggests thoughts in your head that you can’t prove exactly but seem persuasive when he shows them to you. What he tried to show was that the intensification of welfare dependency was not a result of the economy malfunctioning and that, paradoxically, the solution to the problems of the extremes and very ugly forms of poverty that were becoming visible was not greater support from government but less. These were ideas that had been germinating in conservative minds in one way or another – George Gilder’s Wealth of Poverty, published in 1981, had some early sketches of some of these ideas. But Murray really sealed the case. This is the book that was the intellectual antecedent of the welfare reform of the middle 1990s that now most people regard as one of the great successes of American public policy. [source]

Augustine 25

@pantspartyjon @sallykohn Yeah. Check out how well black families did prior to LBJ's great society programs. Read Charles Murray's book, Losing Ground for the details. [source]

Jonathan Gruber

Charles Murray took the economic concept of moral hazard – the concept that if you reward people for bad behaviour then they behave badly – and turned it into prose. Reading the book moved me a notch to the right. It posed a challenge to liberals – to get more rigorous in our analysis. It showed the simple facts didn’t look so good for us and that we needed to address questions like, “Is welfare causing women to become single mothers?” Murray really challenged the way I thought. [source]

David Frum

Great book by @DavidSatter on the politics of Russian memory, with perfect title: "It was a long time ago, and it never happened anyway." https://t.co/rDYR27nWHx [source]

Edward Lucas

I think David Satter has really captured the role of the past in the present in Russia. He’s a very experienced correspondent from the Soviet era who has maintained his interest in post-Soviet Russia. He’s a really energetic, gumption reporter – he just goes to places that foreign correspondents don’t often go to in the provinces and follows up stories he first reported in the 1970s. Also, he’s unashamedly interested in morality. He feels that the Soviet Union hollowed out both public and private morality and left people without a moral compass when it collapsed. He highlights some of the extraordinary instances of casual, amoral treatment of people by the system and by other people in the book. It’s quite a pessimistic book. He feels Russia has been poisoned by the Soviet past and until that poison is out of the system it is going to be sickened by it. [source]

David Frum

Such a great book, all who care about modern India should read it https://t.co/zOGZyJILVN [source]

Sanjay Jha

While on a serene sabbatical read @kapskom’a brilliant book on contemporary Indian politics; it spares no political party, while confesses that India could be perilously close to becoming a authoritarian state. The book is cathartic, given craven media cheerleading. https://t.co/I2a93no4lT [source]

David Frum

Simon’s point is that there is nothing less natural than a natural resource. All of these things are developed by an investment of knowledge, effort and labour. People do that according to whether it pays. The natural way to think about natural resources is that there is so much copper in the ground and then, after you’ve dug it all up, you don’t have any more. And what he argued is no, the world’s supply of copper is like the grocery store’s supply of cans of tomato sauce. So long as people are buying the cans of tomato sauce the store will maintain an inventory of tomato sauce. If there is more of a demand for tomato sauce, then the store will invest more capital to maintain a bigger inventory of tomato sauce. But the idea of how many cans of tomato sauce are there in the world, that is not an answerable question. How many do people want? What will they pay? [source]

Mark Pellegrino

@gnvrbyd @rickrepetti @rickballan @PrimateBri @platypusrex256 @LevelToPower @TeresaRJ3 @AynRand_is_Dead @wellsm8 @twisted_words @KeepItRealLuke @Musicfreak78 @lucidunity2 @angel_scoggins @TheMartyrSpeaks @MDSebach @_ad_libertatum_ @Anarchofree @_AuberonHerbert @comicalwagner @Harun07321327 @Anarchist_Rants @DuneSlaya @Mr_Abysmalyxia @SageThinker99 @HoundJuliet @LuciSoc @JohnFis87569576 @mwhi4321 @djpazzer @678GUY @RalphScenic @GeneKrupa18 @ProletariatRis1 @vrijomslachtig @anonbene5 @jeffreyatucker Basic economics is the Chicago school... part monetarist... it sane and easy to read. Try George Reisman: Capitalism. But you MUST read Julian Simon’s book The State of Humanity. [source]

David Frum

There was an accepted understanding of why it was that the economy went into this searing experience for a generation of Americans and what it was that got the US out again. [source]

Christina Romer

If you buy only one economics book, it should be this. The book is important for our understanding of the Great Depression, but its impact goes far beyond that. Friedman and Schwartz show us that monetary events and monetary policy have affected real output throughout American history. [source]

Robert Barro

It’s clear that a lot of the policies that were put into place were negative, but as to sorting out how important they were, that’s much more challenging. [source]