What I Just Read

Reading this famous book opens a window into the cultural and ethical milieu of early 19th century Europe. We see an idealized family facing severe challenges in an unknown and exotic part of the world, and doing so without despair or pessimism. To a modern reader, the Robinson family might resemble  The Cosby Show : the father comes across as a bit of a pedant, the children speak in complete and grammatically-correct sentences [1] , and the family solves problems in the book-chapter equivalent of a 30 minute TV segment. Other dubious elements of the story might amuse the adult reader: see for example their island's impossible array of wildlife and botany, or the family's ability to MacGyver almost anything out of anything. And yet one can easily see how this would be a wonderful and ethically nutritious story for a young person to read (or have read to him or her), as it conveys a range of non-cynical messages that are rapidly disappearing from the modern era: on not being id...

This book is a transcription of a lecture series on inflation given at New York University back in 1969 by speakers Arthur Okun, Henry Fowler and Milton Gilbert. These three men, all important "experts" in their day on managing the economy, and all speaking with great confidence in the correctness of their policy prescriptions, had no idea how wrong they would be--about everything. As a result, this book indirectly teaches humility, and it once again teaches how incredibly useful it is to read books outside of the time period in which they were written. Each speaker holds forth on various orthodox economic ideas of that era: presumed trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, how to "fine-tune" the economy, and (most hilariously) the critical importance of gold as the foundation of the international monetary system.  Today, we can look back on these confidently-given speeches with rich irony, knowing that in less than a year, the 1970s would dunk on all three sp...