Books of the Year
January 2024
Herewith, a handful of must-reads from the year just passed. Four have been previously noted in these pages; one—the Norberg—will be new to you. In reverse order of urgency:
(5) The Myth of American Inequality by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early. The authors find that the hyperbolic claim of fearful and growing income inequality rests on one simple (and fatal) omission: the taxes paid by the allegedly rich, and the redistributive benefits paid out to the rest of the country. They find that though income inequality will never disappear—nor should it, in a society that rewards merit and initiative—the disparity is far less than the collectivist ethos supposes.
(4) Number Go Up by Zeke Faux. This is the cryptomania book—if any—that one ought to read, with all due respect to Michael Lewis. Mr. Faux is an energetic, peripatetic and gimlet-eyed reporter of the old school. And though he spends a lot of this book in Ahab mode—hunting the white whale of a particular stablecoin, convinced that its reserves are fictional—he manages however anecdotally to capture the full measure of the psychosis. I suggested last month that this book deserves an honored place in the literature of mania, and on a second reading am more convinced of this than ever.
(3) The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age by Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman. Also just reviewed last month, this is certainly the best business-oriented biography of the year—though like Faux's book, it will probably be overwhelmingly outsold by Walter Isaacson's genuinely appalling book on Elon Musk. The family dramas in the story cause it to read like a novel at times, and it is a worthy reminder that electronic computing didn't begin in Jobs's and Wozniak's garage, which may be a species of news to some younger readers. Overall, I now see, it's an object lesson, to the effect that nothing is a blue chip forever (especially in technology), and that there is no such thing as a one-decision stock.
(2) The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg. Every one of our tribe should have one clear and compellingly written book enumerating our free market beliefs, to which he/she can always refer back. Until further notice, this is officially mine. As Joakim Book wrote in a review on AIER (which see), the common denominator of all anticapitalism is still the fatally mistaken notion that trade and markets are zero-sum games—a cosmic battle over finite resources. Norberg's book is a spirited dismantling of this toxic misconception. And if there's not a whole lot that's new here—because there can't be—I found The Capitalist Manifesto to be the most readable treatment of the subject I've seen in a very long time. (So, apparently, did Elon Musk, but please don't hold that against Norberg.)
(1) Game Changer: Our 50-Year Mission to Secure America's Energy Independence by Harold Hamm. I can't possibly be objective about this wonderfully edifying, entertaining and informative book, for the simple reason that I love it so much. Harold Hamm, an energy billionaire up from the direst poverty, is a classic (maybe the classic) American success story for our time. His genius has been to see that horizontal drilling (combined with fracking) would unlock hitherto unimaginable reserves—and, as the subtitle suggests, at long last secure our country's energy independence. Mr. Hamm's account of our own government's holy war against this liberation—and the ways in which he rose to lead the counterattack—elevate this book from the level of a riveting autobiography to an economic (and moral) lesson. For all these reasons and more: my Book of the Year.