Transepochal Steps

After hearing George Kenney interview James K Galbraith, author of The Predator State, I got on Alibris.com and grabbed a copy. It is quite a good and thoughtful book about the state of economics and economic politics with a lot to say to all sides. Not a top 10 for me but still worth the read.

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E.F. Schumacher’s little book of philosophy, A Guide for the Perplexted, is a classic and a gem. At just 140 pages it makes a crystaline statement about the roles of science and philosophy. Mostly, the book establishes the limits of Science as a guide to living outside of its mechanistic and “convergent” areas or endeavor. His argument establishes a strong and valuable foundation for a return to values and approaches which were formerly the province of religion.

It is a must read.

William R. Catton’s Overshoot was very popular in the early 1980s when it first came out and has been largely dismissed with many of the other 1970s and 1980s books on ecology, overshoot, and the like. It is a shame. It is the best thing I’ve read in this genre and still very much worth the read.

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Read Bernard Lietaer’s The Future of Money which got a good review somewhere a while back. I couldn’t find a copy locally and the copies on the Web were all too expensive. Then I learned that the local library system joined an extended circulation system that includes a bunch of libraries and snagged a copy from The Libraries of the Claremont Colleges!(?). Thanks to them and LINK+!

The Future of Money is one of the better books about the way the Western (US, UK, etc.) money system works and the history of recent efforts at work-arounds for some of the short-falls and limitations of the fiat money approach. It is a good source for history of some of the more popular alternative local/alternative currencies. It is more than a little preachy and dated though a tightening up and a rewrite of some of the fluffier sections would make it a must have.

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I’ve been reading Galbraith’s book on the 1929 crash and the depression. Eerily familiar. It’s a primer on what to ask and think about these dark days. It’s all about the ignorance of euphoria. It’s about the enablement of the bubble by the government (more passive last time). It’s about the lack of belief as it fell apart and the odd and useless gestures.

At least that time nobody put up a TRILLION dollars. The deleveraging of the investment trusts was horrific but virtually all of the real corporations underneath the fluff went under.

Great stuff, well written. Not sure why I never read any JK Galbraith before.

Frank Cunningham’s 1992 book, The Sculler at Ease is a small book with a lot of simply stated basic information about a complicated subject. There are a lot of books on the subject. Most are much bigger than this. But this one says it all without fluffing it up. Essentially, there is only a little you can say that applies to a lot of learning that can’t be written down.

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An Adirondack Passage by Christine Jerome is one of those autobiographical historical travel books. There are plenty of them. They mix up history with experience and a bunch of research kind of splashing it about on the way to and/or from somewhere. This was one.

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I forgot, I finished Hallie E. Bond’s encyclopedic Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks the other day. Hard to forget finishing something at large and complete. A bit specialized, I guess, but there’s a lot of content there
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I finished Stephen Jones’s Backwaters yesterday. It wasn’t qute as deeply religious an experience (joke) as Drifting (see the earlier post) but it is a good read. It all comes in the midst of the delivery of the new rowboat and the sculling classes at Jack London Aquatic Center

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Reading in fits and starts over the weekend. Tried The Road to McCarthy that a friend loved and am struggling to build momentum.Am part way through Hallie E. Bond’s Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks (see blog.the-guideboat.com for my bias on this). It’s good but draggy as well. More about that soon when I finish the bulk of the book but before the 1/3 of the book that’s bibliography and Appendix. Other than that, not much got read.

Orlov and Reinventing Collapse (see prior post) are rattling around making much more sense than Kunstler’s continuing shriek. Yes, the finanical system is tanking and yes this will hurt the housing market but no, we have no clue what the next turn of madness might be. An attack on Iran sends us a very different terible direction than a bailout of Chase Manhattan or Bank of America. It isn’t the steps that take us to collapse, it’s what do we do (as Dmitry actually discusses)? I’m sharpening a straight razon. That’s a skill I decided was part of step one.