I am still struggling with Kenneth Minogue’s The Servile Mind. I do not think any of the reviews that I have seen present a satisfying summary. I probably will take on the challenge myself at some point. I cannot tell whether my attachment to the three-axis model helps or hurts me in getting perspective on the book. He clearly dislikes the oppressor-oppressed axis, and he thinks that those who view society in those terms are necessarily headed in a statist direction that undermines individual moral character. He wants to champion individual moral choice over what he calls the “politico-moral world” of collectivist ideals. He sees individualism in moral choice as a unique characteristic of modernity, and he sees in the ideologies that bemoan “inequality” a pull backward toward traditionalism.

The rest of the books in my pile are review copies. Edmund Phelps’ Mass Flourishing overlaps a bit with Minogue, actually. In his concluding paragraph, Phelps writes,

a full return to high dynamism will require that those modern values prevail again over traditional ones: Nations will have to push back against the resurgence of traditional values that have been so suffocating in recent decades and revive the modern values that stirred people to go boldly forth toward lives of richness.

Phelps’ view of the past forty years is basically stagnationist.

Jay W. Richards’ Infiltrated suggests that the low-income-housing advocates (a) caused the financial crisis and (b) are still active politically. He describes Herb and Marion Sandler’s California savings bank in somewhat ambivalent terms. He writes,

some 70 percent of the company’s loans had substantial down payments, contrary to the subprime practice of offering loans with zero down.

His main indictment of the Sandlers is that they sold their bank at the peak of the bubble and then used the profits to fund left-wing political organizations. A strange book.

Derek Bok’s Higher Education in America is much more sanguine than I would be. He writes,

there is surprisingly little evidence that attending a highly selective college with impressive average SAT (ACT) scores produces exceptional improvement in the cognitive abilities of students.

A few pages later, with no sense of irony, he asserts,

The reason why so many capable students from low-income families do not apply to a selective college is that they are poorly informed.

Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. They indict India for its inequality and lack of infrastructure for its poor.

In 2011 half of all Indian households did not have access to toilets…compared with less than 10 percent of households lacking this facility in Bangladesh and only 1 percent or so in China.

I think that if we understood why this is the case, we probably would know a lot more about India than we do. Dreze and Sen make it sound like a lack of willpower on the part of the Indian elites, but my guess is that is not the whole story.

Ohanian, Taylor, and Wright, editors, Government Policies and the Delayed Economic Recovery. Proceedings of a conference dedicated to bashing Obama-era policies, except for Robert Hall, who did not get the memo.

In my reading, the primary source of the current state of the economy is simple–it’s that people aren’t buying enough stuff…The non-household part of private expenditure–that’s plant and equipment investment–seems to have actually outperformed its normal response to a collapse of consumption. The source of low output and employment in today’s economy is the huge decline in household spending.

Hasan Comert, Central Banks and Financial Markets: The Declining Power of US Monetary Policy. Based on a dissertation out of the left-wing, post-Keynesian U. Mass Amherst. I have high hopes for this book. From the introduction:

there has been a gradual decoupling between the Fed policy rate and both quantities and asset prices in financial markets. In this sense, the whole period [since the 1980s] can be seen as a period of decreasing effectiveness of central banks because their influence over financial markets has gradually decreased.

Expect to read more from me on Comert and Minogue, and possibly Phelps. Probably not the others.