Book Bits: 18 May 2024

The Capital Spectator

● A Map of the New Normal: How Inflation, War, and Sanctions Will Change Your World Forever
Jeff Rubin
Adapted essay from book via The Globe and Mail
The world is engulfed in an ever-escalating global trade war. Virtually every day, new sanctions are being imposed, triggering reciprocal actions against Western goods.
Where will this lead? Can the West still win such wars, as it has done before? If not, what are the consequences of losing?
Along with sanctions has risen a new world order in which the United States and its NATO allies can no longer use their economic and military power to unilaterally dictate terms to the rest of the world.

● Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
Tom Chivers
Review via The Wall Street Journal
First articulated in the 18th century by a hobbyist-mathematician seeking to reason backward from effects to cause, Bayes’ theorem spent the better part of two centuries struggling for recognition and respect. Yet today, argues Tom Chivers in “Everything Is Predictable,” it can be seen as “perhaps the most important single equation in history.” It drives the logic of spam filters, artificial intelligence and possibly our own brains. It may soon help us work through tricky social problems like vaccine hesitancy. Once you start to look for it, Mr. Chivers says, you start to see Bayes’ theorem everywhere.
At its core, the theorem provides a quantitative method for getting incrementally wiser by continuously updating what you think you know—your prior beliefs, which initially might be subjective—with new information. Your refined belief becomes the new prior, and the process repeats.

● The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy
Ryan A. Bourne
Review via Reason.com
Prices are guardians of scarce resources, ensuring that these are allocated to their most valuable uses. Prosperity results from the encouragement given to the production of goods and services that people desire most.
There is someone else who sees the price system for its beauty and would like to protect it from continued government interferences: the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne. He has an excellent new book, The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy. It includes 24 essays written by some of the best economists in the business, each addressing a different aspect of today’s war on prices—the widespread and counterproductive ways governments are trying to control inflation or particular prices.

● The Coming Decline:

The full article is available here. This article was published at The Capital Spectator.