Love of Markets

A Brace of Book Reviews

1. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Reading Lewis' The Four Loves naturally enough got me to ruminating about love and I decided to reread this book. I last read it in my Junior Year of High School when it was assigned in my Humanities class (now that I think about it, that class had an odd set of books--Paradise Lost, Inferno, The Religions of Man, Man's Search for Meaning, The Art of Loving, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Fathers and Sons). I remembered nothing about the book. I just reread it and now I remember almost, but not entirely completely, nothing about it. The cover of my copy says "Nearly 200,000 copies in print at $3.00, now only 60[cents]" which I do not think is intended to advertise the discount nature of the contents of the book, but it might as well. As near as I can tell from the book, Love exists when you aren't so narcissistic, Love is hard to do, but by golly if we all just Loved a little more there would be world peace. Or something like that. There is something a bit odd about a book whose contents evaporate as soon as I read it.

2. John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
This s one of those Economic Books for Noneconomists, and on the whole it is a good one. It is a grand tour of the universe of markets, with plenty of interesting anecdotes. Indeed, the book is mostly anecdotes, strung together with some semblance of theory. It is, as I said, good--but not great. There are 229 pages of text. Had the book been 150 pages, I think it would have been extremely good--as it is, the book really drags toward the end. Even so, if you want to learn some economics, this isn't a bad choice.