Adam Smith Institute

My choice this week is The Blunkett Tapes: My Life in the Bear Pit by, of course, David Blunkett MP (£9.49+pp). The working-class kid who overcame blindness to became a Cabinet minister is characteristically blunt as he talks about New Labour colleagues, his career and his two resignations. Amazingly for a politician, he admits where he got things wrong, so that should make it a collector's item. Check it out here.

My end-of-summer reading this week is Boris v Ken: How Boris Johnson Won London by Giles Edwards and Jonathan Isaby (our price £7.99+postage).

The London mayoral battle was both sensational and close. Here, written during the campaign, is the blow-by-blow account of the campaign by two of our leading journalists. The ups, the downs, the efforts of both the leading candidates to curb their natural daftness, the politics, the showbiz, the results and what they mean for Londoners – all these are described with a deft touch.

Buy it here from the ASI bookstore.

The Liberty Fund Books catalogue for Autumn/Winter 2008 that has just thudded onto my desk is both thrilling and dispiriting. It's thrilling because the contents are all so sound – Hayek,  Mises, Mill, Ricardo, Buchanan, Tullock, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, you name it. It's dispiriting because at 75 pages of (beautifully-produced) books, tapes, and DVDs being listed, I only wish I had the time to read, listen, and watch them all. Ah well. 

I'm glad to see a couple of Hayek titles coming in November, Hayek on Hayek and a series of wssays on liberalism and Austrian economics, The Fortunes of Liberalism, along with another collection from Mises, Planing for Freedom.

The full catalogue is available here but to order in the UK you need to call or email Liberty Fund's distributor, Gazelle Books ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ). It's a pity you can't just order online, particularly since Liberty Fund already have many of the titles already online and fully searchable in the Online Library of Liberty. So next time you're stuck of an Adam Smith quote, you can just scan The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments there instead of calling us. We'll be far too busy reading books from the Liberty Fund collection anyway.

The End of Politics: New Labour and the folly of managerialism, by Chris Dillow (£10.19 + postage, a 40% saving)

New Labour's distinctive idea is that equality and efficiency are partners, not enemies. But that's just managerialist ideology - the belief that trade-offs between conflicting values can be managed away. They can't. New Labour's main economic policies - tax credits, the minimum wage, expanding higher education and macroeconomic stability - have not removed the trade-off between equality and efficiency. But the managerialists have deeper flaws. They fail to recognize the multiple and conflicting meanings of equality and efficiency. And they assume that governments have knowledge and rationality that in fact nobody has.

So, says 'mumblling and stumbling' blogger Chris Dillow, let's scrap managerialism and replace it with genuine policies: ditch the idea that politicians can manage away social problems, and instead have a proper debate about conflicting ideals.
 

This is unashamedly another plug for Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy by iconoclastic doc Theodore Dalrymple, which I first reviewed back in January, and which our medi-blogger Dr Fred Hanson mentioned in his piece a few days ago.

Almost everything you know about heroin addiction is wrong, Dalrymple says. Heroin is not highly addictive; withdrawal from it is not medically serious; addicts do not become criminals to feed their habit; addicts do not need any medical assistance to stop taking heroin; and heroin addiction is more about mentality than biology. It's great stuff. And we've got it on special offer, well below the sticker price, for Adam Smith blog readers. You save nearly £4 off the bookshop price if you buy it from our online bookstore.

It was a great pleasure to see David Starkie again at the launch of his new book at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He is one of Britain's leading transport economists, and the new book is a collection of his thoughts on aviation markets – or the lack of them.

Naturally, the book tackles subjects such as whether the UK airport near-monopoly BAA should be broken up (answer: yes), whether airports can really be competitive (answer: yes), whether regulation is a good substitute for competition (answer: no), and how airport slots should be allocated (answer: price).
 
In his quarter of a century of thinking about such issues, Starkie has come to the conclusion that we need more markets, more competition, and less government control of aviation. He told the economists, think-tankers and indeed regulators at the launch party that Mrs Thatcher's government messed up airport privatization, wilting under BAA's insistence that its airport holdings – three in Scotland and three around London – could not and should not be broken up. Well, as ASI said in Sean Barratt's report Airports for Sale, the portfolio should have been broken up. Indeed, Starkie thinks that airport competition would be sufficiently robust that there shouldn't even be any price regulation of them, except possibly in the exceptional case of London's Heathrow – where all the world (for some reason I don't understand) wants to fly to.

The Best Book on the Market is now out at a station or airport bookstore near you. Need proof? Well, here's the author, Adam Smith Institute Director Dr Eamonn Butler, among the shelves of WH Smith at Gatwick Airport, on his way to a conference in Croatia. Unlike George Soros, Dr Butler believes that markets are orderly and self-correcting – it's politicians that get us into the swings of boom and bust!
 

This week I recommend The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything by Tim Harford (£12.53 + postage).
 
Harford's The Undercover Economist  showed how ordinary economics explained everyday curiosities, such as the outrageous price of a cup of coffee and the traffic jam on the way to the supermarket. His new book shows how the new economics of rational choice theory explains much, much more. Drug addicts and teenage muggers are rational. Suburban sprawl and inner city decay are rational. Endless meetings at the office and the injustices of working life? Rational. Economics explains why your boss is overpaid, and whether we should build more prisons, even whether to have sex, take drugs, and be honest. Racy stuff.

Buy it here from the ASI bookstore.

I was in my tuxedo under the blazing sun of Brighton for the annual Booksellers' Association dinner and awards (called the 'Nibbys' in the trade). I was there as a guest of Wiley's, whose imprint Capstone is publishing my book on markets, modestly entitled The Best Book on the Market, along with TV presenter Anne Diamond and other worthies. (Clarissa Dickson-Wright was on the next table – she and I are like that, you know).

Foyles cleaned up on the awards for the best bookseller – something that took even them by surprise. When I was at school this Charing Cross Road shop was revered among my teachers as 'the biggest bookshop in the world', capable of getting any book on any subject from any location. When I got to London in the late 1970s, though, it was starting to look very shabbly. Cluttered and confused, with a funny system where you chose your book, then went to another desk to pay for it, then came back again to pick it up. Christina Foyle, who lived in a penthouse on the top floor, was still holding her celebrated literary lunches, but the place was obviously dying.

In the 1980s, the rise of Waterstones and the like left it completely stranded, and the rational thing might have been to knock it down and sell the site for some big glass office block. But about eight years ago the family had a crisis meeting and brought in new management. They certainly seem to have turned it around.

Another winner was, inevitably Amazon.co.uk. But most of my bookie friends at the table told me that they never used the site, preferring bookdepository or play.com. For a believer in markets, like me, this was heartening news. Competition is a wonderful thing.

The Institute of Economic Affairs held a book launch this week for Eamonn's new book, modestly entitled The Best Book on the Market (subtitle: How to stop worrying and love the free economy). Eamonn told the gathered audience that he learnt the reality of markets in his father's garage, watching him deal with customers as his mother did the books. As a result, when he studied economics at university he quickly realized that the profs had it all wrong. By treating people like robots and trying to make economics a science, they stripped out everything human that actually makes markets work. Unfortunately, lots of bad public policy was (and is) based on these bad ideas.

And that's why Eamonn has written his book – to explain why markets work, why they are a good thing, and why politicians who try to 'perfect' them are evil. He's kept it short and accessible – and full of illuminating examples – so if you liked Freakonomics or The Undercover Economist but thought they were too long, this is the book for you.

Click here to buy your copy now.
 

I'm very pleased to see a new book by my friend David Starkie (no, not the TV historian, the transport analyst) called Aviation Markets. It comes in at a pricey £25 but it's a heavyweight item of 250 pages.

Basically, it's a collection of 17 reports that David has done over the last 25 years, including extensive editing and updating. They're organized in thematic sections, and put in context so that you get an understanding of the background to the issue, and can appreciate each paper's wider significance – including the extend to which current policy has been changed as a result of it.

But the main focus is one close to Adam Smith's heart – the role of the market and how economic and political policies help (or more often, hinder) it. Starkie is a great believer in the power of competition to solve the problems that politicians just can't fix. A useful message to everyone involved in transport: and not lost, I would hope, on people who work in or regulate other utility industries.

Buy it here.

When I began writing about "Common Errors" in early January, I had little idea how many there would be!  It seems that there are more erroneous views in everyday currency than I had supposed possible. However, a series became a book. I decided to stop at 101, for in Room 101 of Orwell's "1984" is the thing that everyone fears most. In this case it is the plausible assumptions that are completely mistaken.  By coincidence the starter courses in US universities and colleges are often designated 101 courses. The series which became a book is now "Freedom 101" and you can read about it here.

The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, by Robert Conquest

The splendid Robert Conquest has devoted his life to exposing the political distortions that spawn and appease tyranny. Whether discussing the political thinking of ancient Greece, the corrosive effect of Stalinism, or the inanities of the European Union, Conquest assesses the ravages of our past, the absurdities of our present, and the pitfalls that lie in our future. He's not exactly an optimist, but at least he identifies the problem. Politicians, mostly.

Buy it here from the ASI book shop.

The new book by our august Director, Dr Eamonn Butler, is now out. It explains in simple language how markets work and why the politicians who try to thwart markets or harp on about 'market failure' are in fact instruments of pure evil. Indeed, Dr B says that he's written the book so simply 'that even politicians can understand it' so let's hope they will take his message on board.

The book will be finding its way to a bookshop near you soon, but it's on Amazon, where you can actually flick through the contents pages – which contain intriguing headings as Zen and the art of price maintenance, That ol' black market, In God we trust – others pay cash, and (presumably a reference to Mrs Thatcher) Handbagging the state.

You can also read the first half-dozen pages, where Butler gets into the subject by describing his foray through a bizarre and rowdy street market in the wilds of China as he searched for someone to fix his trousers. And you can check the index, which references, among other things, Cabbage Patch Kids, Churchill, Coca-Cola, Princess Di, Hammurabi of Babylon, The Good Life, Hobson's choice, Nike shoes, Paying for lighthouses, and Probibition.

My favourite index entry is 'equilibrium, meaninglessness of'. As Butler says, when you get to this section in your economics textbook, 'rip it out'. An amusing and instructive read.

Buy it here.