Helen Thompson, Diane Coyle, and more for PS Read More

The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr; Anointed with Oil, by Darren Dochuk; and more The PS Say More Newsletter | [View this message in a web browser]( [PS Read More]( In this week's edition of PS Read More, we share recommendations from Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. We also highlight a recent work by Diane Coyle, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. And don't miss recommendations from Sergei Guriev, a former chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and a professor at Sciences Po in Paris, and Ashoka Mody, Visiting Professor of International Economic Policy at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Helen Thompson Recommends... [Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America]( By Darren Dochuk This is an extraordinarily compelling book about oil’s place in US history and the spiritual dreams and nightmares attached to oil as the decisive modern energy source. I wish I had read it before I started writing Disorder. Dochuck shows that there is this continuous tension between what John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company did and represented and the wildcatters who created twentieth-century oil-America. Reading Dochuck’s book can bring any number of epiphanic moments, whether about Ronald Reagan, the Christian right’s relationship to Israel, or Woody Guthrie. [Last Call at the Hotel Imperial:]( [The Reporters Who Took on a World at War]( By Deborah Cohen I found myself quite deeply moved by Cohen’s history of the group of freewheeling American journalists who filed stories from around Europe and Asia during the inter-war years. These people were caught up in the big forces at work in the history of the twentieth century, and they were both exhilarated and terrified by what they saw and heard. All of the characters are trying to understand what it means to live in history, and are in some sense defeated. Cohen writes beautifully about time and experience. [The Irony of American History]( By Reinhold Niebuhr I reread Niebuhr’s classic a couple of months into Russia’s war – when US President Joe Biden’s administration appeared tempted by the idea of using the war to deal a serious strategic blow to Russia. Niebuhr’s meditation is centered on the possibility of nuclear war. Stockpiling atomic bombs to prevent a world war was, for Niebuhr, the tragic dilemma facing our civilization, and he did not think Americans’ historical experience equipped them with the capacity to face that dilemma head-on. His critique is of innocence, but throughout the book, he is just as concerned with transcending a tragic perspective, to which human life cannot be reduced – even, he insists in this civilizational predicament. Don't miss Thompson's recent [Say More interview]( in which she explains why European countries cannot end their energy relationship with Russia, highlights the link between Chinese demand for oil and gas and Russia’s war on Ukraine, calls for an American oil strategy, and more. [Click here to read](. By a PS Contributor [Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be]( By [Diane Coyle]( Coyle says: “Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is And What It Should Be is my plea for criticisms of economics to stop focusing on tired old straw men – "Why does economics use so much mathematics?" "Why does it make unrealistic assumptions about behavior?" – and instead focus on the discipline's actual weaknesses. I highlight a number of those weaknesses in the book, such as a lack of diversity in the profession and a particularly serious failing as a social science. Economics suffers from the positivist claim that the discipline deals only with objective facts, even though economists are always advising about 'good' and ‘bad’ courses of action, and thus implicitly making value judgements. And the workhorse models economists use to assess policy decisions still do not reflect the characteristics of the digital economy, such as the fact that data (unlike, say, grain) are not depleted when one person consumes it. In her recent commentary "Rethinking Supply Chains," Coyle shows how many of today’s global production problems have been decades in the making. [Click here to read](. More Contributor Recommendations Sergei Guriev Recommends... [The Revolt of the Public And the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium]( By Martin Gurri Given recent developments in the US, now is the time to read (or reread) this 2014 book, which explores the political implications of widespread access to mobile broadband Internet. In fact, Gurri predicted many of the events of the last six years – including Donald Trump’s improbable rise and the Brexit campaign’s success – and has recently released an updated edition examining them. A 2019 [paper]( I wrote with Nikita Melnikov and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, based on a large global dataset, provides quantitative evidence for Gurri’s main thesis: that digital devices and a vast information sphere can undermine confidence in authorities. (From 2020) [Read more](. --------------------------------------------------------------- Ashoka Mody Recommends... [Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers]( By Richard Neustadt and Ernest May “Look back to look ahead,” the authors write in this 1986 book – a must-read for historians. In looking back, they advise, don’t get distracted by bureaucratic and technical explanations. Instead, focus on political motives at key moments in the storyline, for these motives endure – and shape the future. (From 2020) [Read more](. [Subscribe to PS Premium now.]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [LinkedIn]( Project Syndicate publishes and provides, on a not-for-profit basis, original commentary by the world's leading thinkers to more than 500 media outlets in over 150 countries. This newsletter does not entitle the recipient to re-publish any of the content it contains. This newsletter is a service of [Project Syndicate](. [Change your newsletter preferences](. Follow us on [Facebook]( [Twitter]( and [YouTube](. © Project Syndicate, all rights reserved. [Unsubscribe from all newsletters](.