Here's a review from the Chronicle of Higher Education of Amartya Sen's book – reviewed here recently. An interesting article by James Purnell, a thinking politician (there are some) in the current issue of Prospect also makes reference to it.

Pressure of work and builders and the start of term for my two boys have interrupted my blogging recently. Forthcoming, however, a review of James Boyle's The Public Domain…..

Now the US Justice Department has filed an objection to the Google books deal with the court, on anti-trust grounds. Quite right too. If Google gets the green light, no other entrant would be able to catch up and we'd be in the territory of the competition authorities having to think about enforcing a wholesale market – always difficult and contentious.

There's a very enjoyable review of three new books about pirates in the New Yorker. I particularly enjoyed this description of the author of The Invisible Hook:

Peter T. Leeson, an economist who claims to have owned a pirate skull
ring as a child and to have had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on
his right biceps when he was seventeen, offers a different approach.
Rather than directly challenging pirates’ leftist credentials, Leeson
says that their apparent espousal of liberty, equality, and fraternity
derived not from idealism but from a desire for profit. “Ignoble pirate
motives generated ‘enlightened’ outcomes,” Leeson writes. Whether this
should comfort politicians on the left or on the right turns out to be
a subtle question.

An economist with supply and demand tattoos – respect!

I found this post on Chris Blattman's blog about a recent paper by Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan looking at psychological explanations for the puzzle that poor people are willing to pay what seem like extraordinary rates of interest on short term loans. They look at a number of possible psychological explanations – behavioural development, I suppose, rather than behavioral finance. However, I think the reasoning in a book reviewed here recently, Portfolios of the Poor, is more persuasive. It goes that because of cash constraints, very poor people have a much shorter time horizon than the year assumed by such interest rate comparisons.

Also on the development front, an interesting blog post from Bill Easterly, about the imperial origins of development as a subject.

The Guardian Review has an interesting feature today on Jane Jacobs. It focuses on her book The Death and Life of American Cities, but Cities and the Wealth of Nations meant more to me and of course both anticipated and helped create the revival of recent years in urban economics.

Meanwhile, Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times writes about Google Books and asks a very good question. He begins:

Sceptics often ask of new government programmes: if it is so
worthwhile, why is the private sector not doing it already? A similar
question can be asked of companies claiming to be acting for the
general good: if the public needs it, why is the government not doing
it already?

If it will cost just $125m (the amount Google has paid) to run a non-profit book-rights
registry that
would  distribute royalties to authors, why isn't the public sector doing it? This is an activity which it seems clear should be part of the global public domain discussed in the previous post on this blog.