Not by you
Somewhat surprisingly, the distinguished writers convened by the New York Sun to offer their picks of the year's best books found nothing by You. They did, however, find books by authors including Mark Steyn, Efraim Karsh and Robert Kagan. One surprise entry that caught my eye is a book that uses the Yanomamo bushmen of South America -- celebrated as multicultural heroes in grades K-5 of the elite St. Paul Academy and Summit School -- for comparative purposes:
In the long history of economic thought since the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations,"a dozen or so works stand out as seminal in their exquisite blend of data and theory and epochal boldness in attempting to answer a big question. Pace Smith, the newest addition to the canon is Eric Beinhocker's "The Origin of Wealth" (Harvard Business School Press, 527 pages, $29.95), which dares to answer how humanity made the transition from small bands of hunter-gatherers to giant nations of consumer-traders. Contrast, for example, the Yanomamö people of Brazil, whose average annual income has been estimated at the equivalent of $90 per person per year, with the Manhattanite people of New York, whose average annual income has been estimated at $36,000 per person per year. That dramatic difference of 400 times, however, pales in comparison to the differences in Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), a retail measure of the number of types of products available), which has been estimated at 300 for the Yanomamö and 10 billion for the Manhattanites, a 33 million times difference! Mr. Beinhocker employs evolutionary thinking, complexity theory, and economics to explain how this happened.Take a look at the New York Sun's interesting compilation of "The year's best books."
