It’s a pleasure to be involved in the editing of a brilliant book, and that’s the project to which I’m devoting the weekend. (That and working with a friend who’s returning to Baghdad on Monday to develop a business plan for an Iraqi institute and related membership society to promote liberty in Iraq.)
Olaf Gersemann, American correspondent for the German business weekly Wirtschaftswoche, has updated, revised, and substantially refocused for an American audience his outstanding work Amerikanische VerhÃ?Â?Ã?¤ltnisse: Die Falsche Furcht der Deutschen vor dem Cowboy-Kapitalismus(“American Conditions: The Unjustified Fear of the Germans of Cowboy-Capitalism”). Olaf examines a number of beliefs about the American economy that are widely held by European intellectuals and writers at the New York Times and then compares them to the evidence, to the disadvantage of the former. Olaf is really an outstanding economics reporter — not the kind who started on the sports page or covering cats stranded in trees, but a trained economist who works easily with statistics and high level economic analysis and who can then translate what appears in the American Economic Review or the official statistics of government bureaus into everyday German or English. The American edition is scheduled to appear from the Cato Institute in the Fall of this year — but that’ll happen only if I get back to my work!
P.S. I should point out that heavy lifting on the project has been undertaken by Olaf, by Jens Laurson as translator, and by Beth Kaplan, my colleague at Cato, who has undertaken to revise the translation into more standard and flowing English.
Will the book be available through Cato? In considering the european perspective of “cowboy capitalism”, some insights also documented in John Blundell’s and Gerald Frost’s IEA Discussion Paper “Friend or Foe: What Americans Should Know About the European Union” in the “European Idea” section. This paper is also somewhat reminiscent of Charlotte Twight’s Dependent on DC in its style.
It will be available from Cato this Fall….IF I finish up the revisions. (It’s more work than I had expected, but this is really going to be a wonderful book. I’ve learned an awful lot from working on it.)