More Sex Is Safer Sex or Machiavellis the Prince

More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics

Author: Steven E Landsburg

Economics is no longer the "dismal science" dreaded by college freshmen. In recent years, a band of economists has broken away from the charts and graphs of college textbooks, and begun to explain ordinary behavior in plain and often entertaining English. Steve Landsburg was one of the first of the new breed, in his book The Armchair Economist and long-running "Everyday Economics" column in Slate magazine. Now he is back, and more provocative than ever.
In More Sex is Safer Sex, Landsburg shows how the rational behavior of each one of us -- when combined together -- produces the often bizarre, seemingly irrational behavior of crowds. We all stand up at the ballpark, so none of us can see. We avoid casual sex, from fear of disease, and we thereby make sex more dangerous. Things really get interesting when Landsburg suggests ways to change the rules, and game the system. Why not charge juries if a convicted felon is exonerated? Why not have each member of Congress represent a national subset of voters, chosen alphabetically? Why not solve the ""overpopulation"" problem by having more children, who will help think of ways to improve our use of resources?
More Sex is Safer Sex will make you laugh and argue -- and it will make you think about the world around you in new and unforgettable ways.

Publishers Weekly

Economics books full of "uncommon sense" are more common after the success of Freakonomics, but this rambling survey of hot-button and quotidian issues viewed from a libertarian economic perspective doesn't measure up. Landsburg (The Armchair Economist) is sometimes pleasantly counterintuitive, but too often simply contentious. In using cost/benefit calculations to argue in favor of racial profiling or why we shouldn't care about the looting of Baghdad's museums, he strains to celebrate "all that is counter, original, spare and strange." While positing multiple solutions to interesting problems, he forces logical readers to confront uncomfortable positions--as in the title essay, urging chaste citizens to sleep around, thereby diluting the pool of potential sex partners with AIDS. But the chapters typically conclude without resolution--at one point, the author shrugs: "It's not easy to sort out causes from effects." One suspects that a rival economist could swiftly debunk many of Landsburg's arguments--for instance, his chapter praising misers (who produce but don't consume) depends on the assumption that all resources are fixed and finite. By the time he makes the head-scratching case that "it's always an occasion for joy when other people have more children," the reader may be in the mood for some plain old common sense. (Apr.)

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

New interesting book: The Economics of Imperfect Information or Leviathans

Machiavelli's the Prince: Bold-Faced Principles on Tactics, Power, and Politics

Author: Niccolo Machiavelli

Need to seize a country? Have enemies you must destroy? In this handbook for despots and tyrants, the Renaissance statesman Machiavelli sets forth how to accomplish this and more, while avoiding the awkwardness of becoming generally hated and despised.

"Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge."

For nearly 500 years, Machiavelli's observations on Realpolitik have shocked and appalled the timid and romantic, and for many his name was equivalent to the devil's own. Yet, The Prince was the first attempt to write of the world of politics as it is, rather than sanctimoniously of how it should be, and thus The Prince remains as honest and relevant today as when Machiavelli first put quill to parchment, and warned the junior statesman to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.

Table of Contents:

	Chronology
	Map
	Introduction
	Translator's Note
	Selected Books
	Machiavelli's Principal Works
	Letter to the Magnificent Lorenzo de Medici	1
I	How many kinds of principality there are and the ways in which they are acquired	5
II	Hereditary principalities	5
III	Composite principalities	6
IV	Why the kingdom of Darius conquered by Alexander did not rebel against his successors after his death	13
V	How cities or principalities which lived under their own laws should be administered after being conquered	16
VI	New principalities acquired by one's own arms and prowess	17
VII	New principalities acquired with the help of fortune and foreign arms	20
VIII	Those who come to power by crime	27
IX	The constitutional principality	31
X	How the strength of every principality should be measured	34
XI	Ecclesiastical principalities	36
XII	Military organization and mercenary troops	39
XIII	Auxiliary, composite, and native troops	43
XIV	How a prince should organize his militia	47
XV	The things for which men, and especially princes, are praised or blamed	49
XVI	Generosity and parsimony	51
XVII	Cruelty and compassion; and whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse	53
XVIII	How princes should honour their word	56
XIX	The need to avoid contempt and hatred	58
XX	Whether fortresses and many of the other present-day expedients to which princes have recourse are useful or not	67
XXI	How a prince must act to win honour	71
XXII	A prince's personal staff	75
XXIII	How flatterers must be shunned	76
XXIV	Why the Italian princes have lost their states	78
XXV	How far human affairs are governed by fortune, and how fortune can be opposed	79
XXVI	Exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians	82
	Glossary of Proper Names	86
	Notes	99