I hope you are enjoying your summer. I have decamped Texas
for the Colorado Rockies to be with my wife where fishing, hiking, biking,
kayaking, and visits by family each await us as viable answers to the question,
“What do you want to do today?” These
are the things that make life grand. In
addition, my mind has been wrestling with the question exposed by Thomas
Piketty’s 2014 study, Capitalism in the
Twenty-First Century: is there a bad—really bad—side to capitalism? I have set his work aside Ayn Rand’s 1967 edited
volume Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal and
am scratching my head with both hands.
More on that in my next post when the scratching ends and pen meets
paper.
In the mean
time, I want to let you know that sometime this November—if my publisher’s
schedule holds—my study of presidents, religion, and foreign policy will be
released by Palgrave Macmillan, titled Presidential
Faith and Foreign Policy: Jimmy Carter the Disciple and Ronald Reagan the
Alchemist. I give you fair notice
here in part so you can save some of your earnings from summer’s odd jobs since
Palgrave is pricing the book somewhere north of a Benjamin. I hope their sense of demand exceeds my joy/relief
in its completion. Otherwise, they will
have plenty of doorstops with Carter and Reagan’s faces printed on the cover.
In addition
to my ruminations on Rand and Piketty’s assessments of capitalism, my mind is
stumbling through a new thesis whose working title is “The Certainty
Trap.” It is a critical analysis of
decision making—by presidents, corporate chieftains, and even us lowly
commoners—that observes what happens when the so-called ‘knowns’ are granted
inordinate meaning in decision making, even though in post-analysis the same
knowns often had little effect on the outcomes.
And, of course, how can we avoid this trap?
Cheers for now.
