24 June 2014

Coming this November


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.

No comments:

Post a Comment