Blind Squirrel Finds No Food

It's a good sign that there are critics of The Redistribution Recession, and that so far every one of them admits that he hasn't read any of it. I'm trying to think about how I could encourage such behavior, because any citation is a good citation.

With enough attempted criticisms and a little luck, the law of large numbers predicts that non-reading critics will eventually put forward something that might be valid. That's what's impressive about this admitted non-reader's piece: it makes quite a few claims about the book and every single one of them is false! I'm sure because I HAVE read the book ... many times.

(please click through to take a look: it has a nice picture and page views are the reward I mentioned above)

Example: The book allegedly does not address specific criticisms (without reading a book, how do you know what's missing from it?), when in fact I anticipated these criticisms years ago and devote entire chapters of the book to them.  (Oxford owns the copyright, and I will not steal from them in order to further help non-readers by reprinting or paraphrasing those chapters here or elsewhere on the internet.)

I understand that reading takes time, so in order to help the blind squirrels find an acorn every once in a while, I have prepared a www page (with Oxford's permission) with a brief summary of the book, a brief Q & A about the book, and a short video presentation.

Another alternative, or prelude, to reading: take a look at the opinions of some people who have read the book, or are currently reading it:

• Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal
• Tyler Cohen at Marginal Revolution
• Matt Kahn at Green Economics
• Robert Barro
• Jerry Hausman: "...an innovative analysis of our current economic woes which should cause most economists to rethink their views of what has gone wrong."
• David Neumark
• Stephen Bainbridge

"Rethinking one's views" is even more costly than regular reading, which is one more reason to talk, blog, or curse about the book without actually reading any of it.  Even opening to page one could prove to be expensive.