Week 1 of reading

January 12, 2026

I’m not really sure how I want to configure these blog posts, so bear with me.

Books

Finished: The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati

Started: Hav, Jan Morris, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Leonora Carrington

Rereading/Picked up again: The Sailor from Gibraltar, Marguerite Duras Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov

Essays

I really enjoyed reading “The Case for Prohibiting Vice” by Charles Fain Lehman. I don’t know much about jurisprudence, admittedly, so I appreciated the discussion of the evolution of conservative arguments against social vices. Here is the article.

Economic reading of the week

A goal of my weekly reading is to broaden my knowledge of the field; hence, I will try my best to exclude papers and articles directly related to my work currently.

One source of inspiration for my weekly reading comes from the AER’s “Top 20” Articles, a selection from its first one hundred years of publication.

Last week, I decided to read Kuznets (1955).

This article, and much of Kuznets’ work, has formed the basis for discussions regarding income inequality in contemporary economic research. While this article lacks empirical foundations (and this is by choice!), it provided the basis for how international organizations, such as the IMF and World Bank, viewed the relationship between inequality and economic growth.

Of course, as with many older publications, the conclusions of this article have been supplanted by more recent work, most notably by Robert J. Barro and Thomas Piketty. Nonetheless, it was a very worthy read, and a wonderful (and not too quantitative) start to my series.

I also read an article on Kuznets curves and American income inequality from Branko Milanović for VoxEU.

This week, I want to shift gears and read more about labor and trade.

Until next Monday.