Peter Leeson discussed the economic and business lessons we can glean from pirates on Fox Business yesterday.

William McGuire (1917–2009) began his career as a newspaper reporter in his beloved home town of St. Augustine, Florida; it wasn’t long before he was offered a job offer by the New Yorker, where he served as a reporter and editor with distinction for many years. Bill was deeply committed to the causes of world peace and social justice, and it was in this spirit that he left this secure job in 1946 for a position as an “all-purpose writer/editor” in the office of the Secretariat at the fledgling United Nations.

But it was in 1948, when Bill accepted an offer from Kurt and Helen Wolff to work as an editor at Pantheon Books, that Bill found his life’s work.  At the time, Pantheon just happened to share a cramped walk-up office at 41 Washington Square with a new organization founded by Paul and Mary Mellon, to which they’d given the peculiar name of “Bollingen.”  It wasn’t long before Bill was recruited by the Bollingen group to edit the first titles in the Mellons’ ambitious publishing plan, and only a few months later he found himself on the subway ride home with the manuscript for Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces under his arm.  By 1951, Bill was named Executive Editor of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung.

It was our own good fortune that in 1967, when the Bollingen publishing group found its new home at Princeton University Press, Bill McGuire joined the Press staff as Executive Editor of the Bollingen list, which at the point had as many unpublished projects as published titles.  Not long after Princeton took over the series, Princeton announced the publication of a landmark book, The Freud/Jung Letters, brilliantly edited by William McGuire, which was quickly hailed as a monument in intellectual history. The Times of London wrote, “It is as if Voltaire and Rousseau, or Lenin and Trotsky…had written to each other everyday”; Psychology Today devoted an entire issue to the book.

In 1982 Bill announced his retirement, to take effect that December, following the publication of his indispensable history of the Bollingen enterprise, Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past. The Press threw a gala party to celebrate his career and bid him farewell, and presented him with a bound book of personal letters sent in for this occasion by such Bollingen luminaries as Joseph Campbell, Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, Lord Kenneth Clark, and Mircea Eliade.

In the years following his retirement, Bill continued to research and publish on subjects related to Bollingen, including a history of the Bollingen Prize in poetry and its controversial award to Ezra Pound, in Poetry’s Catbird Seat: The Consultantship in Poetry in the English Language at the Library of Congres, 1937–1987; he also published a study of the novels of William Dean Howells, another native son of St. Augustine.  Bill remained a friend and advisor to the Press on all matters Bollingen through the last decades, and gave us invaluable advice on the publishing of Jung’s seminars and the groundbreaking electronic version of the Bollingen edition I Ching.

We will dearly miss our longtime friend, colleague, and author.

The Staff of Princeton University Press

We were thrilled to learn the other day that bestselling PUP book ANIMAL SPIRITS: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, by George Akerlof and Bob Shiller, was included on the shortlist for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2009 award.  Our congratulations to George and Bob on the publication of this tremendous, important, and timely work.

Princeton has just published a new book by Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy at UCLA and crime policy expert, called WHEN BRUTE FORCE FAILS: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. The book has been generating much discussion as Kleiman proposes an innovative strategy for real and rapid change in the way this country deals with crime and punishment. Instead of instituting brute-force incarceration, substitute swiftness and certainty of punishment, and enforce probation and parole conditions so that community corrections become a genuine alternative to incarceration.

What’s exciting to learn is that Hawaii has created a program for dealing with crime and drug abuse called HOPE that uses many of these principles, and it’s generating much interest and discussion because of its documented success. In fact, the Honolulu Star Bulletin has just published an article about the successes of the HOPE program, and about how other states and even other countries are looking to institute similar program. Kleiman is interviewed in this article and his book mentioned. Read the article here.

And as a follow-up to the article, the Honolulu Star Bulletin published an editorial praising the program as a real and successful alternative to the current state of crime and punishment in the U.S. Here is an excerpt from the article:

“The program is in contrast with the failed “Three Strikes and You’re Out” system in California, where the prison population has soared from 76,000 in 1988 to nearly 167,000 today. California spends more on incarcerating adults than it pays to educate 226,000 students in its 10-campus University of California system.

HOPE has drawn worldwide attention and is being considered in Washington, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and New Jersey as a model for convicts sentenced to probation or serving parole following prison terms.

[Circuit Judge Steven S.] Alm [who conceived the program] was invited to discuss drug policy in Portugal in April and has agreed to a similar agenda at Stockholm with the Swedish Carnegie Institute in November.

Mark A.R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA and an expert on drug policy, said of HOPE, “As a recidivism prevention program, it’s unmatched, and as a drug treatment program, it’s unmatched.”"

Read the entire editorial here.

Amid much fanfare, the embargoed title, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities publishes today. David Leonhardt offers the most provocative and arresting discussion of the book in the Economic Scene column of the NY Times. He is also responding to readers’ comments at Economix. I am itching to add on to the feedback, so here goes.

Hugh Fullerton questions whether we should focus on graduation rates so much. One of the most surprising findings in the book involves the intergenerational effect of college graduation. Students who have parents who completed a college degree (not attended some college), are more likely to graduate themselves. Slight improvements now, will have huge benefits for later generations.

And, David Crane mentions drop-out rates of freshmen, but the research in Crossing the Finish Line finds that 44% of drop outs occur after the sophomore year. Drop-out is a threat throughout college, but most universities focus their retention efforts on freshmen and sophomores. They might see good results if they extended this support through the complete collegiate experience.

Additional media coverage of the book

Chronicle of Higher Education excerpt
David Glenn writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education
Scott Jaschik writing for Inside Higher Ed
Justin Pope writing for the Associated Press
Education Next video interview with Matthew M. Chingos

Mary Beth Marklein writing in USA Today

The Invisible Hook by Peter Leeson is now available as an audio book. Download your copy today at Audible Books.

Calling our current system of health care and private insurance “a nightmare of inflation, waste, and bureaucratic intrusion,” Colin Gordon, professor in the history department of the University of Iowa and author of Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America, offers 5 lessons from earlier attempts at health care reform: Let’s be clear what we are talking about, don’t move furniture into a burning house, sometimes half a loaf is worse than nothing, beware of HMO’s bearing gifts, don’t believe the myths.  Click through to read the complete article.

Six times in the last century (most recently in the early 1990s), health reform has appeared on the national stage, only to be chased off by anxieties about state power, the promise of private alternatives, and the political clout of doctors and employers and insurers.  The results are equally notorious: We spend nearly twice as much on health care as any other country. We insure a dwindling share of the population.  And we routinely crowd the bottom of any international ranking of health outcomes.

Not surprisingly, given these familiar facts and changing of the guard in the nation’s capital, health care is once again at center stage. “From Maine to California, from business to labor, from Democrats to Republicans,” as Barack Obama waxed optimistically during the 2008 campaign, “the emergence of new and bold proposals from across the spectrum has effectively ended the debate over whether or not we should have universal health care in this country.”

Not so fast.  Despite assurances that this time things will be different—that the stakes have changed, that powerful interests are now on board, that Congress will be coddled into cooperation—there is a pall of familiar failure settling over the health care debate.  The same sense of urgency and optimism accompanied past stabs at reform, all of which were spectacular failures.  What lessons does this history offer?

The complete article is available after the jump.

The book trailer for Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age is available now.  Copies are just now being distributed and the official publication date will be in October. The author has an North American tour planned and we’ll post dates here, soon.

Have a listen to this conversation between PUP author Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Mark Memmott of NPR’s The Two-Way blog. Mark writes on the blog:

I came upon Mayer-Schonberger’s thinking in Wired magazine. His premise intrigued me because I’ve always wanted to know what the world looked like thousands of years ago, what great historical figures sounded like — and what life was like for my grandparents and other ancestors I never knew. Here was someone making the case that there might be a downside to my thinking.

We spoke by telephone — Mayer-Schonberger was in Seattle. He was sympathetic to my thinking, but argued that it’s not good if “whatever we do, whatever images are taken of us, will be around for decades to come” — and available to use against us.

Copies of Viktor’s book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age have just arrived in our warehouse this week and will soon be available everywhere.