“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. I” by Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara Haveland)

This is the first novel in a seven volume collection by Balle. The conceit, in a nutshell, is simple, “He is waiting for me. My name is Tara Selter. I am sitting in the back room overlooking the garden and a woodpile. It is the eighteenth of November. Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November. I no longer expect to wake up to the nineteenth of November and I no longer remember the seventeenth of November as if it were yesterday.”

Tara’s husband, Thomas, is not living through whatever it is that she is. “We were living in two different times. That was all. Two times that had flooded their banks. At a place where rivers meet and converge, a kind of temporal Mesopotamia where the Euphrates and the Tigris are merely two different names for water. We were doing fine in Mesopotamia.” But, inevitably, the day(s) start to wear on Selter’s psyche. “76 days was too many. The distance was too great. I stood in the kitchen with the notebook in my hand and knew that too many days had come between us…. I couldn’t carry on with our repetitions. The fog had lifted, the landscape stretched out clear and sharp before me and we were not waking to the same day.” Still, life, for both husband and wife, moves along, of sorts. “The distance is shortest at night. When Thomas is asleep there is only the ceiling between us, a thin line between two forms of time. I sit in a room that holds the world open and keeps the distance between us as short as possible. He calls the ceiling the floor. I call the floor the ceiling. But these are just words, not a distance but a line that keeps us connected.”

“The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered” by Erwin Dekker

Dekker correctly emphasizes that Austrian Economics is better thought of as the study of the social sciences more broadly: the study of human action and, specifically, the study of human interaction and exchange with one another- praxeology and catallactics. There were various "circles" who met regularly during the fin de siecle and inter-war eras in the many cafes of Vienna. They would argue, drink, and even sing songs, but most often they debated about the bigger questions of what made civilization tick- culture, history, institutions, and traditions. The stars of what became labeled the "Austrian School" tradition were Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, and Schumpeter. While differing in economics widely, what largely connected them was their methodological individualism, their radical subjectivity, and their use of marginal analysis in evaluating the economy. While maintaining that economics was a value-free (social)-science, they exposited that markets were the best means of conveying dispersed information widely, through the price system. Markets contained both civilizing and restraining urges by creating a space for the communal interaction of goods and ideas. The lasting contribution of the students from Vienna was to approach economics with humility, that knowledge is too immense, too dispersed, and too diverse to be accumulated by any one man, and thus it is best for the economist to think of himself as a constant learner of partial knowledge and fragments of ideas, rather than a scientist, teacher, or technocrat. Furthermore, economics cannot be studied without studying “the stuff in between”: language, law, tradition, and history- the things that make up a culture and create a civilization.