Results for “vargas llosa” 17 found
Mario Vargas Llosa on Liberty
Mario Vargas Llosa in the WSJ:
There are those who in the name of the free market have supported Latin American dictatorships whose iron hand of repression was said to be necessary to allow business to function, betraying the very principles of human rights that free economies rest upon. Then there are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.
What is lost on the collectivists, on the other hand, is the prime importance of individual freedom for societies to flourish and economies to thrive. This is the core insight of true liberalism: All individual freedoms are part of an inseparable whole. Political and economic liberties cannot be bifurcated. Mankind has inherited this wisdom from millennia of experience, and our understanding has been enriched further by the great liberal thinkers, some of my favorites being Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They have described the path out of darkness and toward a brighter future of freedom and universal appreciation for the values of human dignity….
Many cling to hopes that the economy can be centrally planned. Education, health care, housing, money and banking, crime control, transportation, energy and far more follow the failed command-and-control model that has been repeatedly discredited. Some look to nationalist and statist solutions to trade imbalances and migration problems, instead of toward greater freedom.
…The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another’s rights. It is a search to which I’ve dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake.
I am thrilled that Mario Vargas Llosa, Lech Wałęsa and economist Robert Higgs will receive the Alexis de Tocqueville Award from the Independent Institute (where I am research director) at our Gala on Nov. 15, these remarks were written for that occasion.
Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize
That's for literature, sadly he never had the chance to win a prize for economics, as his political career as a Peruvian classical liberal was cut short by electoral defeat. He has many fine books but I have two particular favorites: The War of the End of the World (serious and epic, concerning a millenarian revolt in Brazil) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (a fun story and spoof of telenovela culture). Conversation in the Cathedral is sometimes considered a classic but I find it unreadable. I suspect his early The Green House will resonate more with Latin Americans. His last major novel, The Bad Girl, was entertaining but not entirely satisfying and it reminded me a bit too much of an older man writing about sex. The Feast of the Goat is a very good study of political power. Here are previous MR mentions of Mario Vargas Llosa.
Here is Wikipedia on Vargas Llosa. Alex has done a good bit of work with Alvaro Vargas Llosa, son of Mario and a prominent writer on classical liberal themes, and perhaps he will relate some of that to us.
Saturday assorted links
1. What a corruption scandal in Singapore looks like.
2. Vargas Llosa uh-oh? (New Yorker)
3. Astral Codex Ten: comments on British economic decline.
4. FedNow will enable speedier payments.
5. One take on the current Chinese economic slowness. A good, non-hysterical piece.
6. Stupid bluster about Suwalki. But don’t think this is not a major issue in the longer term.
What I’ve been reading
1. Trevor Latimer, Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism. I say the correct answer here is culturally specific. Nonetheless this is a good and useful book marshaling arguments against localism and in favor of centralization, including with respect to the value of liberty.
2. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe. On the thinkers who have influenced him, including Adam Smith, Hayek, Berlin, Popper, and Ortega y Gasset, among others. All of the chapters I quite liked. The story of the meeting of Berlin and Akhmatova I had not known. Not consummated, but intensely erotic and unforgettable for both of them.
3. Philip K. Howard, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. I am not sure about the “unconstitutionality” point, but the rest of this critique is right on target. Is this the next frontier for supply-side progressives?
4. Philip Bowring, The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State is a good overview and in general I favor explanatory, country-specific books. Once again, low productivity in agriculture is a big problem.
5. Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, The End of Nightwork is a Northern Irish speculative fiction tale about a group of people who stay a physical age for a long period of time, and then suddenly age many years at once. Uneven, but mostly interesting (I finished it).
There is Daniel Akst, War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance.
Bill Hammack, The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans. From an engineering perspective.
There is also Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors that Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration, and Everything in Between.
Useful is The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India, by Manan Ahmed Asif.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The Norwegian century continues (WSJ): “When Norwegian athletes take to the ice and snow at the Olympics, they don’t mess around: the Scandinavian nation of just 5 million has won the most medals of any country in the history of the Winter Games.”
2. NYT profile of Vargas Llosa, not just the usual.
3. Are we running out of trademarks? Recommended, worthy of its own post, but not easy to excerpt.
My favorite or most influential Spanish-language works
Greg Irving emails me:
Hello Prof. Cowen,
I wonder if you might be tempted to create a blog post, at your convenience, of Spanish language works, ideally read in the original, that have most impacted either a) your appreciation for some till then unknown nuance or beauty in the language or b) your knowledge of/appreciation for some aspect of life in general. Might you?
Quizás obviamente, soy alguien que va aprendiendo el idioma poco a poco sólo de interés y no de necesidad. Si usted se digna a crear una respuesta por este correo electrónico, o en su blog, me alegraría mucho. Gracias por todo el conocimiento que nos da en sus escritos y por leer mi nota.
My Spanish-language reading is slow, but these are the works I found it profitable to devote a great deal of time to. They have influenced me significantly, and mostly I found the English-language version a poor substitute. Here goes:
1. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones. This was super-slow going, but it is one of my favorite books of all time, philosophical and conceptual and in Spanish deeply hilarious. OK in English, but this book alone is almost reason enough to study Spanish.
2. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo. Imagine redoing parts of Dante, with more narrative, in rural Mexico and with lots of comedy. The English-language version does not come close.
3. Julio Cortázar, Rayuela [Hopscotch]. One of my very favorite 20th century novels, again unsatisfying to me in English, I would not recommend that you try at all. Also try his short stories, most of all Bestiario and Historias de cronopios y de famas.
4. Jose Donoso, El obsceno pájaro de la noche [The Obscene Bird of Night]. A masterpiece, quite neglected in the U.S., I found this one so hard I often had to juxtapose it with the English-language text to read it at all.
5. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Noticia de un Secuestro [Notice of a Kidnapping], and Vivir para contarla [Living in Order to Tell It]. Oddly, I think his greatest works are the non-fiction. But these are at least pretty good in English too, unlike what is listed above.
6. Pablo Neruda. Non-Spanish readers certainly have heard of him, or maybe like him, but don’t really have a sense of how he is one of the very greatest poets of all time. It is Canto General, a book-length narrative poem retelling of the story of the New World, that influenced me most, but I love all the classic Neruda poems.
I don’t find it so profitable to read 17th century Cervantes in Spanish, though the defect is likely mine. The Savage Detectives and One Hundred Years of Solitude I find as good in English as in Spanish; Marquez himself suggested that was true for this work. Vargas Llosa is “good enough” in English, except perhaps for the inscrutable Conversation in the Cathedral, which I cannot follow in either language. Javier Marías I find “good enough” in English. The Goytisolo brothers are often too hard for me, not fun in English but I can’t quite manage the Spanish, perhaps in my dotage. Fuentes has never clicked for me, period. Hombres de maíz, by Asturias, is especially good in Spanish and pretty much neglected in the English-speaking world.
What else?
The Global War on Drugs has Failed
The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.
…End the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others. Challenge rather than reinforce common misconceptions about drug markets, drug use and drug dependence.
…This recommendation applies especially to cannabis, but we also encourage other experiments in decriminalization and legal regulation that can accomplish these objectives and provide models for others.
…Break the taboo on debate and reform. The time for action is now.
- Asma Jahangir, human rights activist, former UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Extrajudicial and Summary Executions, Pakistan
- Carlos Fuentes, writer and public intellectual, Mexico
- César Gaviria, former President of Colombia
- Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico
- Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former President of Brazil (chair)
- George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece
- George P. Shultz, former Secretary of State, United States (honorary chair)
- Javier Solana, former European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Spain
- John Whitehead, banker and civil servant, chair of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, United States
- Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, Ghana
- Louise Arbour, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, President of the International Crisis Group, Canada
- Maria Cattaui, Petroplus Holdings Board member, former Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce, Switzerland
- Mario Vargas Llosa, writer and public intellectual, Peru
- Marion Caspers-Merk, former State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Health
- Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, France
- Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve and of the Economic Recovery Board
- Richard Branson, entrepreneur, advocate for social causes, founder of the Virgin Group, co-founder of The Elders, United Kingdom
- Ruth Dreifuss, former President of Switzerland and Minister of Home Affairs
- Thorvald Stoltenberg, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Norway
The report of The Global Commission on Drug Policy is very strongly worded and the commissioners are so stellar it will be difficult to ignore.
Which works ought to be read in their original language?
Gabriel Power, a loyal MR reader, asks:
What works really ought to be read in their original language? Does this suggest classes or types that are best read in the original? Does it suggest that some languages are poorly translated into English while others are well translated (indeed, possibly improved upon, e.g. Poe into French)? Why?
I can speak only to German, Spanish, and English. Borges and Goethe and Juan Rulfo are much, much better in the original and I believe they cannot be well understood or appreciated in translation. Vargas Llosa is an example of a conceptual, plot-driven Spanish-language author who translates quite well into other languages. Max Frisch requires German and in general German humor (please don't laugh) does not translate into other languages, less than English-language humor does. Shakespeare translates relatively well into German, but I wonder about other Shakespeare in other languages. I have always thought of Chekhov as requiring Russian, but that is speculation. It is hard for me to imagine James Joyce in any language but English, but most modern American authors can be translated OK, in part because they are not writing "word-rich" material.
Potentially "cheesy" material, such as Poe, often does better in another language. Raymond Chandler in German was excellent, as it added a layer of cranky mystery to the proceedings. I think of "word rich" and "subtly humorous" as hard to translate, so genre fiction is often better in another language.
What can you all add to this?
Assorted links
African Successes
From Shanta Devajaran at the World Bank’s blog Africa Can…End Poverty, a post on African Successes.
In recent years, a broad swath of African countries has begun to show a remarkable dynamism. From Mozambique’s impressive growth rate (averaging 8% p.a. for more than a decade) to Kenya’s emergence as a major global supplier of cut flowers, from M-pesa’s mobile phone-based cash transfers to KickStart’s low-cost irrigation technology for small-holder farmers, and from Rwanda’s gorilla tourism to Lagos City’s Bus Rapid Transit system, Africa is seeing a dramatic transformation. This favorable trend is spurred by, among other things, stronger leadership, better governance, an improving business climate, innovation, market-based solutions, a more involved citizenry, and an increasing reliance on home-grown solutions. More and more, Africans are driving African development.
A very interesting list of examples and case studies follows. My colleague at the Independent Institute, Alvaro Vargas Llosa has also edited a recent book on this theme titled, Lessons from the Poor.
Question: How does focusing on successes change our view of development?
Hat tip J-J Rosa.
The new Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez biography
One day [Alvaro] Mutis climbed the seven flights of stairs, carried two books into the apartment without saying hello, slapped them down on the table, and roared: "Stop fucking about and read that vaina, so you'll learn how to write!" Whether all GarcÃa Márquez's friends really swore all the time during these years we will never know — but in his anecdotes they do. The two slim books were a novel entitled Pedro Páramo, which had been published in 1955, and a collection of stories entitled The Burning Plain (El llano en llamas), published in 1953. The writer was the Mexican Juan Rulfo. GarcÃa Márquez read Pedro Páramo twice the first day, and The Burning Plain the next day. He claims that he had never been so impressed by anything since he had first read Kafka; that he learned Pedro Páramo, literally, by heart; and that he read nothing else for the rest of the year because everything else seemed so inferior.
That is from the new and noteworthy Gerald Martin biography of GarcÃa Márquez. This very impressive (and enjoyable) book was seventeen years in the making. It's also not a bad way to learn about the political and economic history of northern Colombia. This should make any short list of either the best non-fiction books this year or the best literary biographies. The reader also learns the probable origins of the famed spat with Mario Vargas Llosa (p.375); it had to do with a woman, namely Vargas Llosa's wife.
Foul Weather Austrians
I am puzzled by the resurgence of Austrian Business Cycle theory among Sachs, Krugman, Baker and many others who you would not ordinarily associate with the theory. Sachs, for example, writes:
…the US crisis was actually made by the Fed… the Fed turned on the monetary spigots to try to combat an economic
slowdown. The Fed pumped money into the US economy and slashed its main
interest rate…the Fed held this rate too low for too long.Monetary expansion generally makes it easier to borrow, and lowers
the costs of doing so, throughout the economy. It also tends to weaken
the currency and increase inflation. All of this began to happen in the
US.What was distinctive this time was that the new borrowing was concentrated in housing….the Fed, under Greenspan’s leadership, stood by as the credit boom gathered steam, barreling toward a subsequent crash.
What is puzzling about this is two-fold. First, there is no standard model that I know of (say of the kind normally taught in graduate school) with these kinds of results. Second and even more puzzling is that the foul-weather Austrians don’t seem to draw the natural conclusion from their own analysis.
If the Federal Reserve is responsible for what may be a trillion dollar crash surely we should think about getting rid of the Fed? (n.b. I do not take this position.) The true Austrians, like my colleague Alvaro Vargas Llosa, have long taken exactly this position. So why aren’t Sachs, Krugman et al. calling for the gold standard, a strict monetary rule, 100% reserve banking, free banking or some other monetary arrangement? Each of these institutions, of course, has its problems but surely after a trillion dollar loss they are worthy of serious consideration.
Nevertheless, I haven’t heard any ideas, from those blaming the crash on the Fed and Alan Greenspan, about fundamental monetary reform. (Can Sachs, Krugman et al. really believe that it was Greenspan the man and not the institution that is to blame? That seems naive.)
Instead, the foul weather Austrians seem at most to call for regulatory reform. But that too is peculiar. Put aside the fact that banking is already heavily regulated, have these economists not absorbed the Lucas critique? In short, suppose that whatever regulation these economist want had been put in place in earlier years. Would the crash have been avoided or would the Fed have simply pushed harder to lower interest rates? After all, the Fed lowered rates for a reason and if the regulation reduced the effectiveness of monetary policy in creating a boom well then that just calls for more money.
My Law and Literature reading list
The first real meeting of the class is today; we will be reading and viewing the following:
The Bible, Book of Exodus and later selected excerpts.
Herman Melville, selected stories, including "Bartleby"
Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony."
Snow – Orhan Pamuk
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Leo Tolstoy – Great Short Works, including Hadji Murad and Ivan Ilyich
Eugene Zamiatyin – We
Jose Saramago – Blindness
Jack Henry Abbott – In the Belly of the Beast
Fernando Verissimo – Borges and the Eternal Orangutans
J.M. Coetzee – The Life and Times of Michael K
Law Lit, by Thane Rosenbaum, selections
Mario Vargas Llosa – Who Killed Palomino Molero?
Francisco Goldman – The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?
Films: Battle Royale, others, including I hope some new releases.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet, by John Armstrong. The author does not demonstrate overwhelming expertise but this is nonetheless not a bad place to start on the most neglected of all the great writers.
2. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla. Why Schleiermacher really matters, how Kant painted himself into a corner trying to solve the problems laid out by Rousseau, and why it all springs from Hobbes. I found this well above average for its genre, though you must have a taste for Straussian-like books where big ideas clash at the macro level and there is little attempt at any kind of empirical resolution.
3. How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom, by Garry Kasparov. This is a fun book, except that life mostly doesn’t imitate chess. Chess is characteristic for its lack of self-deception; it is hard to avoid knowing where you stand in the hierarchy and excuses are few and far between. That’s why most chess players are depressed. Kasparov seems to save his self-deception for politics; let’s hope he is still alive a year from now.
4. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. This favorite book of Jason Kottke is first-rate non-fiction, it is also one of the best books on the Cold War.
5. The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa. One of the best studies of the psychology of political power and the connection between tyranny and the erotic. A fun albeit sometimes harrowing read. Another superb translation by Edith Grossman, might she be the best translator ever?
What I’ve been reading
1. Days on the Family Farm, by Carrie Meyer. An interesting economic study of life on an early twentieth American family farm, based on personal diaries, and an antidote to anyone who thinks that all GMU economics faculty are like the bloggers you know.
2. Theory of Clouds, by Stephane Audeguy. I loved this novel, which was the rage in France but sadly will die here stillborn. Think Julian Barnes, Sten Nadolny, or Kazuo Ishiguro. Short, fun, dreamy, and conceptual. Its quality illustrates one of my favorite book-buying algorithms, which is to snap up serious foreign fiction translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so severe.
3. Free Trade Reimagined, by Roberto Unger. This is the fourth book this year to challenge the doctrine of comparative advantage, a more important fact than any argument in the books themselves. The book is weak on empirics but it does present the sophisticated version of the anti-free trade arguments. I don’t believe in open borders, so I suppose I’m not a free trader either. Unger is smart, smart, smart, but that doesn’t mean he should be Minister of Long-Term Planning in Brazil, which he is. Here’s the whole thing on-line.
4. The Bad Girl, Mario Vargas Llosa. That makes two wonderful novels in one week. I don’t enjoy all of his recent work, but this one is very fun, hearkening back to the tradition of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The Edith Grossman translation is first-rate as always.
5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross. Ross won’t quite say it, but he tries to convince the reader that
the twentieth century is the best century for music, ever.
That’s without pushing serialism too hard or resorting much to popular
music. Sibelius, Janacek, Messiaen, and John Adams are among the heroes in this story. If you
are only going to buy (and read) ten books on music, ever, this should be one of
them. Here is one good review. Here is a Jason Kottke interview with Ross, very interesting.
It was an amazing week for reading (the best since I’ve started doing MR) mostly because it was an amazing week for flying. There’s more to come…