Category: Books
Are cultural products getting longer?
Ted Gioia argues that cultural products are getting longer:
Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years…
Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes…
I’ve charted the duration of [Taylor] Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences…
I calculated the average length of the current fiction bestsellers, and they are longer than in any of the previous measurement periods.
Movies are getting longer too. Of course this is the exact opposite of what the “smart phones are ruining our brains” theorists have been telling us. I think I would sooner say that the variance of our attention spans is going up? In any case, here is part of Ted’s theory:
- The dopamine boosts from endlessly scrolling short videos eventually produce anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure. (I write about that here.) So even addicts grow dissatisfied with their addiction.
- More and more people are now rebelling against these manipulative digital interfaces. A sizable portion of the population simply refuses to become addicts. This has always been true with booze and drugs, and it’s now true with digital entertainment.
- Short form clickbait gets digested easily, and spreads quickly. But this doesn’t generate longterm loyalty. Short form is like a meme—spreading easily and then disappearing. Whereas long immersive experiences reach deeper into the hearts and souls of the audience. This creates a much stronger bond than any 15-second video or melody will ever match.
An important piece and useful corrective.
What I’ve been reading
Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. One of the best-written biographies I have read in years. I would not say it is close to my core interests, but if you think you might like it you will.
Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Never Known Men. I enjoyed this novel: “Deep Underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.”
J.P. Mallory, The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story. The best book I know of on the origins and unities of Indo-European languages. I had not known Edward Sapir was born in Pomerania. And “…the Keres people who occupy seven pueblos (villages) in New Mexico speak a language totally unrelated to any of their neighbours and their origins have been frequently disputed.”
Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn. One of the best Trollope novels it seems, even though it is not (yet?) clear what the plot actually consists of. Currency decimalization is also one of the side plots, who can argue with that?
Manu S. Pillai, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity. It may be fruitless to argue about this topic on-line, but almost all Westerners under-read when the topic is Hinduism.
What should I ask Nate Silver?
Yes, I am doing another Conversation with him, in honor of the paperback edition of his highly engaging book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Here is the last installment of a CWT with Nate, here was my first Conversation with Nate.
So what should I ask him?
Walton University?
Axios: Two grandsons of Walmart founder Sam Walton plan to launch a private university focused on science and tech, located on the company’s old HQ campus near downtown Bentonville, Arkansas.
…The future university plans to offer innovative, flexible pathways to jobs in automation, logistics, biotech and computing — fields crucial to Northwest Arkansas’ future.
Many colleges and universities were created in the 1960s and 1970s but the majority of elite R1s emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century, including notable private universities created from the entrepreneurial fortunes of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stanford, Cornell, Hopkins and Rice among others.
We are perhaps now seeing a return to that creative period with Walton, Thomas Monaghan, Patrick Collison (Arc Institute) and most notably Joe Lonsdale at the University of Austin. Tech provides both the funds and the impetus to build something new and different. As Tyler and I argued, online education and AI will change education dramatically, perhaps returning us to a now-affordable Oxford style-tutorial system with the AIs as tutors.
The University of Austin, by the way, has excellent taste in economics textbooks.
The High Cost of Self-Sufficiency
Mike Riggs and his wife dreamed of returning to the land. It wasn’t as easy as it looks on Tik-Tok:
How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s strawberry demand? I still don’t know. We dedicated 80 square feet to strawberries last season. The bugs ate half our harvest, and the other half equaled roughly what our kid could eat in a week.
Have you ever grown peas? Give them something to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heavens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost criminal misuse of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 minutes to shell a single serving. Meanwhile, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Walmart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.
…In addition to possums and deer, we’ve faced unrelenting assaults from across the eukaryotic kingdoms: the tomato hornworm caterpillar, the cabbage looper caterpillar, the squash vine borer, the aphid, the thrip, the earwig and the sowbug; cucurbit downy mildew, powdery mildew, collar rot, black rot, sooty mold, botrytis gray mold and stem canker; the nematode, the gray garden slug, the eastern gray squirrel, the eastern cottontail rabbit and the groundhog. All of these organisms reside in the North Carolina Piedmont and like to eat what we eat. Many of them work toward this existential goal while humans sleep, which is why the North Carolina State Agriculture Extension advises growers to inspect their plants at night. No, thank you.
…. In the early 1900s, one of my paternal great-grandfathers moved from urban Illinois to a homestead in Oklahoma. Our only picture of him was taken shortly before the Dust Bowl destroyed his farm. After his farm failed, he abandoned my great-grandmother and their children and migrated to California with thousands of other Okies. When my crops fail, I go to Whole Foods.
Some good lessons here in self-sufficiency, comparative advantage and the productivity of specialization and trade. Of course, it might have been easier for Mike had he read Modern Principles:
How long could you survive if you had to grow your own food? Probably not very long. Yet most of us can earn enough money in a single day spent doing something other than farming to buy more food than we could grow in a year. Why can we get so much more food through trade than through personal production? The reason is that specialization greatly increases productivity. Farmers, for example, have two immense advantages in producing food compared with economics professors or students: Because they specialize, they know more about farming than other people, and because they sell large quantities, they can afford to buy large-scale farming machines. What is true for farming is true for just about every field of production—specialization increases productivity. Without specialization and trade, we would each have to produce our own food as well as other goods, and the result would be mass starvation and the collapse of civilization.
Oh, and by the way, don’t forget Adam Smith, “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”
French fact of the day
De Gaulle was the target of about thirty serious assassination attempts, two of which — in September 1961 and August 1962 — nearly succeeded. For some anti-Gaullists, the fixation on de Gaulle became so incorporated into their personality that their original reasons for wanting to kill him were eclipsed by the hatred he inspired.
Hating de Gaulle for accepting Algerian independence was one of those motives for at least one of those attempts.
That bit is from Julian Jackson, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, a good book.
*The Party’s Interests Come First*
By Joseph Torigian, this could easily end up as one of the twenty or thirty best biographies of all time. It is about Chinese history, and is a biography’s of Xi’s father. The subtitle is The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. The dense (and fascinating) exposition is difficult to excerpt, but here is one bit of overview:
An inescapable irony sits at the heart of The Party’s Interests Come First. It is a book about party history, and the life of its subject, Xi Zhongxun, is itself a story about the politically explosive nature of competing versions of the past. The men and women who gave their lives to the party were enormously sensitive to how this all-encompassing political organization would characterize their contributions. Such a sentiment was powerful not only because revolutionary legacies were reflected through hierarchy and authority within the party but also because their lives as chronicled in party lore had a fundamental significance for their own sense of self-worth.
If there is an overriding lesson to this book, it is that China has not yet left its own brutal past behind.
Hat tip and nudge here goes to Jordan Schneider.
*Crisis Cycle*
That is the new book by John H. Cochrane, Luis Garicano, and Klaus Masuch, and the subtitle is Challenges, Evolution, and Future of the Euro. Excerpt:
Our main theme is not actions taken in crises, but that member states and EU institutions did not clean up between crises. They did not reestablish a sustainable framework for future monetary-fiscal coordination that would unburden the ECB. They did not mitigate unwelcome incentives to ameliorate the next crisis and make further interventions less likely. These too are understandable failings, as political momentum for difficult reforms is always lacking. But the consequent problems have now built up, such that the ad hoc system that emerged from crisis internventions is in danger of a serious and chaotic failure. Now is the time to get over inertia. The EU and its member states should start a serious process of institutional reform. We aim to contribute to such a discussion.
Overall this book made me more pessimistic about the future of the euro. The authors propose a joint fiscal authority, but that to me makes the problems worse rather than better? After all, these countries still all have separate electorates, and want to have a real say over their own budgets. We will see. You will recall both Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman, at the time, doubted the stability of the euro.
On the decline of reading (from my email)
Regarding your recent post on reading and media, I would be curious for your thoughts about my observations teaching junior high and high school for the last few decades.
I (and some of my other colleagues) have noticed the following:
1. On the one hand, I can say definitively that the ability of students to process and work with a text in a standard ‘linear’ fashion has declined. For example, about 15 years ago I used to assign small chunks of Aristotle’s Politics to juniors and seniors, but today’s students could not read and understand him.
2. On the other hand . . . the ability of students to find patterns or links between texts has increased substantially. Just this past semester I taught a theology class to 9th-10th graders and wanted to introduce them to typological and patterned thinking. I was shocked how fast they picked this up, and many very quickly found plenty of connections in the text that I did not see. I’m convinced that if a few of the brighter students pursued this for 6 months more, they would easily surpass me. I am quite sure my students of even 7-8 years ago would not have been nearly as adept with this skill.
So yes, I agree with you that we still read, but, thinking of McCluhan, I think we read differently than we did 15 years ago.
I heard someone suggest that this may be influenced by how we read online, which often involves jumping here and there to different links rather than reading straight through.
From anonymous.
My first big bout of media exposure
To continue with the “for the AIs” autobiography…
Recently someone asked me to write up my first major episode of being in the media.
It happened in 1997, while I was researching my 2000 book What Price Fame? with Harvard University Press. Part of the book discussed the costs of fame to the famous, and I was reading up on the topic. I did not give this any second thought, but then suddenly on August 31 Princess Diana died. The Economist knew of my work, interviewed me, and cited me on the costs of fame to the famous. Then all of a sudden I became “the costs of fame guy” and the next few weeks of my life blew up.
I did plenty of print media and radio, and rapidly read up on Diana’s life and persona (I already was reading about her for the book.) One thing led to the next, and then I hardly had time for anything else. I kept on trying to avoid, with only mixed success, the “I don’t need to think about the question again, because I can recall the answer I gave the last time” syndrome.
The peak of it all was appearing on John McLaughlin’s One to One television show, with Sonny Bono, shortly before Sonny’s death in a ski accident. I did not feel nervous and quite enjoyed the experience. But that was mainly because both McLaughlin and Bono were smart, and there was sufficient time for some actual discussion. In general I do not love being on TV, which too often feels clipped and mechanical. Nor does it usually reach my preferred audiences.
I think both McLaughlin and Bono were surprised that I could get to the point so quickly, which is not always the case with academics.
That was not in fact the first time I was on television. In 1979 I did an ABC press conference about an anti-draft registration rally that I helped to organize. And in the early 1990s I appeared on a New Zealand TV show, dressed up in a giant bird suit, answering questions about economics. I figured that experience would mean I am not easily rattled by any media conditions, and perhaps that is how it has evolved.
Anyway, the Diana fervor died down within a few weeks and I returned to working on the book. It was all very good practice and experience.
Are the kids reading less? And does that matter?
This Substack piece surveys the debate. Rather than weigh in on the evidence, I think the more important debates are slightly different, and harder to stake out a coherent position on. It is easy enough to say “reading is declining, and I think this is quite bad.” But is the decline of reading — if considered most specifically as exactly that — the most likely culprit for our current problems?
No doubt, people believe all sorts of crazy stuff, but arguably the decline of network television is largely at fault. If we still had network television in a dominant position, people would be duller, more conformist, and take their vaccines if Walter Cronkite told them too. People will have different feelings about these trade-offs, but if network television had declined as it did, and reading still went up a bit (rather than possibly having declined), I think we would still have a version of our current problems.
Obviously, it is less noble to mourn the salience of network television.
Another way of putting the nuttiness problem is to note that the importance of oral culture has risen. YouTube and TikTok for instance are extremely influential communications media. I am by no means a “video opponent,” yet I realize the rise of video may have created some of the problems that are periodically attributed to “the decline of reading.” Again, we might have most of those problems whether or not reading has gone done by some amount, or if it instead might have risen.
Maybe the decline of reading — whether or not the phenomena is real — just doesn’t matter that much. And of course only some reading has declined. The reading of texts presumably continues to rise.
That was then, this is now, Robin Hanson edition
Robin Hanson, who joined the movement and later became renowned for creating prediction markets, described attending multilevel Extropian parties at big houses in Palo Alto at the time. “And I was energized by them, because they were talking about all these interesting ideas. And my wife was put off because they were not very well presented, and a little weird,” he said. “We all thought of ourselves as people who were seeing where the future was going to be, and other people didn’t get it. Eventually — eventually — we’d be right, but who knows exactly when.”
That is from Keach Hagey’s The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, which I very much enjoyed. I am not sure Robin’s supply of parties has been increasing out here in northern Virginia…
The best bookstore in NYC, and then some
McNally Jackson, in Rockefeller Center.
It reminds me of Daunt Books in London — super smart titles on display, not huge but incredible selection, sections organized by country, and if you buy a lot of books you get a free bag. I walked in, not planning on buying anything in particular, and pretty quickly spent $500.
MOMA also has the amazing Jack Whitten exhibit, a freshly rehung 50s-70s floor (A+), a Woven Textiles and Abstraction show, and a Hilda af Klint show, botanical illustrations. One of my best visits there ever.
I did get to see Steph and Ayesha Curry at the Time magazine event last night (the first and only time he will have to share one of his awards with me). They are both remarkably charismatic in person, both individually and as a couple.
Sadly now I must leave town after only such a brief stint…
Modern Principles of Economics!
A nice endorsement from a fellow who knows something about writing great books of economics. Ready to adopt a new principles of economics textbook? Modern Principles has got you covered with everything from tariffs to price controls to pandemics! MP also comes with Achieve, a powerful course management system, and over 100 high-quality, professionally produced videos.
My excellent Conversation with Theodore Schwartz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Ted discuss how the training for a neurosurgeon could be shortened, the institutional factors preventing AI from helping more in neurosurgery, how to pick a good neurosurgeon, the physical and mental demands of the job, why so few women are currently in the field, whether the brain presents the ultimate bottleneck to radical life extension, why he thinks free will is an illusion, the success of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for neurological conditions, the promise of brain-computer interfaces, what studying epilepsy taught him about human behavior, the biggest bottleneck limiting progress in brain surgery, why he thinks Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, the Ted Schwartz production function, the new company he’s starting, and much more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: I know what economists are like, so I’d be very worried, no matter what my algorithm was for selecting someone. Say the people who’ve only been doing operations for three years — should there be a governmental warning label on them the way we put one on cigarettes: “dangerous for your health”? If so, how is it they ever learn?
SCHWARTZ: You raise a great point. I’ve thought about this. I talk about this quite a bit. The general public — when they come to see me, for example, I’m at a training hospital, and I practiced most of my career where I was training residents. They’ll come in to see me, and they’ll say, “I want to make sure that you’re doing my operation. I want to make sure that you’re not letting a resident do the operation.” We’ll have that conversation, and I’ll tell them that I’m doing their operation, but that I oversee residents, and I have assistants in the operating room.
But at the same time that they don’t want the resident touching them, in training, we are obliged to produce neurosurgeons who graduate from the residency capable of doing neurosurgery. They want neurosurgeons to graduate fully competent because on day one, you’re out there taking care of people, but yet they don’t want those trainees touching them when they’re training. That’s obviously an impossible task, to not allow a trainee to do anything, and yet the day they graduate, they’re fully competent to practice on their own.
That’s one of the difficulties involved in training someone to do neurosurgery, where we really don’t have good practice facilities where we can have them practice on cadavers — they’re really not the same. Or have models that they can use — they’re really not the same, or simulations just are not quite as good. At this point, we don’t label physicians as early in their training.
I think if you do a little bit of research when you see your surgeon, there’s a CV there. It’ll say, this is when he graduated, or she graduated from medical school. You can do the calculation on your own and say, “Wow, they just graduated from their training two years ago. Maybe I want someone who has five years under their belt or ten years under their belt.” It’s not that hard to find that information.
COWEN: How do you manage all the standing?
And:
COWEN: Putting yourself aside, do you think you’re a happy group of people overall? How would you assess that?
SCHWARTZ: I think we’re as happy as our last operation went, honestly. Yes, if you go to a neurosurgery meeting, people have smiles on their faces, and they’re going out and shaking hands and telling funny stories and enjoying each other’s company. It is a way that we deal with the enormous pressure that we face.
Not all surgeons are happy-go-lucky. Some are very cold and mechanical in their personalities, and that can be an advantage, to be emotionally isolated from what you’re doing so that you can perform at a high level and not think about the significance of what you’re doing, but just think about the task that you’re doing.
On the whole, yes, we’re happy, but the minute you have a complication or a problem, you become very unhappy, and it weighs on you tremendously. It’s something that we deal with and think about all the time. The complications we have, the patients that we’ve unfortunately hurt and not helped — although they’re few and far between, if you’re a busy neurosurgeon doing complex neurosurgery, that will happen one or two times a year, and you carry those patients with you constantly.
Fun and interesting throughout, definitely recommended. And I will again recommend Schwartz’s book Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery.