Category: Books
Ireland during World War II
The Republic of Ireland of course was neutral. I had not known these facts:
1. Irish were allowed to emigrate to Britain to work, but with assurances they would not be conscripted.
2. Ireland engaged in heavy censorship during the War, mostly to stop people from getting the impression that the War was a moral struggle between good and evil. The government wished to avoid pressure to enter the war, fearing the initial strong support for neutrality might fade. This censorship even covered the telephone and telegraph, or at least tried to.
3. German broadcasts to Ireland did get through, and “There was still a tendency in Ireland at the end of the war to believe that Irish suffering was more marked than that experienced anywhere else in Europe, a narrow mindset which government policies facilitated.”
4. Erwin Schrödinger spent much of the War in Ireland.
5. The Belfast Blitz of 1941 made 100,000 homeless and damaged 53 percent of the homes in Belfast.
6. Following the death of Hitler, Irish Prime Minister Éamon de Valera visited the German embassy in Dublin to express his condolences, an action that was much criticized at the time.
That is all from The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, a quite good book by Diarmaid Ferriter.
What I’ve been reading on Ireland
1. Susan McKay, Northern Protestants on Shifting Ground, and also Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People. These two books straddle a journalistic and anthropological approach to what the titles indicate. As one Protestant in the text remarked, Irish reunification would work just fine, it is the ten years getting there that everyone is afraid of. It seems increasingly muddled what actually the Northern Irish Unionist is supposed to stand for — passionate attachment to union with an unwilling or indifferent partner, namely England?
2. David Dickson, The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation. One of the best books on cities in recent years, and more general than the title might indicate. I had not known that Waterford was once a rival for Dublin, or fully realized that Ireland has no significant city which is not right next to the coast. Readable throughout, and gives you an excellent sense of how the Irish pecking order for cities evolved. Recommended.
3. Fintan O’Toole, Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks. Most educated outsiders approach Ireland through the lens of its rather prominent literary history (Joyce, Yeats, etc.). That’s fine, but also somewhat misleading. This book gives you an alternate tour — focused on modernism and the 20th century — through the visual arts, design, television, theatre, and more. It should prove eyeopening to many people, and is also a wonderful book for browsing or as a guide to further study. Harry Clarke’s stained glass “Eve of St. Agnes” work, located in Dublin and produced in the 1920s, is much more central to the Irish narrative than many people realize.
*Beautiful World, Where Are You?* — the new Sally Rooney novel
It is really good, and more subtle than one might have expected. Imagine Ireland’s #1 left-wing writer imbibing the brew of Ross Douthat over the last few years and putting it all into fictional form, and convincingly at that. I don’t just mean the Mass scene and the pornography discussion, it is the consistent theme running throughout the book.
The tale ends up as a true case for cultural optimism, albeit with some reasonable qualifications.
Here is a good New Yorker review by Lauren Michele Jackson. The title of the book is excellent as well.
My appearance on the Ezra Klein Show
Talking with Ezra is always both fun and enlightening for me, here is his partial summary of the episode:
So we begin this conversation by discussing the case for and against economic growth, but we also get into lots of other things: why Cowen thinks the great stagnation in technology is coming to an end; the future of technologies like A.I., crypto, fourth-generation nuclear and the Chinese system of government; the problems in how we fund scientific research; what the right has done to make government both ineffective and larger; why Cowen is skeptical of universal pre-K (and why I’m not); whether I overestimate the dangers of polarization; the ways in which we’re getting weirder; the long-term future of human civilization; why reading is overrated and travel is underrated; how to appreciate classical music and much more.
Here is the link, full transcript here, definitely recommended!
My Conversation with Ed Glaeser
I did David Cutler and Ed sequentially, based on their new co-authored book, here is the joint episode but there is also a separate link concerning Cutler. Here is one excerpt from the general summary:
They joined Tyler for a special joint episode to discuss why healthcare outcomes are so correlated with education, whether the health value of Google is positive or negative, why hospital price transparency is so difficult to achieve, how insurance coding systems reimburse sickness over health improvement, why the U.S. quit smoking before Europe, the best place in America to get sick, the risks that come from over-treatment, the possible upsides of more businesses moving out of cities, whether productivity gains from remote work will remain high, why the older parts of cities always seem to be more beautiful, whether urban schools will ever improve, why we shouldn’t view Rio de Janeiro’s favelas as a failure, how 19th century fights to deal with contagious diseases became a turning point for governance, Miami’s prospects as the next tech hub, what David and Ed disagree on, and more.
And from my exchange with Ed:
COWEN: Let’s start with a simple question. All this enthusiasm about cities and agglomeration benefits — the pandemic comes along. A lot of people transition to work from a distance, and then we see big measured productivity gains. What has gone on there?
GLAESER: It reminds us that for many jobs, in a static sense, you can do this long-distance. You can make things work. I think many of us found this. We wrote this book in eight months over the pandemic year, distinctly away from each other, partially because there were no distractions, and all that was good.
However, you also need to recognize the limits of long-distance living. The most important of those limits is just it’s much less fun. It’s much less joyful, but while it seems as if it’s fine for static productivity, it seems distinctly more problematic for people learning and for onboarding new talent.
Let me just give you two types of studies, one of which is we have the call center studies. The father of that was the Nick Bloom paper, which was a randomized control trial in China. A more modern version is done by our students, Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, which looks into American call centers.
Both of them find the same thing in terms of static productivity. If anything, it goes up, but the workers who go remote are much less likely to be promoted in both studies. One interpretation of this is that promotion in the call center work means that you actually are given the job of handling more difficult calls.
How would your boss know that you are good at handling difficult calls if they weren’t in the same room with you? How would you learn how to do those difficult calls if you weren’t around other people? So while the static productivity remains, you lose the dynamic benefits of being around other people.
Second piece of evidence it comes from Burning Glass Technologies and new hires. Even though Microsoft tells us that its programmers were just as productive, overall, new hires for programmers were down 42 percent between November 2019 and November 2020. Firms were clearly unwilling to take the same kind of risks of hiring new workers that they couldn’t inculcate in their corporate culture or screen them properly, or do any of those other things.
Even though measured productivity did well during the pandemic, there were still lots of disruptions. In particular, many younger workers who came of age really lost out as a result of this.
COWEN: If work from a distance goes fine in the short run, what’s the cross-sectional prediction about where it will persist in the future? Is it firms facing bankruptcy, firms with immediate projects now, possibly start-ups who will then later transition to all being together in one big happy family, but they’re afraid they’re going to fail before then? What should we expect?
GLAESER: I think we should expect young workers to be more likely to be brought together. Young firms, as well, because you’re very much at this learning, creative phase. I think the optimal work-from-home strategy is a couple of partners who are in an accounting practice and have decided they know each other perfectly well and are delighted to Zoom it in from wherever they are.
I think, unquestionably, working from home will remain a part of the economy. It may well be many workers end up spending 20 percent of their time working from home, even if they’re part of a generally full-time job. But for younger workers, for firms that are just getting started, I think being live is likely to continue being a major part of the work environment.
It also depends a lot on what your home environment is like. If you’re like us — if you are a middle-aged professor who’s likely to have a comfortable home office, and maybe even not having kids at home anymore, certainly not kids who are crying all the time at home anymore — working at home is a lot more pleasant than if you’re a 23-year-old and live in a studio apartment in Somerville or New York or London.
Recommended!
My Conversation with David Cutler
I did Cutler and Ed Glaeser sequentially, based on their new co-authored book, here is the joint episode but I will create another link concerning Glazer. Here is one excerpt from the general summary:
They joined Tyler for a special joint episode to discuss why healthcare outcomes are so correlated with education, whether the health value of Google is positive or negative, why hospital price transparency is so difficult to achieve, how insurance coding systems reimburse sickness over health improvement, why the U.S. quit smoking before Europe, the best place in America to get sick, the risks that come from over-treatment, the possible upsides of more businesses moving out of cities, whether productivity gains from remote work will remain high, why the older parts of cities always seem to be more beautiful, whether urban schools will ever improve, why we shouldn’t view Rio de Janeiro’s favelas as a failure, how 19th century fights to deal with contagious diseases became a turning point for governance, Miami’s prospects as the next tech hub, what David and Ed disagree on, and more.
And from David:
COWEN: But even if we adjust for that, education seems to matter a lot. It’s also puzzling to me — in your own work, it matters more at younger ages. You would think the returns are cumulative: it would really pay off when you’re 67 because you’ve invested in a stock portfolio for decades, but it matters most when you’re young. What’s your best micro account of that?
CUTLER: One of the things that’s super interesting is that, for example, people who live in cities — where there are more better-educated people — smoke less, even conditional on your own education. The same thing is true about age and so on.
I think it’s partly that cities and areas are run by upper-middle-class folks often. For example, the environment is set up in a way that’s more conducive to health when you have more upper-middle-income people. It’s much more difficult to smoke. There are healthier behaviors in general. There are parks and things like that. I think part of it is just that society is shaped by higher-income, higher-SES people, and that can be good for everyone who lives around those areas.
COWEN: To the extent education makes you healthier by lowering your stress and raising your relative status — which is a possible hypothesis — what are the policy implications of that? What should we do?
CUTLER: Part of what we’re learning over time is that social insurance programs are actually having a bigger and more sustained effect on health than we had thought they did. For example, we’ve always thought of Medicare and Medicaid as being the primary social insurance programs that affect health, but then there’s research that the WIC program — Women, Infants, and Children — affects health, that food stamp programs affect health, that TANF benefits affect health, that housing policies can affect health.
COWEN: And you think that’s through lowering stress as one mechanism?
Recommended!
Auction markets where you most expect them
At Christie’s, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, first edition, estimate is in the 80k-120k range, bid here.
What I’ve been reading
1. Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, The Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus. Self-recommending (they were leaders on the team), most of all it is striking how much time they spend covering and complaining about problems in the science funding network. Let’s improve that. In any case I enjoyed the book.
2. Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-55. A quite interesting book which considers how German women were disappointed in German men, how eastern German women dealt with Soviet soldier rape, how the Soviets resumed classical orchestral concerts within weeks (for their own pleasure), currency conversion, and more: “But Beate Uhse fell foul of the law for the first time, not because of violation of the moral code of corrupting the young, but for breach of price regluations.”
3. Jeevan Vasagar, Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia. Selective rather than comprehensive, but entertaining and balanced and insightful. Those interested in Singapore should read this book, and even Singapore experts will learn some new nuggets. The author was the FT correspondent in Singapore from 2015 to 2017.
4. Mathilde Fasting and Øystein Sørensen, The Norwegian Exception: Norway’s Liberal Democracy Since 1814. “This book started as an idea to explain Norwegian society to a broader public.” I am not sure they quite succeed, but still it is the best single Norway book I know. I hadn’t known for instance that Norway has two different official written languages. In general there should be more books trying to explain highly successful countries! This is a move in the right direction, and I am happy to see that the authors do not try to deny or run away from Norway’s first-rate performance.
5. James Hawes, The Shortest History of England. One can pick nits with books such as these, but I found this one useful. It stresses the role of the French in English history, and also the ongoing clash between the South and the North over who will rule whom.
There is also Robert Wuthnow’s Why Religion is Good for American Democracy (true), and Michael Taylor’s The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which dashed my hopes when I learnt that Alexander McDonnell, the Belfast-born 19th century chess player who famously sparred with Louis de la Bourdonnais, also was a strongly pro-slavery and pro-imperialism economist in his time.
What I’ve been reading
1. Anne Serre, The Beginners. What is it like for a woman to go from loving one man to another? This newly translated French novel was fun enough, insightful enough, and direct and short enough for me to finish.
2. Lachlan Goudie, The Story of Scottish Art. Even if you don’t care about art, this is a wonderful way to learn the history of Scotland. My takeaway favorite painters were Allan Ramsey (friends with Smith and Hume), Henry Raeburn, David Wilkie, and John Duncan, more or less consistent with my earlier views but now they are better informed. A good book with a nice blue and yellow cover.
3. Frank Herbert, Dune. For me a reread, I loved it when I was twelve, but how does it stand up? I am struck by how excellent and pathbreaking the best chapters are, including the introductory chapter. The influence on Star Wars is obvious, as is the role of Islam in the story. It strikes me as remarkably cinematic, with the right kinds of transitions to boot — how was this never put successfully on the big screen? I am about two-thirds through it right now, and maybe it 2/3 holds up? But would you want all of the slow pacing of the detail removed?
Carole Hooven, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. Recommended.
Aubrey Clayton, Bernoulli’s Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science. I found this most interesting as a history of probability theory, and with more coverage of Quetelet than one usually finds.
*The Money Illusion*, the new Scott Sumner book
The subtitle is “Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy.” I just got my copy, self-recommending of course. In fact, hard to think of a better example of “self-recommending” than this one.
You can buy it here.
Gordon S. Wood’s *Power and Liberty*
The subtitle is Constitutionalism in the American Revolution, and of course self-recommending. Here is one excerpt:
The breadth and depth of popular interest in the Constitution in 1787-1788 was remarkable. The towns of Massachusetts, for example, elected 370 delegates to the state’s ratifying convention, of whom 364 attended. Most were eager to meet and discuss the Constitution. It took six days for the delegates from Bath, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), to make their way south across rivers and through snow to Boston. The people of Massachusetts believed they were involved, as the little town of Oakham told its delegates, in deciding an issue of “the greatest importance that ever came before any Class of Men on this Earth.”
And this:
Many expected the electoral college to work as a nominating body in which no one normally would get a majority of electoral votes; therefore, most elections would take place in the House of Representatives among the top five candidates, with each state’s congressional delegation voting as a unit.
You can buy it here.
*Smashing the Liquor Machine*
The subtitle is A Global History of Prohibition, and the author is Mark Lawrence Schrad. I blurbed the book with this:
The best book on Prohibition, period. It is a revelation on the causes and nature of the Prohibition movement, and takes a properly international perspective, considering colonies and indigenous peoples as well. You will never look at Prohibition the same way again.
Highly recommended, you can buy it here.
How to tell when you are reading a truly great history book
When it treatment of secondary topics is better than what you can find anywhere else. For instance I am reading Alexander Mikaberidze’s The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History. Just in the span of a few pages, his treatment of Dessalines and his plan to rule Haiti is excellent. Then his discussion of the French motivations for allowing the Louisiana Purchase is amazing. Yet a page later his take on the evolution of the Swiss confederation, while offered only in passing, is more instructive than I’ve found in books written solely on Switzerland.
This is in the very top tier of history books I ever have read. Highly recommended.
Ashish Kulkarni interviews me
About half is about India, including on how to construct an ideal India trip and also on the legacy of British colonialism. The other half is his very careful, memory-rich questions about earlier MR posts. I was happy with how it turned out…
*Against White Feminism*
In Zero Dark Thirty (and the truish story behind it), American feminism — once a movement that existed in opposition to the state, as a critique of its institutions and mores — was recast as one that served the state’s interests through any means imaginable. This identification with state interests, and the idea of going out to conquer the world with the same mindset of subjugation and domination possessed by white men, seems to have become a warped feminist goal. Put another way, white women wanted parity with white men any at any cost, including by avidly taking on the domination of Black and Brown people.
That is from the new and noteworthy Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption, by Rafia Zakaria. Or how about this:
Securo-feminism, thus, bound white American feminism to the neoimperial and neoliberal project of nation-building around the world — one that Harvard professor Niall Ferguson had articulated in his history of “Angloglobalization,” proposing that young Americans should be taught to go overseas and transform other nations in their own image much as Britain had done. Caught in its fevers, American feminists did not question loudly enough the wisdom of exporting feminism through bombs and drones.
Or:
White feminists in the colonial era were all about spreading their civilized ways, but neo-colonial white feminists want to illustrate their courage and compassion — often while providing moral subsidy for cruelties inflicted in feminism’s name. Times may have changed, but the commitment of whiteness to extracting value wherever it can — and dominating the narrative to frame this extraction as benevolence — persists.
Recommended, sort of. And here is the author with more detail on “Securo-feminism.”