Category: Books
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.
What I’ve been reading
1. Eric Ambler, Cause for Alarm. Are all his books so good? So far yes. With very simple means he redefines what it means to be a good writer of thrillers. Very English, written and set in Italy 1937, with a foolish Englishman who could be out of a Hitchcock movie. They still called it Laibach back then, the menace of the pending war casts the proper shadow over the whole novel.
2. Futurism & Europe: The Aesthetics of a New World, Fabio Benzi and various editors. “By their aesthetics ye shall know them!” What were the aesthetics of the futurist movement in the early 20th century? Should we approve of those aesthetics? This book is a good starting point for asking that question. Nice color plates.
3. Philip Shenon, Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. A very well-written and useful book, I cannot say I have a stance on the issues per se. It is one of my defects that I cannot care enough about the politics of the Catholic Church — I feel there are already too many separate countries with their own politics. Nor do I feel close to either “the liberals” or “the conservatives” in this debate. I do think the current American Pope — who seems “pilled” on many things — will be a big deal, I suspect mostly for the better.
4. Renaud Camus, Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings. Interesting enough, and if you can read the French lefties why not this guy too? That said, he could be more specific on “the Great Replacement.” The most likely scenario is a France that is about twenty percent Muslim, wracked with periodic ethnic issues, but doing more or less OK. In any case you should not be afraid to read this book, even though for a while it was considered cancel-worthy.
5. Tom Arnold-Foster, Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography. With so many forms of liberalism in semi-collapse, Lippmann is suddenly relevant again. He had faith in experts, and also was not crazy. But somehow is not deep enough to hold my interest? Still, this book is very well done.
I will not soon have time to get to Joseph Torigian, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, but it looks excellent.
Has Buddhism been statist for a long time?
Again, as was also the case in so many Buddhist countries, the success of Buddhism relied heavily on its connections to the court. In Korea, the tradition of “state protection Buddhism” was inherited from China. Here, monarchs would build and support monasteries and temples, where monks would perform rituals and chant sutras intended to both secure the well-being of the royal family, in this life and the next, and protect the kingdom from danger, especially foreign invasion.
…As in China, the Korean sangha remained under the control of the state; offerings to monasteries could only be made with the approval of the throne; men could only become monks on “ordination platforms” approved by the throne; and an examination system was established that placed monks in the state bureaucracy. As in other Buddhist lands, monks were not those who had renounced the world but were vassals of the king, with monks sometimes dispatched to China by royal decree. With strong royal patronage, Buddhism continued to thrive through the Koryo period (935-1392), with monasteries being granted their own lands and serfs, accumulating great wealth in the process.
That is an excerpt from Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Buddhism: A Journey through History, an excellent book. Maybe the best book on the history of Buddhism I have read? And one of the very best books of this year.
Claims about police shootings
There is a new book by Tom S. Clark, Adam N. Glynn, and Michael Leo Owens, called Deadly Force: Police Shootings in Urban America. Here are a few of the conclusions:
…we were more likely to obtain records [on police shootings] from cities with women mayors and more women on municipal legislatures.
And, most interesting to me:
…we also found that fewer police shootings occurred in cities with more police, all else equal.
And:
…Black and Hispanic officers are disproportionately the ones involved in police shootings. That is particularly true when a Black civilian is the subject of the shooting.
I do not follow this area closely, but the book seems of interest.
New Bryan Caplan book, *Pro-Market AND Pro-Business: Essays on Laissez-Faire*
Bryan presents and summarizes the book here. These are very good essays, as Bryan is the world’s leading libertarian economist.
You can buy it here on Amazon.
My Conversation with the excellent Ken Rogoff
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Ken and Tyler tackle international economic dynamics, unresolved macro puzzles, the state of chess, and more, including whether trade deficits are truly unsustainable, why China’s investment-heavy growth model has reached its limits, how currency depreciation neutralizes tariff effects, Pakistan’s IMF bailouts, whether more Latin American countries should dollarize, Japan’s deceptively peaceful economic decline, Europe’s coming fiscal reckoning, how the US will eventually confront its ballooning debt, the puzzling absence of a recession during our recent disinflation, the potential of phasing out large denomination currency notes, the future relevance of stablecoins, whether America should start a CBDC, Argentina’s chances under Milei, who will be the next dominant player in chess, hanging out with Bobby Fischer, drawing out against Magnus Carlsen, and how to save classical chess from excessive computer preparation.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Just predictively, what do you think the United States will do with its fiscal position?
ROGOFF: That is a darn good question. Looking way forward, I would just say we’re on an unsustainable path. We will continue to have our debt balloon. Eventually — not necessarily in a planned or coherent way — I think we’re going to have another big inflation soon, next five to seven years, maybe sooner with what’s going on, and that’s going to bring it down just like it did under Biden. It brought the debt down. Then the markets are, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, no, we’re raising the interest rate, and then we’ll have to make choices.
I think in the United States, a lot of the choices, I’m sorry to say, probably point towards higher taxation because we’re hardly running a welfare state. All due respects — and I’m not sure I have any due respects to DOGE — there’re not that many things to cut in the United States compared to many other countries. I don’t know what the choice will be. I probably won’t be here, and you might not be either, when we’re making the choices, but if actually we’ll —
COWEN: Oh, I think we’ll both be here.
ROGOFF: It could happen much sooner. On the other hand, it’s hard to know what’s going through Trump’s head. I presumed he was going to blow up the deficit, like everybody else. We’ll see.
COWEN: When you say big inflation, how big is big?
ROGOFF: Last time we probably had a bonus 10 percent inflation over the 2 percent target cumulatively, maybe 12 percent. I think this time, it’ll be more on the order of cumulatively over the 2 percent target, 20 percent, 25 percent. There’s going to be an adjustment. I don’t think the debt is going to be the sole contribution to that. There are many factors. You have to impinge on Federal Reserve independence. Probably, there’ll be some shock, which will justify it. I don’t know how it’s going to play out.
I know that for years, people have said the US debt is unsustainable, but it hasn’t come to roost because we’ve lived through this post-financial crisis, post-pandemic era of very, very low and negative real interest rates. That is not the norm. There’s regression to mean.
You know what? It’s happened. Suddenly, the interest payments start piling up. I think they’ve at least doubled over the last few years. They’re quickly on their way to tripling, of going up to $1 trillion. Suddenly, it’s more than our defense spending. That’s the most important macro change in the world, that real interest rates appear to have regressed more towards long-term trend.
COWEN: What’s the most plausible scenario you can imagine where the US does not have to make any major adjustment? I’m not saying you’re predicting it. I’m not saying you think it’s very plausible, but you have to come up with something. What is it?
Recommended. And I am happy to also recommend Ken’s new book Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead.
What should I ask Annie Jacobsen?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Annie Jacobsen (born June 28, 1967) is an American investigative journalist, author, and a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. She writes for and produces television programs, including Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan for Amazon Studios, and Clarice for CBS. She was a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine from 2009 until 2012.
Jacobsen writes about war, weapons, security, and secrets. Jacobsen is best known as the author of the 2011 non-fiction book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, which The New York Times called “cauldron-stirring.”[ She is an internationally acclaimed and sometimes controversial author who, according to one critic, writes sensational books by addressing popular conspiracies.
I very much liked her book Nuclear War: A Scenario. Do read the Wikipedia entry for a full look at what she has written. So what should I ask her?
*Hope I Get Old Before I Die*
That is the new and fun book by David Hepworth. It focuses on the careers of rock stars who simply keep on going and do not retire.
Can we admit that Paul McCartney and also the Rolling Stones have made the best of this?
Here is one bit:
Of the ten most-visited graves in the USA, just one is the resting place of a president. The rest are all the graves of entertainers.
I liked this line:
‘Sometimes I feel like I work for Liz Phair,’ she [Liz Phair] says. ‘And I have years off but then, like, I work for her.’
You can order the book here.
My excellent Conversation with Chris Dixon
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Chris Dixon believes we’re at a pivotal inflection point in the internet’s evolution. As a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of Read Write Own, Chris believes the current internet, dominated by large platforms like YouTube and Spotify, has strayed far from its decentralized roots. He argues that the next era—powered by blockchain technology—can restore autonomy to creators, lower barriers for innovation, and shift economic power back to the network’s edges.
Tyler and Chris discuss the economics of platform dominance, how blockchains merge protocol-based social benefits with corporate-style competitive advantages, the rise of stablecoins as a viable blockchain-based application, whether Bitcoin or AI-created currencies will dominate machine-to-machine payments, why Stack Overflow could be the first of many casualties in an AI-driven web, venture capital’s vulnerability to AI disruption, whether open-source AI could preserve national sovereignty, NFTs as digital property rights system for AIs, how Kant’s synthetic a priori, Kripke’s modal logic, and Heidegger’s Dasein sneak into Dixon’s term‑sheet thinking, and much more.
Most of the talk was about tech of course, but let’s cut right to the philosophy section:
COWEN: What’s your favorite book in philosophy?
DIXON: I’ve actually been getting back into philosophy lately. I did philosophy years ago in grad school. Favorite book, man. Are you into philosophy?
COWEN: Of course, yes. Plato’s Dialogues; Quine, Word and Object; Parfit, Reasons and Persons; Nozick. Those are what come to my mind right away.
DIXON: Yes. I did analytic philosophy. I actually was in a graduate school program and dropped out. I did analytic philosophy. Actually, Quine was one of my favorites — Word and Object and Two Dogmas of Empiricism, all those kinds of things. I like Donald Davidson. Nozick — I loved Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Reading that with Rawls is a great pairing. I used to love Wittgenstein, both early and later. I was into logic, so Frege and Russell. This was a grad school.
Now I’m trying to finally understand continental philosophy. I never understood it. I’ve actually spent the last three months in a philosophy phase. I’ve been watching a lot of videos. Highly recommend this. Do you know Bryan Magee?
COWEN: Sure, yes.
DIXON: Amazing. I watched all of his videos. This guy, Michael Sugrue, was a Princeton professor — great videos on continental philosophy. I’ve been reading — it sounds pretentious; I’m not saying I understand this or I’m an expert on it, but I’m struggling in reading it. I’m trying to read Being and Time right now — Heidegger. I really like Kripke. I follow Kripke. I liked his books a lot. Nelson Goodman was one of my favorites. Funny enough, I just bought it again — Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Kripke — Naming and Necessity is his legendary book on reference and language.
COWEN: I’ve never been persuaded by that one. It always felt like sleight of hand to me. He’s very, very smart. He might be the sharpest philosopher, but I like the book on Wittgenstein better.
DIXON: He basically invented modal logic. I don’t know if you know that story. He was in high school, something.
COWEN: He was 15 years old, I heard. Yes.
DIXON: [laughs] He’s like a true prodigy. Like a lot of philosophy, you have to take it in the context, like Naming and Necessity I think of as a response — gosh, I’m forgetting the whole history of it, but as I recall, it was a response to the descriptive theory of reference, like Russell. Anyways, I think you have to take these things in a pairing.
Actually, last night I was with a group of people. I got a lecture on philosophy, and it was great because he went through Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. I don’t want to go too much into that, but I’ve always struggled with Kant. Then he went into Hegel and explained that Hegel struggled with Kant in the same way that I did, and then improved on it. I’m not trying to go into details of this; it’s too much. The point is, for me, a lot of it has to be taken in as a dialogue between thinkers over multiple periods.
COWEN: Are you getting anything out of Heidegger? Because I sometimes say I’ve looked at every page of that book, but I’m not sure I’ve read it.
DIXON: It’s a good question. I have a friend who’s really into it, and we’ve been spending time together, and he’s trying to teach me. If you want, I’ll send you some videos that I think are really good.
COWEN: That’d be great.
DIXON: They’ve helped me a lot. I’ve always got it from an intellectual history point of view. If you want to follow the history of postmodernism, there’s Heidegger and then Derrida, and just what’s going on in the academy today with relativism and discourse and hermeneutics. I think it’s modern political implications that were really probably kicked off by Nietzsche and then Heidegger. I’ve always understood in that sense.
What I struggle with, and I understand him as a theory of psychology, I think of describing the experience of the Dasein and being-in-the-world. To me, it’s an interesting theory of psychology. You’re thrown into the world. This whole idea is very appealing to me. Just that whole story he tells — you’re thrown into the world, ready at hand versus present at hand. I think this idea of knowing how versus knowing that, different kinds of knowledge is a very interesting idea. Do you watch John Vervaeke?
COWEN: No.
You will find the (very interesting) tech segments all over the rest of the dialogue. And I am happy to refer you all to the new paperback edition of Chris’s new book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet.
Smith Reviews Stiglitz
Vernon Smith reviews Joe Stiglitz’s book The Road to Freedom:
Stiglitz did work in the abstract intellectual theoretical tradition of neoclassical economics showing how the standard results were changed by asymmetric or imperfect information. He is oblivious, however, to the experimental lab and field empirical research showing that agent knowledge of all such information is neither necessary nor sufficient for a market to converge to competitive supply-and-demand equilibrium outcomes.
Consequently, both the standard and the modified theories are irrelevant because buyers and sellers in possession only of dispersed, private, decentralized, value information easily converge to competitive price-quantity allocations in experimental markets over time via learning in repeat transactions.
…The first experiments, showing that complete WTP/WTA information was not necessary, were reported in Smith (1962), and none of us could any longer accept the standard and Stiglitz-modified theories. Further experiments, showing that such information was not sufficient, and that equilibrium prices need not require that markets clear, were reported in Smith (1965). (For propositions summarizing and evaluating observed empirical regularities in these experimental markets, see Vernon L. Smith, Arlington Williams, W. K. Bratt, and M. G. Vannoni, 1982, “Competitive Market Institutions: Double Auctions vs. Sealed Bid-Offer Auctions,” American Economic Review 72, no. 1, 58–77; and Vernon L. Smith, 1991, Papers in Experimental Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) It was natural, in the first market experiments, to investigate those questions, such as the information state of traders, that were central to the abstract economic theory of the time.
So, the Akerlof-Stiglitz modifications of theory were founded on a false conditional and thus were not germane to practical market performance. They were born falsified.
…The needed policy implications are quite clear, and they have nothing to do with Stiglitz’s market failure and everything to do with how markets function. Indeed, the appropriate policy recommendation is to fully support the market-system maximization of prosperity, as did Friedman and Hayek, then use incentive mechanisms to improve the relative positions of those who are disadvantaged in that system. Never kill the goose that lays eggs of gold.
My history with philosophy
At the same time I started reading economics, at age 13, I also was reading philosophy. I lived in Hillsdale, New Jersey, but River Vale had a better public library for those topics, so I would ride my bike there periodically and take out books (I also learned about Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis by bringing home scratched LPs).
Most of all, I was drawn to the Great Books series, most of all the philosophy in there. I figured I should read all of them. So of course I started with the Dialogues of Plato, which occupied my attention for a long time to come. Aristotle was boring to me, though at the time (and still) I felt he was more correct than Plato.
I also, from the beginning, never bought the argument that Socrates was the mouthpiece of Plato. In my early view (and still), Plato was the real genius, and he upgraded the second-rate Socrates to a smarter figure, mostly to make the dialogues better. The dialogic nature of Plato shows is true genius, because any single point of view you might find in there is quite untenable.
My favorite dialogues were the classic ones, such as Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and Symposium. Parmenides was a special obsession, though reader beware. It seemed fundamental and super-important. Timaeus intrigued me, as did Phaedrus, but I found them difficult. I appreciated The Republic only much later, most of all after reading the Allan Bloom introduction to the Chicago edition. My least favorite was Laws.
The other major event was buying a philosophy textbook by John Hospers (yes, if you are wondering that is the same John Hospers who wrote all that gay porn under a pseudonym). I think I bought this one in NYC rather than taking it out of the library. It explained the basic history of “early modern philosophy” running through Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and that fascinated me. So I decided I should be reading all those people and I did. Berkeley and Hume were the most fun. I already could see, from my concomitant economics reading, that Kant could not think at the margin.
Other early philosophy readings, in high school, were Popper, Nietzsche, and Doseoyevsky, at the time considering Karamazov a kind of philosophy book. Some Sartre, and whatever else I could find in the library. Lots of libertarian philosophy, such as Lysander Spooner’s critique of social contract theories of the state. I also read a number of books on atheism, such as by Antony Flew and George Smith, and a good deal of C.S. Lewis, such as God in the Dock. Arthur Koestler on the ghost in the machine. William James on free will. Various 1960s and 1970s screeds, many of which were on the margins of philosophy. Robert Pirsig bored me, not rigorous enough, etc., but I imbibed many such “works of the time.” They nonetheless helped to define the topic for me, as did my readings in science fiction. If I was reading Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, and Theory and History by Mises, I also was thinking of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.
For a brief while I considered becoming a philosopher, though I decided that the economist path was better and far more practical, and also more useful to the world.
I kept on reading philosophy through my undergraduate years. The biggest earthquake was reading Quine. All of a sudden I was seeing a very different approach to what social science propositions and economic models were supposed to mean. (I never had been satisfied with Friedman, Samuelson, or the Austrians on ecoomic methodology.) For a long time I thought I would write a 100-page essay “Hayek and Quine,” but I never did. Nonetheless some radical new doors were opened for me, most of all a certain kind of freedom in intellectual interpretation. I also was influenced a good deal by reading Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men/Starmaker novels, feeding into my speculative bent.
I didn’t do much with philosophy classes, though in graduate school at Harvard I sat in on Hilary Putnam’s philosophy of language class (with my friend Kroszner). That was one of the very best classes I ever had, maybe the best. At Harvard I also got to know Nozick a bit, and of course he was extraordinarily impressive. At that time I also studied Goethe and German romanticism closely, and never felt major allergies toward the Continental approaches.
One day at Harvard, in 1984, I walked into Harvard Book Store and saw a copy of Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which had just come out. I hadn’t known of Parfit before, but immediately decided I had to buy and read the book. I was hooked, and spent years working on those problems, including for part of my dissertation, which was hardly advisable from a job market point of view. Like Quine, that too changed my life and worldview. “Quine and Parfit” would be an interesting essay too.
When I took my first job at UC Irvine, I hung out with some of the philosophers there, including the excellent Alan Nelson and also Gregory Kavka, with whom I co-authored a bit. Greg and I became very good friends, and his early death was a great tragedy. I also enjoyed my periodic chats with David Gordon, a non-academic philosopher who lives in Los Angeles and the best-read philosopher I have met.
In the late 1980s I met Derek Parfit, and ended up becoming Derek’s only co-author, on the social discount rate. The full story there is told in Dave Edmonds’s excellent biography of Parfit, so I won’t repeat it here. These posts are for secrets! I will add that Derek struck me as the most philosophical person I ever have met, the most truly committed to philosophy as a method and a way of life. That to me is still more important than any particular thing he wrote. Your writings and your person are closely related, but they also are two separate things. Not enough philosophers today give sufficient thought to who they are.
After the collaboration with Parfit, he wrote me a letter and basically offered to bring me into his group at Oxford (under what terms was not clear). That felt like a dead end to me, plus a big cut in lifetime income, and so I did not pursue the opportunity.
I ended up with four articles in the philosophical equivalent of the “top five” journals in economics. I also was pleased and honored when Peter Singer invited me to present my paper “Policing Nature” to his philosophy group at Princeton. I think of my books The Age of the Infovore and Stubborn Attachments as more philosophy than anything else, though synthetic of course.
I have continued to read philosophy over the years. Next on my list is the new translation of Maimonides, which on first glance seems like a big improvement. However I read much less philosophy in refereed journals than I used to. Frankly, I think most of it is not very philosophical and also not very interesting. It is not about real problems, but rather tries to carve out a small piece that is both marginally noticeable by an academic referee and also defensible, again to an academic referee. That strikes me as a bad way to do philosophy. It worked pretty well say in the 1960s, but these days those margins are just too small.
Most professional philosphers seem to me more like bureaucrats than philosophers. They simply do not embody philosophic ideals, either in their writings or in their persons. Most of all I am inclined to reread philosophic classics, read something “Continental,” or read philosophic works that to most people would not count as philosophy at all. An excellent tweet on AI can be extraordinarily philosophical in the best sense of the term, and like most of the greatest philosophy from the past it is not restricted by the canons of refereed journals. Maxims have a long and noble history in philosophy.
My notion of who is a philosopher has broadened extensively over the years. I think of Patrick Collison, Camille Paglia, and the best Ross Douthat columns (among many other examples, let’s toss in the best Matt Y. sentences as well, and the best Peter Thiel observations), not to mention some art and architecture and music critics, as some of the best and most important philosophy of our time. The best philosophy of Agnes Callard (NYT) does not look like formal philosophy at all. I know it is hard for many of you to make this mental shift, but revisit how Kierkegaaard and Schopenhauer wrote and you might find it possible. And of course the very greatest philosophers of our time are the people who are building and learning how to use the quality LLMs.
A simple rule of thumb is that if no one is writing you, and telling you that you changed their lives, you probably are not a philosopher. You cannot expect such feedback in mathematical logic, or early in your career, but still it is not a bad place to start for judging this issue.
Looking back, I now see myself as having chosen the path of philosophy more than economics. I view myself as a philosopher who knows a lot of economics and who writes about economics (among other things). I am comfortable with that redefinition of self, and it makes my career and my time allocation easier to understand.
And now to go try that new Maimonides edition…
Music compensation fact of the day
The Kanye West and Jay-Z song “No Church in the Wild,” for instance, sampled a single instrumental line from a failed solo album recorded in the late 1970s by the Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera; the licensing proceeds provided Mr. Manzanera with “the biggest payday he had in the course of his entire career.” Or there is Mr. Hepworth’s revelation that some crazed fan supposedly paid more than $160,000 for a seat at Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion.
Here is more from the WSJ review of David Hepworth’s Hope I Get Old Before I Die, reviewed by D.J. Taylor.
What I’ve been reading
1. Florian Illies, The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time. An excellent book, usually I am allergic to art history books that attempt to charm, but this one works. Excerpt: “A question posed to the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk: ‘What makes the Monk by the Seashore so unprecedented?’ His answer: “It is the first picture of the dissolution of the subject in the substance.”” I had not known Friedrich also was an expert canary breeder.
2. Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery. The kind of long novel that women on average will like much more than men do? If someone said to me they thought it was excellent, I would not feel they had bad taste. For me the narrative strayed too far from anything I cared about, other than fineries about the characters.
3. John Ferling, Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War. A good and well-detailed book for putting the Revolutionary War and its battles into a broader perspective, explicable to both American and British perspectives.
4. Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment. There is plenty one can say about this book and these views, but most of all I am struck how negative “the new Right” is about American institutions. Even at whatever you might think is their most decrepit state (which year is that again?), they are some of the best institutions the world has seen. Call that a low standard if you wish, but it is not an irrelevant standard. Here are some other examples of people becoming far, far too pessimistic about the American status quo ex ante. As personality types, they are simply way too much a bunch of sourpusses. Things just have not been that bad!
5. John Cassidy, Capitalism and its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI. John Cassidy of course is the New Yorker writer on economics. Comprehensive and clearly written, I predict this book will find its audience, and no it does not discuss Nick Land.
*The German Empire, 1871-1918*
By Roger Chickering, this is so far the best book I have read this year, and I knew that within the first fifty pages (or less). It is everything one could want from a book on this very important country and time period. Likely I will report more on it as I read more, for the moment here is one excerpt:
Together, the new smelting techniques had driven the price of crude steel in Europe down nearly 90 percent by the end of the nineteenth century. In Germany, the results of this trend registered in a thirty-fold increase in the annual production of steel between 1879 and 1913. Thanks in great part to the iron fields of Lorraine, German output overtook British annual production in 1893; by 1913, German mills produced more steel than their British, French, and Russian counterparts combined. Much of this steel was poured into the German railways. Rail networks were extended; primarily at the insistence of the army, trunk lines were enlarged to two, in some cases four tracks. Iron rails were replaced with more durable steel. Wheels, axles, couplings, and wagons were modernized into steel, as were bridges. These substitutions not only made railroads faster but also increased their capacity. Meanwhile, palaces of rail travel emerged out of metal and glass as the great train stations of Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Germany’s other main cities. Late in the century travel along the steel rails also expanded in the form of tramways onto the streets of the cities themselves.
It is wonderful on the politics of the time as well, for instance tracing out the rise of Bismarck, or how the rivalries between Prussia and Austria shaped so many issues at the time. You can buy the book here.
My Conversation with the excellent Ian Leslie
I loved his new book on John and Paul, of the Beatles, and I am delighted to see it doing so well on the UK bestseller lists, and now also on the US lists. Here is my audio, video, and transcript with him. Here is the episode summary:
In this deep dive into one of music’s most legendary partnerships, Ian Leslie and Tyler unpack the complex relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Leslie, whose book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs examines this creative pairing, reveals how their contrasting personalities—John’s intuitive, sometimes chaotic approach and Paul’s methodical perfectionism—created a unique creative alchemy that neither could fully replicate after the Beatles split.
They explore John’s immediate songwriting brilliance versus Paul’s gradual development, debate when the Beatles truly became the Beatles, dissect their best and worst covers, examine the nuances of their collaborative composition process, consider their many musical influences, challenge the sentiment in “Yesterday,” evaluate unreleased tracks and post-Beatles reunions, contemplate what went wrong between John and Paul in 1969, assess their solo careers and collaborations with others, compare underrated McCartney and Lennon albums, and ultimately extract broader lessons about creative partnerships.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Do you think Paul’s song, “Yesterday,” is excessively sentimental?
LESLIE: No, I don’t. First of all, it’s not really sentimental in any way. I think it acquired this reputation because it does seem to come from a different tradition, perhaps a more easy-listening tradition in the first instance, although, I can hear echoes of music going far back from that in history.
But as a song about this person, this woman has left me and I have no idea why, it doesn’t then go on to describe how wonderful this girl is. Just says she’s gone and I don’t know why. It’s bleak. [laughs] The way he sings it is clipped, it’s brusque, it’s northern. It’s almost this northern folk sound to the way he sings it.
The string arrangement — he made sure that it wasn’t sentimental. He said to George Martin explicitly, “We’ve got to find a way of not making this sound saccharine.” So, George Martin asked the players not to play with vibrato or to play with very little vibrato. I think it’s very unsentimental, and in a way, it’s not that far off from “For No One,” which is an anti-sentimental song, where there’s very little hope.
COWEN: Or “Another Girl” even, right? The girls were leaving all the time in that song. It’s quite brutally about something very particular.
LESLIE: It’s interesting because I think in that year, 1965, with “Another Girl” and “I’m Looking Through You,” he is really soaking up, I think, from John. Or “The Night Before.” He’s leading into his Johness in the sense of he’s finding some anger and some hostility.
COWEN: “You Won’t See Me,” most of all.
The only topic was the Beatles, plus a bit on artistic collaboration more generally. In any case this was one of the most fun episodes for me. Definitely recommended, and again I am a big fan of Ian’s book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.