Category: Books
*Goodbye Eastern Europe*
The author is Jacob Mikanowski and the subtitle is An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Might this be the best overall book on how Eastern Europe ended up so different (but not entirely different) from Western Europe? I’ll be doing a CWT with him later this fall (hold your suggestions for now, and I’ll hold further commentary as well), but though I would flag this book for you in the meantime. I hope it gets some good publicity as the release date is approaching.
*Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter*
Ian Mortimer is the author of this excellent book, here was one of my favorite bits:
It may seem preposterous today to describe a 5 mph increase in the maximum land speed as revolutionary. It sounds like someone pointing to a hillock and calling it a mountain. But it was revolutionary, for a number of reasons. Like a one-degree rise in average global temperature, it represents a huge change. This is because it is not a one-off event but a permanent doubling of the maximum potential speed. By 1600 the fastest riders could cover 150 miles in a day and individual letters carried by teams of riders could travel at speeds of up to 200 miles per day. This significantly reduced the time it took to inform the government about the goings-on in the realm. If the Scots attacked Berwick when the king was at Winchester, and the news came south at 40 miles per day, as it is likely to have done in the eleventh century, it would have taken nine days to arrive. After the king had deliberated what to do, if only for a day, the response would have travelled back at the same speed — so the north of the kingdom would have been without royal instructions for almost three weeks. If, however, the post could carry the news at 200 miles per day, the king and his advisers could decide on a response in less than two days. After a day’s discussion, the king’s instructions would have been back in the Berwick area less than five days after the danger had arisen — two weeks faster than in the eleventh century.
It is hard to exaggerate the political and social implications of such a change. The rapid delivery of information allowed a king far greater control over his realm…The rise in travelling speeds subtle shifted the balance of power away from territorial lords and towards central government.
The speed of information thus created a demand for more information.
That meant, among other things, more spies. And there was this:
Looked at simply as a statistic, an increase in speed of 5 mph is not very impressive. In terms of the cultural horizons explored in this book, however, it is profoundly important. Imagine the rings spreading out from where you are now — the first ring marking the limit of how far you can travel in one day, with a further ring beyond it marketing two days, and then a yet further ring marking three days. Now imagine all those moving further and further outwards, each one twice as far…you haven’t just doubled or trebled the area you could cover in one, two or three days, you’ve increased it exponentially…With the collective horizon also increasing exponentially, you can see how a doubling of the distances people could travel in a day had a huge impact on the nation’s understanding of itself and what was going on within and beyond its borders.
Interesting throughout, this one will make the year’s “best of non-fiction” list. You can buy it here.
My excellent Conversation with Peter Singer
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Peter joined Tyler to discuss whether utilitarianism is only tractable at the margin, how Peter thinks about the meat-eater problem, why he might side with aliens over humans, at what margins he would police nature, the utilitarian approach to secularism and abortion, what he’s learned producing the Journal of Controversial Ideas, what he’d change about the current Effective Altruism movement, where Derek Parfit went wrong, to what extent we should respect the wishes of the dead, why professional philosophy is so boring, his advice on how to enjoy our lives, what he’ll be doing after retiring from teaching, and more.
Peter described it as “like aerobics for the brain.” Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How much should we spend trying to thwart predators?
SINGER: I think that’s difficult because, again, you would have to take into account the consequences of not having predators, and what are you going to do with a prey population? Are they going to overpopulate and maybe starve or destroy the environment for other sentient beings? So, it’s hard to say how much we should spend trying to thwart them.
I think there are questions about reducing the suffering of wild animals that are easier than that. That’s a question that maybe, at some stage, we’ll grapple with when we’ve reduced the amount of suffering we inflict on animals generally. It’s nowhere near the top of the list for how to reduce animal suffering.
COWEN: What do you think of the fairly common fear that if we mix the moralities of human beings and the moralities of nature, that the moralities of nature will win out? Nature is so large and numerous and populous and fierce. Human beings are relatively small in number and fragile. If the prevailing ethic becomes the ethic of nature, that the blending is itself dangerous, that human beings end up thinking, “Well, predation is just fine; it’s the way of nature.” Therefore, they do terrible things to each other.
SINGER: Is that what you meant by the moralities of nature? I wasn’t sure what the phrase meant. Do you mean the morality that we imply, that we attribute to nature?
COWEN: “Red in tooth and claw.” If we think that’s a matter that is our business, do we not end up with that morality? Trumping ours, we become subordinate to that morality. A lot of very nasty people in history have actually cited nature. “Well, nature works this way. I’m just doing that. It’s a part of nature. It’s more or less okay.” How do we avoid those series of moves?
SINGER: Right. It’s a bad argument, and we try and explain why it’s a bad argument, that we don’t want to follow nature. That the fact that nature does something is not something that we ought to imitate, but maybe, in fact, we ought to combat, and of course, we do combat nature in many ways. Maybe war between humans is part of nature, but nevertheless, we regret when wars break out. We try to have institutions to prevent wars breaking out. I think a lot of our activities are combating nature’s way of doing things rather than regarding it as a model to follow.
COWEN: But if humans are a part of nature flat out, and if our optimal policing of nature leaves 99.9999 percent of all predation in place — we just can’t stop most of it — is it then so irrational to conclude, “Well this predation must be okay. It’s the natural state of the world. Our optimal best outcome leaves 99.99999 percent of it in place.” How do we avoid that mindset?
Recommended. And the new edition (much revised) of Peter’s Animal Liberation is now out.
Ian Dunt on how Westminster works, or doesn’t
I enjoyed his new book How Westminster Works…And Why It Doesn’t.
Here is one short excerpt:
The continued use of Downing Street is an act of pathological national sentimentality, the product of a country that has come to value tradition over function and its past over its future.
Various attempts have been made to reform it, but they all came to nothing. Powell tried to convince Blair to swap it for open-plan space in the nearby Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, but was twice defeated. In August 2008, Gordon Brown set up a horseshoe-shaped work centre in the chief whip’s office in No. 12 Downing Street. Cameron dropped it as soon as he entered government. Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Boris Johnson, moved to 70 Whitehall to create a kind of space station information nerve centre, but the project died when he was sacked.
Instead, the British government has simply made do with a physical structure that prohibits it from working effectively.
Dunt defends the House of Lords (!) as one of the most functional parts of British government, calls for proportional representation, and most of all he wants to open up candidate selection to the public.
Here is his summary take on what is wrong:
At the heart of the problem with Westminster is machismo. It’s a sense, deep at the base of our assumptions, about what politics is about and how we conduct ourselves: that we do not need to seek consensus or compromise, that the winner takes all, evidence can be ignored, the government must get with civil servants who are moved so quickly they cannot sensibly advise on what is happening, and would be undermined by a spad caste even if they could.
Spad cast refers to special advisors.
What should I ask Ada Palmer?
I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is a unique thinker and presence, and thus hard to describe. Here is a brief excerpt from her home page:
I am an historian, an author of science fiction and fantasy, and a composer. I teach in the History Department at the University of Chicago.
Yes, she has tenure. Her four-volume Terra Ignota series is a landmark of science fiction, and she also has a deep knowledge of the Renaissance, Francis Bacon, and the French Enlightenment. She has been an advocate of free speech. Here is her “could be better” Wikipedia page. The imaginary world of her novels is peaceful, prosperous, obsessed with the Enlightenment (centuries from now), suppresses both free speech and gender designations, and perhaps headed for warfare once again?
Here is her excellent blog, which among other things considers issues of historical progress, and also her problems with chronic pain management and disability.
So what should I ask her?
My excellent Conversation with Seth Godin
Here is the audio, video, and transcript from a very good session. Here is part of the episode summary:
Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive?
GODIN: [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant.
What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division.
Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways.
Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now.
And another:
COWEN: What is the detail you have become most increasingly pessimistic about?
GODIN: I think that our ability to rationalize our lazy, convenient, selfish, immoral, bad behavior is unbounded, and people will find a reason to justify the thing that they used to do because that’s how we evolved. One would hope that in the face of a real challenge or actual useful data, people would say, “Oh, I was wrong. I just changed my mind.” It’s really hard to do that.
There was a piece in The Times just the other day about the bibs that long-distance runners wear at races. There is no reason left for them to wear bibs. It’s not a big issue. Everyone should say, “Oh, yeah, great, done.” But the bib defenders coming out of the woodwork, explaining, each in their own way, why we need bibs for people who are running in races — that’s just a microcosm of the human problem, which is, culture sticks around because it’s good at sticking around. But sometimes we need to change the culture, and we should wake up and say, “This is a good day to change the culture.”
COWEN: So, we’re all bib defenders in our own special ways.
GODIN: Correct! Well said. Bib Defenders. That’s the name of the next book. Love that.
COWEN: What is, for you, the bib?
GODIN: I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And here is Seth’s new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
Orwell Against Progress
Orwell was deeply suspicious of technology and not simply because of the dangers of totalitarianism as expounded in 1984. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell argues that technology saps vigor and will. He quotes disparagingly, World Without Faith, a pro-progress book written by John Beever, a proto Steven Pinker in this respect.
It is so damn silly to cry out about the civilizing effects of work in the fields and farmyards as against that done in a big locomotive works or an automobile factory. Work is a nuisance. We work because we have to and all work is done to provide us with leisure and the means of spending that leisure as enjoyably as possible.
Orwell’s response?
…an exhibition of machine-worship in its most completely vulgar, ignorant, and half-baked form….How often have we not heard it, that glutinously uplifting stuff about ’the machines, our new race of slaves, which will set humanity free’, etc., etc., etc. To these people, apparently, the only danger of the machine is its possible use for destructive purposes; as, for instance, aero-planes are used in war. Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress; machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more machines–until finally you land up in the by now familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men.
What’s Orwell’s problem with progress? He is a traditionalist. Orwell thinks that men need struggle, pain and opposition to be truly great.
…in a world from which physical danger had been banished–and obviously mechanical progress tends to eliminate danger–would physical courage be likely to survive? Could it survive? And why should physical strength survive in a world where there was never the need for physical labour? As for such qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went wrong, they would be not only irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain, and difficulty.
..The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard.
I will give Orwell his due, he got this right:
Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles which they would never be obliged to use.
Orwell’s distaste for technology and love of the manly virtues of sacrifice and endurance to pain naturally push him towards zero-sum thinking. Wealth from machines is for softies but wealth from conquest, at least that makes you brave and hard! (See my earlier post, Orwell’s Falsified Prediction on Empire). Orwell didn’t favor conquest but it’s part of his pessimism that he sees the attraction.
Another of Orwell’s tragic dilemmas is that he doesn’t like progress but he does favor socialism and thus finds it unfortunate that socialism is perceived as being favorable to progress:
…the unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress…The kind of person who most readily accepts Socialism is also the kind of person who views mechanical progress, as such, with enthusiasm.
Orwell admired the tough and masculine miners he spent time with in the first part of Wigan Pier. In the second part he mostly decries the namby-pamby feminized socialists with their hippy-bourgeoise values, love of progress, and vegetarianism. I find it very amusing how much Orwell hated a lot of socialists for cultural reasons.
Socialism is too often coupled with a fat-bellied, godless conception of ’progress’ which revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of
an aesthetic sense.…One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
…If only the sandals and the pistachio coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!
What Orwell wanted was to strip socialism from liberalism and to pair it instead with conservatism and traditionalism. (I am speaking here of the Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier).
It’s still easy today to identify the sandal wearing, socialist hippies at the yoga studio but socialism no longer brings to mind visions of progress. Today, fans of progress are more likely to be capitalists than socialists. Indeed, socialism is more often allied with critiques of progress–progress destroys the environment, ruins indigenous ways of life and so forth. A traditionalist socialism along Orwell’s lines would add to this critique that progress destroys jobs, feminizes men, and saps vitality and courage. Thus, Orwell’s goal of pairing socialism with conservatism seems logically closer at hand than in his own time.
The changing classic book culture that is German
I visited the best and largest bookstore in Konstanz, a university town and a town with above-average wealth. The bookstore had three floors.
In times past, you might have expected to find hundreds of classic German-language novels in such a store. This visit I found only a single shelf devoted to such novels, and most of them were not German-language heritage at all. (In contrast, the section for English-language books was about three times larger.) I saw Italienische Reise by Goethe and Wilde Phantasien by Tieck, and…? Maybe two or three others? There was plenty of Sherlock Holmes, a fair amount of Dickens and Austen and Melville, and so on. No Kafka, Musil, Mann…you can keep on going and no it wasn’t there. Nowhere to be found in the store. You might do better looking for those works (in English) in an American Barnes and Noble.
Do the classic German book buyers simply use Amazon? Or is the shift in reading habits so dramatic? Is this another international conformity effect, and can I somehow blame the Woke? Maybe immigrants are a modest factor too, or you might not wish to post your reading of such books on social media.
*The Corporation and the Twentieth Century*
The author is Richard N. Langlois, and the subtitle is The History of American Business Enterprise. 551 pp. of text. I’ve taught Ph.D Industrial Organization for a good while now, and have always wanted a text that provides an overview and introduction to U.S. business history, with sophistication and good economics, and without being out of date. This is that book, so I am happy indeed.
Two Podcasts
Two podcasts I have enjoyed recently, First, The Social Radars, headed by Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy, co-founder and managing director of Y Combinator respectively. Jessica and Carolynn bring a lot of experience and trust with them so the entrepreneurs they interview open up about the realities of startups. Here is a great interview with David Lieb, creator of Google Photos and before that the highly successful failure, Bump.
I’ve also enjoyed the physician brothers Daniel and Mitch Belkin at The External Medicine Podcast. Here’s a superb primer on drug development from the great Derek Lowe.
The rise of Louise Perry
I am pleased to see Bryan Caplan reviewing the new Louis Perry book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. He opens with this:
I read Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century in a single day. If you want a page-turner, look no further. The sentences are gripping, the anecdotes are shocking, and the thesis is eyebrow-furrowing. For pure entertainment, I honestly don’t think I can compete with this book, which strives to convert today’s young feminists to a heretical syncretic creed of sex-negative feminism and social conservatism.
On Amazon the book has a five-star average with 716 ratings, and I strongly suspect it still will be read and referenced in ten or twenty years. I disagree with much of what Bryan says on this topic, but am glad to see he recognizes the importance of the book. In my view, Bryan is insufficiently Freudian, unwilling to see both “sexual freedom” and “sexual repression” as embodying a complex bundle of options, with no unproblematic way out and with no truly stable solution. I read Perry (who is an Emergent Ventures winner, by the way) as embodying the Freudian perspective, and not denying it, but not willing to emphasize it either. She has chosen her side, and would rather tell the woman not to let the guy choke you for his own fun.
On that I can agree. I am pleased to see this book doing so well.
*Why Congress*
By Philip A. Wallach, of the American Enterprise Institute. Here is the book’s home page. Here is a review of the book. A very good book. As I read Phil, he is suggesting that Congress is even a wee bit underrated. You can buy it here.
*The Lost Album of the Beatles*
The author is Daniel Rachel, and the subtitle is What if The Beatles Hadn’t Split Up? This is perfectly fine as a music book (for Beatle fans, it won’t convince the unconverted), but I couldn’t stop thinking of the Lucas critique.
For the author, the Beatles “final last album” is a double album of the best cuts from Beatle early solo careers, and that is an impressive assemblage indeed. McCartney’s “Back Seat of My Car,” for instance, was written in 1968, or at least started in that year, so surely it would have ended up on the last album. Or would it have? It didn’t end up on Let It Be or Abbey Road, so who knows? As long as the end of The Beatles was in sight, perhaps each Beatle would have hoarded his best potential solo material. Or maybe the other Beatles would have vetoed some of those songs, just as Paul in 1968 had decided that George’s “Isn’t a Pity?” wasn’t suitable as a Beatles song. Or maybe John and Paul would have had to give more songs to George and Ringo, to keep the group together, but arguably to the detriment of the final album. Most of the songs on All Things Must Pass are very good, but best suited to their own little walled garden.
In contrast, this economist believes that an additional album would have fallen somewhere between Let It Be and The White Album, with an overall sound somewhat akin to “Free as a Bird,” or perhaps also Ringo’s “I’m the Greatest,” penned by John and cut with George as well. Good stuff, but I’m still glad they split. Get that Q up, especially given that market power was present!
And don’t assume that Beatle behavior remains invariant across different policy regimes. Lucas truly was a universal economist.
*The Soul of Civility*
The subtitle is Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, and the author is the still-on-the-rise Alexandra Hudson. Most of all this is a sane and healthy book! And it indicates a direction for the future evolution of classical liberalism. Here is one short excerpt:
In Rituals of Dinner, Margaret Visser notes the dark side to hospitality. she argues that hosting others can be a power play. The host has the opportunity to be the guest of honor, the center of all praise and attention in the comfort of their own home. Guests must fawn and thank them whether or not the hospitality or food is any good, and often feel obligated to reciprocate whether they want to or not. While cynical, I’ve come to see some wisdom in her insight.
I am very glad this book now exists, you can pre-order it here.
Jonathan Swift/Gulliver/Laputa optimal taxation
I heard a very warm debate between two professors, about the most commodious and effectual ways and means of raising money, without grieving the subject. The first affirmed, “the justest method would be, to lay a certain tax upon vices and folly; and the sum fixed upon every man to be rated, after the fairest manner, by a jury of his neighbours.” The second was of an opinion directly contrary; “to tax those qualities of body and mind, for which men chiefly value themselves; the rate to be more or less, according to the degrees of excelling; the decision whereof should be left entirely to their own breast.” The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the other sex, and the assessments, according to the number and nature of the favours they have received; for which, they are allowed to be their own vouchers. Wit, valour, and politeness, were likewise proposed to be largely taxed, and collected in the same manner, by every person’s giving his own word for the quantum of what he possessed. But as to honour, justice, wisdom, and learning, they should not be taxed at all; because they are qualifications of so singular a kind, that no man will either allow them in his neighbour or value them in himself.
The women were proposed to be taxed according to their beauty and skill in dressing, wherein they had the same privilege with the men, to be determined by their own judgment. But constancy, chastity, good sense, and good nature, were not rated, because they would not bear the charge of collecting.
First Pigou taxes on vice, then taxes on inherited rents, and finally no tax on ideas, knowledge, or wisdom. That is from part III, chapter six.