Category: Books
The Economics Nobel goes to Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt
The Nobel prize goes to Joel Mokyr, the economic historian of the industrial revolution and the growth theorists Phillippe Aghion and Peter Howitt best known for their Schumpeterian model of economic growth.
Here’s a good quote from Nobelist Joel Mokyr’s the Lever of Riches.
Yet the central message of this book is not unequivocally optimistic . History provides us with relatively few examples of societies that were technologically progressive. Our own world is exceptional, though not unique, in this regard. By and large, the forces opposing technological progress have been stronger than those striving for changes. The study of technological progress is therefore a study of exceptionalism, of cases in which as a result of rare circumstances, the normal tendency of societies to slide toward stasis and equilibrium was broken. The unprecedented prosperity enjoyed today by a substantial proportion of humanity stems from accidental factors to a degree greater than is commonly supposed. Moreover, technological progress is like a fragile and vulnerable plant, whose nourishing is not only dependent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short. It is highly sensitive to the social and economic environment and can easily be arrested by relatively small external changes. If there is a lesson to be learned from the history of technology it is that Schumpeterian growth, like the other forms of economic growth, cannot and should not be taken for granted.
Aghion and Howitt’s Schumpeterian model of economic growth shares with Romer the idea that the key factors of economic growth must be modelled, growth is thus endogenous to the model (unlike Solow where growth is primarily driven by technology, an unexplained exogenous factor). In Romer’s model, however, growth is primarily horizontally driven by new varieties whereas in Aghion and Howitt growth comes from creative destruction, from new ideas, technologies and firms replacing old ideas, technologies and firms.
Thus, Aghion and Howitt’s model lends itself to micro-data on firm entry and exit of the kind pioneered by Haltiwanger and others (who Tyler and I have argued for a future Nobel). Economic growth is not just about new ideas but about how well an economy can reallocate production to the firms using the new ideas. Consider the picture below, based on data from Bartelsman, Haltiwanger, and Scarpetta. It shows the covariance of labor productivity and firm size. In the United States highly productive firms tend to be big but this is much less true in other economies. In the UK during this period (1993-2001) the covariance of productive and big is considerably less than half the rate in the United States. In Romania at this time the covariance was even negative–indicating that the big firms were among the least productive. Why? Well in Romania this as the end of the communist era when big, unproductive government run behemoths dominated the economy. As Romania moved towards markets the covariance between labor productivity and firm size increased. That is the economy became more productive as it reallocated labor from low productivity firms to high productivity firms.
Aghion and Howitt’s work centers on how new ideas emerge and how creative destruction turns those ideas into real economic change through the birth and death of firms. But creative destruction is never painless—growth requires that some firms fail and that labor be displaced so resources can flow to new, more productive uses. Aghion and Howitt will likely point to the United States as dealing with his process better than Europe. Business dynamism has declined in Europe relative to the United States, a worrying fact given that business dynamism has also declined in the United States. Nevertheless, the US has a more flexible labor market and appears more open to both the birth of new firms (venture capital) and the deaths of older firms. Yet, in both the United States and around the the world the differences between high productivity and low productivity firms appears to be growing, that is the dispersion in productivity is growing which means that the good ideas are not spreading as quickly as they once did. Aghion and Howitt’s work gives us a model for thinking about these kinds of issues–see, for example, Ten Facts on Business Dynamism and Lessons from Endogenous Growth Theory.
Ian Smith’s memoir *Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal*
Yes he used to run Rhodesia, and yes it is costly to buy this book because no one wants to reprint it, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless it is a fascinating look into an era and its dissolution.
Smith is a wonderful writer, and remarkably erudite, more so than virtually any politician today. He also is delusional almost beyond belief. As the title of the memoir indicates, the story is all about the different parties who betrayed him. The British, the South Africans, and also some of his fellow Rhodesians. He blames almost everybody else, without considering the possibility that the Rhodesian system of “one white for every seventeen blacks, and without equal rights” (as was the ratio circa 1960) simply was never going to work.
He calls the Rhodesian human rights record “impeccable,” but you will find another perspective from GPT-5.
He loves to inveigh against South African apartheid, which he considered very bad publicity for the broader project of civilizing the southern cone of the African continent. He insisted that Rhodesia had nothing similar.
Unlike many contemporary writers, he often is willing to tell you what he really thinks, for instance:
Hilgar Muller certainly put on a good performance, full of drama and emotion, the kind of thing these foreign-affairs types have got to perfect if they are going to do their job. He need not have bothered as far as I was concerned, for I am far too experienced and down to earth to be influenced by such tactics.
The closest he ever comes to blaming himself, his party, or his decisions is when he writes:
Our crime was that we had resisted revolutionary political change.
Or he writes:
I myself certainly prefer having dealings with some of these honest-to-goodness black people, than with the two-faced liberals of the Labour Party or the Fabian Society.
“Recommended” is not exactly the word I wish to use here, but I can report that I read the whole thing.
What I’ve been reading
Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking. A very good book, perhaps the best introduction to Kant? Though for me it is mostly interior to my current knowledge set.
Matthew Bell, Goethe: A Life in Ideas. A beautiful book, now in English we have Nicholas Boyle’s work and also this. Bell is wise enough to understand and value Iphigenia auf Tauris, a good test for Goethe appeciation. Although I had a library copy out to read, I went ahead and bought a copy of this one to own.
Benjamin Wilson, Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex is both interesting and has plenty of information on early Thomas Schelling and his precursors.
Very well researched is The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China, by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, with Claire Cousineau.
Peter Baxter, Rhodesia: A Complete History 1890-1980. The most complete history of the country I have been able to find. Many of the other books contain a few dominant, non-false narratives, but one gets tired of that? I say LLMs come especially in handy for learning this history.
Luka Ivan Jukic, Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea. I took this sentence to encapsulate the main lesson of the book, namely that this does not usually work: “Central Europeans were, as ever, masterfully adept at rearranging polities into new configurations.”
I enjoyed Maxim Samson, Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, From the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way.
My excellent Conversation with John Amaechi
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. As I said on Twitter, John has the best “podcast voice” of any CWT guest to date. Here is the episode summary:
John Amaechi is a former NBA forward/center who became a chartered scientist, professor of leadership at Exeter Business School, and New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders, argues that leadership isn’t bestowed or innate, it’s earned through deliberate skill development.
Tyler and John discuss whether business culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated, what rituals leadership requires, the quality of leadership in universities and consulting, why Doc Rivers started some practices at midnight, his childhood identification with the Hunchback of Notre Dame and retreat into science fiction, whether Yoda was actually a terrible leader, why he turned down $17 million from the Lakers, how mental blocks destroyed his shooting and how he overcame them, what he learned from Jerry Sloan’s cruelty versus Karl Malone’s commitment, what percentage of NBA players truly love the game, the experience of being gay in the NBA and why so few male athletes come out, when London peaked, why he loved Scottsdale but had to leave, the physical toll of professional play, the career prospects for 2nd tier players, what distinguishes him from other psychologists, why personality testing is “absolute bollocks,” what he plans to do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Of NBA players as a whole, what percentage do you think truly love the game?
AMAECHI: It’s a hard question to answer. Well, let me give a number first, otherwise, it’s just frustrating. 40%. And a further 30% like the game, and 20% of them are really good at the game and they have other things they want to do with the opportunities that playing well in the NBA grants them.
But make no mistake, even that 30% that likes the game and the 40% that love the game, they also know that they like what the game can give them and the opportunities that can grow for them, their families and generation, they can make a generational change in their family’s life and opportunities. It’s not just about love. Love doesn’t make you good at something. And this is a mistake that people make all the time. Loving something doesn’t make you better, it just makes the hard stuff easier.
COWEN: Are there any of the true greats who did not love playing?
AMAECHI: Yeah. So I know all former players are called legends, whether you are crap like me or brilliant like Hakeem Olajuwon, right? And so I’m part of this group of legends and I’m an NBA Ambassador as well. So I go around all the time with real proper legends. And a number of them I know, and so I’m not going to throw them under the bus, but it’s the way we talk candidly in the van going between events. It’s like, “Yeah, this is a job now and it was a job then, and it was a job that wrecked our knees, destroyed our backs, made it so it’s hard for us to pick up our children.”
And so it’s a job. And we were commodities for teams who often, at least back in those days, treated you like commodities. So yeah, there’s a lot of superstars, really, really excellent players. But that’s the problem, don’t conflate not loving the game. And also, don’t be fooled. In Britain there’s this habit of athletes kissing the badge. In football, they’ve got the badge on their shirt and they go, “Mwah, yeah.” If that fools you into thinking that this person loves the game, if them jumping into the stands and hugging you fools you into thinking that they love the game, more fool you.
COWEN: Michael Cage, he loved the game. Right?
But do note that most of the Conversation is not about the NBA.
*Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000*
By Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini. Due out in November, likely to be excellent.
*Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History*
That is the forthcoming book by Andrew Burstein, who is also author of the excellent Madison and Jefferson (with Nancy Isenberg). I am sent many books on the founding and Founding Fathers, and while I find their average quality to be high, usually they do not grab my attention. I have already read plenty in that area. I also have consumed many books on Jefferson in particular,s Dumas Malone boring or magisterial? But this one I read straight through, as it is simply…compelling. Excerpt:
Three thousand copies of Esquisse were issued in 1795, nine years before the publication of Condorcet’s Collected Writings in twenty-one volumes [TC: when is the AI-assisted translation coming?]. As a systematic compendium of the philosophe’s outlook on all matters of human intervention and the “perfectability” of the species, the book advances through the stages of social development from early times in order to address the need for liberation of the progressive spirit through all available means of encouragement. He applaus every perceptible advance toward closing the economic gap between the wealthy and everyone else, as well as equality under the law, rights of conscience, decolonization, and universal suffrage. It is difficult to find another Enlightenment figure who went as far as Condorcet in envisioning a just society.
And:
President Thomas Jefferson, self-styled champion of republican methods, was putting his finger on the scale here. It is hard to pretend otherwise. With an unwarranted exercise of power aimed at weakening the Supreme Court, he was acting from a private need to humiliate a man who treated a nonelective position as a partisan platform. While the emotion is quite understandable, Jefferson’s justice was purely retributive.
Recommended, you can pre-order here.
My excellent Conversation with Steven Pinker
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Steven probe these dimensions of common knowledge—Schelling points, differential knowledge, benign hypocrisies like a whisky bottle in a paper bag—before testing whether rational people can actually agree (spoiler: they can’t converge on Hitchcock rankings despite Aumann’s theorem), whether liberal enlightenment will reignite and why, what stirring liberal thinkers exist under the age 55, why only a quarter of Harvard students deserve A’s, how large language models implicitly use linguistic insights while ignoring linguistic theory, his favorite track on Rubber Soul, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Surely there’s a difference between coordination and common knowledge. I think of common knowledge as an extremely recursive model that typically has an infinite number of loops. Most of the coordination that goes on in the real world is not like that. If I approach a traffic circle in Northern Virginia, I look at the other person, we trade glances. There’s a slight amount of recursion, but I doubt if it’s ever three loops. Maybe it’s one or two.
We also have to slow down our speeds precisely because there are not an infinite number of loops. We coordinate. What percentage of the coordination in the real world is like the traffic circle example or other examples, and what percentage of it is due to actual common knowledge?
PINKER: Common knowledge, in the technical sense, does involve this infinite number of arbitrarily embedded beliefs about beliefs about beliefs. Thank you for introducing the title with the three dots, dot, dot, dot, because that’s what signals that common knowledge is not just when everyone knows that everyone knows, but when everyone knows that everyone knows that and so on. The answer to your puzzle — and I devote a chapter in the book to what common knowledge — could actually consist of, and I’m a psychologist, I’m not an economist, a mathematician, a game theorist, so foremost in my mind is what’s going on in someone’s head when they have common knowledge.
You’re right. We couldn’t think through an infinite number of “I know that he knows” thoughts, and our mind starts to spin when we do three or four. Instead, common knowledge can be generated by something that is self-evident, that is conspicuous, that’s salient, that you can witness at the same time that you witness other people witnessing it and witnessing you witnessing it. That can grant common knowledge in a stroke. Now, it’s implicit common knowledge.
One way of putting it is you have reason to believe that he knows that I know that he knows that I know that he knows, et cetera, even if you don’t literally believe it in the sense that that thought is consciously running through your mind. I think there’s a lot of interplay in human life between this recursive mentalizing, that is, thinking about other people thinking about other people, and the intuitive sense that something is out there, and therefore people do know that other people know it, even if you don’t have to consciously work that through.
You gave the example of norms and laws, like who yields at an intersection. The eye contact, though, is crucial because I suggest that eye contact is an instant common knowledge generator. You’re looking at the part of the person looking at the part of you, looking at the part of them. You’ve got instant granting of common knowledge by the mere fact of making eye contact, which is why it’s so potent in human interaction and often in other species as well, where eye contact can be a potent signal.
There are even species that can coordinate without literally having common knowledge. I give the example of the lowly coral, which presumably not only has no beliefs, but doesn’t even have a brain with which to have beliefs. Coral have a coordination problem. They’re stuck to the ocean floor. Their sperm have to meet another coral’s eggs and vice versa. They can’t spew eggs and sperm into the water 24/7. It would just be too metabolically expensive. What they do is they coordinate on the full moon.
On the full moon or, depending on the species, a fixed number of days after the full moon, that’s the day where they all release their gametes into the water, which can then find each other. Of course, they don’t have common knowledge in knowing that the other will know. It’s implicit in the logic of their solution to a coordination problem, namely, the public signal of the full moon, which, over evolutionary time, it’s guaranteed that each of them can sense it at the same time.
Indeed, in the case of humans, we might do things that are like coral. That is, there’s some signal that just leads us to coordinate without thinking it through. The thing about humans is that because we do have or can have recursive mentalizing, it’s not just one signal, one response, full moon, shoot your wad. There’s no limit to the number of things that we can coordinate creatively in evolutionarily novel ways by setting up new conventions that allow us to coordinate.
COWEN: I’m not doubting that we coordinate. My worry is that common knowledge models have too many knife-edge properties. Whether or not there are timing frictions, whether or not there are differential interpretations of what’s going on, whether or not there’s an infinite number of messages or just an arbitrarily large number of messages, all those can matter a lot in the model. Yet actual coordination isn’t that fragile. Isn’t the common knowledge model a bad way to figure out how coordination comes about?
And this part might please Scott Sumner:
COWEN: I don’t like most ballet, but I admit I ought to. I just don’t have the time to learn enough to appreciate it. Take Alfred Hitchcock. I would say North by Northwest, while a fine film, is really considerably below Rear Window and Vertigo. Will you agree with me on that?
PINKER: I don’t agree with you on that.
COWEN: Or you think I’m not your epistemic peer on Hitchcock films?
PINKER: Your preferences are presumably different from beliefs.
COWEN: No. Quality relative to constructed standards of the canon…
COWEN: You’re going to budge now, and you’re going to agree that I’m right. We’re not doing too well on this Aumann thing, are we?
PINKER: We aren’t.
COWEN: Because I’m going to insist North by Northwest, again, while a very good movie is clearly below the other two.
PINKER: You’re going to insist, yes.
COWEN: I’m going to insist, and I thought that you might not agree with this, but I’m still convinced that if we had enough time, I could convince you. Hearing that from me, you should accede to the judgment.
I was very pleased to have read Steven’s new book
Reading Orwell in Moscow
In this paper, I measure the effect of conflict on the demand for frames of reference, or heuristics that help individuals explain their social and political environment by means of analogy. To do so, I examine how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reshaped readership of history and social science books in Russia. Combining roughly 4,000 book abstracts retrieved from the online catalogue of Russia’s largest bookstore chain with data on monthly reading patterns of more than 100,000 users of the most popular Russian-language social reading platform, I find that the invasion prompted an abrupt and substantial increase in readership of books that engage with the experience of life under dictatorship and acquiescence to dictatorial crimes, with a predominant focus on Nazi Germany. I interpret my results as evidence that history books, by offering regime-critical frames of reference, may serve as an outlet for expressing dissent in a repressive authoritarian regime.
That is from a job market paper by Natalia Vasilenok, political science at Stanford. Via.
What of American culture from the 1940s and 1950s deserves to survive?
In the comments, Elijah asks:
Would love to read a post about which movies and novels from this era do and do not deserve to survive and why.
I do not love 20th century American fiction, so maybe I am the wrong person to ask. I started with GPT-5, which gave this list of novels from those two decades. I’ve read a significant percentage of those, and would prefer:
Raymond Chandler, J.D. Salinger, Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and lots of science fiction. The I, Robot stories are from the 1940s, and the book published in 1950. A lot of the “more serious” entries on that list I feel have diminished somewhat with age.
Great Hollywood movies from that era are too numerous to name. In music there is plenty of jazz, plus Elvis, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Buddy Holly, doo wop, “the roots of rock” (includes some one hit wonders), Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, the Everlies, the Louvin Brothers, Johnny Cash, lots of country and bluegrass and blues, and many other very well known names from the 1950s. It is one of the most seminal decades for music ever. The 1940s are worse, perhaps because of the war, but still there is Rodgers and Hammerstein, lots of big band, and Woody Guthrie.
Contra Ted Gioia, much of that remains well-known to this day, though I would admit Howard Hanson and Walter Piston have fallen by the wayside. Overall, I think we are processing the American past pretty well.
The Return of the MR Podcast: In Praise of Commercial Culture
The Marginal Revolution Podcast is back with new episodes! We begin with what I think is our best episode to date. We revisit Tyler’s 1998 book In Praise of Commercial Culture. This is the book that put Tyler on the map as a public intellectual. Tyler and I also wrote a paper, An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture, exploring themes from the book. But does In Praise of Commercial Culture stand the test of time? You be the judge!
Here’s one bit:
TABARROK: Here’s a quote from the book, “Art and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles.”
COWEN: So much of democratic politics is based on consensus. So much of wonderful art, especially new art, is based on overturning consensus, maybe sometimes offending people. All this came to a head in the 1990s, disputes over what the National Endowment for the Arts in America was funding. Some of it, of course, was obscene. Some of it was obscene and pretty good. Some of it was obscene and terrible.
What ended up happening is the whole process got bureaucratized. The NEA ended up afraid to make highly controversial grants. They spend more on overhead. They send more around to the states. Now, it’s much more boring. It seems obvious in retrospect. The NEA did a much better job in the 1960s, right after it was founded, when it was just a bunch of smart people sitting around a table saying, “Let’s send some money to this person,” and then they’d just do it, basically.
TABARROK: Right, so the greatness cannot survive the mediocrity of democratic consensus.
COWEN: There are plenty of good cases where government does good things in the arts, often in the early stages of some process before it’s too politicized. I think some critics overlook that or don’t want to admit it.
TABARROK: One of the interesting things in your book was that the whole history of the NEA, this recreates itself, has recreated itself many times in the past. The salon during the French painting Renaissance, the impressionists hated the salon, right?
COWEN: Right. And had typically turned them away because the works weren’t good enough.
TABARROK: There could be rent-seeking going on, right? The artists get control. Sometimes it’s democratic politics, but sometimes it’s some clique of artists who get control and then funnel the money to their friends.
COWEN: French cinematic subsidies would more fit that latter model. It’s not so much that the French voters want to pay for those movies, but a lot of French government is controlled by elites. The elites like a certain kind of cinema. They view it as a counterweight to Hollywood, preserving French culture. The French still pay for or, indirectly by quota, subsidize a lot of films that just don’t really even get released. They end up somewhere and they just don’t have much impact flat out.
Here’s the episode. Subscribe now to take a small step toward a much better world: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube.
What should I ask Alison Gopnik?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Alison Gopnik (born June 16, 1955) is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles…
Gopnik has carried out extensive work in applying Bayesian networks to human learning and has published and presented numerous papers on the topic…Gopnik was one of the first psychologists to note that the mathematical models also resemble how children learn.
Gopnik is known for advocating the “theory theory” which postulates that the same mechanisms used by scientists to develop scientific theories are used by children to develop causal models of their environment.
Here is her home page. So what should I ask her?
The forthcoming Joe Studwell book on Africa
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Development Frontier.
Self-recommending…
The new Derek Parfit volume
He also talked about more personal matters such as his severe problems with insomnia during the recent book-writing process, saying that he was sometimes awake for thirty-six hours at a time and felt that if he had had a gun to hand he might have shot himself — not because he wanted to die, but because he was desperate to lose consciousness. He had eventually been recommended to try a sleep regime and calming drugs that had solved the problem, and when I commented that I also had problems with sleep, he immediately suggested I should try his methods too. I discovered later that whenever he came across some technique he regarded as providing a major life improvement, he would proselytize it far and wide.
That is from Janet Radcliffe Richard, the widow of Derek Parfit. Her fascinating spousal memoir is from the new and fascinating edited collection Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought, edited by Jeff McMahan. Worth the triple digit price. Derek would exercise on a stationery bike only, because that was the only form of exercise compatible with reading. And he was a big fan of Uchida playing Mozart, as all people should be.
And there is this segment, near the close of the essay:
…in the eyes of some people who were aware of it, my philosophical standing was if anything diminished, because in Derek’s circle I was merely his partner, and barely known otherwise. He did not open up new opportunities for me; on the contrary, I rather dropped out of public view when we lived togehter. He did not widen my social circle, because he did not have one; in practice (not deliberately), he severely contracted it. He was of little use for anything recreational, because we did together only what he wanted to do, and soon after I met him most possibilities of that kind were perpetually over the horizon. He did not in any way advance my career: he was neither my teacher nor my referee, and I had started to establish my terrain — very different from his — before I knew him. I learned an enormous amount from him, of course; but I did not often find it helpful to discuss my work with him. Even my eventual return to Oxford had nothing to do with him.
Recommended. Larry Temkin tells us that Parfit could not calculate a fifteen percent tip, and there is an essay by Derek’s brother as well. I have never seen a volume where the contributors evince so much fierce loyalty and attachment to their subject.
What I’ve been reading
1. Mark Gilbert, Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy. How Italy built a democracy after WWII, more or less out of nothing. An optimistic and good book. De Gasperi was a great man, and essential to the building out of a democratic Italy, yet today his name is hardly known.
2. Dave Edmonds, Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, A Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need. An engaging but also intellectually serious history of some strands of utilitarianism and effective altruism. I was happy to blurb this book, you may recall Edmonds also wrote the excellent biography of Derek Parfit.
3. Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Well-written, but at some point I started wondering why I should care. OK, Mama was a pain in the ass, but then what? You had to take care of her when she was old. I guess I prefer whaling tales?
4. Chuck Klosterman, Football. An excellent and highly conceptual book about America’s favorite sport. Could this be the best book on (American) football ever?
5. Jordana Pomeroy, Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Both a book and a picture book rolled into one. This new release is a very good introduction to her life, her art, and her role as semi-official court painter for Marie de Antoinette. She remains an underrated artist.
6. Michael Lentz, Schattenfroh. About one thousand pages, it is receiving buzz as a new novel to master, some are calling it “the new Solenoid” (not a positive for everyone, I do understand). I have tried parts in English and parts in German, but still I do not get it. Does it have a plot? Any humor? For purposes of norming, I am a big fan of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I will try it again, however. At least the author was not complacent.
What should I ask Cass Sunstein?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him soon. Most of all (but not exclusively) about his three recent books Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom, Manipulation: What It Is, Why It Is Bad, What To Do About It, and Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do.
So what should I ask him? Here is my previous CWT with Cass.