Category: Books
What should I ask Marilynne Robinson?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is from Wikipedia:
Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
Her next book is Reading Genesis, on the Book of Genesis. So what should I ask her?
My Conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Rebecca F. Kuang just might change the way you think about fantasy and science fiction. Known for her best-selling books Babel and The Poppy War trilogy, Kuang combines a unique blend of historical richness and imaginative storytelling. At just 27, she’s already published five novels, and her compulsion to write has not abated even as she’s pursued advanced degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and now Yale. Her latest book, Yellowface, was one of Tyler’s favorites in 2023.
She sat down with Tyler to discuss Chinese science-fiction, which work of fantasy she hopes will still be read in fifty years, which novels use footnotes well, how she’d change book publishing, what she enjoys about book tours, what to make of which Chinese fiction is read in the West, the differences between the three volumes of The Three Body Problem, what surprised her on her recent Taiwan trip, why novels are rarely co-authored, how debate influences her writing, how she’ll balance writing fiction with her academic pursuits, where she’ll travel next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why do you think that British imperialism worked so much better in Singapore and Hong Kong than most of the rest of the world?
KUANG: What do you mean by work so much better?
COWEN: Singapore today, per capita — it’s a richer nation than the United States. It’s hard to think, “I’d rather go back and redo that whole history.” If you’re a Singaporean today, I think most of them would say, “We’ll take what we got. It was far from perfect along the way, but it worked out very well for us.” People in Sierra Leone would not say the same thing, right?
Hong Kong did much better under Britain than it had done under China. Now that it’s back in the hands of China, it seems to be doing worse again, so it seems Hong Kong was better off under imperialism.
KUANG: It’s true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era, and that would take hours and hours to unpack. I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about a historical counterfactual such as, “Oh, if it were not for the British Empire, would Singapore have the economy it does today?” Or “would Hong Kong have the culture it does today?” Because we don’t really know.
Also, I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do, as well, because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. It feels like a useless comparison to say, “Oh, why has Hong Kong prospered under British rule while India hasn’t?” Et cetera.
COWEN: It seems, if anywhere we know, it’s Hong Kong. You can look at Guangzhou — it’s a fairly close comparator. Until very recently, Hong Kong was much, much richer than Guangzhou. Without the British, it would be reasonable to assume living standards in Hong Kong would’ve been about those of the rest of Southern China, right? It would be weird to think it would be some extreme outlier. None others of those happened in the rest of China. Isn’t that close to a natural experiment? Not a controlled experiment, but a pretty clear comparison?
KUANG: Maybe. Again, I’m not a historian, so I don’t have a lot to say about this. I just think it’s pretty tricky to argue that places prospered solely due to British presence when, without the British, there are lots of alternate ways things could have gone, and we just don’t know.
Interesting throughout.
*The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America*
By Coleman Hughes, coming soon!
Argentina fact of the day
The country was not quite as rich in the early days as it is sometimes made out to be:
Argentina’s performance on this measure is frequently exaggerated. In 1929, for example, Argentina’s per capita income was less than half of the average of other temperate agrarian societies (such as Canada and Australia) and of European industrialized countries (such as Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Sweden). In 1969 and in 1929, it was 38 percent of the U.S. figure…
That is from the very good 1996 Larry Sawers book The Other Argentina: The Interior and National Development. It is related to my earlier post on Salta.
The author also has an excellent explanation of how import substitution strategies run out of steam, even if they produce more growth in a shorter run. The import substitutes usually require subsidies to get started, which puts a squeeze on the government budget, and in fact you can think of import substitution as a kind of deficit spending/borrowing against the future. The import substitution also puts a squeeze on the agricultural sector, which for many countries, Argentina included, had been generating net foreign exchange. The balance of payments then worsens, which also becomes a longer run problem. Over time, in addition, obtaining the needed foreign inputs for the import-substituting sectors becomes yet another problem. In time, tariffs are needed for the nascent domestic sector, and that protectionism lowers living standards and also leads to higher corruption.
As the author notes:
In the early postwar years, ISI [import substitution] was highly recommended by almost every development economist in the world and pursued by virtually every Third World country.
At first it worked, but over time it fared far less well. This is one of the very best and also unheralded books about Argentina, as there are interesting points on almost every page. One point the author makes, for instance, is that the Argentina economy never had great facility in making high fixed investments, even before Peron and various later depredations. Most of all, this is a book that actually tries to answer your questions.
My “writing every day” awards
Since I recommend the practice of writing every day, or virtually every day (every day is better!), I thought I should give awards for 2023.
Clear winner in my view in Noah Smith, who just keeps on writing and being productive and improving. Here is Noah’s Substack.
Runner-up awards go to the blog Economists Writing Every Day (duh).
Cass Sunstein remains extraordinarily prolific, and Rainer Zitelmann keeps on writing books, he has a new one Unbreakable Spirit: Rising Above All Odds.
I wonder if the exact same people will win next year? If you don’t see these awards given again, that means the answer has been “yes.”
*You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism*
That is the new book by my colleague Bryan Caplan, collected largely from his previous blog writings. Bryan emails to me:
I just released a new book of essays on Amazon, entitled *You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism*. Emerson and Thoreau were right: Excessive conformity is a major impediment to living a full life in the modern world, and you really can improve a lot with modest effort.For details, see my recent Substack.…Like my other books of essays, You Will Not Stampede Me is divided into four parts.
- The first, echoing Milgram, is “Disobedience to Authority.” These pieces dissect the psychology and economics of being normal.
- The next section, “The World Is Wrong,” explores big, specific issues where the popular opinion sucks. Covid, of course, but also bioethics, trolling, the right of revenge, and more.
- I follow with “The Weird Is Right,” most notably with the essay, “A Non-Conformist’s Guide to Success in a Conformist World.” Yes, the world does punish non-conformists, but so sporadically and thoughtlessly than the crafty can usually defy the world with impunity.
- I close the book with “Non-Conformist Candor,” where I call a litany of hand-picked controversies just like I see them.
As usual with my books of essays, you can read them all for free in the Bet On It Archives. What you get for your $12 is curation, convenience, and coolness.
As you might expect, I like to troll Bryan by telling him he is a deeply conformist suburban Dad, in the good sense of course. Read this book and find out if I am right or not.
What should I ask Jonathan Haidt?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with him. Here is my previous Conversation with him, almost eight years ago. As many of you will know, Jonathan has a new book coming out, namely
The Everything Token
If you want to understand NFTs and where they are going, The Everything Token by web entrepreneur Steve Kaczynski and Harvard Business school professor Scott Duke Kominers is by far the best guide. 
Kaczynski and Kominers emphasize that NFTs are more than deeds to digital art they are an ideal way to create communities.
Community formation around shared interests has been happening forever, of course. But NFTs turn it up to eleven because of what we call their embedded network superpower:…becoming the owner of an NFT is to some degree an act of affiliation with the brand. Yet NFT ownership doesn’t just connect you with the brand itself, but also with the entire network of individuals who are similarly affiliated….The holders of a given NFT comprise a network of brand enthusiasts just waiting to be activated.
The Everything Token is all about advising brands on what NFTs are, how to understand and navigate the design space and how to active brand enthusiasm. Now you may find ‘activating brand enthusiasm’ pedestrian, perhaps even a little dystopian but Kaczynski and Kominers are correct that this is where the NFT market is going.
When the internet first exploded into public consciousness there was a lot of talk about declaring independence and creating a civilization of the Mind. If you bought into that (I did not, despite lauding the goals) then maybe you think that the internet as we know it today, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and all the rest are a big disappointment. I don’t. I love the new world, even if it isn’t the libertarian paradise that some once promised.
In the same way, NFTs won’t lead to a revolution of the creator class but they are poised to be increasingly adopted by corporations. Corporate adoption will ‘domesticate’ the underlying cryptographic technology. That is, as corporations infuse NFTs into mainstream business models, NFTs will become more user-friendly and accessible and much like the seamless integration into our daily lives of technologies such as Google Maps and digital payments, they will become a ubiquitous part of the digital economy. As NFTs become embedded in various sectors ranging from finance to entertainment, they will reshape how we perceive and interact with digital assets offering innovative and versatile applications that extend well beyond their current scope. It will be fun but don’t expect to liberate the means of production.
*Molly*
That is the new book by Blake Butler, a memoir. It is no spoiler to tell you that his wife Molly takes her own life at a young age. I don’t know of any better argument for social conservatism than this book. And perhaps suicide should be regarded as a sin, not something to get sentimental about on Twitter. There is so much depravity in this book, at so many different levels. There is the decline of a whole civilization in this book. Here is a good New Yorker review by Alexandra Schwarz.
What I’ve been reading
1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create. Could the be the best book on NFTs? I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future. In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.” Do you pass or fail this test? The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…
2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans. Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work. Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture. Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.” A wonderful chronicle of a very particular time, artistic and otherwise.
3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman. The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition. But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.
4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis. One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment. For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well. Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay. Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you! If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare. Recommended, for all those who care.
5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus. It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away. I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024. The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened. The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.
William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.
My GOAT podcast with Robert Murphy
He is of the Mises Institute, so plenty of talk about Mises and the Austrians as well.
Bob is very smart and widely read. The other links are here: https://mises.org/library/tyler-cowen-goat-economics, https://soundcloud.com/misesmedia/tyler-cowen-on-the-goat-in-economics
Mark Skousen reviews *GOAT*
An excellent review, here is one excerpt:
Oddly enough he leaves out several economists who many consider possible GOATs: From the British school, David Ricardo (Milton Friedman’s favorite); from the Monetarists, Irving Fisher (whom James Tobin ranked “the greatest economist America has produced”); from the Austrians, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard (which the Mises Institute would consider leaving out unforgiveable); from the Institutionalists, Thorstein Veblen (who Max Lerner called “the most creative American social thought has produced”) and Max Weber (the “one man” that Frank Knight admired); and from the Marxists, Karl Marx (which they would consider his omission a cardinal sin). Cowen tells me he may write a short monograph on Marx (email dated November 22, 2023).
He also excluded the big three of the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s: Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walras.
Do read the whole thing, and note I may write more on the Marginal Revolution as well, the revolution that is not the blog!
And here is Mark’s daughter, doing a skating back flip on ice.
*The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters*
By Benjamin Moser, I loved this book. It is one of my favorite books of art criticism ever, written from the perspective of a fan I might add. It talks you through the pictures and the lives of the 17th century Dutch artists and tries to tie it all together. It doesn’t spend too much time on the super-famous works or the anecdotes you might already know.
If you want to get down to brass tacks, after Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Fabritius — the top Dutch masters — I like Pieter Saenredam and Paulus Potter and Rachel Ruysch, who had ten children. I admire Hals, but don’t go to any great lengths to go see it. Judith Leyster remains modestly underrated. If you read this book, you’ll come away with your own opinions, or revise the ones you already have. The color plates are well presented.
Moser is highly rated but still underrated, and his Lispector and Sontag biographies are excellent as well.
*Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative*
That is the new memoir from Glenn C. Loury, and I cracked it open right away, here is one excerpt:
But now Harvard is looking to retool its ailing Afro-American Studies department, and Tom [Schelling] serves on the committee whose job it is to recruit new faculty worthy of the institution. The chair of that committee is the distinguished black historian Nathan Huggins, who has recently taken the helm in Afro Studies at Harvard. Apparently my Econometrica paper on intergenerational transfers had gotten their attention, and my writing on the dynamics of racial income differences has piqued their interest. I’m just six years past my PhD and they’re offering a joint appointment as full professor of economics and of Afro-American Studies. The appointment would make me the first black tenured professor in the history of Harvard’s economics department. I like the sound of that. In the past, the timing hadn’t quite felt right for Harvard. But now it does feel right, and I have the sense that if I say no a third time, they won’t be calling again.
You can pre-order the book here, it is self-recommending of course. And here is my earlier Conversation with Glenn Loury.
The new *Pedro Páramo* translation
By Juan Rulfo, first published in 1955. The previous English-language translation was abysmal, so this is perhaps the least read piece of truly great world literature? In the English-speaking world at least. It took me a long time and a lot of effort to read this short novel in Spanish. The vocabulary is not difficult, it is simply difficult in any language to know exactly what is going on. What exactly are the borders between the living and the dead, for instance? Which character is doing what? What is Rulfo telling us about Dante? As first-tier literature should, it strains our capabilities to the utmost. A knowledge of rural Mexico helps, for sure.
García Márquez compared the work to that of Sophocles in import. Carlos Fuentes called it “the essential Mexican novel.” For me it is in the top 25 novels of all time. Susan Sontag thought it was one of the essential works of 20th century literature.
The new Douglas J. Weatherford translation is probably as good as it is going to get. The work is intrinsically difficult to translate, so try the Spanish if you can, or read the two jointly together, switching back and forth. And as they like to say in Haiti, “if you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.”
Recommended, essential, and kudos to Weatherford for making this available. I’ve addended it to my favorite fiction of 2023 list.