Category: Books
The new Elizabeth Gilbert book and what makes for an ideal read on a long plane flight?
It’s good — really — and it is called The Signature of All Things. I also find the book was nearly ideal for a long plane flight. It has enough ideas to keep one’s interest, as I find that truly schlocky fiction bores me after a short while (it is better for short flights than for long ones). But it is also easy enough to read and the print is suitably large.
Which other books do you find to be ideal for long plane flights?
Alice Munro wins the Nobel Prize in literature
She is one of my favorite authors. If you are looking for one place to start try Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories, but all of her books are worth reading. As writers go, she falls into the “behavioral” camp, so to speak. Here is a story on Alice Munro retiring, as of earlier this year. Here is an associated slide show. I liked this article about her decision to retire. She was 37 when her first collection of stories was published, her first story was published in 1977, but she had been sending stories to The New Yorker as early as the 1950s. Here is a good interview with Munro.
What I’ve been reading
1. Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Not thrilling, but a well-informed, readable book, full of good information, about a part of the world which is growing in importance rapidly.
2. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. This is a remarkably good, serious, detailed, and documented work on what we (possibly) know about the Gospels, if we read them through the lens of being eyewitness testimony. Anyone interested in The New Testament should read this book.
3. Lara Feigel, The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War. This book chronicles some fairly intense love affairs, albeit in an intellectual sort of way.
4. Jonathan Franzen, editor, The Kraus Project. The Karl Kraus texts in German are energetically written, but one remembers how cantankerous and idiosyncratic he was. The Kraus translated into English doesn’t work and probably the works are untranslatable. The Franzen in English is cringe-worthy. The Michael Hofmann review in TNYRB is one of the best book reviews I have read, ever, gated here.
Arrived in my pile are:
5. Brigitte Granville, Remembering Inflation, and
6. Dwight H. Perkins, East Asian Development: Foundations and Strategies.
What I've been reading
1. Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Not thrilling, but a well-informed, readable book, full of good information, about a part of the world which is growing in importance rapidly.
2. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. This is a remarkably good, serious, detailed, and documented work on what we (possibly) know about the Gospels, if we read them through the lens of being eyewitness testimony. Anyone interested in The New Testament should read this book.
3. Lara Feigel, The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War. This book chronicles some fairly intense love affairs, albeit in an intellectual sort of way.
4. Jonathan Franzen, editor, The Kraus Project. The Karl Kraus texts in German are energetically written, but one remembers how cantankerous and idiosyncratic he was. The Kraus translated into English doesn’t work and probably the works are untranslatable. The Franzen in English is cringe-worthy. The Michael Hofmann review in TNYRB is one of the best book reviews I have read, ever, gated here.
Arrived in my pile are:
5. Brigitte Granville, Remembering Inflation, and
6. Dwight H. Perkins, East Asian Development: Foundations and Strategies.
*David and Goliath*
Quite possibly it is Gladwell’s best book. His writing is better yet and also more consistently philosophical. For all the talk of “cherry picking,” the main thesis is that many qualities which usually appear positive are in fact non-monotonic in value and can sometimes turn negative. If you consider Gladwell’s specific citations of non-monotonicities to be cherry-picking, you’re not understanding the hypothesis being tested. Take the book’s central message to be “here’s how to think more deeply about what you are seeing.” To be sure, this is not a book for econometricians, but it so unambiguously improves the quality of the usual public debates, in addition to entertaining and inspiring and informing us, I am very happy to recommend it to anyone who might be tempted. It also shows Gladwell’s side as a regional thinker like never before. And the moral lesson of the work — don’t write people off — is very important indeed and we are far from having fully absorbed it. The same can be said for the second moral lesson of the book which is don’t overrate your power.
What I’ve been reading
1. Richard A. Posner, Reflections on Judging. I’m not seeing this book receive enough attention. It is written in a somewhat fragmented manner, but it is an important and stimulating look at how growing social and economic complexity and the increased specialization of knowledge make the current organization of judgeships increasingly problematic. Furthermore the opening “legal autobiography” offered by Posner is fascinating and it could be turned into a longer book of its own.
2. Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth, Prometheus Shackled: Goldsmith Banks and England’s Financial Revolution after 1700. This book argues that the financial revolution led to a reallocation of resources toward war and other public purposes, away from private investment, and that such shifts were partially responsible for the slow growth of living standards in the eighteenth century.
3. Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924. A 1000 pp. plus tome — readable throughout — on exactly what went wrong in the Weimar era, a work unlikely to be surpassed, good on both the politics and the economics.
4. Steve Lehto, The Great American Jetpack: The Quest for the Ultimate Personal Lift Device. The title says it all.
5. Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography. Perhaps the most frequent sets of questions I receive from readers have to do with a) time management (try here and here), b) low-skilled jobs, c) future inflation, and d) Leo Strauss. (Bitcoin was once on that list, no more.) This book will answer your questions on the latter, and there are few other good sources on Strauss. But it’s more than that, it is a splendid work of intellectual history, wide-ranging an insightful on every page, I loved this book.
EconTalk with Russ Roberts on *Average is Over*
You will find the podcast and text here, and Russ is as always an excellent interviewer. Excerpt:
TC: And I think 50 years from now we’ll look back on that and be shocked at the notion that so many poor people got to live in Manhattan, Los Angeles, wherever we are talking about. Because in the future they will be in other places with lower rents.
*The Essential Hirschman*
Jeremy Adelman, Hirschman’s biographer, is the editor behind this one, and you can pre-order your copy here. It contains many of Hirschman’s best known essays, with an afterword by Amartya Sen and Emma Rothschild.
Self-recommending, to say the least. I find only the title strange, as I would have preferred “Some of the essays by Albert Hirschman which perhaps we are not still underrating,” though I grant that might sell fewer copies.
My interview with Eric John Barker
It is here in excerpts, mostly about Average is Over, but with some twists, here is one part:
TC:…That’s right, and Obi-Wan also tells Luke, “Finish your training in the Dagobah system,” right? How many times did he tell him? Yoda tells him. Yoda. What does Luke do? He tells Yoda to get lost. So I think as humans we’re somewhat programmed to be a bit rebellious and to not want to be controlled, which is perfectly understandable given that others are trying to control us as often as they are. But that’s going to mean in those new settings, which we’ve never biologically evolved to handle, we’re going to screw up an awful lot. Just like Luke did not finish his training in the Dagobah system.
Eric’s very interesting blog you will find here.
Book and movie splat
1. Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. From my colleague at GMU Law, I have not yet read this one.
2. Damien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade. How often does a book have both a good title and subtitle these days? The authors are more pessimistic about China long-term than I am, but nonetheless this is a very interesting take on The Middle Kingdom.
3. Clare Jacobson, New Museums in China. Good text but mostly a picture book, I loved this one. Stunning architecture, no art, full of lessons in multiple areas, think of it as a Straussian picture book with beauty on its side too.
4. John Durant, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health. A useful overview of its topic, with an influence from Art DeVany, but you will not find recipes for either “grubs” nor “worms” here.
5. John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election. Good, sane tome on how the fundamentals matter and lots of campaigning ends up being cancelled out by the campaign of the other candidate.
From another direction, In a World… is a subtle and entertaining movie with much economics in it, most of all the economics of superstars in the “voiceover” sector. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceacescu is mesmerizing, like watching one of the great silent films of the past, and the scenes where the Chinese communists praise the Romanian communists are some of the best ever filmed.
Chinese edition of *An Economist Gets Lunch*, Friday cat blogging edition
Finally MR steps up to the plate with a cat photo:
There is (probably) more information here. For the pointer I thank Kunlung Wu.
*The Age of Oversupply*
That is Daniel Alpert’s book and the subtitle is Overcoming the Greatest Challenge to the Global Economy. I found this a fun and interesting read and I agreed with more of it than I thought I would. I’ve stressed numerous times that some of the dilemmas of our current day can be understood through nineteenth century parallels and also through the writings of the classical economists. So why not pull Thomas Chalmers and Malthus out of the closet and worry about a general glut of goods and services, juxtaposed with Bernanke’s global savings glut, and a dash of MMT at the end for good measure? The more the merrier, I say.
Here is one representative overview passage from the book:
The supply of global labor and capital is too great, and demand too weak, for them to resume proper functioning without proper assistance. This imbalance has been going on for years and nobody seems to know what to do about it. Private markets haven’t solved the problem, not because they are inherently dysfunctional, but because the sheer magnitude of changes in the global economy, thanks to the fall of the Bamboo and Iron curtains, has created challenges too big for private markets, acting alone, to reasonably address.
I like the integration of the international dimension, but I do have some worries:
1. The book too often lapses out of its international context and falls into standard Keynesianism. I don’t mean to prejudge against that approach, but we’re already pretty familiar with it and it doesn’t justify another book to spell it out. The author should have spent more time in the nineteenth century, in China, or both.
2. Good infrastructure selection, as the author proposes, could boost growth but it won’t undo any general glut that might exist and it won’t help current unemployment a lot. Those are not the workers who would end up being hired to build the new projects. Rather than closing the book with policy prescriptions (always a downer in a trade book), the author should have spelt out a vision for where all this is likely headed. In any case, we’re unlikely to spend another $1.2 trillion on infrastructure over the next five years, so what happens then? Can we depreciate our capital stock back into a more dynamic recovery?
3. Even when I agree with Alpert, I don’t think “oversupply” is what he is pinpointing. Like Krugman’s recent flirtation with demand-side secular stagnation theories, it is an embarrassment for these views that current nominal gdp is considerably higher — more than ten percent — than its pre-crash peak. The price level is higher too. On p.135 Alpert recognizes this problem and even mentions that his own theory may have predicted as much as six percent deflation, which of course isn’t there. He doesn’t have a good explanation on this point and yet it is critical to his overall framing (though not to each and every particular argument).
Yes, I know, many wages won’t fall in nominal terms and that limits price deflation. But it won’t get you the increase in nominal values we have observed, the wage truncation hypothesis has theoretical problems, and also it is failing recent empirical tests. Arnold Kling considers some recent research on the Phillips curve (pdf) and finds it can’t explain why the rate of inflation remained as high as it did, given the recession we experienced. Or take a peek at the recent empirical study by Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Koustas (pdf, interesting on several counts). They find, to put it bluntly: “Hence, there is no missing wage disinflation puzzle to match the missing price disinflation puzzle. This strongly suggests that downward wage rigidity is unlikely to be the key factor underlying the missing disinflation of the Great Recession.” In other words, that whole line of explanation seems to fail and that is going to mean no general glut of goods and services.
Still, I am happy I bought this book. Bravo for the nineteenth century.
Addendum: Alpert replies by email: “As to the price level and wage rigidity – I imagine we have differing views on what is supporting both. I believe I make a reasonable argument that easing has kept financial asset value (incl. real estate) from falling, and that wages haven’t fallen because, ex-Japan, the labor oversupply has been absorbed via high levels of underemployment in advanced economies, rather than by wage reductions. Put it all on a per-capita basis and have another look at aggregate wages. Prices, of course, have fallen in the tradable sectors. And but for rents (incl. owners equiv) (protected by monetary easing), and healthcare and education (guild industries with extensive price interference from third party payor systems), we would not have price stability since the beginning of the great recession.”
*The Tragedy of Liberation*
That is the new book by Frank Dikötter, the subtitle is A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957, and it is a prequel to his earlier Mao’s Great Famine. His books are superb documents of the tyrannical age he studies. Here is one excerpt:
In an orgy of false accusations and arbitrary denunciations, few escaped with their reputations intact. By February no more than 10,000 of a total 50,000 ‘capitalists’ in Beijing were considered honest. Similar figures came from other parts of the country. To punish all would wreck the economy. Mao had a solution to this conundrum. He came up with a quota, ordering that a few should be killed to set the tone, while exemplary punishment should focus on 5 per cent of the most ‘reactionary’ suspects. Across most cities, by a rough rule of thumb, about 1 per cent of the accused were shot, a further 1 per cent sent to labour camps for life, and 2 to 3 per cent imprisoned for terms of ten years or more.
This is not easy material to read about, but Dikötter’s books are landmark achievements of their time.
And as I am wont to say, China’s prospects and fundamentals look pretty good if you scrutinize the country’s history over the last 30 or also the last 3000 years. It’s the time frame of the last 300 years that doesn’t look so good.
*The Why Axis*
That is the new, excellent, and self-recommending book by Uri Gneezy and John List. The subtitle is Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life, and the core of the book revolves around the authors’ use of field and natural experiments to tease out what is causal and what is not. List is in my view a candidate for a future Nobel Prize.
Here is one excerpt from the book, concerning the experience of trying to buy a car at auto dealerships:
In this experiment, we worked with our colleague Michael Price in assigning pairs of men to pose as our secret agents: straight men acting as friends, straight men playing loving partners, gay men acting as friends, and gay men portraying partners. Each of these pairs visited various car dealerships to negotiate the purchase of a new car. Every “couple” bargained at different randomly determined dealerships, and every dealership was approached twice. We observed not only what kinds of offers the various “couples” received, but also how often they were offered niceties like a test drive and a cup of coffee.
Our results showed that the people acting as gay partners got shabbier treatment. Many dealerships rejected offers from buyers they perceived as gay, while accepting identical offers from our straight buyers. More than 75 percent of the time, dealers quoted the gay couples higher initial prices, when the gay couples extended counter offers, they were much more likely to be rejected and the salespeople ended the negotiations.
You can pre-order the book here.
*Vodka Politics*
The author is Mark Lawrence Schrad and the subtitle is Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State. This is a gripping and original book, even if it overstates its conclusions sometimes. Here is one bit:
Shcherbakov — Stalin’s today drunkard — died from a heart attack two days after the Nazi surrender…at the ripe old age of 44. While Stalin valorized him, Khrushchev and the rest of the circle “knew that he died from drinking too much in an effort to please Stalin and not because of any insatiable urge of his own.” Likewise, Andrei Zhdanov — once thought of as Stalin’s heir apparent — died less than three years later at 52, to the end ignoring his doctors’ frequent warnings to stop drinking. It was clear to all that this situation was disastrous both for their work and their physical health. “People were literally becoming drunkards, and the more a person became a drunkard, the more pleasure Stalin got from it.”
…the use and abuse of alcohol is crucial to understanding the dynamics of autocratic rule in Russia.
What else do you learn from this book? It seems that Raymond Llull, still an underrated figure, is the one who spread vodka-making techniques to much of Europe (he also discovered an early version of social choice theory in the 13th century, not to mention he advanced the theory of computation).
I liked this bit:
The financial needs of the early Russian state dictated pushing the more potent and more profitable distilled vodka over less lucrative beers and meads. To maximize its revenue, the state not only benefited from its subjects’ alcoholism, but actively encouraged it.
As late as 1927, the state’s vodka monopoly accounted for ten percent of government revenue.
Gorbachev, by the way, was known as “Mineral Water Secretary,” because he did not drink like the others did. Here is a joke from the book:
Q: What is Soviet business?
A: Soviet business is when you steal a wagonload of vodka, sell it, and spend the money on vodka.
From the Yeltsin years to the Putin years, the average Russian boy lost a measured eighteen percent of his muscle mass.
Recommended, and you can pre-order the book here. Here is my earlier post, “The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol.”