Category: Books
*Securities Against Misrule*, the new Jon Elster book
The subtitle is Juries, Assemblies, Elections and the book focuses on the very Nordic concern of how to make better political decisions within a democratic framework. Elster thinks that social choice theory presents insoluble dilemmas with ranking outcomes, so we should focus on improving how political decisions are made. It’s all about “preventing the prevention of intelligence.” He promotes secret voting, public deliberations, incorporation of diverse opinions, waiting until passions have subsided, and various methods of running better jury trials. The influence of Bentham here is paramount, albeit a lesser-known Bentham, that of his own tract Securities Against Misrule, among other writings.
I found this one of the most stimulating social science books so far this year, and it has Elster’s impressive intelligence, breadth and clarity. But I see many points quite differently, so I will pass along a few issues that come to mind:
1. I worry about the standard philosopher’s comeback to Elster’s proceduralism. If we cannot very well judge or compare outcomes, how ultimately are we supposed to evaluate procedural changes? Furthermore the theory of the second best suggests that procedures which “sound good” may not in fact lead to better outcomes. We get stuck rather quickly.
2. I don’t myself find aggregation problems to be insuperable. We all know that Norway is a great place, and cardinal information will get us over the usual Arrow problems , a’la Sen (1984). A lot of the rest is what I call details. Without intending any bias against explicit norms of rational discourse, the more fundamental question is how a country can enjoy the luxury position of debating such matters peacefully in the first place. Ask Egypt.
3. If I think about the historical decisions which I consider wise and important, they very often are based on a certain amount of Machiavellianism, rather than on the standards for an ideal speech community. The ratification of the U.S. Constitution is one obvious example. Might Elster’s proceduralism work best at the micro level, when embedded in a broader realpolitik framework that already gives some Machiavellian control to “the good guys”?
4. Elster never considers markets or betting (apologies to Carow Hall) as mechanisms for preference revelation, though at one point he evinces skepticism about vote trading.
5. The idea of giving more influence to smarter people also is not on the table (see p.85 for a brief discussion, and also the bottom of p.5).
6. There is occasional talk of the private sector, such as the stipulation that Norwegian corporate boards appoint 40% women. Yet there is no systematic discussion of how private companies or private non-profits run meetings, conduct elections, obtain board consensus, or otherwise reach decisions. This point is not unrelated to #5. I’m not suggesting government can be “run like a business” but it is odd to write as if private sector experience with decision-making is irrelevant. It is those procedures which have to pass some kind of market test. So more Hayek, less Habermas.
7. At the end of the day, the losers in these dialogues will suffer under coercion and the winners will exercise power. This limits what kind of upfront discourse is possible. I wished for this topic to receive more attention.
Elster has been writing excellent books for over thirty years, and you can buy this book here.
*İçinizdeki Ekonomisti Keşfedin*
That’s my Discover Your Inner Economist, now out in Turkish.
What I’ve been reading
1. Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History. There needs to be a single word for “excellent if read in conjunction with other books on the same topic, though a quality but wasted effort if read alone.” This book is that.
2. Tom Miller, China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History. Excellent on land use but also one of the very best books on the Chinese economy, as seen through the lens of land. Interesting on almost every page.
3. Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites. More a memoir than a food memoir (which is how it is being marketed), the subtitle is thus better than the title. This is an excellent example of the “read smart books by people who are totally unlike you” principle. I finished it in one sitting, and it takes a place with The Great Man as one of my two favorite Christensen books.
4. John C. Williams (not the composer), “A Defense of Moderation in Monetary Policy” (pdf). A beautiful title and full of truth.
5. Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight. Brings the author and his milieu to life to a remarkable degree and shows Kafka was a comic author after all.
Vikram Seth was once a graduate student in economics at Stanford
That was in the heyday of the game theory years at that school. Then he became a famous author. And now:
But an author like Seth who commands million dollar advances and who took eight years to write the voluminous A Suitable Boy, works on his own terms. He does not share his manuscripts with anyone until he is ready and will not be bullied by publishers, having once said, not entirely in jest, it was his job to get the money out of publishers and it was the publishers’ job to get the book out of him.
Penguin Random House has in turned asked for its $1.7 million advance back, as they are still awaiting his delivery of a sequel A Suitable Girl. The story is here, and for the pointer I thank Yogesh. Seth never finished his doctorate at Stanford but A Suitable Boy is one of my favorite modern novels.
Sentences to ponder
A random sample of new books for sale on Amazon.com shows three times more books initially published in the 1850’s are for sale than new books from the 1950’s.
Here is much more, from Paul J. Heald.
Two excellent new books on the history of technology
1. David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity. The typewriter and the bicycle revolutionized India early in the twentieth century
2. Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America. Two of the takeaways from this book are a) the United States had a more statist approach to electricity infrastructure than did most of Europe, and to its advantage, and b) we didn’t let lots of people accidentally being electrocuted stop progress, again probably to our advantage.
Foreign markets encourage Hollywood sequels
Jim reviews the numbers: “The first Ice Age does $175 million domestically, $206 million internationally. The second one does $192 million domestically, $456 internationally. The third one does $200 million domestically and $700 million internationally.”
That is from the new Lynda Obst book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the NEW ABNORMAL in the Movie Business. The book is poorly written but sometimes of interest for those who follow this topic.
How bad were the Navigation Acts really?
Adam Smith supported them and he was no mercantilist. Here is another take:
…that remains the consensus view among a broad sample of modern scholars: a recent study concluded that nearly 90 percent of the economists and historians surveyed agreed with proposition that “[t]he costs imposed on the colonists by the trade restrictions of the Navigation Acts were small.”
if the burden of the Navigation Acts was so slight — no more than one percent of GDP, according to Thomas’ calculation — why did the Americans make such a fuss over it? The short answer is that although the burden to the American colonies as a whole was low, it did not fall evenly across the entire economy: some sectors and regions suffered disproportionately, while others were barely affected. The regions and sectors that suffered the most from the Navigation Acts tended to be the strongest supporters of the American Revolution.
That is from the forthcoming useful book by Richard S. Grossman Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them. For the two relevant Robert Paul Thomas pieces (jstor) see here and here.
To further brighten your day, here is a non-gated piece by Robert Whaples, “Where is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions” (pdf).
*Napoleon’s Egypt*
The author of this interesting work is Juan Cole and the subtitle is Invading the Middle East. Here is one excerpt:
Many of the French took seriously Bonaparte’s proclamations that he intended to bring liberty to the Egyptians through institutions such as the clerically dominated divan. The French not only interpreted Egypt in terms familiar to their eighteenth-century world, they were also capable of reinterpreting their own history in light of what they saw in Egypt. Just as rationalist officers coded popular Islam as reactionary Catholicism, so the Republican French mapped the defeated beys as analogous to the French Old Regime and saw their overthrow and institution of municipal elections as the advent of liberty.
This book is one good place to start. Here is the Wikipedia page on the French invasion of Egypt and Syria.
Claims about me
Tyler Cowan [sic] wishes he could be teleported to Kansas or Korea or the moon to live in a Gucci-free egalitopia.
That is from George Gilder’s new Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing Our World. reviewed by Arnold Kling here.
Now that is a claim I would be willing to bet on.
Arrived in my pile
1. Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America.
2. F. H. Buckley, editor, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law.
3. Vaclav Smil, Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing.
Amish arbitrage fact of the day
Eight percent of one sample (n = 112) of Lancaster county Amish have sought medical care in Mexico.
That is from Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, The Amish, which is an excellent social scientific look at what we outsiders know about Amish communities.
I also learned that the Amish strongly frown on home schooling of children and consider it possible grounds for excommunication. The requirement to use the internet has pushed many Amish out of public school systems, and the Amish are experts at making apprenticeship systems work. Inequality of wealth seems to be rising among the Amish.
Claims about the United Kingdom
It is not the state that the British object to, but other people.
That is from Terry Eagleton’s Across the Pond: An Englishman’s View of America, which is sometimes amusing.
The cookbook theory of economics
That is a new piece by me, from Foreign Policy. Here is one excerpt:
First consider global cuisines like Mexican or Chinese. You can find a handful of good cookbooks pretty much anywhere these days. It’s not just that we’re all suckers for guacamole or stir-fry. It’s development economics in practice — a foodie measure of how much these societies have moved toward greater commercialization, large-scale production, and standardization of production processes. Quite simply, it’s the recipe for economic progress.
And:
Consider how cooking evolves: It starts in the home and then eventually spreads to restaurants and on to cookbooks, along the way transforming a recipe from oral tradition to commercialized product. In the home, recipes are often transmitted from grandmother to mother, or from father to son, or simply by watching and participating. I’ve seen this in rural Mexico, for instance, when an older daughter teaches her younger sister how to pat tortillas the right way. When societies get richer, you start to see restaurants, a form of specialization like auto mechanics or tailors…Restaurants require that strangers — other cooks — be taught the process. That means simplifying or standardizing ingredients so they’re easier to work with and, in many cases, available year-round. This, of course, means writing down the recipe. Once a dish reaches these commercial milestones, cookbooks will follow.
The piece closes with:
Meanwhile, if you’re looking to see Adam Smith in action, go out and get yourself some Sichuanese peppercorns and some fresh Thai basil — that’s the true wealth of nations.
You can buy my book An Economist Gets Lunch here.
Traditional dress from the Gulf States, and its origins
This is from the latest book by Christopher M. Davidson, After the Sheikhs:
Another prominent mechanism for guarding and preserving the social base of national elites in the Gulf monarchies has been the adoption of a “national dress” code. There are significant variations across the region, with men and women in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait wearing several different styles of garments, and with the younger generations in all six Gulf monarchies increasingly wearing western clothes during their leisure time. For the most part the older generations in all these countries, and most citizens — young and old — in the wealthiest of the Gulf monarchies tend to wear a fairly strict uniform of white thobes or dishdashas (men) or black abayas (women). Such quotidian sartorial choices allow the observer to differentiate instantly between a citizen and an expatriate, which helps the former to access the aforementioned privileges associated with citizenship and the concomitant elevated social status they bring. In those monarchies such as Qatar or the UAE where the material rewards of citizenship are the greatest and where the expatriate component of the total resident population is the highest, adherence to the dress code is most prevalent. As one recent study put it, “it is no mere fashion that leads all Qatar national men to wear their traditional thoh at all times…the emir and his government have perpetuated these neo-traditional myths of authenticity, allowing the creation of a citizen autocracy.” Certainly it is very important to note that this dress code is primarily a product of the oil era and the rentier state: although sometimes referred to as “traditional dress” or even “Islamic dress” by foreigners, the current national dress code in these Gulf monarchies has few roots in tradition or religion, with early pre-oil photographs from the region demonstrating that the indigenous populations once wore a variety of colours and styles.
As for the book as a whole, I don’t think the author makes a convincing case for his extremely pessimistic forecasts, but still it is an interesting read.