Category: Books
*Worldly Philosopher*
The author is Jeremy Adelman and the subtitle is The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. This is the book I have looked forward to most all year and so far (p.153) it does not disappoint. Here is one excerpt:
If there was one author who captured Hirschmann’s imagination, it was Michel de Montaigne. The highly personal vignettes, meditations, and moral reflections shook Hirschmann to his core. He immediately grasped the power of the essays — Montaigne questioned absolute forms of knowledge by submitting everything to the interrogating eye of the observer, starting by looking at himself, turning himself over and over to capture the multiple points of perspective or the multiple forms of the self. “We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves,” Montaigne wrote. “Whoever would do what he has to do would see that the first thing he must learn to know is what he is.”
I am pleased that this book has 740 pages and I am wishing for more. Here is a WSJ review. Here is a good UK review. Here is a review from The Economist.
A sentence from Neil Munro
He emailed this to me:
Let me summarize; Diversity = the self-assembling, self-serving ideology of high-IQ, complexity-arbitraging professionals.
My view by the way is different, and can be found in my book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures.
*Robot Futures* (and fan out)
This is a very good short book by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh. Here is one excerpt:
In USAR, the effective number of robots controlled by a single human operator has a formal term: fan out…Ironically, fielded robots have very low fan out scores today. For instance, the Predator-class drones, unmanned aerial vehicles that fight proxy battles for the United States in distant lands, have a fan out of less than 0.2. That is, more than five people are required at all times, just to manage a single robot. In USAR, researchers have begun to demonstrate ever-increasing fan out — exceeding 6.0 — by providing the robots with more and more autonomy so that the human operator is only responsible for the most strategic decisions, with robots making every tactical choice. Critical to this success is the ability of robots to decide when they need to ask for human help — when they face a survivor, or are stuck in the rubble in a way that the robot cannot extract itself, or when the robot has suffered a serious hardware of software error. This “intelligent reasoning” for deciding when to ask for help means that one human can manage even more robots to achieve a higher fan out…They do not need true autonomy so much as a willingness to call for help whenever required. This alleviates the pressure to create perfect robots, and instead good-enough robots can play meaningful roles in a USAR team because humans will bridge the gap between the robot’s capabilities and what the situation demands.
File under “meta-rational robots,” and buy the book here.
*How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?*
This is quite an extraordinary book, remarkably informationally dense, interesting on almost every page, though I would pass on the extended discussions of methodological Marxism. Did the so-called bourgeois revolutions have relatively little to do with the bourgeoisie? (This leads some readers to the further question, namely if so, how should this reshape our understanding of “neo-liberalism” today?) What is a bourgeois revolution anyway? This far-ranging book is a kind of esoteric blockbuster, to be worshiped by the handful of people who are familiar with Hotman’s Francogallia and its role in 1570s French politics, or who carry around in their heads some underlying sense of why 17th century Scottish and Polish feudal rule might have had significant common features.
Ideally, CrookedTimber should do a symposium on this book, though I am not sure they can find commentators who are up to the task.
Enthusiastically recommended, sort of, to some of you, maybe.
The author is Neil Davidson, a Scot, and the Amazon link is here.
My talk at Arlington Public Library
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, 2013
6:00 p.m. – Food Trucks Open for Business
7:00 p.m. – Lecture, Q&A with the Author
Arlington Public Library
1015 North Quincy Street
Arlington, VA 22201
RSVP at the Event Page. It’s an excellent library!
Arrived in my pile
1. Frank H. Buckley, editor, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law.
2. Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data.
3. Chester E. Finn Jr., Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut.
Not altogether untrue
If the Tea Party is to be disparaged for anything, it is not for being too conservative, too right wing, or too libertarian, but simply too immature, quick-triggered, and impatient for final answers. Traumatized by the collapse of the narratives that used to organize reality and armed with what appears to be access to direct democracy, its members ache for harsh, quick fixes to age-old problems, something they can really feel — as if fomenting a painful apocalypse would be better than enduring the numbing present.
That is from Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.
What I’ve been reading and viewing
1. A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather. A knockout, and oddly neglected these days.
2. The Dinner, by Herman Koch. It sold millions in Europe, but I don’t find snark about rich Dutch people that interesting.
3. Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala. Smart reviewers love this memoir of a woman who lost her family in the tsunami, but it didn’t have enough structure to grab my attention.
4. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Bentham and Coleridge. Of course these are re-reads. Especially when read in conjunction, they are two of the best books on how to think, as well as gripping stories in their own right.
5. Amour, the new movie by Michael Haneke. I can’t review it without introducing spoilers, but it’s one of the two movies this year I have been recommending. The other is the Chilean film NO, a fantastic account of how, even in the strangest of circumstances, democracies filter policy outcomes, as indeed autocracies do too (in different ways).
*Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing*
The authors are Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman and the Amazon link is here. If you’re like me, by this point you have “popular behavioral economics book” fatigue. Still, I bought and read this one through. It doesn’t fall into the “designed to erase all doubts” category, but still it has some interesting ideas which you won’t find in the other popular behavioral economics books. I am glad I bought and read it. Here is one bit:
…Fehr also noticed a difference between children who’s grown up as siblings and those who were only children. Contrary to the presumption that only children are more selfish than children raised in larger families, Fehr found the onlies to be the more cooperative and selfless. They were completely untroubled by handing over toys to another child, whereas the siblings flatly refused. Fehr came to the conclusion that the onlies didn’t know to be competitive because they’d never had to compete…They weren’t afraid of sharing toys, because they didn’t understand if you gave Barbie to another child, she might come back missing her leg or head.
It is claimed that, between the ages of three and seven, siblings clash 3.5 times per hour, on average (unless you are in the Caplan household).
Here is another interesting section:
…one study of every single pitch thrown during the 2005/2006 Major League Baseball season — some 1, 374,923 pitches — showed that most MLB pitchers are secretly prevention-focused. As they get closer to finishing out innings, their pitch locations become more conservative. A similar study of over 2 million PGA tour putts showed that pro golfers tend to leave it short as the stakes and pressure rise.
*With Charity for All*
I am a fan of this book. The author is Ken Stern and the subtitle is Why Charities are Failing and a Better Way to Give, with emphasis on the former I would say. Here is one excerpt:
The CBO study and other reporting on the practices of charitable hospitals did in fact spur reforms efforts, including a proposal in Congress to require a minimum uncompensated care rate of 5 percent in return for tax-exempt status. All the major proposals, however, have been beaten back, with reform advocates having to settle for greater public reporting obligations for charitable hospitals on the theory that greater transparency would ratchet up pressure for change. It hasn’t worked. A 2012 nationwide study found continuing low levels of uncompensated care, only 1.51 percent on average, a number less than half the profit margins for the same group of hospitals.
J. Coetzee writes to Paul Auster
From a letter:
Finally, a remark by Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: that one goes to bed with a woman in order to be able to talk to her. Implication: that turning a woman into a mistress is only a first step; the second step, turning her into a friend, is the one that matters; but being friends with a woman you haven’t slept with is in practice impossible because there is too much unspoken in the air.
That is from Here and Now Letters 2008-2011, by Auster and Coetzee. That excerpt is from the first letter, and I will keep reading.
*Why Growth Matters*
That is the new book by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. I reviewed the slightly earlier UK/India version briefly and very favorably here, and next month it will be out under this new title in the U.S. The subtitle is How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and Lessons for Other Developing Countries. It is no surprise that they did not keep the India title — India’s Tryst with Destiny — for the US market. Who wants to read about India per se? Who knows what a tryst is?
Good sentences about John Stuart Mill
He was so bewildered by his lack of books that he even began sleeping late, once not getting up till nine o’clock. One of the daughters [in Toulouse] pitying his plight gave him Legendre’s Geometry. He dissected it eagerly, although its muddled thinking on Ratio took away a good deal of its merits as an elementary work. The confusion in the house grew worse; a dog went mad and terrorized the servants. To John’s orderly mind the Benthams seemed to live in a state of constant uproar. They were always interrupting him for other things. He was never left to himself. They took him to see peasant dances…
That is from Michael St.John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill.
What is your long Kindle book?
Everyone should have a long book on their Kindle that they otherwise would never read. Then, when you don’t feel like starting a whole new book on your Kindle, you dig into a small piece of your long book. And stop. As the years pass, you may eventually finish your long book (or not).
The long book on my Kindle is John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion. It’s impressive. I don’t agree with Calvin, either theologically or temperamentally, but he is an extremely sharp thinker and writer, too often neglected for his extreme “Calvinism.”
After three years, I’m about eighteen percent finished. And someday I hope to read more works by Calvin, although not someday anytime soon.
What is the long book on your Kindle?
Addendum: Kevin Drum comments.
*The Alchemists*
The author is Neil Irwin and the subtitle is Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire. This is very likely a very good book. If my quick perusal is accurate, I like how Irwin refers to Trichet as “the president of Europe.” There is also a very interesting chapter on the Swedish central bank of the 17th century.