Category: Books
Korea fact of the day
Korea is now the world’s second-largest exporter of missionaries after the United States.
That is from Daniel Tudor, Korea: The Impossible Country, which is quite a good overview of the place.
*Bad Pharma*, by Ben Goldacre
Here is a simple sentence from Frank Lichtenberg, an economist who studies pharmaceuticals and a highly reputable researcher in the area:
This implies that the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (cost per life-year gained) of pharmaceutical innovation was about $12,900.
Read the whole paper, and if you wish to go further, you can peruse his entire body of work.
I am thus a little nervous when Ben Goldacre entitles his recent book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. (I have a UK copy, and it is due out in the U.S. this February.) I do in fact agree with Goldacre’s portrait of a sector wracked with massive corruption and shoddy scientific standards. And I see many aspects of this book as deserving an “A” or “A+” rating, which I would not hand out lightly. But I won’t continue down that track, because I suspect the book will receive many very positive reviews, as indeed it did in the UK.
Could he not have called the book Not Nearly as Good as it Could be Pharma: How Corruption is Diminishing One of Our Great Benefactors? Admittedly that does not roll off the tongue as nicely.
Or how about Slow Pharma: How to Get the New Drug Pipeline Up and Running Again?
Goldacre’s policy recommendations would in general raise the costs of research and development, although they would likely improve the accuracy of research results and reduce over-prescription and overuse of drugs. It is quite possible they would lower the rate of return to pharmaceutical innovation, likely I would say. These trade-offs are neglected, and, much as I admire many features of this book, I cannot help but, alas with trepidation, call some of its central features “Bad Science.” Bad Economic Science. The morality of the narrative and the Platonism of his vision distracts him from presenting the policy trade-offs clearly.
Lichtenberg’s name does not appear in Goldacre’s index. Nor does the word “innovation.”
Recommended, with or without prescription, but use with extreme caution. And you should “compound” this with other books.
Addendum: I bought this book myself, which included Amazon shipping charges from the UK, and was not sent a free sample or visited by an attractive sales representative.
Second Addendum: There is some back and forth between Goldacre and me in the comments section.
*Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power*
I quite liked this book, which is by Jon Meacham. Here is the bit best suited to MR:
“She [Sally Hemings] was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved,” said Madison Hemings. “So she refused to return with him.”
It was an extraordinary moment. Fresh from arranging terms with the bankers of Europe over a debt that was threatening the foundation of the French nation, Thomas Jefferson found himself in negotiations with a pregnant enslaved teenager who, in a reversal of fortune hardly likely to be repeated, had the means at hand to free herself.
…So he began making concessions to convince Sally Hemings to come home to Virginia. “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years,” Madison Hemings said.
Sally Hemings agreed…
Their father kept the promise he had made to Sally in Paris. “We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born,” Madison Hemings said. It was one of the most important pacts of Jefferson’s life.
My favorite fiction books of 2012
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl.
Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds.
Alonso Cueto, The Blue Hour.
Peter Sis, The Conference of the Birds. Mostly illustrated, beautiful in any case.
Alice Munro, Dear Life: Stories. I can confidently put this on my list without having read it yet.
I was disappointed by most of the well-known novels to have come out this year, including the Tom Wolfe (unreadable, alas) and the McEwan (OK but not distinguished). Mantel is somehow too dense for me and I do not enjoy it, the fault may be mine.
The Cueto was my favorite of the lot.
My favorite non-fiction books of 2012
Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.
Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.
David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States.
George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe.
Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.
Michael Dirda, On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling.
James Fallows, China Airborne.
Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story.
Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750.
Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography.
Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Khanho Shin, From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy.
I am sure I missed some, even of my own favorites!
The new Emily Oster book
Expecting Better: How to Fight the Pregnancy Establishment with Facts.
Due out next August!
Discrimination against shorter people, as reported by Andrew Solomon
One recent study observed that adults with achondroplasia have “lower self-esteem, less education, lower annual incomes, and are less likely to have a spouse.” The income statistic bears witness to institutional discrimination against LPs; the study found that while three-quarters of the dwarfs’ family members, presumably demographically similar to them in most regards, made more than $50,000 per year, less than a third of the dwarfs made that amount.
That is from Andrew Solomon’s new book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.
I pre-ordered this book eagerly, but overall I am having difficulty with it. Too many sections throw too much at the proverbial wall and fail to sort out truth from fallacy. I am not sure what is supposed to be insight and what is supposed to be a recording of different views. I would have liked a more direct confrontation with the issue of parental narcissism. This is still a good review of the book. I longed for a page of Ross Douthat or Michael Bérubé.
The book, however, supplies excellent data for anyone wishing to study the utter hypocrisy of current understandings of diversity.
One Amazon reviewer raised a good question:
As a special ed teacher, my question is, does it make sense to include murderers in the same category with deaf people, dwarves, and people with physical disabilities? Perhaps he has a justification for it, in that parents might be disappointed and heartbroken in all these cases. But right off the bat that seems wrong to me, categorically different, moral deviance v. physical or intellectual.
Solomon is a very smart guy. But overall this book leaves one with a sense of being tired of the value of the individual, written by an author overwhelmed by what comes across as, despite Solomon’s quest for nobility, a rogue’s gallery of misfits, baroque style, and without the writing itself coming to terms with the book’s own underlying emotional tenor. Is it unfair to read this as still being, ultimately, a book about depression?
This book may interest many of you, and its publication can be seen as an event of sorts, but I can’t quite bring myself to recommend it.
New intermediate microeconomics textbook by Goolsbee, Levitt, and Syverson
It is by Austan Goolsbee, Steve Levitt, and Chad Syverson. I have only browsed it, but it looks very good. There is information about the book here (note that we share a publisher; they do great books!).
*India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State*
That is the new book by the excellent Gurcharan Das and it makes an excellent case for the relevance of a classical liberal approach to the problems of India. Note the subtitle! You can buy the book here.
Simon Blackburn suffers from mood affiliation
Via Ross Douthat, here is the close of Blackburn’s review of the new Thomas Nagel book:
There is charm to reading a philosopher who confesses to finding things bewildering. But I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence. It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off. If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.
The Nagel book continues to go up in my eyes.
Coase and Wang on capitalism in China
Nick Schulz does the interview. After they discuss the topic, here is one bit toward the end:
We are now working with the University of Chicago Press to launch a new journal, Man and the Economy. We chose our title carefully to signal the mission of the new journal, which is to restore economics to a study of man as he is and of the economy as it actually exists. We hope this new journal will provide a platform to encourage scholars all over the world to study how the economy works in their countries. We believe this is the only way to make progress in economics.
For the pointer I thank David Levey.
What does equilibrium look like for the book business?
Adam Davidson offers some interesting remarks. My take is a little more radical. I expect two or three major publishers, with stacked names (“Penguin Random House”), and they will be owned by Google, Apple, Amazon, and possibly Facebook, or their successors, which perhaps would make it “Apple Penguin Random House.” Those companies have lots of cash, amazing marketing penetration, potential synergies with marketing content they own, and very strong desires to remain focal in the eyes of their customer base. They could buy up a major publisher without running solvency risk. For instance Amazon revenues are about twelve times those of a merged Penguin Random House and arguably that gap will grow.
There is no hurry, as the tech companies are waiting to buy the content companies, including the booksellers, on the cheap. Furthermore, the acquirers don’t see it as their mission to make the previous business models of those content companies work. They will wait.
Did I mention that the tech companies will own some on-line education too? EduTexts embedded in iPads will be a bigger deal than it is today, and other forms of on-line or App-based content will be given away for free, or cheaply, to sell texts and learning materials through electronic delivery.
Much of the book market will be a loss leader to support the focality of massively profitable web portals and EduTexts and related offerings.
There is this funny thing called antitrust law, but I think these companies are popular enough, and associated closely enough with cool products — and sometimes cheap products — to get away with this.
*Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers*
That is a new and forthcoming book from Wayne A. Leighton and Edward L. Lopez, and the subtitle is The Economic Engine of Political Change. Here is my blurb:
Ideas matter. Madmen, with its engaging stories, is perfect for anyone interested in public policy, or how our world could be a better place. Read it, and assign it to your class.
Arrived in my pile
Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. Here is a short related piece by the author.
*The Redistribution Recession*
That’s the new book by Casey Mulligan, and the subtitle is How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy. To get to the point, it’s quite good.
Maybe you’ve already read some of the other blogosphere reviews, a few of which are cited here. Atrios calls him “the worst person in the world,” without showing he has read the book, and there is further invective from other sources. The critics all misrepresent his arguments, and/or respond to the weakest rather than the strongest version of his arguments (“soup kitchens caused the Great Depression”). They are not criticizing him from the vantage point of science.
The contributions of this book include:
1. Using data from seasonal cycles and seasonal changes to better understand supply-demand relationships during the Great Recession. These sections are excellent and highly original.
2. Showing that the normal laws of supply and demand still held and that we were not living in anything resembling wrong-ways sloping AD curves.
3. Calculation of various implicit marginal tax rates during the Great Recession and showing their relevance for labor supply decisions.
By no means am I fully on board. I believe he specifies the aggregate demand view incorrectly and significantly under-measures the impact of aggregate demand. I don’t think the AD view has to imply sticky prices or completely inelastic labor demand, for instance, although one version of that view does (p.208). I see Mulligan as underestimating labor supply composition effects and overestimating productivity growth during the period under consideration. There are other points one can complain about and overall he ends up overstating the size of the effects he is measuring.
Still, there are only a few readable books which integrate actual empirical research with a look at the Great Recession. This is by no means the whole story, but this is a book which anyone seriously interested in the topic should read. People still will be consulting it after the invective against it has long since died away.