Category: Books

*Restless Empire*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Odd Arne Westad and the subtitle is China and the World Since 1750.  Excerpt:

…the Chinese on Cuba joined others in rebellion.  Two thousand fought in the Cuban forces in the first war of independence in the 1870s.  Some of the Chinese soldiers must have had battle experience, probably from the Taiping Rebellion, and they played a substantial role in the struggle for Cuban freedom up to 1902.  A monument to the fallen Chinese in Havana has the following inscription: “There was not one Cuban Chinese deserter, not one Cuban Chinese traitor.”

I found this to be an excellent book and a very good starting place for unraveling the current foreign policy crises in Asia. It does a very good job explaining the sore spots from the past.

As you may know, one of my views is that most people underrate the chance of a (non-trivial) war in Asia in the next twenty years.  I regard this chance as at least p = .05, and I do not think it is priced into securities markets at nearly that high a level.  Historically, wars are not always easily predicted in advance.  They tend to be correlated with the rise of major powers and with regional disruptions.  In many countries nationalism and regional rivalries run rampant.  It is not obvious to me that the United States is in a position to hold the whole region together.

In any case, this book will make my “one of the best of the year” list.

*Science Left Behind*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The authors are Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, and the subtitle is Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left.  I agree with many of the particular claims in this book, and also I find those undervalued in broader intellectual discourse.  Nonetheless I am struck by a mismatch between the book’s message and some of its tone, as well as the sense that one side should be singled out for condemnation (the same point can be made about left-wing books on related topics).

This excerpt made me giggle:

…despite what some progressives will contend, the purpose of this book is not to demonize all progressives.  We just want to demonize the loony ones.

Jeff Sachs reviews Acemoglu and Robinson

by  Tyler Cowen in

As you might expect, he stresses geography rather than institutions:

In places where production is expensive because of an inhospitable climate, unfavorable topography, low population densities, or a lack of proximity to global markets, many technologies from abroad will not arrive quickly through foreign investments or outsourcing. Compare Bolivia and Vietnam in the 1990s, both places I experienced firsthand as an economic adviser. Bolivians enjoyed greater political and civil rights than the Vietnamese did, as measured by Freedom House, yet Bolivia’s economy grew slowly whereas Vietnam’s attracted foreign investment like a magnet. It is easy to see why: Bolivia is a landlocked mountainous country with much of its territory lying higher than 10,000 feet above sea level, whereas Vietnam has a vast coastline with deep-water ports conveniently located near Asia’s booming industrial economies. Vietnam, not Bolivia, was the desirable place to assemble television sets and consumer appliances for Japanese and South Korean companies.

The review is interesting throughout, though I would stress the old saying: “As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between.”

What I’ve not been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

These books have been sent to me, they appear to be of high quality, but they are still sitting in my pile:

1. Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein, Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment: A New Approach to the Firm.

2. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.

3. Barry Cunliffe, Britain Begins.

4. David R. Montgomery, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood.

5. Evan F. Koenig, Robert Leeson, and George A. Kahn, editors, The Taylor Rule and the Transformation of Monetary Policy.

6. Martin B. Gold, Forbidden Citizens: Chinese Exclusion and the U.S. Congress: A Legislative History.

Posner on Skidelsky and Keynes and leisure time

by  Tyler Cowen in

This review is a fun rant about whether we would be better off with lower incomes and more leisure time.  Here is one excerpt:

…I well remember as recently as the 1980s how shabby England was, how terrible the plumbing, how shoddy the housing materials, how treacherously uneven the floors and sidewalks, how inadequate the heating and poor the food — and how tolerant the English were of discomfort. I recall breakfast at Hertford College, Oxford, in an imposing hall with a large broken window — apparently broken for some time — and the dons huddled sheeplike in overcoats; and in a freezing, squalid bar in the basement of the college a don in an overcoat expressing relief at being home after a year teaching in Virginia, which he had found terrifying because of America’s high crime rate, though he had not been touched by it. I remember being a guest of Brasenose College — Oxford’s wealthiest — and being envied because I had been invited to stay in the master’s guest quarters, only to find that stepping into the guest quarters was like stepping into a Surrealist painting, because the floor sloped in one direction and the two narrow beds in two other directions. I recall the English (now American) economist Ronald Coase telling me that until he visited the United States he did not know it was possible to be warm.

*The Park Chung Hee Era*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is a book from last year, edited by Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel, which somehow escaped the notice of much of the broader world.  Maybe because it is a collection, as we all know that most edited collections are mediocre.  This one is superb, as it offers a very detailed and also fairly comprehensive look at the seminal years for South Korean economic growth.  Two-thirds of the essays are excellent and the others are at least pretty good.  My favorite was the Paul Hutchcroft comparison between the economic development of South Korea and the Philippines.  Not everyone will want 650 pp. on economic (and other) policy under South Korean autocracy, but if you do this is the book for you.  I didn’t even mind paying $47.50 for it.

My dual review of Michael Casey and Daniel Gross

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is from The New York Times Book Review, and it covers Michael J. Casey’s The Unfair Trade: How Our Broken Global Financial System destroys the Middle Class, and Daniel Gross’s Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline…and the Rise of a New Economy.  My bottom line:

Each of these books illuminates one particular economic story very well, but fails to see the larger and more complex picture.

One excerpt on the Casey book:

But does China deserve so much attention (5 chapters out of the book’s 10)? Casey writes that China “provided the cheap goods needed to sustain the American way of life, as well as the finance to pay for it.” Yet the numbers tell a less dramatic story. Currently, imports from China are measured at about 2.7 percent of consumer spending in America. Furthermore, for each dollar of imports from China, a lot of that money was spent in the United States preparing the import; imagine an iPad designed and marketed from Cupertino, Calif., but counted as an import from China. That leaves Chinese imports, measured in terms of true net impact, at about 1.2 percent of American consumer spending.

One excerpt on the Gross book:

The most probable American economic future is a lot of export success, fantastic wealth for the owners of thriving businesses and persistent productivity problems, and thus high prices, for some major items in consumer budgets. That means more stagnation of real wages at the middle of the income distribution.

Both books are already on the market.

The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Nearly here:

SITTING down with the Inquire system is, at first, a lot like trying to cosy up to an intimidatingly dense biology textbook. Sure, its presentation on the iPad is slick, but that can’t hide the fact that you are in for a tough old read.

That is until you highlight the first bit of particularly impenetrable text. Suddenly a list of questions pops up in the right-hand margin. Touch one and you are whisked away to a Wikipedia-like page full of information specific to the concept you are stuck on. Terms like “chloroplast” and “plasma membrane” are succinctly defined, and the page explains how each concept fits into the wider field of biology.

Want to know more? Type in your own question and artificially intelligent software will construct a new page to answer your query.

The aim of Inquire is to provide students with the world’s first intelligent textbook, says its creator David Gunning of Seattle-based Vulcan. At first glance, the system just looks like an electronic version of Campbell Biology, the tome that forms the bedrock of biology classes for first-year university and advanced high school students in the US. But behind the scenes is a machine-readable concept map of the 5000 or so ideas covered in the book, along with information on how they are all related.

*The New New Deal*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book about ARRA and fiscal stimulus, by Michael Grunwald, available here with the subtitle The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era.  Excerpt:

…it was an astonishingly big bill,  In constant dollars, it was more than 50 percent bigger than the entire New Deal, twice as big as the Louisiana Purchase and Marshall Plan combined.  As multibillion-dollar items were being erased and inserted with casual keystrokes, Obama aides who had served under President Bill Clinton occasionally paused to recall their futile push for a mere $19 billion stimulus that seemed impossibly huge in 1993, or their vicious internal battles over a few million bucks for beloved programs that suddenly seemed too trivial to discuss.

Critics of ARRA will not agree with everything in this book, but putting mood affiliation aside for a moment, the writing, research, and conception of the work are all excellent.