Category: Books
My excellent Conversation with Stephen Jennings
Recorded in Tatu City, Kenya, not far from Nairobi, Tatu City is a budding Special Enterprise Zone. Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is the episode overview:
Stephen and Tyler first met over thirty years ago while working on economic reforms in New Zealand. With a distinguished career that transitioned from the New Zealand Treasury to significant ventures in emerging economies, Stephen now focuses on developing new urban landscapes across Africa as the founder and CEO of Rendeavour.
Tyler sat down with Stephen in Tatu City, one of his multi-use developments just north of Nairobi, where they discussed why he’s optimistic about Kenya in particular, why so many African cities appear to have low agglomeration externalities, how Tatu City regulates cars and designs for transportation, how his experience as reformer and privatizer informed the way utilities are provided, what will set the city apart aesthetically, why talent is the biggest constraint he faces, how Nairobi should fix its traffic problems, what variable best tracks Kenyan unity, what the country should do to boost agricultural productivity, the economic prospects for New Zealand, how playing rugby influenced his approach to the world, how living in Kenya has changed him, what he will learn next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Just give us some basic facts. Where is Tatu City right now, and where will it be headed when it’s more or less finished?
JENNINGS: Tatu City is the only operational special economic zone [SEZ] in the country. It is 5,000 hectares of fully planned urban development. It is at quite an advanced stage. We have 70 large-scale industrial companies with us, including major multinationals and many of the regional leaders. We have 3,000 students come on site every day to our four new schools. We’re advanced in building the first phase of the first new CBD for the region. We have tens of thousands of core center jobs moving into that area, together with other modern office amenities. All of the elements — we have many residential modules, thousands of new residential units at a wide range of price points — all of the elements of a new city are in place.
COWEN: How many people will end up living here?
JENNINGS: Around 250,000.
COWEN: And how many businesses?
JENNINGS: There’ll be thousands of businesses.
And delving more deeply into matters:
COWEN: What do you think is the book [on economic development] that has influenced you most?
JENNINGS: It’s a very good question. I think I’ve read just about everything in development. There’s nothing I really like very much. Development is a black box. I don’t think there’s anything that has much predictive power. There’s a lot of ex post explanations, whether they be policy settings, location, culture. I think 90% of them are ex post; very few of them are predictive. Some of them are just tautologies. I really like factualization.
It’s descriptive more than analytical, but it just makes it clear that most of the world has been on a very similar development trajectory. It’s just not sequenced. Sweden started early; Ethiopia started late. But the nature of the transition and the inevitability of that transition, other than very extreme circumstances, is kind of the same.
COWEN: What do you think economists get wrong?
JENNINGS: I don’t think we really understand development at all, because if we could, we could predict it. We can predict virtually nothing. It’s just too complicated. It’s too connected with politics. I think there’s a lot of feedback loops and elements of development that we don’t understand properly. We certainly can’t quantify them because the development’s happening in such a wide range of settings, from communism dictatorships through to very liberal systems and with all different kinds of industrial — on every dimension, there’s a huge range of variables.
Excellent and interesting throughout.
What I’ve been reading
1. Eric Ambler, The Night-Comers. (U.S. editions are sometimes titled State of Siege.) Think of Ambler as a precursor of Le Carré. I used to think he had one or two excellent works, now I am realizing his ouevre is much deeper than I had imagined. Just long enough at 158 pp., this novel uses the Sundanese setting very well. He was a favorite of Graham Greene’s, and I will read yet more by him.
2. Lydia Davis, Our Strangers, not on Amazon try these sources. Very very short fiction, sometimes as short as a single paragraph. With some periodic non-fiction (or is it?) thrown in. The best pieces are excellent, and many of the others are at least interesting. Here is my earlier CWT with Lydia Davis, I am a fan.
3. Alexandra Hudson, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Highly intelligent, and today much needed. Her opening sentence is: “Did you know there are at least four women named Judith who are internationally renowned experts on manners?” I would say that Alexandra is one of my “dark horse” picks to become a leading classical liberal influencer, except maybe she isn’t a dark horse any more.
4. Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories. An extremely well-written, and also useful history of the opium trade, albeit with more than its fair share of left-wing jargon. And yes that is the novelist Ghosh. Due out in February.
The other books I’ve been reading I haven’t so much liked.
That was then, this is now — Gaza edition
The [Assyrian] empire’s chief concern were the corridors and trade routes that ran through Gaza on the coast as well as Megiddo, which had been an important city in the Northern kingdom. Scholars are divided on the issue of Assyria’s economic interest in the Southern Levant. Some insist that the empire was eager to exploit the resources of the region and even encouraged its economic development. Others argue that it was interested in little else than collecting tribute from its client states, and that it left most lands (especially those that did not serve a strategic purpose) to languish under the imperial “yoke” it imposed on them.
That is from the new and quite interesting Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins, by Jacob L. Wright. From the jacket copy: “…the Bible began as a trailblazing blueprint for a new form of political community.”
*George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle*
By Philip Norman, a wonderful book of course. My “problem” (not with the book of course) is just how much John and Paul tower over the proceedings, from the very beginning. Here is one excerpt:
He [Hanton, an early drummer for the Quarrymen, a Beatles precursor] felt excluded from the others’ practice sessions at the art college and resented Paul, who was more than competent on drums as well as guitar and piano, for continually finding fault with his performances.
And:
John’s leadership remained unchallenged, but Paul was ever his zealous adjutant; convinced that they could be spotted by some talent scout at any moment, he called for maximum effort, however late the hour or sparse the audience. And Stu Sutcliffe’s bass playing, though now reasonably competent, was clearly never going to satisfy Paul.
Recommended, I will read every page. You can order here, Norman’s other bios are great too. And if you are wondering, a few of the most underrated George songs are the early instrumental “Cry for a Shadow,” “Don’t Bother Me,” and the much later “You.”
*GOAT* on Gary Becker
Written by me, from my new generative book:
Most of all, for me, Becker was a true “micro-machine,” a relentless, unstoppable thinker, analyst, and writer with the button always in the “on” position. Anything he did would be thought through to the maximum extent, at least relative to the conceptual tools at Becker’s disposal. And he never ever stopped. He died with his boots on, as one colleague of Becker’s once related to me.
Yet I don’t feel the need to give you a comprehensive analysis of Becker for the following reason: I can’t quite see putting him above Milton Friedman in the GOAT sweepstakes. And the purpose here is not to evaluate every wonderful economist, but to determine GOAT, and there Becker has to fall short.
I should add that much of Becker’s work has not aged well in the last ten to fifteen years. In recent times, economics has become more like sociology than sociology has become like economics. Behavioral economics has assumed greater importance, relative to the relative price effects and rational choice approaches that are so prominent in Becker’s work. His “economics of the family,” which seems to rationalize male breadwinner dominance, is now considered somewhat chauvinist or at least old-fashioned, though it fit the 1960s frame he wrote in. Even at the University of Chicago, new hires do not seem to be moving in the Beckerian direction. Hardly any current up and coming young economists seem to regard Becker as a critical influence or an inspiration, even if his indirect influence on them is immense. Becker’s breadth of topics has won out as a dominant approach, but not his modeling methods or his obsession with demonstrating the rationality of different social practices.
I don’t side against Becker on all of these questions, but as a simple description of where the profession is at, Becker has lost a lot of status and influence. That too removes him from the GOAT game, though in the meantime I will gladly aver that he is now significantly underrated.
I find Becker fairly boring to read, as the model does most of the work and, while he is perfectly clear, he is not a writer of wit or nuance. I don’t recommend his works to other people. His brilliance lies in a method and a machine of inquiry, and in his own relentlessness, and in the breadth of investigation he helped to create. Now that his presence has left the stage, his import will become less evident with time and I predict he will end up underrated all the more.
Here is the book itself (free), GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter, here is an explanatory blog post.
*GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?*
I am pleased to announce and present my new project, available here, free of charge. It is derived from a 100,000 word manuscript, entirely written by me, and is well described by the title of this blog post.
I believe this is the first major work published in GPT-4, Claude 2, and some other services to come. I call it a generative book. From the project’s home page:
Do you yearn for something more than a book? And yet still love books? How about a book you can query, and it will answer away to your heart’s content? How about a book that will create its own content, on demand, or allow you to rewrite it? A book that will tell you why it is (sometimes) wrong?
To be clear, if you’re not into generative AI, you can just download the work onto your Kindle, print it out, or read it on a computer screen. Yet I hope you do more:
One easy place to start is with our own chatbot using GPT-4, and we’ll soon provide custom apps using Claude 2 and Llama 2. In the meantime we’ve provided instructions for how to experiment with them yourself.
Each service has different strengths and you should try more than one. You’ll see the very best performance by working with individual chapters using your own subscription to ChatGPT, Claude, or a similar service. The chapters can be read independently and in any order. Ask the AI if you’re lacking context. Try these sample questions to start.
You can ask it to summarize, ask it for more context, ask for a multiple choice exam on the contents, make an illustrated book out of a chapter, or ask it where I am totally wrong in my views. You could try starting with these sample questions. The limits are up to you.
Here is the Table of Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Milton Friedman
3. John Maynard Keynes
4. Friedrich A. Hayek
5. Those who did not make the short list: Marshall, Samuelson, Arrow, Becker, and Schumpeter
6. John Stuart Mill
7. Thomas Robert Malthus
8. Adam Smith
9. The winner(s): so who is the greatest economist of all time?
The site address is an easy to remember econgoat.ai. And as you will see from the opening chapter, it is not only about economics, it is also a very personal book about me. No Straussian here, I tell you exactly what I think, including of my personal meetings with Friedman and Hayek. If, however, you are looking for a Straussian reading of this project — which I would disavow — it is that I am sacrificing “what would have been a normal book” to the AI gods to win their favor.
And apologies in advance for any imperfections in the technology — generative books can only get better.
Recommended.
What should I ask Ami Vitale?
Yes I am doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Ami Vitale is an American photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, educator and speaker. In 2018, she published a photo book titled Panda Love which captures pandas within captivity and being released into the wild…
In 1994, Vitale joined the Associated Press (AP) as a picture editor in New York and Washington, D.C.[5][6] She self funded her travel through her work with AP and left for the Czech Republic in 1997.
She moved to Prague, Czech Republic, and spent a year covering the war in Kosovo, traveling back and forth to Prague, and spending a month at a time in the war zone. She later traveled to Angola, and then to the second Intifada in Gaza and Israel. In 2000, she received an Alexia Foundation grant to document a small village in the West African nation of Guinea Bissau.
Vitale currently photographs wildlife and environmental stories in order to educate about global conservation issues. She is a visual journalist working as a photographer for National Geographic, a documentary filmmaker, and a cinematographer. Her recent still photography focuses on wildlife conservation in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. As an ambassador for Nikon and a contract photographer with National Geographic magazine, she has documented wildlife and poaching in Africa, covered human-wildlife conflict, and concentrated on efforts to save the northern white rhino and reintroduce pandas to the wild.
She has traveled to more than one hundred countries. Here is her home page, which includes links to her documentaries. Here is her Instagram.
So what should I ask her?
*The Women Who Made Modern Economics*
By Rachel Reeves. Here is the U.S. Amazon listing, but even the Kindle version is not actually available. Here is the UK Amazon listing. Here is a Times of London review of the book: “They [the book’s subjects] range from Beatrice Webb, who, as a founder of the LSE, is a natural choice, to Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary Marxist, and Dambisa Moyo, the international aid theorist elevated to the Lords by Boris Johnson.” Note that Reeves is also Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and thus surely worthy of getting U.S. book distribution?
*Eighteen Days in October*
That is the new and excellent book by Uri Kaufman, and the subtitle is The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East. Here is one excerpt:
The ordeal of the 314 Israelis who fell into captivity during the 1973 war — 248 in Egypt, 66 in Syria — did not end when they returned home. All were sent to a facility — not to be treated for post-traumatic stress, which was then only thinly understood — but to find out what they had told their captors. The facility was located in the Israeli town of Zichron Yakov; the men sent there nicknamed it “Stalag Zichron.” It was a nice play on words because it literally translated to “Stalag Memory.” Interrogators plumbed the depths of their memories, even giving some “truth serum,” ostensibly to treat shell shock. In interviews of these soldiers years later, the word that comes up again and again is humiliation. Elazar asked the men, “Why didn’t you do what Uri Ilan did? What didn’t you commit suicide?” On a radio program interviewing the survivors of Mezakh, former chief of staff Chaim Laskov said that “falling into captivity, surrendering, these are evasive things. An order to surrender is illegal. The only proper order is ‘every man for himself.'”
And this short bit:
It was Napoleon who famously prayed that if he had to face an enemy, please God let it be a coalition.
Recommended.
My excellent Conversation with Jacob Mikanowski
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why isn’t Stanisław Lem more popular in the West today as a writer?
MIKANOWSKI: That’s interesting. I grew up on Stanisław Lem like some people grow up on the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My dad’s a computer scientist. His father set up one of Poland’s first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction: he used to read the Tales of Pirx the Pilot and the Ijon Tichy stories — the robots, the short, fun ones — like they were fairy tales. I grew up with them.
I think — actually I have trouble going back to those. I’d go back to Solaris, and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it’s had lasting influence. But there’s something pessimistic about them. They don’t have that thing that Asimov does, or even Dune, of world-building and forecasting the human future far in advance. They are like Kafka in space, and that’s absurd situations, strange turns of events — I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress. Maybe that makes them hard to digest. Also a kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories. Almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take.
I think there’s been a little bit of a Lem revival, though. I know technologists, some people like them; futurologists like him. I like him.
COWEN: Some of the cybernetics tales, they seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I’ve seen this mentioned once, but it’s not generally known: the idea that you use them to talk to, that they’re weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles — that’s very much in Lem, quite early.
MIKANOWSKI: I think people should go back to them. I think — I was just thinking of Solaris, which I always thought about as this story about contacting a truly alien alien. Now it’s like, well, this is a little bit of what we’re doing with virtual reality and AI. It’s like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams, if you could revive people? You could have the mimicry of consciousness, the appearance of consciousness, without anything behind it — without a consciousness.
There’s something seductive about it, and there’s something monstrous about it. I think he was there way ahead of anyone else, and people should be going back to them. Maybe they will.
Of course we talk about the Suwalki Gap as well. And this: “Given all your study of Eastern Europe, what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine that maybe other well-informed people would not?”
Recommended, interesting throughout. Again, here is Jacob’s new and excellent book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
The Great Depression is Over!
Throughout the 20th century, the Great Depression dominated macroeconomic discourse, engaging prominent economists such as Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Lucas, and Prescott. Most 
principles of macroeconomics textbooks spend considerable time analyzing the Great Depression as it was this event which galvanized thinking about aggregate demand, bank runs, fiscal policy and money policy. However, the Great Depression occurred nearly a century ago and in a vastly different world, rendering its analysis more relevant to economic history than contemporary macroeconomics. We think it’s time to revise.
In the forthcoming edition of Modern Principles we excise the Great Depression and focus instead on the Great Financial Crisis and the Pandemic Recession as exemplifying the core of macroeconomics and policy. These events showcase a demand-driven recession followed by a supply-driven one, well illustrated by our dynamic AD-AS model. Focusing on these recessions also moves the lessons beyond the shifting of curves and towards important discussions of shadow banking, securitization, the microeconomics of externalities, and how monetary and fiscal policy must change when the goal – as during a pandemic — is not to get people back to work!
The lessons drawn from these significant and more recent recessions will inform policymakers as they deal with future recessions and will be the subject of analysis by economists for generations to come. A textbook for the 21st century must analyze the macroeconomics of the 21st century.
*China’s World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict*
That is a forthcoming book by David Daokiu Li. Perhaps it is the very best book explaining “how China works today?”
“What should I read on China? Which single book?” — those are two of the most common questions I receive. There are plenty of perfectly fine history books, but I am never sure what I should recommend. Now I have an answer to that question. Here is one short excerpt from the text:
Many people in China are concerned with the side effects of the massive anticorruption campaign. The first side effect is that government officials, especially those dealing with economic affairs, have now become inert. The reason is that active officials almost surely create enemies or grumbling groups, such as through the demolition of an old building to make room for new investments. These groups would bring their cases, and perhaps even historical cases, to the party discipline committee. On their path to promotion and their current positions, most officials have either intentionally or unintentionally engaged in practices that are not in compliance with today’s tighter government rules. In the Chinese reform process, laws and regulations are gradually implemented and then tightened. The anticorruption campaign is using today’s tighter regulations to judge the past conduct of officials, which occurred when the rules were either looser or entirely unclear. As a result, officials today are extremely hesitant to take any action that would make them stand out or draw extra attention, even if those actions are in the best interests of the locale or department they serve.
The author covers much more, including the importance of history, how the CCP works, local governments, SOEs, education, media and the internet, the environment, population, and much more.
There should be a book like this about every country.
I should note that the author lives in Beijing, so he soft pedals some of the more negative interpretations of the data, but ultimately I think this is much more fruitful than the books by journalist outsiders. The analysis is here, and you can do the moralizing on your own, if that is how you want it.
Definitely recommended, a very real contribution.
The Calverts Cliff Decision
By the early 1970s, Atomic Age dreams of ubiquitous nuclear power were evaporating as fast as those Space Age fantasies of humanity soon spreading out into the solar system. The data show a clear break in nuclear reactor construction in 1971 and 1972, which suggests the decline in reactor construction is likely attributable to a confluence of regulatory events, perhaps creating uncertainty about the future cost of safety regulations. Two of the most important events happened in 1971: the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Calvert Cliffs decision, in which the DC Circuit Court ordered federal regulators to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, widely considered the “Magna Carta” of federal environmental laws. Basically, NEPA and related executive orders require federal agencies to investigate and assess the potential environmental costs, if any, of its projects and solicit public input. (At least twenty states and localities have their own such statutes, known as “little NEPAs.”) The following passage from the Calvert decision gives a good feel for the era’s Down Wing attitude: “These cases are only the beginning of what promises to become a flood of new litigation…seeking judicial assistance in protecting our natural environment. Several recently enacted statutes attest to the commitment of the Government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress.’”
Wow. They wanted to stop the the engine of material progress and they did. Right out of Atlas Shrugged.
This is from The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, James Pethokoukis’s cheery introduction to ending the great stagnation. Pethokoukis ably covers all the big debates about the causes, consequences and solutions to the great stagnation and does so briskly, with optimism and covering culture as well as economics. Recommended as a one-stop shop for ending the great stagnation and as a pick-me-up.
We are reading the scrolls!
Megabytes of ancient text are coming https://t.co/zTAzZbpCwf
— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) October 12, 2023
Here is further information.
What should I ask John Gray?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is from Wikipedia:
John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948) is an English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is an atheist.
Gray has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religions; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.
John has a new book coming out The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. So what should I ask him?