Category: Books

In my pile

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jonathan Schlefer, The Assumptions Economists Make.

Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, by Edward Luce.   Here is his recent essay, related to the book.

Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities.

Ruchir Sharma, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles.

Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality.

Non-Google digital library in the works, connected with Robert Darnton.

The WSJ reviews *An Economist Gets Lunch*

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Graeme Wood, the review is here.  It has the excellent title “From Invisible Hand to Mouth.”  Excerpt:

For authenticity, he awards points to Pakistani restaurants that feature pictures of Mecca, since they’re more likely to cater to Pakistani clientele. (“The more aggressively religious the décor, the better it will be for the food.”) Find restaurants where diners are “screaming at each other” or “pursuing blood feuds,” he says—indications that people feel comfortable there and return frequently with their familiars.

I liked this line:

These labor-intensive operations, Mr. Cowen writes, show “just how uneconomical true barbecue art can be”—which suggests that if you want to eat like an economist, you should find a chef who doesn’t cook like one.

Note, however, that if you have talent but do not wish to scale it up very far, running an excellent local barbecue restaurant still may be a good use of your time.  The last two lines are sincere flattery:

Mr. Cowen says to beware of scenic views, bevies of beautiful women, and well-stocked bars. “You want to see that the people eating there mean business,” Mr. Cowen writes. Food is a business he knows intimately, although his preference for delicious meals in windowless rooms with ugly women, pictures of the Kaaba, and active blood-feuds will not be a taste shared by all.

You can pre-order the book on Amazon here.  For Barnes & Noble here.  For Indiebound.org here.  It is due out April 12.

What (and how) Whit Stillman reads

by  Tyler Cowen in

You have a lot of freedom in reading a book. I’m unable, for some reason, to read books from beginning to end. I have to go to what interests me most in the book. And if I like that, I start going backwards and forwards. And it starts to become a really complicated endeavor of just reading the parts of the books once and not sort of overlapping. I don’t know why I have to sort of re-edit the books myself. I don’t know why I can’t read a prologue and read a first chapter. I mean, if I really love a book I’ll get to them too. For some reason, I usually find them deadly dull, the prologues.

And this:

And my favorite reading of all is the unabridged Boswell’s Life of [Samuel] Johnson. It’s my favorite thing because it’s interesting and has no import or forward narrative momentum. So you’re interested and edified but it doesn’t keep you up at night.

Here is more.

*Early Retirement Extreme*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of an erratic but interesting book by Jacob Lund Fisker, and the subtitle is A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence.  Think of it as a study in “least cost living,” his web site is here.

Here is his post on a middle class lifestyle on 7k a year, health insurance included, sans young children, don’t skip the section on the lentils.  How does it compare to how people lived fifty years ago?  To how I lived thirty-two years ago as an undergraduate?

“Not buy very much” seems to be his main strategy.

I transplant these scenarios to a foreign setting.  Let’s say you had 10k a year, net, to live in either India or Mexico.  How high would your standard of living be?  What kind of health insurance could you buy?  How would your level of happiness compare to working at a job you don’t like for 80k a year for twenty more years?

When it comes to modern society, I sometimes wonder, what is the true secession point with decent utility?  What kinds of options are your savings giving you?  Is there any chance you will take those options?

For the pointer I thank CR.

*Darwin’s Devices*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is John Long and the subtitle is What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology.  Excerpt:

4. Evolve predatory robots.  If you or the enemy employ Pell’s Principle, you’ll need to be prepared to capture or destroy swarms.  For starters, you’ll need to let your evolving predators have the capacity and capability of filter feeders like baleen whales.  Consider behavioral adaptation first in your predators because the shorter generation tie of the prey will limit opportunities for hardware evolution in the predators.

File under: Whole new class of worries.

Matthew Bishop’s new book

by  Tyler Cowen in

With Michael Green, In Gold We Trust: The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty, Kindle Single.  Here is a short video about the book.

From the authors:

It provides a lively analysis of the big economic questions currently facing America, such as the danger to the dollar posed by gridlock in DC, especially over deficit reduction, the euro crisis, the growing risk of inflation and the changing attitude of China towards America. We argue that the renaissance of gold, plus the development of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, reflect weaknesses in the technology of money that we all need to take seriously and try to fix.

Good overview of the legal battle over eBooks

by  Tyler Cowen in

You will find it here, by Tim Carmody, and there are more issues involved than I had thought:

Knebel says there are three major points of law at stake in both the class-action suit and the Justice Department investigation against Apple and the five publishers:

  1. Whether and how the agency model applies to virtual goods;
  2. Whether Apple and publishers engaged in a “hub-and-spoke” conspiracy or simply “conscious parallelism”;
  3. The status of the “most-favored nation” clause, common to many legal contracts today, which Apple used to ensure that books could not be sold elsewhere at a lower price than in the iBooks store.

On the latter point there is this:

The last point at issue is Apple’s agreement with publishers that their books be sold at the same price to all other competitors. In contract law, this is called “the most-favored nation” clause.

“The most-favored nation clause has been suspicious under antitrust laws for years,” says Knebel. But at the same time, it’s extraordinarily common. “Most law firms, including mine, will agree to charge one client the lowest possible price for the same services,” he says.

So even though Apple’s insistence that HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, Penguin Group Inc. and Simon & Schuster Inc all charge the same prices for their books at all e-book stores is what seems on its face the fishiest about the whole affair, it’s actually the part that, in the absence of a conspiracy, is most hallowed by practice. A change in its status under federal antitrust law would require the largest revision to current legal agreements, in industries widely separated from publishing and software.

My view is simple, namely that in the face of massive disruptive innovation, antitrust law rarely does a good job.  The law should stay out of this.  In any case the prices of books have been falling for some time.

*Being Global*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The authors are Angel Cabrera and Gregory Unruh, and the subtitle is How to Think, Act, and Lead in a Transformed World.  Cabrera is the incoming president of GMU, as of this summer, so of course I am keen to read this book, which arrived in my pile today.

You can follow Cabrera on Twitter here, among other topics he covers leadership, globalization, and also the Spanish economy.

*Culinary Intelligence*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Peter Kaminsky and the subtitle is The Art of Eating Healthy (and Really Well).  I enjoyed this book, here is one bit:

If I had to reduce Culinary Intelligence to one guiding principle, it would be maximizing Flavor per Calorie (FPC): the notion that if ingredients are chosen on the basis of optimum flavor, and prepared with the goal of intensifying that flavor, then you can be satisfied while eating less.

The best tip in the book is that you get most of the value of a dessert from the first bite or two.  I believe also — for most but not all meals — that 80 percent of the value of a soft drink comes in the first 10 percent of your consumption of that drink.  What are some other principles of Culinary Intelligence?

Puerto Rico hypergamy fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

In Puerto Rico, women already outearn men — in 2009, women’s wages were 103 percent of men’s.  In other regions, women are close to catching up: in the District of Columbia, with a high number of federal workers and a high proportion of minorities, women earn 88 percent of what men do…Among 25- to 34-year-olds working full-time, women’s earnings were 91 percent of men’s in 2010, up from 68 percent in 1979.

That is from Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family.  It is an interesting book, though it does not always focus on the questions that I would.  The core thesis is that women will learn to marry down and men will learn to marry up.

The text has subtitles like “Women Will Have to Learn to Appreciate New Qualities in Men.”

Here is a paper on “the end of hypergamy,” it has fragments like “we estimate a female hypergamy parameter, following Mare’s example (1991),” plus it introduces me to the word “hypogamy.”  The key sentence I suppose is this:

This means that the gender gap in education accounts for almost 80% of the cross-country and within country variance in observed hypergamy.

And it is stated:

According to our results, if current trends in education are to continue the end of hypergamy is near.

That would be for recorded marriages, but at what rate of marriage might such an equalization take place?  This paper on hypergamy suggests that marriage rates are falling predominantly for the less educated women; Betsey Stevenson has work on related topics.  It is a puzzle for the extreme hypergamy theorists why the rate of marriage for educated women has not fallen lower than it has.

*The Clash of Economic Ideas*

by  Tyler Cowen in

In 1958, on his first visit to India, the Hungarian-British development economist Peter Bauer was eager to meet the Indian economist B.R. Shenoy.  Bauer knew the name from a “Note of Dissent on the Memorandum of the Economists’ Panel,” which Shenoy had written criticizing India’s Second five-Year Plan.  In 1955 the Indian government had recruited twenty-one senior Indian economists for the Panel of Economists, chaired by the minister of finance, to review the plan.  Twenty of the economists had signed a memorandum endorsing the plan.  Professor Shenoy was the lone dissenter  Shenoy’s “Note of Dissent” was an annoyance to members of the Indian Planning Commission; to Prime Minister Nehru, who had initiated the planning effort; to Nehru’s adviser P.C. Mahalanobis, who had drafted the plan; and even to international aid officials, who overwhelmingly supported the planning effort.  Shenoy had become persona non grata in official economic policy-making circles.

Yet Shenoy turned out largely to be right.

That is from the forthcoming excellent book by Lawrence H. White, Amazon link here.  The book is not mostly about India, but it is about the role of economic ideas in shaping economic outcomes.  The chapter on India is my favorite, however, and it is perhaps the very best place to start to understand the failures of India’s planning period.

White also points our attention to Milton Friedman’s 1955 Memorandum to the Indian Government, which is I believe not well known, not even among Friedman fans.

The book truck

by  Tyler Cowen in

Sometimes the number of books arriving at the house each day exceeds my ability to carry them away (not a complaint), in part because I am not always in town to bring them to the office.  Kathleen Fasanella suggests the book truck:

I have a Bretford, 36″ long shelves (6 sloped shelves), 18″ deep, 43″ or so high, 5″ Casters. 2 swivel, 2 lock. It is a welded frame so there is nothing to put together (except to snap in the casters)This model is available at highsmith…http://www.highsmith.com/Bretfordreg-Duro-Book-Truck-6-Sloped-Shelves-43Hnbspxnbsp36Wnbspxnbsp18D-c_21704649/H10251/

The model no is L3W-H10251, bottom of the page at the above link.

This is the least expensive price I found but I don’t know if this company is any good:
http://www.worthingtondirect.com/school_furniture/av_equipment/V336PB_37X18X42H__PUTTY_BEIGE__SIX_SLANT_SHELVES__MOBILE_UTILITY_TRUCK.htm?utm_source=shopzillacom&utm_medium=productfeed&utm_campaign=product

Here is her blog post on how to organize books.

I am going to buy the book truck.