Category: Books
“Scene of the Verge of the Hay-Mead”
That is a chapter from Far From the Madding Crowd, which remains a much underrated Thomas Hardy novel. This chapter is a masterpiece of behavioral economics, most of all on matters of courtship and romance. It is difficult to excerpt, because it relies so much on the sequence of events and dialog. You can read it free here. There are other sources, including MP3s, here.
*The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New*
That is the new book by the very active and very smart Peter Watson, due out soon but I bought a copy in the UK.
Why has the New World been so different from the Old World? What a splendid seventeenth and eighteenth century question. Imagine Jared Diamond — and with comparable scope — yet with shamans, peyote, and El Niño playing a role in the argument. I recommend it to everyone who can keep in mind how speculative the argument will be.
If we had to sum up what has gone before and describe in a few words the main features shaping early life in the Old World, those words would be: the weakening monsoon, cereals (grain), domesticated mammals and pastoralism, the plough and the traction complex, riding, megaliths, milk, alcohol. One way to highlight the differences between the two worlds is to perform the same summing-up exercise for the Americas…For the New World the crucial and equivalent words would be: El Niño, volcanoes, earthquakes, maize (corn), the potato, hallucinogens, tobacco, chocolate, rubber, the jaguar, and the bison.
Unlike Diamond, this book assigns ideology a central role in the story. Europe and the Middle East generate the ideas of the shepherd, the New World the ideas of the shaman, some of which may have been picked up or carried from the Chukchi of Siberia. Perhaps my favorite point in the book is the observation that the Old World had a greater diversity of ideologies.
Watson touches on many Hansonian themes about the differences between gatherers and foragers. Here is a Guardian review. Here is an Independent review. Here is a Matthew Price review.
This is an easy book to criticize, see the reviews or for instance take this passage:
…artwork was not developed [in the early stages of the New World] because there was no need to establish either dedicated territories or tribal identities. And/or food was in such plentiful supply that they had no need to keep records that assisted their memory of animal habits.
One really does have to take this book as a scenario, not as science. It is nonetheless interesting if used with care.
*Economic Fables*, the new Ariel Rubinstein book
It is summarized here:
I had the good fortune to grow up in a wonderful area of Jerusalem, surrounded by a diverse range of people: Rabbi Meizel, the communist Sala Marcel, my widowed Aunt Hannah, and the intellectual Yaacovson. As far as I’m concerned, the opinion of such people is just as authoritative for making social and economic decisions as the opinion of an expert using a model.
Part memoir, part crash-course in economic theory, this deeply engaging book by one of the world’s foremost economists looks at economic ideas through a personal lens. Together with an introduction to some of the central concepts in modern economic thought, Ariel Rubinstein offers some powerful and entertaining reflections on his childhood, family and career. In doing so, he challenges many of the central tenets of game theory, and sheds light on the role economics can play in society at large.
Economic Fables is as thought-provoking for seasoned economists as it is enlightening for newcomers to the field.
The book can be read freely here. Rubinstein’s home page is here.
Estonia fact of the day
There is no movie with the word “Estonia” in its title.
That is from Alexander Theroux’s new and interesting Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery. Here is from one Amazon review:
It is one of the most hateful books I’ve ever read. There is even an entire chapter called “Why I hate Estonia”, and almost every sentence starts with “I hate…” Here’s how that chapter starts: “I hate the pointless cold. I hated the fact that most people are sour but consider that normal. I hated the ungrammatical ‘5,2 litre’ alcohol content comma, when it should be a period ‘5.2’ liter!”
The author is badly uninformed about the region.
Most of the reviews are one star, but so far I am enjoying the book, and for that matter the reviews. I can’t vouch for all of the information. Here is another recent controversy about Estonia.
There is a new Dan Ariely book out
All bookstores should be organized by country
Like Daunt Books, 83 Marylebone High Street, in London. You go to the “India” section and they have Rushdie and Roy and Dalrymple and Luce.
For the pointer I thank Alen Mattich.
*The Ocean of Life*
The author is Callum Roberts and the subtitle is The Fate of Man and the Sea. It is an excellent look at the environmental problems associated with oceans. Here is one bit:
European seas are far less productive than they once were. The fact that the UK bottom trawl fleet lands only half the fish today that it did when records began in 1889, despite a massive increase in fishing power, says all we need to know about how we have squandered natural capital.
…In 1889, there were ten to fifteen times as many large bottom-living fish like cod, haddock, and halibut in the seas around the UK as there are today.
The book is interesting throughout and very readable, without losing its fundamental seriousness.
*Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher*
I very much enjoyed the new biography of Eric Hoffer, here is one excerpt:
Reminding us of Immanuel Kant, Hoffer went on solitary walks, did not marry, had a stomach that often gave him trouble, and (after he moved to San Francisco) rarely traveled. (Kant, it seems, never did.) Remarkably, we know more about Kant’s early life than we do about Hoffer’s. A professor of geography, Kant early on was more interested in science than in philosophy; Hoffer was the same. After moving to skid row in Los Angeles, he said, he taught himself chemistry and botany.
…Hoffer’s hundreds of three-by-five-inch index cards carried quotations from Aristotle, Bagehot, Clemenceau, Disraeli, Gandhi, Hobbes, Kant, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Pascal, Spinoza, and a hundred others, compiled over many years. Was there any precedent for this in the life of the nation? An apparently unschooled laborer who became a longshoreman and made an attempt to compile the wisdom of the ages on his own? he was filling them out by the 1940s and he continued adding to them until near the end of his life. the later dates are conspicuous because his handwriting becomes ever more shaky.
The author is Tom Bethell, you can buy the book here.
*Peter Singer and Christian Ethics*
The author is Charles C. Camosy and the subtitle is Beyond Polarization, you can buy it here.
Most philosophies draw heavily from religion, as Ross Douthat suggested recently. Peter Singer is no exception, as Camosy ably demonstrates. There should be more books like this.
My new question for visitors to the lunch table is: “What is it you really believe in?”
*Progressive Consumption Taxation*
The authors are Robert Carroll and Alan D. Viard and the subtitle is The X Tax Revisited, published by AEI. Here is a summary excerpt:
…we propose an X tax, consisting of a flat-rate firm-level tax on business cash flow and a graduated-rate household tax on wages. The tax would completely replace the individual and corporate income tax, the estate and gift taxes, and the Unearned Income Medicare Contribution tax slated to take effect in 2013.
Those interested in tax policy should read this book, which covers some of the tricky issues — such as the transition, or international income — more carefully than do most sources.
*The Knockoff Economy*
The authors are Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman, and the subtitle is How Imitation Spurs Innovation. Here is one excerpt:
During the postwar heyday of the one-liner, there was no strong norm against imitating another comedian. In fact, comedians copied one another shamelessly, joking about it as they did so. And the type of comedy prevalent then permitted and even encouraged this practice. Comedians were telling largely interchangeable generic jokes that a wide audience could appreciate. Comics differentiated themselves by their performance style: who delivered the joke better, timed the audience better, was able to compile and assemble from a repository of jokes a subset that fitted the particular audience. Many comedians based their acts on a blend of stock jokes, purchased jokes, and copied jokes. There was not much investment in the kind of personalized material that dominates today. Given the system at the time, this made sense. One-liners were easy to copy; delivery, however, was relatively more difficult to steal. Post-vaudeville comedians were incentivized to invest in their delivery, not in writing new jokes.
Now compare those comedians with their modern counterparts. Contemporary comics invest far more in original and personal content. The medium is no longer focused on reworking preexisting genres like mother-in-law jokes. Nor is it just about slinging in one funny joke after another. Comedy today is more personal, more story-telling in orientation, and more consistent with a real or assumed stage persona. In short, comedians in the post Lenny-Bruce era invest in a personality, and their comedy reflects that personality. They create a comedic brand of sorts. And to protect that investment and that brand, they have developed a system of social norms that punishes copying. At the same time, comedians invest less in some of the performative aspects of their work: many today stand at a microphone, dress simply, and move around very little, with none of the more elaborate costuming, mimicry, musicianship, and play-acting that characterized the post-vaudeville comics.
The book is due out in September.
*The Oil Curse*
The author is Michael L. Ross and the subtitle is How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations. It is an excellent book, here is the bottom line:
Most social scientists trace the oil curse to the governments of petroleum-producing states…This book, though, shows that the events of the 1970s, especially nationalization, made the problems of the oil states a lot worse.
Recommended, here is the book’s home page.
Very good sentences
This is from Elias Canetti’s memoir, volume three, The Play of the Eyes:
When friends had told him that someone had praised The Man Without Qualities to the skies and would be overjoyed to meet him, Musil’s first question was “Whom else does he praise?”
I am happy to praise these memoirs too.
*Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man*
That is the new and oddly underreported book by Mark Kurlansky, about Clarence Birdseye and the early history of frozen food. I found it consistently good and enjoyable, here is one excerpt:
Birdseye asked himself many questions about food and survival in the subarctic. Why, he wondered, did people in Labrador eat lean food in the summer but a tremendous amount of fat in the winter? The ultimate winter survival dish was something he called bruise, which is sometimes known as brewis, a combination of dried and salted food mixed with a tremendous amount of fat. Usually it was salt cod, hardtack, flour, and water, baked hard and mixed with cubed salt pork, and then boiled and served like a hash with huge globs of melted pork fat. Bowls of melted fat were often served on the table to spoon onto food. Birdseye laughed when heard a host say, “Have some more grease on your bruise,” but everyone then took a few spoonfuls. It was a Sunday morning breakfast favorite. He remembered that people also ate a great deal of grease in the Southwest, where it was hot in the summer. They would open a can of corn and eat it with pork fat.
Here is one picture of fish and brewis. I found this book especially interesting on the early history of European-settled Labrador.
The Father of Microcredit
You’ve heard how microcredit was born. In a nation long shackled by British rule and wracked by famine, a brilliant man was seized with a desire to strike a blow against the poverty all about him. Defying common sense and the skepticism of his colleagues, he began lending tiny sums out of his own pocket to poor people, which they were to invest in tiny businesses. He demanded no collateral, only the vouchsafe of the borrowers’ peers. The borrowers rewarded his faith with punctual repayment. In time, his experiment spawned a national movement that delivered millions of loans to poor men and women and broke the power of money lenders.
The hero of this story is…Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels.
Swift developed the main ideas of microcredit–small sums, co-signers on the loan who knew the recipient, loans to women–in the 1730s. Although the system did not grow large in his lifetime, by the 1840s Irish microcredit institutions served a fifth of the population of Ireland.
The quote and information are from David Roodman’s excellent book Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance. Roodman is a remarkable scholar, equally at ease collecting information in the slums of Bangladesh as writing complex computer code, and Due Diligence is a very good book not just on microcredit but on development more generally.
(Loyal readers may recall that Tyler also noted Swift’s connection to microcredit in a post from 2006.)