Category: Books

*Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life*

That is the new book by Nicholas Phillipson from Yale University Press.  I urge all fans of Adam Smith to read this book.  It covers Smith's life and times more than his texts per se.  It is especially strong on Smith and Hume, Smith's work as a customs inspector, Smith's time in France, Smith and Quesnay, and Smith's dedication to his mother.  I like very much what it covers; my main complaint is that the book is not longer.

Here is a James Buchan review of the book.  Here is a John Gray review, more about Gray than the book.  Here is further coverage.  Here is a short piece by Phillipson.  Here is a short bio of Phillipson.

Do protagonists of great novels have children?

In his new book Encounter, Milan Kundera writes:

I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children.  Scarcely 1 percent of the world's population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced.  Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny.  Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liaasons.  Not Tom Jones, Fielding's most famous hero.  Not Werther.  All Stendhal's protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac's; and Dostoyevsky's; and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil's major characters…and Kafka's protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason — to erase the infant from his life — that he flees to America and the novel can be born.  This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the arc of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.

Toss in Melville and Conrad while you're at it.  What I find striking, however, is that contemporary writers seem more likely to give their protagonists children (Roth, Franzen, Updike, for a start, plus the rise of female authors helps this trend).  And that is precisely at a time when more people are having no children at all.  The decline of the heroic ideal in literature, and the decline of the journey of adventure, seem to be stronger forces in predicting fictional family size.

When is the first good Western literary characterization of a child?

I enjoyed reading this book, especially the two chapters about the still-underrated Janacek.

“Free Markets Foster Competition”

That's a chapter title from Jonathan Franzen's new book Freedom.  If you think you are going to like this book, you almost certainly will; it delivers on its promise.  The problem is, I never thought I was going to like this book.

This passage is one of many that made me cringe:

"And while you're here hon, can you help me with my taxes?  They're due tomorrow and my nails are wet." 

Is there any surer way to long for Victor Hugo and "men as they ought to be"?

I almost stopped reading it at about p.100.  I was not afraid it would get worse, rather I was afraid it would get better and I would start liking it and finish it.

Which is precisely what is happening.

The Small Schools Myth

Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean?  Howard Wainer makes the case in the entertaining Picturing the Uncertain World (first chapter with the Gates story free here). The Gates Foundation certainly spent a lot of money, along with many others, pushing for smaller schools. A lot of the push came because people jumped to the wrong conclusion when they discovered that the smallest schools were consistently among the best performing schools.

Schools1The chart at left, for example, shows by size the percentage of schools in North Carolina which were ever ranked in the top 25 of schools for performance. Notice that nearly 30% of the smallest decile (10%) of schools were in the top 25 at some point during 1997-2000 but only 1.2% of the schools in the largest decile ever made the top 25.

Seeing this data many people concluded that small schools were better and so they began to push to build smaller schools and break up larger schools. Can you see the problem?

The problem is that because small schools don’t have a lot of students, scores are much more variable.  If for random reasons a few geniuses happen to enroll in a small school scores jump up for that year and if a few extra dullards enroll the next year scores fall.

Thus, for purely random reasons we would expect small schools to be among the best performing schools in any given  year. Of course we would also expect small schools to be among the worst performing schools in any given year!  And in fact, once we look at all the data, this is exactly what we see. The figure below shows changes in fourth grade math scores against school size. Note that small schools have more variable scores but there is no evidence at all that scores on average decrease with school size.

States like North Carolina which reward schools for big performance gains without correcting for size end up rewarding small schools for random reasons. Worst yet, the focus on small schools may actually be counter-productive because large schools do have important advantages such as being able to offer more advanced classes and better facilities.

Schools2All of this was laid out in 2002 in a wonderful paper I teach my students every year, Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger’s The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures.

In recent years Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have acknowledged that their earlier emphasis on small schools was misplaced. Perhaps not coincidentally the Foundation recently hired Thomas Kane to be deputy director of its education programs.

Ignoring variance and how it relates to group size is a simple but common error. As Wainer notes, building on a discussion in Gelman and Nolan, counties with low cancer rates tend to be rural counties in the south, mid-west and west. Is it the clean country air or some other factor peculiar to rural counties which accounts for this fact? Probably not. The counties with the highest cancer rates also tend to be rural counties in the south, mid-west and west! Once again, small size and random variation appear to be the main culprit.

What I’ve been reading

1. The Private Lives of Trees, by Alejandro Zambra.  He has snuck up on us and suddenly he is one of Latin America's best writers.  As an extra bonus, you can read this in a single sitting, and still wish to read it again.

2. Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story, by Karen Connelly.  Insights into dissidents, why Burmese intellectuals love books so much, and the author's sex life.  She doesn't wish to call the country Myanmar.  I liked it, although it would be easy to mock in a hostile review.

3. Book of Days, personal essays, by Emily Fox Gordon.  She is a self-described "faculty wife" (I know her husband, the philosopher George Sher, a bit) and she has been seeing therapists most of her adult life.  This is a more multi-faceted book than it may sound, and it is good for thinking through what a workable marriage actually consists of. 

4. The Death of French Culture, by Donald Morrison and Antonie Compagnon.  Maybe there is nothing new here, but it is useful to have a statement of French culture-bashing in one coherent place.  Antonie responds, by confessing a sense of desperation.

5. Understanding The Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide, by Grant Hardy.  I only skimmed/browsed this book, but I learned a great deal from even that limited treatment.  It's a serious, substantive treatment, historical and literary rather than religious.  For instance, I had never even known before who "Mormon" was.  This book is getting very good reviews and deservedly so.

*Madoff Victims in Their Own Words*

That is the subtitle, the title is The Club No One Wanted to Join and the editor is Erin Arvedlund and the compiler is Alexandra Roth.  Here are a few excerpts:

You are an evil predator…The Bible says that as Christ hung on the cross He cried out to God, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."  I do not forgive you.  You and your family knew exactly what you were doing.  You will face God soon, and he will hold you accountable for your sins.

And another:

I no longer hate you.  You are no longer the Monster that terrifies my dreams and fills my nightmares, because now I have courage and strength, and I have taken back control of my life.

This ordeal has allowed me to grow.  It has allowed me to be a better friend, a better daughter, a better sister, and better me.

And for that I say, thank you!

And another:

P.S. I have been spelling your name in low caps for a while now, simply because you are a low life.

And:

I never met you, yet you had more influence and control over my life than I ever did.

A very good point from Dan Drezner

Quiggin thinks he’s only writing about the failure of free-market ideas, but he’s actually describing the intellectual life cycle of most ideas in political economy. All intellectual movements start with trenchant ways of understanding the world. As these ideas gain currency, they are used to explain more and more disparate phenomena, until the explanation starts to lose its predictive power. As time passes, the original ideas become obscured by ideology, caricature and ad hoc efforts to explain away emerging anomalies. Finally, enough contradictions build up to crash the paradigm, although current adherents often continue to advance the ideas in zombielike form. Quiggin demonstrates with great clarity how this happened to the Chicago school of economics. How he can think it won’t happen with whatever neo-Keynesian model emerges is truly puzzling.

Whether this applies to the Quiggin book is beside my point (I read an earlier draft of the manuscript but not the final).  It is in any case a valuable observation and John Quiggin discusses it here.  Drezner's full review, which covers a number of books, is here.

Assorted Links

1)  "The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a
soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to
play soccer."  Ron Paul on the mosque controversy.

2) Interesting review (pdf) of the health care bill from NCPA.

3) Philosopher Galen Strawson defends my most absurd belief.

4) "We've learned more about cooking in the past 15 years than we had in the previous 15,000 years." Video interview with Wylie Dufresne. By the way, I don't think this is true–we have learned more why but the previous 15,000 years developed a lot of how.  Surprising amount of political psychology in cooking, how to sell an unfamiliar food idea.  FYI, don't forget the book.

What do I think of diplomacy?

Diogo, a loyal MR reader, asks:

How do you see diplomacy as a profession? If you could be nominated US Ambassador to a country, which country would you choose? What good novels are there about diplomacy and diplomats?

I see diplomacy as a stressful and unrewarding profession.  A good diplomat has the responsibility of deflecting a lot of the blame onto himself, and continually crediting others, while working hard not to like his contacts too much.  And how does he or she stay so loyal to the home country when so many ill-informed or unwise instructions are coming through the pipeline?  Most of all, a good diplomat requires some kind of clout in the home country and must maintain or manufacture that from abroad.  The entire time on mission the diplomat is eating up his capital and power base, and toward what constructive end?  So someone else can take his place?  And what kind of jobs can you hope to advance into?

Diplomats are in some ways like university presidents: little hope for job advancement, serving many constituencies, and having little ability to control events.  Plus they are underpaid relative to human capital.  They must speak carefully.  They must learn how to wield power in the subtlest ways possible.

Who was it that said?: " Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice Doggie" until you can find a stick"

Presumably diplomats either enjoy serving their country or they enjoy the ego rents of being a diplomat or both.  It is a false feeling of power, borrowed power from one's country of origin rather than from one's personal achievements.  For the spouse the required phoniness is even worse.

For all those reasons, and more, I would not wish to be a diplomat.  I also might prefer to be a diplomat to a country I did not like, rather than to a country I did like.  

As for novels about diplomats, The Constant Gardener comes to mind.  The Diplomat's Wife is popular, though I have never read it.  I read the Ender trilogy as about diplomacy as well.  (Is there more from science fiction?  It seems like a good plot device to bring people into contact with alien cultures.)  Carlos Fuentes was himself a diplomat, as were Octavio Paz, Lawrence Durrell, Ivo Andriæ, Pablo Neruda, and Giorgos Seferis.  That's a lot of writer-diplomats and you can add John Kenneth Galbraith (ambassador to India) to the list.  Galbraith was the guy who said:

"There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception.  When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished."

*The Tenth Parallel*

The author is Eliza Griswold and the subtitle is Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.  Excerpt:

Church is no staid ritual in Nigeria; it is a carnival.  One Friday night, I went to the Redeemed Christian Church of Christ at an all-night church ground with three hundred thousand other people.  The figure is larger than the number of Quakers in America — the equivalent of an entire American denomination worshipping at the edge of Lagos.  With no traffic, the church ground is an hour's drive from Lagos.  The choir was a phalanx of thousands of young people sitting under a tent, and I wandered among them, swallowed by the rush of their voices.  Most attendees would spend the night dozing in their chairs of buying peanuts and soda and tapes and T-shirts and a host of other amusements.  The service started at eight.  Around midnight, I left to face hours of traffic and the sizable risk of a carjacking by the bandits who freely roamed the highways, picking off tired churchgoers.

This is the book which everyone is reading, and reviewing, right now.  It has good coverage of Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and the clash between religions in those areas.  I can definitely recommend it.  My major complaint has to do with framing.  The author reminds us that "the main fault lines are within Islam," or something like that, etc., yet if you read only this book, or for that matter its subtitle, you would come away with a different impression altogether.  The very premise of the book selects for clash among the two major religions surveyed and I don't think the author quite comes to terms with this fact.  She is torn by conflicting impulses to pursue her initial premise to its logical conclusion, and yet also to provide a more politically correct account than what she sees in front of her eyes.

New books in my pile

1. Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy, by Viviana A. Zelizer, home page here.  From a browse I learned that many prostitutes spend their "dirty money" more quickly.

2. A Short History of Celebrity, by Fred Inglis, home page here, with chapter one pdf.

3. Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities, by Lucien Karpik, from the French, chapter one pdf and home page.

What is emblematic of the 21st century?

A recent reader request was:

What things that are around today are most distinctively 21st century?  What will be the answer to this question in 10 years?

Here is what comes to mind and I think most of it will remain emblematic for some time:

Technology: iPhone, Wii, iPad, Kindle.  These are no-brainers and I do think it will go down in American history as "iPhone," not "iPhone and other smart phones."  Sorry people.

To read: blogs and Freakonomics, this is the age of non-fiction.  I don't think we have an emblematic and culturally central novel for the last ten years.  The Twilight series is a possible pick but I don't think they will last in our collective memory.  Harry Potter (the series started 1997) seems to belong too much to the 1990s.

Films: Avatar, Inception (for appropriately negative reviews of the latter, see here, here, and here).  Both will look and feel "of this time."  Overall there have been too many "spin-off" movies.  Keep in mind this question is not about "what is best."

Music: It's been a slow period, but I'll pick Lady Gaga, most of all for reflecting the YouTube era rather than for her music per se.  I don't think many musical performers from the last ten years will become canonical, even though the number of "good songs" is quite high.  Career lifecycles seem to be getting shorter, for one thing.

TelevisionThe Sopranos starts in 1999, so it comes closer to counting than Harry Potter does.  It reflects "the HBO era."  Lost was a major network show and at the very least people will laugh at it, maybe admire it too.  Battlestar Galactica.  Reality TV.

What am I missing?  What does this all add up to?  Pretty strange, no?

p.s. Need to add Facebook and Google somewhere!

*Packing for Mars*

Dust is the lunar astronaut’s nemesis.  With no water or wind to smooth them, the tiny, hard moon rock particles remain sharp.  They scratched faceplates and camera lenses during Apollo, destroyed bearings, clogged equipment joints.  Dusting on the moon is a fool’s errand.  Unlike on the Earth, where the planet’s magnetic field wards off charged particles of solar wind, these particles bombard the moon’s surface and impart an electrostatic charge.  Moon dust clings like dryer socks.  Astronauts who stepped from the Lunar Module in gleaming white marshamllow suits returned a few hours later looking like miners.  The Apollo 12 suits and long johns became so filthy that at one point, astronaut Jim Lovell told me, the crew “took off all their underwear and they were naked for half the way home.”

That is from Mary Roach’s new book, subtitled The Curious Science of Life in the Void.

Further German predictions about 2010

Everard Hustler, writing in 1910, predicted that in 2010 tuberculosis patients will conquer the disease by receiving shots of radium and by inhaling streams of radioactive air, with pipes running to their mouths and cloths tied tightly around their heads, and covering their eyes (the accompanying illustration is a good one), to make sure none of the radioactive air escapes.

He also predicted that a hostile nation could destroy the Berlin Rathaus using a beam of radium energy, shot from…a hovering zeppelin.

Radium: good to inject, good to inhale, bad to shoot at a tower from a zeppelin.  

That sounds odd, but radiation as a method of medicine starts in the 1920s and it uses the element of radium.   Modern chemotherapy does not arise until 1940, with the use of mustard gas.  Chemotherapy to attack tuberculosis starts in 1944.

Still, E.H. was not as perceptive as the guy who predicted the iPhone.