Category: Books

The Patrick Melrose novels

by  Tyler Cowen in

I usually find “derelict fiction” unappealing (I don’t for instance enjoy Trainspotting, although I admit its aesthetic merits, nor did I like Drugstore Cowboy; someone should write an essay on the merits and demerits of drug-based fiction), but these books are for me compulsively readable and the prose is more vital than almost anything else being written.  They are by Edward St. Aubyn and you can buy the first four of them here, the final one here.   By no means should you let these novels be defined by their excerpts, but here are a few:

How could he ever hope to give up drugs?  They filled him with such intense emotion.  The sense of power they gave him was, admittedly, rather subjective (ruling the world from under the bedcovers, until the milkman arrived and you thought he was a platoon of stormtroopers come to steal your drugs and splatter your brains across the wall), but then again life was so subjective.

And:

If he got her he would give up drugs forever, or at least have someone really attractive to take them with.  He giggled wildly, wrapping a towel around himself and striking back into his bedroom with renewed vigour.

And:

Fergus took me to the coast and forced me to go snorkeling.  All I can say is that the Great Barrier Reef is the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen.  It’s one’s worst nightmare, full of frightful loud colours, peacock blues, and impossible oranges all higgledy-piggledy while one’s mask floods.

If you are wondering, drug addiction is a central theme in only some of these books, no more than half actually.  There are also scenes of child abuse, family, and Australia.

*Library Journal* review of *An Economist Gets Lunch*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Part In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and part Roadfood, this is a culinary coming-out party for Cowen (economics, George Mason Univ.), who up to now has been known for more standard economic works like The Great Stagnation. This latest book combines economic and environmental messages, all written in a highly entertaining and informative style—often with a counterintuitive twist. The real story, though, is the author and his techniques for finding and eating delicious, inexpensive food from all over the world. Thus, we get tips on how to obtain good Chinese food from local, not-so-authentic places; which strip malls are likely to have the best restaurants (who knew they were in strip malls to begin with?); using Google to turn up unexpected restaurant gems; and why places filled with fun, laughing, drinking people often don’t have good food. An entire chapter is devoted to barbecue, and another provides specific suggestions for eating well in numerous countries.

VERDICT A fun and informative book that environmentalists, economists, and (most of all) foodies will enjoy. Recommended for all. [See Prepub Alert, 10/7/11.]—Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH

Not from Atlas Shrugged

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Hill: Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a “Reasonable Profits Board” to control gas profits.

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a “windfall profit tax” as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation.

…The Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784, would apply a windfall tax on the sale of oil and gas that ranges from 50 percent to 100 percent on all surplus earnings exceeding “a reasonable profit.” It would set up a Reasonable Profits Board made up of three presidential nominees that will serve three-year terms.

And here directly from the proposed bill:

(4) REASONABLE PROFIT.—The term ‘reasonable profit’ means the amount determined by the Reasonable Profits Board to be a reasonable profit on the sale.

Addendum: Here is Bryan Caplan’s classic, Atlas Shrugged and Public Choice: The Obvious Parallels and here is the award-winning Atlas Shrugged app.

*The Start-Up of You*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman and the subtitle is Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career.  if you are starting a career, it is an excellent book for thinking through the practical issues you will face in branding yourself in what is becoming a more volatile and very different labor market.  The book’s home page is here.

Dostoyevsky

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ken writes:

I was scouring your blog for Fyodor Dostoevsky and was surprised to see no mentions. I was just wondering your thoughts on him. Currently reading the Brothers Karamazov and it’s fantastic.

Brothers Karamazov spent seven or so years as my favorite book, starting in high school.  I’m not suggesting it is juvenile, only that I find it hard to go back and enjoy things at lower levels than I did before (I also don’t like to eat in still-good but declining restaurants).  I no longer find Notes from Underground interesting, as I regard its questions as a dead end.  I’d sooner reread Pascal.  I never got through The Idiot or Demons in the first place.  About two years ago I read House of the Dead and liked it, though it felt like a respite from the more typical conception of Dostoyevsky.

How much can you like Dostoyevsky anyway?  My sense is that he is probably underrated as a pure writer (much of it comes across as garbage in English translation, but perhaps is quite biting or comic or interestingly manic), and overrated as a source of the “novel of ideas.”

If you enter “Dostoyevsky” into the search function of Twitter, you don’t come up with much interesting these days.

Whence comes this sudden wave of economic determinism?

by  Tyler Cowen in

All of a sudden it is pulled out of the closest as a weapon against Charles Murray, such as by Paul Krugman (and here and here), Rortybomb, David Frum, and others.  Bryan Caplan brings some sanity to the debate:

I’m baffled by people who blame declining marriage rates on poverty.  Why?  Because being single is more expensive than being married.  Picture two singles living separately.  If they marry, they sharply cut their total housing costs.  They cut the total cost of furniture, appliances, fuel, and health insurance.  Even groceries get cheaper: think CostCo.

These savings are especially blatant when your income is low.  Even the official poverty line acknowledges them.  The Poverty Threshold for a household with one adult is $11,139; the Poverty Threshold for a household with two adults is $14,218.  When two individuals at the poverty line maintain separate households, they’re effectively spending 2*$11,139-$14,218=$8,060 a year to stay single.

But wait, there’s more.  Marriage doesn’t just cut expenses.  It raises couples’ income.  In the NLSY, married men earn about 40% more than comparable single men; married women earn about 10% less than comparable single women.  From a couples’ point of view, that’s a big net bonus.  And much of this bonus seems to be causal.

More plausibly it is the rise in female income (among other factors, including the rise of birth control, read more here) which is behind the decline in marriage, but that doesn’t fit with traditional mood affiliation, which finds the rise in female income to be good (which it is), and the decline in marriage to be — neither good nor bad per se but not exactly worth celebrating.  If you can blame capitalism and wage stagnation for the decline of the family among lower earners, so much the better for ideology but as a sociological proposition that is a very weak hypothesis (do you see convincing links to real sociological evidence, showing this to be the dominant factor? No) and as Caplan shows it doesn’t fit with the economics either.

Remind me again, how is wage stagnation supposed to explain the pronounced decline in religiosity, among lower earners, as shown by Murray?  It’s well-known that a secular outlook is a normal good, and that on average poorer countries are more religious than wealthier countries.

I’m struck by how many people are offering negative comment on the new Murray book who have not read it, or who do not appear to have read it.  I found it to be a much less controversial book than the commentary makes it seem, and actually I had stopped thinking about it, except for all the negative reviews I see it getting.  It is unpopular because it disrupts current moral narratives about economic and social decline, as much on the right as on the left I might add, not because it is relying on dubious facts.  It is simply redescribing inequality through a somewhat different lens.  There’s much less at stake here than meets the eye.

Maybe I should not even be responding, but then again I am a determinist and does not Karl Smith have a good forecasting record to date?

*An Economist gets Lunch*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am pleased that Publisher’s Weekly has offered a starred review to my forthcoming book:

Enlightened consumerism, not ideology, is the surest path to tasty and responsible dining, argues this yummy gastronomic treatise. Economist and restaurant critic Cowen (The Great Stagnation) takes readers along as he eats, shops, and cooks in a diversity of spicy settings, including a Nicaraguan tamale stand, the greens aisle at the Great Wall supermarket chain, backwoods barbeque pits, and his own kitchen, where he wrestles with Mexican cuisine. He focuses on how the interplay between creative suppliers and demanding customers produces good, cheap food, an approach that yields offbeat insights into, for example, why the menu item that sounds the least appetizing usually tastes great and why you should never eat in a place filled with beautiful people having a great time (that restaurant’s specialty, he reasons, is the scene, not the food). Cowen also offers a telling contrarian critique of high-minded food orthodoxies that extols agribusiness, debunks the environmental benefits of locavorism, and toasts genetically modified organisms. Cowen writes like your favorite wised-up food maven, folding encyclopedic knowledge and piquant food porn—“the pork was a little chewy but flavorful, and the achiote sauce gave it a tanginess”—into a breezy, conversational style; the result is mouth-watering food for thought.

You can pre-order the book on Amazon here.  For Barnes & Noble here.  For Indiebound.org here.

Book splat

by  Tyler Cowen in

Timothy Taylor, The Instant Economist: Everything You Need to Know About How the Economy Works is too elementary for most MR readers but it is well executed and would make a good gift for anyone needing an introduction to economic reasoning.

Larry Kotlikoff and Scott Burns have their new The Clash of Generations: Saving Ourselves, Our Kids, and Our Economy, due out in March.  I believe they are still fiscal pessimists.

There is Ruchir Sharma, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles, due out in April.

I reviewed Ruth Grant’s new Strings Attached: When do Incentives Corrupt? here, for Science, university readers can get through the gate.

Alessandra Casella, Storable Votes: Protecting the Minority Voice, calls for a system where you can abstain from voting on one measure and receive an extra vote on something else.

Christopher Balding, Sovereign Wealth Funds: The New Intersection of Wealth and Politics is a useful overview.

Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State is a good and also conceptual history of 19th century road building.

I loved Arthur Schnitzler’s Casanova’s Homecoming, free on Kindle, which I never had read before.  Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse, is a very good look at her life (she is the sister) and the life of the James family.

There is The Southern Tiger: Chile’s Fight for a Democratic and Prosperous Future, by Ricardo Lagos, Elizabeth Dickinson, and Blake Hounshell, next up on my Kindle.

I recommend Michael Grabell, Money Well-Spent?: The Truth Behind the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, The Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History.  It is a very good journalistic account of how the money was spent, and less scandal-mongering than the title might indicate.  I found it to be quite an objective account.  There should be more books like this, looking at the nuts and bolts of economic legislation.

Tony Judt’s new book *Thinking the Twentieth Century*

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is a wide-ranging dialogue with Timothy Snyder, you can buy it here.  I will gladly recommend this book, but I have mixed feelings about it.  It is Judt’s “deathbed conversations” with Snyder, when he was paralyzed.

Is it fascinating?  Yes.  Did I read it straight through without pausing?  Yes.  Did I learn a lot?  Yes.

Yet it doesn’t show Judt in such an overwhelmingly favorable light.  He is cranky, unfair to his intellectual opponents, and he repeatedly misrepresents thinkers such as Hayek on some fairly simple points.  He conducts unsubstantiated attacks on various New York Times columnists, as if they had once beaten him in a debate and this was his revenge.  It shows his lifelong and mostly unhealthy obsession with what Daniel Klein has called “The People’s Romance.”  Unlike in some of his previous writings, his proposals for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem come off as an irresponsible and somewhat flip symbolic gesture, easy enough to make because he doesn’t have to live with the outcome.  As a reader and reviewer it is hard to not wonder whether/how Judt was medicated during these conversations, and how well he had thought through his lack of editing options before publication.  Or is this the real Judt?  Are we all really like this?  Pondering that question is as interesting as the dialogue itself.

The Austrians will be happy when Judt writes: “The three quarters of century that followed Austria’s collapse in the 1930s can be seen as a duel between Keynes and Hayek.”  Yet he has the odd view that free market ideas were “imported to the U.S. in the suitcases of a handful of disabused Viennese intellectuals.”  Others may underrate the importance of central/eastern Europe but in these dialogues he overrates it.

One does not have to agree with Hayek’s Road to Serfdom to find this an unfair characterization:

Hayek is quite explicit on this count: if you begin with welfare policies of any sort — directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships — you will end up with Hitler.

My favorite part of the book comes at Kindle location 1294, here is part of that discussion:

But even when Blunt was outed as a Soviet spy, in 1979, his standing in high society, and in the distinctive codes of that society in England, still protected him…Thus Blunt — a spy, a communist, a dissembler, a liar and a man who may have actively contributed to the exposure and death of British agents — was nonetheless deemed by some of the his colleagues to be guilty of no crime serious enough to justify depriving him of the fellowship of the British Academy.

If you are seeking to “normalize” this review, I consider Judt’s Past Imperfect to be one of the best books of the last few decades, his Postwar to be one of my favorite books ever, and his late essays to be some of the best writing, in any genre, in a long time.  (Though I didn’t like Ill Fares the Land.)  I can recommend this too, as something worth consuming and pondering and spending money on, but I still have a slightly queasy feeling in my stomach.

Assorted Launching Links

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute talks with me about innovation in a fun podcast (mp3) and here is my earlier Econ Talk with Russ Roberts. I was also interviewed by Davin O’Dwyer for the Irish Times. Launching also has a new cover, shown at right. Here is one bit from the Irish Times:

The new normal is that we’re going to go back to where China and India are going to be playing huge roles. That definitely means that our relative status is going to fall. We’re not going to be, either the US or Europe, the powerhouse we once were. We’re not going to be the giant in the land of the Lilliputians. But, in an absolute sense, we can continue to do well and even better than before. I like to say that if you invent a cure for cancer, that’s great, that’s fantastic. If your neighbour invents a cure for cancer, that’s almost as great.

 

The new Charles Murray book

by  Tyler Cowen in

Kevin Drum offers comment:

…is it really true that back in 1963 the “upper tribe” and the “lower tribe” were more similar than they are today? It might seem that way in retrospect, but it sure didn’t at the time. It didn’t seem that way to Gunnar Myrdal or Michael Harrington, anyway. Overall, I can pretty easily buy the “Apart” piece of the title, but I’m a lot less sure about the “Growing” piece. For every example of a way in which top and bottom have diverged over the past 50 years, I suspect that you could also find an example of ways in which they’ve converged. It’s just that Murray wasn’t looking for any of those.

Perhaps electronic communications is one example, or maybe air conditioning, paging Don Boudreaux.  Sharing a greater number of absolute benefits is an extra commonality, for instance sharing “telephone plus internet” is more in common than just “everyone has a telephone,” even if the absolute number of differences is rising too.

This “mood affiliation” review is from a Rortybomb pointer I believe, excerpt:

Murray can’t tell you what really caused the class divide in marriage because the class-based changes in families he laments closely track the class warfare of the 1%. Up through the mid-’80s, upper class and working class divorce rates rose and fell together. Starting in 1990, the lines diverged, with the divorce rates of college graduates falling back to the level of the mid-sixties (before no-fault divorce) while the divorce and non-marital birth rates of everyone else continued to rise.

Do all the other social indicators follow this same pattern?  Did religiosity decline because of privileges for the wealthy and class warfare?  Are we supposed to think that broadly stagnant incomes for the lower classes caused more divorce for those individuals?  Didn’t stagnant incomes set in around 1973, with parts of the 1990s being relatively good times for the labor market?  In other words, those divorce rate and other social indicator changes are not the fault of the top one percent as this review would have you believe.  This latter point in the review makes more sense to me, though I don’t read it as contra Murray:

Third, women’s employment increased in the same period and women’s wages gained the most vis-à-vis men at the bottom of the income scale. As recently as 1990, women of all educational levels earned about the same percent of the hourly wages of men with the same education. To the extent the gendered “wage gap” varied, college educated women enjoyed slightly more parity with men than working class women. By 2007, the wage gap varied dramatically by class. College-educated women earned a smaller percentage of the hourly income of their male counterparts, while the wage gap between working-class men and women shrunk substantially.

…The result: a change in family norms. College-educated women postpone childbearing, invest in their careers, and conduct a long search for a compatible and reliable mate.

But does he have the stones to write “A hypergamy theory of changing social indicators”?

The liberation of American women also damaged the quality of public education, by removing the implicit subsidy of so many “captive” and smart female laborers.  I would say that the non-wealthy did not have good norms to deal with women’s liberation and maybe they could not have had such norms.  It’s time to come to terms with that history.  I am willing to embrace it, though I am not sure Murray is.

I’ve now read the book and I think it is very good, very well-written, and considerably more bulletproof than some of the critics are suggesting.  That said, not much in it surprised me or changed my views; admittedly these are areas where I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately.