Category: Books
*Steak*, by Mark Schatzker
Roughly 98 percent of cattle do live to see the day the truck from the packing plant pulls up because antibiotics are mixed in with the feed to keep livers and guts from failing. A certain number are fated to die, however. Feedlot nutritionists, Williams explained, actually want to see a small percentage get sick, as "that way, they know they're pushing the feed to the edge." The ones that aren't dying are getting fat fast."
That is from the new and notable book Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef. This book is interesting and substantive on virtually every page and it is one of the best food books I have read in some time.
If you are wondering, the best steaks I have had were (in no order):
1. Kobe Beef in Kobe, Japan.
2. Dry-aged, in Hermosillo, Mexico.
3. Southern Brazil, in small towns outside of Curitiba.
It is rare that I end up eating steak in the United States; I just don't see a good reason to do it. I also think a lot of steak in B.A. is overrated, as does Schatzker.
Circa 1961, or, the more things change…
At the August FOMC meeting, Young reported on a lengthy discussion at OECD of West Germany's persistent surplus. The economic solution required either German inflation, additional revaluation of the mark, or deflation elsewhere. The German delegation rejected inflation and revaluation…
That is from Allan Meltzer's History of the Federal Reserve, volume 2, book 1, 1951-1969.
Why do we like adventure stories with guides?
Robin Hanson asks:
I’ve been sick, so watched tv more than usual. Watching Journey to the Center of the Earth, I noticed yet again how folks seem to like adventure stories and games to come with guides. People prefer main characters to follow a trail of clues via a map or book written by someone who has passed before, or at least to follow the advice of a wise old person.
Dante of course provides another example, as does Sibyl and Aeneas. And Robin's conclusion?:
This has a big lesson for those who like to think of their real life as a grand adventure: relative to fiction, real grand adventures tend to have fewer guides, and more randomness in success. Real adventurers must accept huge throws of the dice; even if you do most everything right, most likely some other lucky punk will get most of the praise.
If you want life paths that quickly and reliably reveal your skills, like leveling up in video games, you want artificial worlds like schools, sporting leagues, and corporate fast tracks. You might call such lives adventures, but really they pretty much the opposite. If you insist instead on adventuring for real, achieving things of real and large consequence against great real obstacles, well then learn to see the glorious nobility of those who try well yet fail.
*Jimmy Stewart is dead*
So says Larry Kotlikoff, in his new book, entitled Jimmy Stewart is Dead: Ending the World's Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking. It's lively and polemic, and suddenly it lurches into a proposal to reform financial intermediation:
Under limited purposes banking the banks are themselves simply financial intermediaries, while their mutual funds represents mini-banks, if you like, all of which are subject to 100 percent capital requirements.
Explained another way, you hold liquid securities directly and cut out the middleman of the lending bank. It's like expanding the idea of a checkable money market mutual fund to cover the retail banking sector. Here is his short Op-Ed on the idea, here is a Business Week article, and here are numerous endorsements for the book. See also Bob Litan on "narrow banking."
I used to advocate a version of this idea myself, but I no longer think it is a good reform proposal, for a few reasons:
1. There aren't enough safe, liquid assets to cover the stock of bank deposits. There would be even fewer safe, liquid assets if fiscal conservatives had their way. And we've now learned that the commercial paper market can seize up and shut down and AAA securities aren't always so safe.
2. Holding T-Bills eliminates the need for the bank intermediary and the resulting problems of moral hazard. But remember — these ends are achieved only by lending that money to the government. What's the old saying?: out of the frying pan, into the fire…
3. A lot of what current banks do would be replicated by non-bank commercial lenders and the risk of the banking sector would be transferred somewhere else. Ideally, these non-bank lenders would engage in greater "maturity-matching," but if banks will exploit the moral hazard problem won't these lenders exploit it too? The financial crisis very much changed my mind on this question. Can't such lenders, to policymakers, appear "too big to fail" in the same way that standard banks do? Are General Motors, AIG, and GE Credit really the path to future financial sector safety? Maybe there is room for improvement, by using more commercial lending, but it is murky and I no longer see a clear gain in this regard.
Here, by the way, is a Bert Ely critique.
*Vietnam: Rising Dragon*
It might seem strange, given the system's surveillance and security networks, but the Communist Party is wary of high-profile law enforcement campaigns. Failure would be worse than embarrassing for a party which is supposed to represent the people's will. Such campaigns are only ever risked at times and in ways which demonstrate the Party's continuing hold on power.
That is from Bill Hayton's new book — Vietnam: Rising Dragon — which I found informative and insightful on virtually every page. Recommended.
How good is the new David Grossman book?
David Grossman, the well-known Israeli writer, has a new book coming out this September, namely To the End of the Land (pre-order at that link). The basic plotline is of a mother who sets out on a wander through the Galilee, with a former lover, to avoid any news of her son's possible death on the front in Lebanon.
Has any book received better blurbs? Nicole Krauss blurbs that Grossman "may be the most gifted writer I've ever read"; Paul Auster compares the book to Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina.
Here is a discussion of whether the blurbs for the book are overwrought. Yet it has received amazing reviews in Israel. It has won a German book prize. It was strongly recommended to me in two German bookstores, by sales clerks. Grossman himself seems to realize how good the book is.
Here is an interview with Grossman.
I am on p.100 of about 700 pp., and while the book develops slowly, I am not ready to reject the extreme claims made on its behalf. I am sad when it comes time to put it down. Have any of you read it? Heard credible accounts of its quality?
Last Call
Daniel Okrent's Last Call, a history of the rise and fall of alcohol prohibition, is a masterpiece. Of course the writing is great but Okrent is also very good at building the history on a framework of analysis and social science.
Here is Okrent on Prohibition and the income tax:
By 1875 fully one-third of federal revenues came from the beer keg and the whiskey bottle, a proportion that would increase in the years ahead and that would come to be described by a temperance leader in 1913, not inaccurately, as "a bribe on the public conscience."
…it would be hard enough to fund the cost of government without the tariff and impossible without a liquor tax. Given that you wouldn't collect much revenue from a liquor tax in a nation where there was no liquor, this might have seemed like an insurmountable problem for the Prohibition movement. Unless, that is, you could weld the drive for Prohibition to the campaign for another reform, the creation of a tax on incomes.
And here is Okrent on voting law and prohibition. I'd always understood that prohibition was, in part, an attack by rural WASPs against urban, (often) Catholic, immigrants but I had not realized how much the drys were helped by malapportionment in the state legislatures which gave rural voters greater power than their numbers alone would have suggested.
Statewide wet majorities were rendered irrelevant by the rotten-borough legislatures. The very same day the citizens of Missouri rejected a dry amendment to the state constitution by a margin of 47 percent dry to 53 percent wet, they elected a legislature that just two months later would ratify the Eighteenth Amendment by a 75 percent to 25 percent margin. In Ohio, the sacred cradle of the ASL, legislative districting and assiduous politicking put ratification over by a combined legislative vote of 105-42; however, when left to their own devices, Ohio voters rejected the very same measure in a referendum.
See also Tyler's review for more.
Who’s preposterous?
I don't usually pull out media quotes to mock them, but this one caught my eye. There is a new book out — Lucy — and it is the (fictional) story of a woman who is part human, part bonobo chimpanzee, but who looks quite human. Michiko Kakutani wrote this criticism about the story:
It seems preposterous that the United States government or its agents would throw this teenage girl into a cage on an Air Force base.
Huh? If the point is that they would sooner use a Navy base, that can be granted. More generally, don't we live in a world where the U.S. government tries to assassinate some of its citizens, arbitrarily detains and holds many people — even innocent people –, and until recently tortured many people, and how about the still-legal Judge Rotenberg Center? As an aside, how do we treat full-blooded chimpanzees?
Kakutani's sentence made me want to buy the book.
Whole Earth Discipline
Here's my final quote (earlier quotes here and here) from Stuart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, a quote which sums up the thesis of the book:
Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilization, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilization from a natural system…
Brand is talking about climate change and in particular the possibility of rapid, difficult to reverse, tipping points in climate. Brand has a challenging message for environmentalists: If we take the threat of climate change seriously we must recognize that Cities are Green, Nukes are Green and Genetic Engineering is Green.
Brand's long history with the environmental movement should give his message credibility with that group. Brand's rationalism, reasonableness, and pro-technology, pro-civilization outlook gave his environmental message credibility with me.
Laissez-Faire Genetic Engineering
Every few minutes, every one of the microbes in your body (and the ocean, and the soil, and the air) is defying precaution and the sacred, playing God, performing an act illegal in Europe — swapping genes around in the endless search for competition or collaborative advantage.
Another good sentence from Steward Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
Are there hidden codes in Plato?
Take this one with a grain of salt, but here is the latest:
Kennedy's breakthrough, published in the journal Apeiron this week, is based on stichometry: the measure of ancient texts by standard line lengths. Kennedy used a computer to restore the most accurate contemporary versions of Plato's manuscripts to their original form, which would consist of lines of 35 characters, with no spaces or punctuation. What he found was that within a margin of error of just one or two percent, many of Plato's dialogues had line lengths based on round multiples of twelve hundred.
The Apology has 1,200 lines; the Protagoras, Cratylus, Philebus and Symposium each have 2,400 lines; the Gorgias 3,600; the Republic 12,200; and the Laws 14,400.
Kennedy argues that this is no accident. "We know that scribes were paid by the number of lines, library catalogues had the total number of lines, so everyone was counting lines," he said. He believes that Plato was organising his texts according to a 12-note musical scale, attributed to Pythagoras, which he certainly knew about.
Do note this:
Kennedy believes his findings restore what was the standard, mainstream view which held for 2,000 years "from the first generation of Plato's followers, up through the renaissance". This held that "he wrote symbolically and that if you worked hard and became wise you could understand the symbols and penetrate his text to his underlying philosophy." Only in the last few hundred years has an emphasis on the literal meanings of texts led to a neglect of their figurative meanings.
It also explains why it is that Aristotle, Plato's pupil, emphatically claimed that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras, to the bafflement of most contemporary scholars.
I used to consider allegiance to this idea (Montaigne, also, for symbolic codes) as one of my absurd beliefs, but maybe now it is looking better. I will have to look elsewhere.
Profile of David Mitchell
Here is one good bit of many:
“I can’t bear living in this huge beautiful world,” Mitchell said, gesturing to the rolling green hills and the glittering calm sea, “and not try to imitate it as best I can. That’s the desire and the drive. But it’s maybe closer to hunger or thirst. The only way I can quench it is to try to duplicate it on as huge a scale as I can possibly do. I want to capture that,” he said, turning in a circle on the sand and gesturing beyond the beach and the hills, “all the way around the world and all the way to your home and all the way around and back. I want to do all of that here and transmit it through ink.”
What I’ve been reading
I've been trying not to read too much during my stay in Berlin, as an experiment in information processing and to see how it changes my thoughts. Still, I've been reading a bit and here are a few of the books:
1. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, by Eric D. Weitz. A bit stolid, but a good general overview of an era I very much would like to be able to visit. That said, deflation and fascist political movements make for an obviously nasty combination.
2. My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic, an interview with Charles Saatchi. Entertaining throughout, plus you can read it in a few minutes time. This is the sort of book Felix Salmon would blog. Saatchi claims that Pollock, Warhol, Judd, and Hirst are the four artists from recent times who will pass into history as the immortals. The others will be swept away.
3. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention, by William Rosen. This is a popular treatment of some of the themes in Jack Goldstone's excellent work on engineering culture in England. I don't think this book has anything fundamentally new, but about half of it I found to be worthwhile reading. The other half is OK summaries of various economic theories.
4. William Voegeli, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State. Voegeli has a good basic point, namely that a) the welfare state is here to stay, and b) we need to set limits to it. At some point the book runs into diminishing returns. Arnold Kling wrote a good review of the book, plus he had lunch with the author.
5. Herta Müller, assorted. When she won the Nobel Prize last year, I was skeptical. In Berlin I've been reading her work, much of which is set in Berlin, and I like it. It helps if you have a connection to those who have left formerly communist countries. In English, I suggest The Land of Green Plums as a starting point.
6. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses. This one is a re-read, as I will teach it next spring in Law and Literature and I am studying it well in advance. This is Rushdie's most significant achievement and one of the truly excellent novels of the last thirty years. It's not an easy read, but worth the commitment if you haven't already done so. Sadly, this book seems to have fallen into a commercial black hole; you can't even get it on Kindle.
Paul Einzig, from 1932
It is often argued that Governments are in a position to inflate by carrying out ambitious schemes of public works. Undoubtedly during the earlier stages of the crisis such measures might have produced the desired effect. At present, however, they could hardly be adopted on any large scale. Practically every Government has a huge budgetary deficit, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to raise loans for meeting the extraordinary expenditure of such public works. Any attempt to borrow for such purposes would inevitably lead to a further accentuation of distrust, which must be avoided at all costs.
No matter what your point of view on fiscal policy, you can find that quotation to be scary. That is from this book, p.103, and I thank Michael Reddell for the pointer.
*The Age of the Infovore*, paperback edition
This is the paperback of Create Your Own Economy, with (to me) a better title and better cover. I am pleased to have persuaded the publisher in this regard. It is out this coming Tuesday, one week from today. You can pre-order it on Amazon here (Kindle too), Barnes&Noble here, and Borders.com here.
Of my books, it is my clear favorite and not just because it is the latest. It is the one whose ideas I use and think about most often.