Category: Books
*The Price of Civilization*
That is the new Jeffrey Sachs book, with the subtitle Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity. Here is one excerpt:
Though I can’t prove that America’s mass-media culture, ubiquitous advertising, and long hours of daily TV watching are the fundamental causes of its tendency to let markets run rampant over social values, I can show that America represents the unhappy extreme of commercialism among the leading economies. To do this, I have created a Commercialization Index (CI) that aims to measure the degree to which each national economy is oriented toward private consumption and impatience rather than collective (public) consumption and regard for the future. My assumption is that the United States and other heavy-TV-watching societies will score high on the CI and that a high CI score will be associated with several of the adverse conditions plaguing American society.
Here is Sachs writing further on TV; here is Steve Johnson on TV.
Model this (a continuing series)
From a profile of Donald Keene:
“He [Mishima] died, as you know, at the age of 45, leaving at least 45 stacked volumes of novels, plays, criticism, poetry.” Mishima slit his belly after leading a failed, and farcical, coup to restore the emperor’s power but Keene thinks he committed suicide because he was passed over for the Nobel Prize. During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Mishima had written Keene a letter with the line, “I envy the athletes who know if they are first, second or third.” Keene says: “That was all he said but I knew exactly what he meant.” The irony was that Kawabata, who did win the Nobel Prize, also committed suicide because of the pressure of living up to his new reputation.
*Engineering the Financial Crisis*
This is an excellent conceptual book on the financial crisis, full of deep research and intellectual honesty. The authors, Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus, are not in the usual loops of the economist elite, so I hope it is not ignored. They place central importance on the Basel capital regulations and mark-to-market accounting, complemented by a credit channel, in their narrative. Arnold Kling has much more on the book. You can buy the book here; anyone interested in the financial crisis should read it. The authors have some of the best arguments against the “moral hazard” interpretations of the crisis, preferring instead knowledge and calculation arguments. My main worry is about how much the Basel regulations mattered, given that many banks held more mortgage-backed securities than Basel regulations required.
Here is a blog post on their most controversial claim in the book.
*Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry, 1840-1914*
That is the new book by James Simpson, home page here, with free chapter one. Excerpt:
In Britain, taxes on all types of alcohol contributed 36 percent of national revenue in 1898-99, but they were also 19 percent in France (1898), 18 percent in Germany (1897-98), and 28 percent in the United States (1897-98).
Anyone interested in the economic history of wine and drink should read this book; you may already know John Nye’s War, Wine, and Taxes.
Self-recommending eBook
Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfeee.
There is a partial summary of the book here, I ordered my copy last night. Here are the authors on the book.
New novels of interest (what I’ve been reading)
I have benefited from travel in Italy and a keen eye for UK editions in airport bookshops and the like:
1. A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods. Beautifully written, mixing moods from fantasy and Icelandic sagas, but it did nothing for me. Some of you will like it.
2. Audur Ava Olafsdottir, The Greenhouse. From Iceland, one of my favorite novels this year, it’s funny and sheer fun to read and short and easy yet deep and moving all at the same time.
3. Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending. This one just won the Booker Prize. At first I thought it was contrived, then I realized it was deliberately contrived, and then I thought it was contrived in its deliberate construction of the contrivance, and so on. I’ll try it again, in the spirit of being fooled by prizes, in the meantime you may be better off reading “spoilers” about the book before you start it, so you can skip right to your final opinion.
4. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot. I’ve read only thirty pages but so far I’m impressed, I doubt the so-so reviews of the book, and note I have never loved his work in the first place. This one has potential.
5. Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table, above average.
The new Ha Jin sits in my pile, he is underrated. Next week Murakami and Nadas join that pile, lots to do!
*Grad School Rulz*
Let’s turn the mike over to Bryan Caplan:
Fabio Rojas’ pearls of wisdom for grad students are now available as a concise, information-packed $2 e-book. Definitely worth the money if you have any noticeable interest in grad school.
I have yet to read this book, but Alex and I both love Fabio, who has been a frequent MR guest-blogger in the past. He also has excellent taste in jazz.
Ilya Somin on Israeli signaling (markets in everything)
Ilya writes:
Various commenters on this and my previous post on the same subject claim that the Israeli government had to do this in order to send its citizens a “message” about how much it valued their lives and was willing to pay a high price to save them. But if these deals lead to the deaths of far more innocent Israelis than they save, the real message sent will be exactly the opposite: that the government is willing to make a large net sacrifice of innocent life in order to gain short term public relations benefits or a short-term boost in national morale. It’s possible, of course, that Israeli public opinion is myopic enough that they will think that the government is saving life despite the fact that it is actually sacrificing a much larger enough of innocent lives. If so, there could be a more permanent and substantial boost in national morale. Even then, it will probably fade as public attention shifts to other issues. In any event, it’s not worth the sacrifice of numerous innocents and the creation of perverse incentives for terrorist groups.
Link here. I don’t know whether this exchange is a good idea, but Ilya is possibly underrating the power of signaling models. It is precisely the fact that that Israeli government will trade for this single life, even apart from whether it is instrumentally rational, that sends the relevant signal. The less “rational” the act, the more potent the signal of concern, and in this case the possible irrationality is stochastic, not certain. Perhaps one must take a stand for the single, identifiable life in question; Hollywood rescue movies accept this meme and they face market tests all the time. Doesn’t the starship captain go back down to save the one life, even though it may place the entire ship in jeopardy? “That’s what makes us human, Bones,” while Spock raises the eyebrow, etc.
One can also read the Israeli government as signaling (correctly or not) that it has the power to prevent or at least limit future kidnappings. It is an expression of strength, or at least a belief in strength, and citizens seem to like that signal from their leaders. It also may allow governments to perform other (efficient) acts which involve offsetting signals of weakness.
That said, Ilya’s comments indirectly raise an issue in signaling theory: where does salience come from? Why is “one person” the relevant unit of concern for the Israeli citizenry here? There are plenty of simple answers, but most of them beg the question and of course one person is often considered quite disposable in other contexts, especially military. It also would not suffice to get just a month of freedom for him. Yet neither is the deal insisting that more than this one soldier be delivered.
If you haven’t already, I recommend that you all read David Grossman’s splendid To The End of the Land.
I’ve noticed this too
Perhaps you haven’t read Mrs. Molesworth’s “Uncanny Tales” or C. Schweigger’s “Schweigger on Squint.” Perhaps you missed “How to Be Happy Though Married” or the Farmers’ Bulletin devoted to “House Rats and Mice.” No worries. They are available in 24 digital formats, including versions to suit just about any e-book reader you own. These titles, and millions more, are all out of copyright and part of the accelerating effort to digitize the public domain contents of the world’s libraries.
Every e-book reader seems to come preloaded with a few canonical titles — “Pride and Prejudice” or “Alice in Wonderland,” for instance. But there has never been a better time to be a slightly faded writer just beyond the cusp of copyright, like Edgar Wallace or Hilaire Belloc. Their voluminous works — not easily found in your local library — are now copiously available to the digitally curious.
…How “My Unknown Chum” by Charles Bullard Fairbanks was selected for digitizing is unclear.
Here is a bit more.
*The Map and the Territory*
That is the new Michel Houellebecq book, available from UK Amazon, out January in the US. It is worth the shipping costs. Yet, while waiting for it to arrive, I saw a copy on sale in Rome, above a PPP price. In my desire to read it sooner rather than later I bought it, that was worth it too. It’s worth both prices put together, and then some, at pretty much any dollar/euro exchange rate or any dollar/pound sterling exchange rate, you can imagine.
I was relieved to see that Houllebecq understands the connection between his ideas and those of Charles Fourier (an underrated thinker).
Libraries destroy books carrying costs exceed liquidity premia no free disposal edition
The first and most obvious objection is, why not give the books to the poor? They need stuff to read. Or to prisoners? Or to sick kids? Or to struggling independent booksellers? It doesn’t cost a thing to give something away, right?
The problem is the situation for a library is more complicated than when you just take a bunch of old clothes and unwanted porn down to the Salvation Army. A library book is stamped and bugged and cataloged so that the library knows that it belongs to them. When a book is given away or sold, the library has to go through and remove all that crap, so whoever winds up with it can prove they didn’t just steal it off the shelf. I’m not kidding about that, either — some people who wind up with such books helpfully return them to the library.
And we’re talking about a lot of books here — these libraries are having to cut down their stock in a hurry. Imagine you’re the manager of a library, and some accountant tells you that you need to get rid of 100,000 books, and do it in a week. You really have two options. One, you can get a bunch of academics to scour your collection and painstakingly rate each book according to its value and importance. Then you can hire a bunch of people to take down the 100,000 least important books and painstakingly stamp and debug them, one by one. Your second option is to get the computer to spit out a list of the 100,000 least borrowed books, and hire a few people to walk down the aisles with their arms out, throwing those books in a shredding machine.
That second option is much quicker and much cheaper. Sometimes you can find a paper recycling centre that will pay you for the pulp, so destroying the books leads to a net profit. Nobody likes it, but for a librarian it’s like your best friend just got bitten by a zombie and you’re the only one with a gun.
Also, remember that the stuff worth saving is buried among a lot of other books that are basically garbage. Though everyone realizes that extremely valuable books are going to inevitably get caught in the same net, there’s not much that can be done about it. Nobody is going to order a first-edition Moby-Dick from a library warehouse if the 2011 reprint is sitting right there on the shelf. A computer list that ranks books by popularity can’t tell the difference.
Another downside to this option is that you have to ensure total destruction. You can’t just throw the books in a Dumpster for some asshole to come along and grab later. If you go the Dumpster option, you have to tear out chapters so that people won’t want them, or just fill the Dumpster with detergent. You don’t want people to get in the habit of treating your Dumpster like the clearance rack — it’s dangerous and messy for everyone involved.
The Negative Externality of Voting
Here is Jason Brennan:
How other people vote is my business. After all, they make it my business. Electoral decisions are imposed upon all through force, that is, through violence and threats of violence. When it comes to politics, we are not free to walk away from bad decisions. Voters impose externalities upon others.
We would never say to everyone, “Who cares if you know anything about surgery or medicine? The important thing is that you make your cut.” Yet for some reason, we do say, “It doesn’t matter if you know much about politics. The important thing is to vote.” In both cases, incompetent decision-making can hurt innocent people.
Commonsense morality tells us to treat the two cases differently. Commonsense morality is wrong.
…In The Ethics of Voting, I argue that…voters should vote on the basis of sound evidence. They must put in heavy work to make sure their reasons for voting as they do are morally and epistemically justified. In general, they must vote for the common good rather than for narrow self-interest. Citizens who are unwilling or unable to put in the hard work of becoming good voters should not vote at all. They should stay home on election day rather than pollute the polls with their bad votes.
*Thinking, Fast and Slow*, by Daniel Kahneman
It is a very good book, clearly written, engaging yet sober, substantive in every chapter, and it does not oversell its material. If you are familiar with the underlying papers you will not see much new here, but as a readable introduction to the work of Kahneman (and Tversky) I give it an A or A+.
It is evident throughout that the author is a psychologist and not an economist; your mileage may vary, but you will not find a response to John List in here. Here is a bit about those unreliable judges, this time in Germany rather than Israel:
The power of random anchors has been demonstrated in some unsettling ways. German judges with an average of more than fifteen years of experience on the bench first read a description of a woman who had been caught shoplifting, then rolled a pair of dice that were loaded so every roll resulted in either a 3 or a 9. As soon as the dice came to a stop, the judges were asked whether they would sentence the woman to a term in prison greater or lesser, in months, than the number showing on the dice. Finally, the judges were instructed to specify the exact prison sentence they would give to the shoplifter. On average, those who had rolled a 9 said they would sentence her to 8 months; those who rolled a 3 said they would sentence here to 5 months; the anchoring effect was 50%.
You can pre-order the book here; it is due out October 25th.
Steven Pinker on violence
It is an important and thoughtful book, and I can recommend it to all readers of intelligent non-fiction, reviews are here But I’m not convinced by the main thesis.
Might we run an econometrics test on regime changes? The 17th century was much more violent than the preceding times, as was the early 19th century, albeit to a lesser extent. Perhaps the distribution is well-described by “long periods of increasing peace, punctuated by large upward leaps of violence”, as was suggested by Lewis Richardson in his 1960 book on the statistics of violent conflict? Imagine a warfare correlate to the Minsky Moment. In the meantime, there will be evidence of various “great moderations,” though each ends with a bang.
Pinker does discuss these ideas in detail in chapter five, but at the end of that section I am not sure why I should embrace his account rather than that of Richardson. I am reminded of the literature on the peso problem in finance.
Another hypothesis is to see modern violence as lower, especially in the private sphere, because the state is much more powerful. Could this book have been titled The Nationalization of Violence? But nationalization does not mean that violence goes away, especially at the most macro levels. In a variant on my point above, one way of describing the observed trend is “less frequent violent outbursts, but more deadlier outbursts when they come.” Both greater wealth (weapons are more destructive, and thus used less often, and there is a desire to preserve wealth) and the nationalization of violence point toward that pattern. That would help explain why the two World Wars, Stalin, Chairman Mao, and the Holocaust, all came not so long ago, despite a (supposed) trend toward greater peacefulness. Those are hard data points for Pinker to get around, no matter how he tries.
We now have a long period between major violent outbursts, but perhaps the next one will be a doozy.
How would this book sound if it were written in 1944? Maybe there is a regime break at 1945 or so, with nuclear weapons deserving the credit for a relative extreme of postwar peace. Pinker’s discussion of the nuclear question starts at p.268, but he underrates the power of nuclear weapons to reach the enemy leaders themselves and thus he does not convince me to dismiss the nuclear issue as central to the observed improvement, throw in Pax Americana if you like.
In one of the most original sections of the book (e.g., p.656), Pinker postulates the greater reach of reason, and the Flynn effect, working together, as moving people toward more peaceful attitudes. He postulates a kind of moral Flynn effect, whereby our increasing ability to abstract ourselves from particulars, and think scientifically, helps us increasingly identify with the point of view of others, leading to a boost in applied empathy. On p.661 there is an excellent mention of the wisdom of Garett Jones. Pinker’s thesis implies the novel conclusion that those skilled on the Ravens test have an especially easy time thinking about ethics in the properly cosmopolitan terms; I toy with such an idea in my own Create Your Own Economy.
What is the alternative hypothesis to this moral Flynn Effect? Given that the private returns to supporting violence are rare — most of the time — and violence has been nationalized, people will have incentives to invest in greater empathy and to build their self-images around such empathy. This empathy will be real rather than feigned, but it also will be fragile rather than based in a real shift in cognitive and emotive faculties; see 1990s Mostar and Sarajevo or for that matter Nagasaki or British or Belgian colonialism.
When doing the statistics, one key issue is how to measure violence. Pinker often favors “per capita” measures, but I am not so sure. I might prefer a weighted average of per capita and “absolute quantity of violence” measures. Killing six million Jews in the Holocaust is not, in my view, “half as violent” if global population is twice as high. Once you toss in the absolute measures with the per capita measures, the long-term trends are not nearly as favorable as Pinker suggests.
Here is John Gray’s (excessively hostile) review of Pinker. In my view this is very much a book worth reading and thinking about. And I very much hope Pinker is right. He has done everything possible to set my doubts to rest, but he has not (yet?) succeeded. I find it easiest to think that the changes of the last sixty years are real when I ponder nuclear weapons.
A model of political corruption
Lessig takes on the model of lobbying as “legislative subsidy” developed by political scientist Richard Hall and economist Alan Deardorff as an alternative to the naive lobbying-as-bribe model. Legislators come to Washington passionate about several issues. Quickly, though, they come to depend on the economy of influence for help in advancing an agenda. They need the policy expertise, connections, public-relations machine, and all the rest that lobbyists can offer. Since this legislative subsidy is not uniformly available, the people’s representatives find themselves devoting more of their time to those aspects of their agenda that moneyed interests also support. No one is bribed, but the political process is corrupted.
That is from Matt Yglesias.