Category: Books

Stan Kenton and Leslie Kenton

by  Tyler Cowen in

I never knew my paternal grandfather, but I was told he loved the music of Bartok, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and above all, Stan Kenton.  My grandfather was a professional jazz drummer in the era of big band, supposedly with more talent than workplace discipline.  Maybe because it's a way of keeping a connection with Grandpa Tom, but I've been listening to the music of Stan Kenton for about thirty-five years.  In any case the best Kenton cuts (download here) still strike me as underrated.  Despite the clunky and sometimes elephantine side of Kenton's style, his work draws upon, and anticipates, developments in compositional jazz, European modernism, Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound," and early Latin rhythms, all topped off with an energetic American brashness.  I eagerly lapped up last year's new Kenton biography.  But now — what am I to do? I've just read Leslie Kenton's Love Affair: A Memoir of a Forbidden Father-Daughter Union, which among other things is a very good treatment of how little consent lies behind father-daughter incest (review here, and it was from ages 11 to 13).

None of Kenton's previous biographers seems to have suspected this horror and overall he had the reputation of a straight-laced man.  I had long thought of him as a somewhat dour disciplinarian, firmly wrapped up in middle American values. 

The lesson is how little we know of an individual life.  And what do we still not know?  When we judge others, or decide not to, that is worth keeping in mind. 

*Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Ralph Keyes and you can buy it here.  Here are three excerpts:

Yesterday's polite euphemism is tomorrow's prissy evasion.  "Cherry" was once considered more respectable than "hymen."  Now, just the opposite is true.  The former is thought to be vulgar, the latter decent.

And:

When the unfortunately named rapeseed oil had trouble competing with products that had nicer names, a Canadian strain low in saturated fat was dubbed Canola (i.e., "Canadian oil") in 1978 and has done rather well since.

And:

It used to be said that "Horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow."

Most of all, this book was…interesting.

Median-itis and The Great Stagnation

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is my NYT column from today, on themes relevant to The Great Stagnation.  I won't rehash this entire discussion, but I would like to focus on this one column excerpt:

From 1947 to 1973 – a period of just 26 years – inflation-adjusted median income in the United States more than doubled. But in the 31 years from 1973 to 2004, it rose only 22 percent. And, over the last decade, it actually declined.

I am noticing that some reviews or commentaries (and here) are citing per capita income growth as a response to my argument.  It is true that per capita income grows at a slower rate post-1973, but my argument is about the slowing down of median income growth and that is a much stronger shift.  The productivity data also tell a glum story.   

CPI bias can change those numbers in absolute terms (see comments from Russ Roberts), but it also changes the pre-1973 median income growth numbers and arguably more so.  The gap remains and TGS refers to the living standard for the average person or household in the United States, not the total amount of innovation, which remains quite high.  They're just not innovations with the same trickle-down or broad-based effects as in an earlier era.

Kindle eBooks are themselves a good example.  It's a real improvement for a lot of us — especially travelers – but even the median reader, much less the median American, doesn't have a Kindle or buy eBooks.  As I argued in The Age of the Infovore, the big gains of late have gone to the extreme information-processors.  

I've seen in the MR comments (and elsewhere) a lot of anecdotal comparison of recent gains vs. earlier gains in technology.  Don't we now have this, don't we now have that, and so on.  Of course.  Median incomes have risen somewhat.  But, when it comes to the average household, the published numbers for median income are adding up and trying to measure those gains and it turns out their recent rate of growth really has declined.  Most serious researchers who work in this area use and accept these numbers as the best available (though they do not in general advocate my causal interpretation; see for instance Mark Thoma or Jacob Hacker).  

If the numbers for median income growth are low we ought to take that seriously, as does Scott Sumner.  We are not cheerleaders per se (BC: "I'm baffled why Tyler would focus on slight declines in American growth when the world just had the best decade ever."  Is it then wrong to focus on any other problems at all?  I also was one of the first people to make the "best decade ever" argument, which I still accept.)  Medians also matter for the political climate, even though the median earner is not exactly the median voter.  Adam Smith's welfare economics was basically that of the median, a point which David Levy has made repeatedly.

I'm also being called a "pessimist" a lot.  Yet in my view our current technological plateau won't last forever.  That's probably more optimistic than the Hacker-Pierson approach, which requires a Progressive revolution in economic policy (unlikely), although it is not more optimistic than denying the relevance of the numbers.

I'll soon blog some remarks on changing household size as another attempt to avoid confronting the facts about slow median income growth.

My favorite things Egypt

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Novel: I like all of the Mahfouz I have read, but the Cairo Trilogy is the obvious pick.  Here is a very useful list of someone's favorite Egyptian authors and novels.

2. Musical CD: The Music of Islam, vol.1: Al-Qahirah, Classical Music of Cairo, Egypt.  The opening sweep of this is a stunner, and it shows both the Islamic and European influences on Egyptian music.  Musicians of the Nile are a good group, there is Hamza El Din, and there is plenty of rai.  What else?  I can't say I actually enjoy listening to Um Kalthoum, but her voice and phrasing are impressive.

3. Non-fiction book, about: Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious.  Few cities have a book this good.  There is also Dream Palace of the Arabs and Tom Segev's 1967.  Which again is the really good book on the 1973 War?

4. Movie, set in: Cairo Time.  This recent Canadian film avoids cliche, brings modern Cairo to life, and is an alternative to many schlocky (but sometimes good) alternatives, such as The Mummy, Death on the Nile, Exodus, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on.  There is Agora.  Egyptian cinema surely has masterpieces but I do not know them.  If you're wondering, for books, I could not finish Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings.

5. Favorite food: I was impressed by the seafood restaurants on the promenade in Alexandria.  Food in Cairo did not thrill me, though I never had a bad meal there.

6. Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus?  I don't find him especially readable.

7. City: I enjoyed Alexandria, but I can't say I liked Cairo beyond the museum (much better than any Egyptian collection outside of Egypt) and the major mosques.  The Sphinx bored me.  The air pollution prevented me from walking for more than an hour and there was cement, cement. and more cement.  The ride between Cairo and Alexandria was one of the ugliest, most uninspiring journeys of my life.  The Egyptians were nice to me but I never had the sense that anything beautiful was being done with the country.  Let's hope that changes.

8. Opera, about: Philip Glass, Akhnaten.  But wait, there's also Aida, with Callas.  And there's Handel's Israel in Egypt.  Handel set a lot of his operas in Egypt, including Berenice and Giulio Cesare.

Diane Rehm is Egyptian-American but I don't know her show.  The new biography of Cleopatra is smooth but the narratives made me suspicious.  Was Euclid Egyptian?

*The Order of Public Reason*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title, the author is Gerald Gaus of U. Arizona, and the subtitle is A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World.  This is a big and ambitious work, broadly in the liberaltarian tradition, mixing Rawls and Hayek, pondering the implications of disagreement, and experimenting with the idea that morality itself has a coercive element.  It is Gaus's attempt to lay out the proper foundations for a liberal society and he summarizes the hard-to-summarize book a bit here.

Also new on the market is Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs.  I like the title and I like most of his previous books, but I am not finding this one rewarding to read.  Here is one previous debate on related material.

Sentences to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the comments:

You do not need a Kindle device to read Kindle eBooks. You can download from Amazon and read on your PC, iPhone, Blackberry or iPad.

Another MR reader wrote:

free kindle for PC here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000426311&tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=6737383737&ref=pd_sl_92i9zans8g_b

You also can get an eReader here: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781101502242,00.html

And I am told that some foreign editions (including Canada!) will be ready soon.  I will keep you posted.

Matt Yglesias reviews *The Great Stagnation*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Tyler Cowen’s new ebook How The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better is a bravura performance by one of the most interesting thinkers out there. I also think it’s a great innovation in current affairs publishing–much shorter and cheaper than a conventional book in a way that actually leaves you wanting to read more once you finish it. My guess is that this is the future of books.

Here is much more, and again the book is here.  Here is coverage from Arnold Kling, though I think he (like some MR commentators) is spending too much time on impressions and not considering (at all) the numbers presented in chapter one.

We are now on Facebook

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is correct, the Cowen-Tabarrok text, Modern Principles.  It is a steady stream of resources for using the text, and learning and teaching economics more generally, updated on a very regular basis, organized using the wonders of Facebook.

Don't forget to click the "Like" button. 

http://www.facebook.com/ModernPrinciples

Thank you Mark Zuckerberg!  I rooted for you in the movie too.

Reihan Salam reviews *The Great Stagnation*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Excerpt:

I'm wary of summarizing the book — I really want you to read it for yourself — but the basic idea is very straightforward: Americans have grown accustomed to painless, automatic increases in prosperity. This is true of Americans on the right, who believe that painless tax cuts will deliver prosperity, and Americans on the left, who believe that above-market wages and more public investment funded by painless tax increases on the rich will deliver prosperity. Tyler convincingly argues that we've run out of this "low-hanging fruit."

In 1920, the marginal college student was fully capable of profiting from a rigorous college education. In 2011, the marginal college student is perhaps less capable, due to a confluence of factors. Some believe that credit constraints are the driver of an increase in dropout rates. Others, myself included, believe that traditional college instruction isn't necessarily right for, say, 80 percent of the population, and that the rigidity that defines an education sector that is tightly regulated and fueled by third-party public dollars doesn't lend itself to the kind of specialization that would yield big productivity increases. This is a subject of particular interest to me.

…Many thanks to Tyler for writing a really terrific provocation.

There is much more, including some very good points on commuting.

In praise of picture books

by  Tyler Cowen in

No, I don't mean the pictures, I mean the text.  Picture books are one of the best ways to learn basic information about a topic.  First, by viewing the photos you are more likely to remember some aspects of the material.  It works for kids and maybe it works for you too.  Second, the text is stripped down to essentials.  Third, the authors of picture books are often relatively "agenda-less," since most people don't read the text, the selling point is the pictures, and the book is so expensive that the publisher doesn't want to rule out the broadest possible audience.

I would not use picture books to resolve disputes over details or to find the best conceptual framework.  The text in picture books has some of the same strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia pages.  It's odd to see a similar blandness in both the lowest cost and highest cost corners of the publishing world.

Lately I have been "reading" Ottoman Architecture, by Dogan Kuban, Toyokuni (oddly I can't find it on Amazon or remember the author's name), Textiles: Collection of the Museum of International Folk Art, by Bobbie Sumberg, and Architectura, by Miles Lewis.  You can walk into any public library and take home more splendid picture books than you will have time for.  How many you can carry is another constraint. 

Have track and field performances peaked?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I don't know much about track and field, but I found this article interesting, excerpt:

Today 64 percent of track and field world records have stood since 1993. One world record, the women’s 1,500 meters, hasn’t been broken since 1980. When Berthelot published his study last year in the online journal PLoS One, he made the simple but bold argument that athletic performance had peaked. On the whole, Berthelot said, the pinnacle of athletic achievement was achieved around 1988. We’ve been watching a virtual stasis ever since.

It seems unlikely to me that we have reached a true peak, rather a temporary plateau with slower-than-average growth, until the next breakthrough in training, technique, genetic manipulation, or whatever.  Does that sound familiar?

China fact (book) of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

When it comes to the overall death toll, for instance, researchers so far have had to extrapolate from official population statistics…Their estimates range from 15 to 32 million excess deaths.  But the public security reports compiled at the time, as well as the voluminous secret reports collated by party committees in the last months of the Great Leap Forward, show how inadequate these calculations are, pointing instead at a catastrophe of a much greater magnitude: this book shows that at least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962.

That is from Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, which is one of the scariest books I have read.  Here is another passage, I am not sure how well it is sourced:

Mao was delighted.  As reports came in from all over the country about new records in cotton, rice, wheat or peanut production, he started wondering what to do with all the surplus food.  On August 4 1958 in Xushui, flanked by Zhang Guozhong, surrounded by journalists, plodding through the fields in straw hat and cotton shoes, he beamed: "How are you going to eat so much grain?  What are you going to do with the surplus?"

"We can exchange it for machinery," Zhang responded after a pause for thought.

[Showing a poor understanding of Say's Law] "But you are not the only one to have a surplus, others too have too much grain!  Nobody will want your grain!"  Mao shot back with a benevolent smile.

"We can make spirits of out of taro," suggested another cadre.

"But every county will make spirits!  How many tonnes of spirits do we need? Mao mused.  "With so much grain, in future you should plant less, work half time and spend the rest of your time on culture and leisurely pursuits, open schools and a university, don't you think?…You should eat more.  Even five meals a day is fine!"

Here are some reviews of the book.