Category: Books
*Violent Saviors*
That is the new William Easterly book, and the subtitle is The West’s Conquest of the Rest. I liked this book very much, but found the title and also book jacket and descriptions misleading. I think of this work as a full-throated examination and study of the classical liberal anti-imperialist tradition. We have been needing such a thing for a long time. It is not that I expected Easterly to be poorly informed, but it amazes me how well he knows this material from a historical point of view. A lengthy (and good) discussion of E.D. Morel!
So recommended, and here’s hoping these traditions find some new legs and less crazy adherents.
Two books I hope you do not mood affiliate against
The firtst is Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.
The author chronicles the history of the “New Right” from a left-wing perspective, and often in ways that non-Trumpers also will find objectionable. Still, the book has plenty of facts and substance, and it is the best history of this group I know of. There is plenty of biography and group identification in here, so it serves as a guidebook.
The second is Mahmood Mamdani, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State. I ordered this one before I knew who wrote it, namely Papa Mamdani. Again, there is plenty you can object to here, but it is an actual (partial) history of Uganda, interwoven with autobiography. The author actually tries to explain to you what was going on, rather than writing to “fill a gap in the literature,” or whatever. Too bad his actual views are so objectionable — Papa Mamdani, Uganda never had neoliberalism! Yet I am glad I bought it and will continue reading it, because it fills in many pieces of the story, most of all for the Ugandan campaigns against Israelis, the British, and Indians.
And there you go.
What I’ve been reading
1. Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. There are a variety of books on these figures and this topic, but after buying and perusing a whole bunch of them, this is the one I found useful.
2. Meryle Secrest, Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject. A highly entertaining quasi-autobiography, focusing on her work on the nine different biographies she wrote of some very different people. As far as I can tell, Secrest is 95 years old and living in the Washington, D.C. area — hope I run into her at Mama Chang some day. Though I suspect she lives in Bethesda.
3. Paul McCartney, Wings: A Story of a Band on the Run. Not really written by McCartney, but excerpts from interviews with parties involved with Wings, Paul included. Presented as if it were an oral history, which in part it is. Very well done, not for everyone obviously but it is for me. Macca and music aside, it is a good study of how to reinvent oneself, and how weird you need to be to actually succeed with that. Here is a good Ian Leslie review.
4. Eça de Queiros, Adam and Eve in Paradise. Originally from the 19th century, but translated into English only this year. A 60 pp. novella about exactly what the title indicates, noting that matters are not as simple as the first telling of that story might have suggested.
5. Daniel Baldwin Hess, editor, The Shoup Doctrine: Essays Celebrating Donald Shoup and Parking Reforms, is much needed and is exactly as it seeks to present itself.
The MR Podcast: Our Favorite Models, Session 3: Compensating Differentials and Selective Incentives
On The Marginal Revolution Podcast this week, Tyler and I discuss compensating differentials and Olsonian selective incentives. Here’s one bit:
If you think about the gender wage gap, it’s sometimes said that women earn—it varies—80 cents for every dollar that a man earns. That doesn’t control for anything. Once you control for education and skill and so forth, this gets smaller. Then you also have to control for these quite difficult, elusive sometimes, job amenities. Claudia Goldin, for example, has pointed out that men are much more willing to take jobs requiring inflexible hours.
COWEN: And longer hours, too.
TABARROK: Longer hours and inflexible hours, where your hours are less under your control. That’s what I mean by inflexible. For example, in one study of train and bus drivers, the train and bus drivers are paid equally by gender. There’s no differences whatsoever in what they’re paid on an hourly basis. It turns out that the male drivers, their wages, their returns are much higher because they take a lot more overtime. They take 83% more overtime than their female colleagues. They’re much more likely to accept an overtime shift, which pays time and a half. The male workers also take fewer unpaid hours off. The male salaries on a yearly basis end up being higher, even though males and females are paid equally.
Now, you can roll this back and say that’s because of the unfair demands on women of childcare or something like that, but it’s not a market discrimination. It’s not market discrimination. It’s a compensating differential. Males earn more because they’re more willing to take the inflexible overtime hours and so forth.
One of the most interesting ones is that Uber drivers, male drivers earn a little bit more. Now, obviously, there’s no gender difference whatsoever in how the drivers are paid. It just turns out that male drivers just drive a little bit faster.
COWEN: I’ve noticed this, by the way, when I take Ubers.
TABARROK: On an annual basis, they make about 7% more. Now, again, it’s not entirely obvious that this is even better for the male drivers. Maybe they’re taking a little bit more risk. Maybe they’re a little bit more likely to get into an accident as well.
….COWEN: …Someone gets the short end of the stick. Not only women, but maybe women on average would be more likely to suffer.
TABARROK: I’m not sure it’s the short end of the stick, though I agree with increasing returns, that the people who work longer hours will also earn higher salaries and maybe have plush offices and so forth. Let me put it this way. One of the things which I think the feminism story sometimes gets a little bit wrong is to actually underestimate the value that women get, and that men can get as well, of childcare, of looking after kids, of spending more time at home, or spending more time doing childcare. That can be extremely valuable. At the end of life, who writes on their tombstone, “I wish I could have worked more”?
COWEN: You’re looking at one.
TABARROK: Present company excepted.
Here’s the episode. Subscribe now to take a small step toward a much better world: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube.
Andrej and Dwarkesh as philosophy
If you follow AI at all, you probably do not need another recommendation of the Andrej Karpathy and Dwarkesh Patel podcast, linked to here:
I hardly ever listen to podcasts, but at almost two and a half hours I found this one worthwhile and that was at 1x (I don’t listen to podcasts at higher speed, not wanting to disrupt the drama of the personalities). What struck me is how philosophical so many aspects of the discussion were. Will this end up being the best “piece of philosophy” done this year? Probably. Neither participant of course is a trained philosopher, but neither were Plato or Kierkagaard. They are both very focused on real issues however, and new issues at that. And dialogue is hardly a disqualifying medium when it comes to philosphy.
Some guy on Twitter felt I was slighting this book in my tweet on the matter. I’ll let history judge this one, as we’ll see which issues people are still talking about fifty years from now (note I said nothing against that book in my tweet, nor against contemporary philosophy, I just said this podcast was philosophical and very good). I’ve made the point before (pre-LLM) that current academic philosophers are losing rather dramatically in the fight for intellectual influence, and perhaps more of a serious engagement with these issues would help. I’ve seen plenty of philosophical work on AI, but none of it yet seems to be interesting. For that you have to go to the practitioners and the Bay Area obsessives.
*The Master of Contradictions*
The author is Morten Jensen, and the subtitle is Thomans Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain. An excellent introduction to Mann’s tome, and it many fine discussions. Here is one excerpt:
It becomes possible, then, to read The Magic Mountain as a novel partly about the limits and failures of the more positivistic strain of nineteenth-century liberalism — a triumphalist worldview that failed to recognize or halt Europe’s drift toward nationalism, reaction, and the industrial carnage of the First World War. Settembrini, the noveläs representative of this worldview, shares its myriad flaws, beliving, for instance, that self-perfection is the ultimate goal of humankind. And like so many nineteenth-century liberal utopians, he celebrates technology as “the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, furthering their knowledge of one another, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations.
…More than just a vessel for a philosophical point of view, however, Settembrini is, or becomes, one of The Magic Mountain’s most endearing characters. One cannot help but smile a little — half with affection, half with pity — whenever he enters the stage. It’s one of the novel’s great distinctions that its central characters are never merely reducible to the philosophical worldview they represent; Settembrini, even when Mann is at his most sarcastic, is always first and foremost Settembrini, as if Mann were gradually convinced by his fictional creation as a dynamic individual rather than a static representation.
Recommended.
Technological Change and the Market for Books, 1450-1550
Abstract: This paper considers how movable-type printing’s economic features shaped the early modern book market using product-level data. Building on a lively medieval tradition of manuscript production, Gutenberg’s innovation did not simply reduce costs; it introduced new incentives and constraints that altered both the product’s nature and the market’s structure. First, printing’s business model encouraged the production of shorter and simpler books targeting a poorer and less literate audience. Second, its cost structure led to product differentiation and prolific trade rather than direct competition and localized production, making available a greater variety of products offering diverse information and perspectives. Rather than simply making medieval books cheaper and more abundant, these changes may represent printing technology’s true contribution to European economic development.
That is from the job market paper of Qiyi Charlotte Zhao, who is on the market this year from Stanford. Excellent topic.
My Conversation with the excellent Jonny Steinberg
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg’s particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee’s journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist’s emotional insight.
Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons, why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren’t foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: My favorite book of yours again is Winnie and Nelson, which has won a number of awards. A few questions about that. So, they’re this very charismatic couple. Obviously, they become world-historical famous. For how long were they even together as a pair?
STEINBERG: Very, very briefly. They met in early 1957. They married in ’58. By 1960, Mandela was no longer living at home. He was underground. He was on the run. By 1962, he was in prison. So, they were really only living together under the same roof for two years.
COWEN: And how well do you feel they knew each other?
STEINBERG: Well, that’s an interesting question because Nelson Mandela was very, very in love with his wife, very besotted with his wife. He was 38, she was 20 when they met. She was beautiful. He was a notorious philanderer. He was married with three children when they met. He really was besotted with her. I don’t think that he ever truly came to know her. And when he was in prison, you can see it in his letters. It’s quite remarkable to watch. She more and more becomes the center of meaning in his life, his sense of foundation, his sense of self as everything else is falling away.
And he begins to love her more and more, and even to coronate her more and more so that she doesn’t forget him. His letters grow more romantic, more intense, more emotional. But the person he’s so deeply in love with is really a fiction. She’s living a life on the outside. And you see this very troubling line between fantasy and reality. A man becoming deeply, deeply involved with a woman who is more and more a figment of his imagination.
COWEN: Do you think you learned anything about marriage more generally from writing this book?
STEINBERG: [laughs] One of the sets of documents that I came across in writing the book were the transcripts of their meetings in the last 10 years of his imprisonment. The authorities bugged all of his meetings. They knew they were being bugged, but nonetheless, they were very, very candid with each other. And you very unusually see a marriage in real time and what people are saying to each other. And when I read those lines, 10 different marriages that I know passed through my head: the bickering, the lying, the nasty things that people do to one another, the cruelties. It all seemed very familiar.
COWEN: How is it you think she managed his career from a distance, so to speak?
STEINBERG: Well, she was a really interesting woman. She arrived in Johannesburg, 20 years old in the 1950s, where there was no reason to expect a woman to want a place in public life, particularly not in the prime of public life. And she was absolutely convinced that there was no position she should not occupy because she was a woman. She wanted a place in politics; she wanted to exercise power. But she understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to do that was through a man. And she went after the most powerful rising political activists available.
I don’t think it was quite as cynical as that. She loved him, but she absolutely wanted to exercise power, and that was a way to do it. Once she became Mrs. Mandela, I think she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy. She understood herself to be South Africa’s leader by virtue of being married to him, and understood his and her reputations as her projects to endeavor to keep going. And she did so brilliantly. She was unbelievably savvy. She understood the power of image like nobody else did, and at times saved them both from oblivion.
COWEN: This is maybe a delicate question, but from a number of things I read, including your book, I get the impression that Winnie’s just flat out a bad person…
Interesting throughout, this is one of my favorite CWT episodes, noting it does have a South Africa focus.
What should I ask Dan Wang?
Yes, I will be doing a podcast with him. Dan first became famous on the internet with his excellent Christmas letters. More recently, Dan is the author of the NYT bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
Here is Dan Wang on Wikipedia, here is Dan on Twitter. I have known him for some while. So what should I ask him?
*The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny*, now finished
This novel took me a long time to read, mostly because it was so good (and pretty long at about 660 pp.). It keeps on getting better and more closely knit together, requiring additional levels of attention. Apart from being an entrancing story and beautifully written, it is the best fiction I know on:
The near-metaphysical difficulties of immigrant assimilation
The strength and pull of Indian culture
The difficulties of escaping one’s own romantic past, most of all for women
The growing attitude gap between men and women in matters of romance
What Indians bring to America from “the old country,” whether they wish to or not
Loneliness in cosmopolitan modern life, and why it is so difficult to escape
The novel has multiple layers, and by the time you finish you realize the earlier story has a somewhat different meaning than you were thinking all along. Desai pulls this off very well. So this one is still recommended. Here is a very good Adam Mars-Jones LRB review, really a masterful piece, noting it is full of spoilers.
What should I ask Andrew Ross Sorkin?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. From Wikipedia:
Andrew Ross Sorkin (born February 19, 1977) is an American journalist and author. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service published by The New York Times. He wrote the bestselling book Too Big to Fail and co-produced a movie adaptation of the book for HBO Films. He is also a co-creator of the Showtime series Billions.
In October 2025, Sorkin published 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation, a new history of the Crash based on hundreds of documents, many unpublished.
Most of all I am interested in his new book, but not only. So what should I ask him?
What I’ve been reading
Terry Eagleton, Modernism: A Literature in Crisis. The book is short, its quality unevenly distributed, and the subtitle misleading (plenty of it is not about literature). It remains the case that Eagleton is one of the people who knows enough that he is almost always worth reading.
Jonathan Healey, The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642. What I found so compelling about this book was the step-by-step narrative of how the whole thing collapsed into very direct conflict and then an execution. Recommended.
Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. I’m not the sort of person to recommend these sorts of anti-tech books (they are a dime a dozen), but if you have to read one of them…this is maybe the most coherent, non-ridiculous, and philosophically oriented, in the good sense of course?
David Nasaw, The Wounded Generaton: Coming Home After World War II. A good book showing just how much post-traumatic stress disorder there was during and after WWII.
Marc S. Ryan, The Healthcare Labyrinth: A Guide to Navigating Health Plans and Fixing American Health Insurance is a very good and balanced book on the economics of health care.
Benjamin Schneider, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution. How do we make urban transformation succeed in America’s largest and most important cities? What are the main obstacles to such success? Schneider calls for resurrecting the “lost art of city-building” to achieve abundant housing, good public transit, and streets for people instead of cars.
Helen Vendler, Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays. She wrote these for Leon Wieseltier’s magazine, and they are now collected after her passing. Self-recommending.
And there is Cynthia Paces, Prague: The Heart of Europe.
*Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic*
That is the new Helen C. Epstein book, which I found very instructive and useful. My main wish is that it would be longer, in any case here is one very interesting excerpt of many:
If Nunavut, the semi-autonomous Canadian territory that is home to roughly 28,000 indigenous Inuit people, were an independent country, it would have the highest suicide rate in the world. The suicide rate in Greenland, whose population is mostly Inuit, is 85 per 100,000; next highest is Lithuania, at 33 per 100,000. Nunavut’s rate is 100 per 100,000, ten times higher than the rest of Canada and seven times higher than the US. When I visited Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit, in July, virtually every Inuit I met had lost at least some relative to suicide, and some recounted as many as five or six family suicides, plus those of friends, co workers ,and other acquaintances. Three people in my small circle of contacts lost someone close to them to suicide during my nine-day visit. Acquaintances would direct my attention to passersby on the street: “his older brother too,” “his son.” Almost one-third of Nunavut Inuit have attmpted suicide, and most Inuit I met confided, without my asking that had done so at least once.
This book also is important for understanding the key phenomenon of negative emotional contagion.
What should I ask Diarmaid MacCulloch
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. He has a recent book out on the history of sexuality and Christianity, but of course is renowned for a much longer series of books and writings on Christianity, the Reformation, and Tudor British history, just for a start.
Here is his Wikipedia page. So what should I ask him?
*Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent*
By Kim Bowes, this is an excellent book, the best I know of on ordinary economic life in the Roman empire. It also shows a very good understanding of economics, unlike some forays by archeologists. Here is one excerpt:
On the income side, we’ve seen that unskilled wages, which were very low indeed, were also a very bad proxy for income. Wages were usually part of a portfolio of income, a portfolio that all family members contributed to, but one still centered on own production — either farming or textile/artisanal work. Unskilled wages supplemented own-production; they mostly weren’t equivalent to it. Roman wagges, unlike modern wages, can’t be used as a proxy for income.
Gross income from own-production, particularly farming, appears to have been much higher than previously supposed. Rotation strategies practiced by Italian and Egyptian farmers meant that per-hectare outputs were many times greater than alternate fallow models predicted, since outputs included not only wheat but also significant quantities of fodder and animals. In the northwest provinces, where rotation was less common, outputs per hectare were lower but still included some hay and larger animal herds. And every, high settlement densities and shrinking amounts of land would have urged farmers to achieve higher yields — in some places three or more times greater than previously supposed. We can’t be sure they managed this, only that low yields would have been mostly unteanble and that farmers had the tools — rotation, manuring, weeding — to achieve higher ones.
Most working class Romans, by the way, bought their clothing rather than having to make it themselves.
Recommended, you can pre-order it here.