Category: Books

My excellent Conversation with Bob Spitz

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

Excerpt:

SPITZ: Mick, from a very early age, was an exercise freak.

As we know from my investigation in the book, Mick’s father was the Jack Lalanne of the United Kingdom. He had a television show, an exercise show like Richard Simmons, and he always had a great person to show off the exercises, young Michael. He would say, Mike, get down, show him 50 pushups. Mike, do 100 chins, and Mick would jump to it and do it. That man still has a 27-inch waist at the age of 83.

Keith, on the other hand, is a medical miracle.

And this:

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

And:

COWEN: How good a cook was Julia Child? That’s another of your biographies. Actually, how good was she?

SPITZ: She was great. She was a wonderful person, but here’s the little secret. Julia was a great cooking teacher, but not a very good cook. There were people who left her house—and John Updike told me this. He was a frequent guest with her. Corby Kummer, who was a wonderful food writer, told me this as well. They’d leave Julia’s house. They’d go to a little park around the corner, and they’d get physically ill. They’d get sick. Julia used too much butter, too much cream. She really had no reins on her when it came to using things like that.

Bob was excellent throughout, and I very much enjoyed his new biography of the Rolling Stones.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. David Narrett, The Cherokees in War & at Peace 1670-1840.  An excellent book, one of the two best books on a single Native American tribe I have read.  The book actually aims at explaining the Cherokees and enlightening the reader – how rare.  In 1700, there were no more than 20,000 Cherokees, mostly in the southeast, so it is amazing what the author was able to come up with.  Will make the year’s best of non-fiction list.

2. Boyd van Dijk, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions.  A very good look at the negotiations behind the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and just how driven by national self-interest they were, including colonial motives from the major colonial powers, who wished to retain stronger rights to put down uprisings.  The Soviets wanted strong protections against torture (!), as they thought this might limit the power of the United States to bomb their population into submission.  Yet nuclear war ended up being permitted, largely at the insistence of the U.S.  And so on.  The colonial subjects of course had not much say in any of this.

3. Jim Windolf, Where the Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other — and the World.  An excellent and engaging book, which even serious fans can learn from.  The first time Paul McCartney heard the music of Bob Dylan he called it “folk crap,” to his brother Mike.  Dylan and McCartney grew closest in 1971, when Paul was making the Ram album in NYC.  Music from Big Pink is one of Paul’s favorite albums of all time.  Thingumybob, first composed by Paul in 1968, later received accretions from Harrison and Dylan and became an odd three-party composition, albeit never released on a recording.  And here is Paul’s account of bumping into Dylan at the airport.

If you wish to think about the Roman Empire more, there is Pliny & Co., How to Make Money: An Ancient Guide to Wealth Management.

Thomas Asbridge, The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity’s Most Devastating Pandemic is a good overview.

There is also Devon Cox, Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent.

*Last Evenings with Teresa*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Juan Marsé, this novel is set in 1956, first published in Spain in 1966, and only now appearing in English.  Here is the Amazon link.  Marsé is one of the handful of great authors who has no real presence in the Anglo world, Bioy Casares would be another.  You can think of the story as covering class conflict, romance, and their intersection in the Barcelona of the 1950s.  Definitely recommended, I am excited to see this finally out and am reading it avidly (in Spanish it is too difficult and slow for me).  Here is one review out of a very small number in English.

Ryan Avent’s new book *In Good Faith*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle is How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies.  Here is Ryan doing a podcast with Brink Lindsey.  As Brink writes:

All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Ryan contends that the dysfunctions and discontents plaguing 21st century democracies reflect such underlying neglect.

I am pleased to see “thought books,” as one might call them, headed in this direction and I was happy to blurb Ryan’s latest effort.

Capitalism and Modernity

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, one of the few economists in the world equally at home solving stochastic dynamic optimization problems as with  sociological theory and history, has an excellent series of twitter posts on capitalism and modernity.

JFV:  I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory.

What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.

I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978.

Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely.

Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies.

But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies.

I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric information, career concerns, lack of timely feedback, pressure toward conformity) that cause dysfunction in the former are even more pronounced in the latter because of the absence of a profit motive, the sharpest disciplinary mechanism.

At a very fundamental level, Marx got modernity wrong; Weber got it right. Time to spend much less time with Marx and much, much more time with Weber.

Here’s the second post:

Many readers yesterday asked for more concrete examples of what I have in mind regarding the distinctions between features inherent to modernity and those inherent to “capitalism.”

Imagine we have a functioning socialist commonwealth. For simplicity, I will call it the SC.

Imagine also that this SC aims to provide state-of-the-art medical care to its citizens. This is not about superfluous consumption. It is about the desire to provide good preventive care, adequate treatment, palliative care, and so on.

Soon, you realize that you need the scientific-technological complex that develops advanced mRNA vaccines and, even more importantly, the industrial capacity to produce tens of millions of doses at short notice when a new virus arrives or an old one mutates. These are sophisticated processes that involve coordinating millions of individuals with diverse knowledge, skills, and personalities.

But it does not stop there. You will need to produce thousands of MRIs, scanners, FLASH radiotherapy machines, and all the bewildering array of equipment you find in a top hospital.

And I insist: wanting to be treated with the latest oncological equipment if you get cancer is not frivolity. It is a deep human desire that a good society (any society, really) should attempt to provide.

How are you going to accomplish all this? An SC does not want to use private property, so it relies on some form of public property. But public ownership is not the main issue. The real issue is that the SC would need to organize large bureaucratic organizations. Without them, it cannot develop and deploy vaccines, MRIs, scanners, and the rest. The need to scale is the key mechanism at play, not who owns the property.

And, because of their scale, these large bureaucratic organizations will suffer the type of problems that critics of “capitalism” attribute to “capitalism.” The organization will be impersonal and alienating, and inefficient due to career concerns, asymmetric information, conformity effects, and internal politics.

Moreover, because resource constraints hold in every human endeavor, some claims for medical treatment will be denied. The SC will not have enough resources to satisfy every medical demand (and medical demands are, for all practical purposes, unlimited), every demand for education, every demand for the environment, and every demand for this or that worthwhile cause. Sorry, yes, scarcity will always be with us, with or without AI.

Patients whose requests for medical treatment are denied will be particularly annoyed because the SC is built on the idea that such events cannot happen. At least in a “capitalist” society there is someone to blame (the “capitalist”).

Those who deny the need for large bureaucratic organizations are living in a fantasy world. I am pretty sure the day they are told they have prostate cancer, they will run to their closest large bureaucratic organization for treatment.

Those who deny the problems of large bureaucratic organizations, and how deeply irresoluble those problems are, have not seen how not-for-profits work. I have never seen more acrimonious fights than within not-for-profit organizations, where some shared sense of the common good unites members. The fights are fierce precisely because profits play no role.

I have been reading about these issues for nearly 40 years, and I have seen plenty of proposals to address the problems of large bureaucratic organizations. A favorite among many is “participation” or “more democracy” within the organization. No, sorry, more “participation” or “more democracy” only makes things worse. Yugoslavia taught us that you cannot run a large bureaucratic organization based on democratic participation (well, you only need to know some basic economics; Arrow’s impossibility theorem, anyone?).

Large bureaucratic organizations are essential to modern life, and they are full of problems, with or without “capitalism.”

This is what Weber understood and what Marx, who had an incredibly naïve view of the future, never grasped. Weber saw that bureaucracy is not a feature of “capitalism” but the institutional form modern society uses to coordinate large-scale tasks under rational, impersonal rules. Hospitals, ministries, armies, universities, and, yes, corporations all converge on the same form because it works at scale. The iron cage is not capitalist. It is modernity.

The third excellent post on whether capitalism created modernity which criticizes Quine and the analytic-synthetic distinction (!) is here.

That was then, this is now

by  Tyler Cowen in

Around Hormuz, however, the Portuguese always had to be on guard.  Many naturally protected sandy coves (khors in Arabic) practically invited “pirates.”  The Nakhilu, or Banu Hula, were Sunni arabic speakers on the Gulf coast of Persia whose descendants still inhabit the Gulf coast of Iran.  For decades they set up upocket ports in the many hidden bandars and byways of the mountainous shore and created an underground economy that rivaled Hormuz’s.  These “pirates” were a major drain on Portuguese revenue, regularly attacking ships that paid the feed for the cartaz, and docked at Hormuz.

That is from Allen James Fromherz, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present.  From this same book I learned that Milton refers to the Straits in Paradise Lost, but under the name of Ormus:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far

Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind[ia],

Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand

Showrs on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold,

Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d

To that bad eminence

What should I ask Luke Burgis?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Excerpted (and edited) from a bio:

He is on the business faculty at Catholic University and has a background on both Wall Street and in the startup world, where he founded several companies. His first book, Wanting (2021), has been translated into 20+ languages and is selling more than copies than ever five years in. He is an expert on Rene Girard.  His new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is out from St. Martin’s June 16 — a theory of how identity gets formed or deformed under conditions of technological social contagion. He has a third book with a major publisher (on “technology as soulcraft”) in the pipeline with a major publisher. He also lived in Italy and for a while was studying to be a priest. He remains a true Catholic, and is the founder and director of the Cluny Institute.

Here is Luke on Twitter.  Here is Luke’s home page.  So what should I ask him?

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Mason Currey, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life.  The best overall book I know on the different methods top artists have used to keep themselves going financially.  It is perhaps more anecdotal and less theoretical than I would prefer, still a nice work.

2. Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Dissent in Qajar Iran.  A very good, clear, and useful book on different dissident religiouis developments in Iran, leading up to the Bahai faith.  Recommended, one of the best books I have found for grappling with the history of current Iran.

3. Lena Dunham, Famesick: A Memoir.  Not exactly my thing, so I did not finish it.  But it is pretty good, so if you are tempted give it a try.

4. Iain Pears, Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent.  A delightful story/indirect memoir, telling the tale of the lives and marriage of Francis Haskell, the British art historian, and Larissa Salmina Haskell, a Russian woman who survived the siege of Leningrad as a girl.  Pears had the full cooperation of Larissa, at an age where she doesn’t give a damn any more.  This story truly comes to life, and that is helped by Pears’s background as a writer of very good fiction.

5. Lázár, by Nelio Biedermann.  An excellent novel of ideas, in the style of earlier Continental literature, by a 23-year-old Swiss phenom.  It is very good in German, I have not sampled the translation.

That was then, this is now

by  Tyler Cowen in

At the advent of a more aggressive Persian Gulf policy on the part of Iran during the interwar years, the resilience of these symbols was watched like a kind of barometer that attested to Britain’s levell of commitment to the maintenance of security in the Persian Gulf.  Britainäs abstention from the use of force against Iran, dictated by its will to protect its interests in Iran, was at times perceived as weakness by the shaykhs and merchants of the Arabian littoral.  During the period of heightened tension that accompanied Reza Shah’s rise, a perpetual cause of excitement among the Arabs inhabiting the southern littoral was the persistence of rumors that Iran would soon effect the complete withdrawal of the British from the area of the Persian Gulf waterway.

That is from the very useful The Origins of the Arab-Iranian Conflict: Nationalism and Sovereignty in the Gulf between the World Wars, by Chelsi Mueller.

By the way, on the eve of WWI, the population of Dubai was about 2,075 people, and about 500 of them were Iranian merchants.

That was then, this is not now?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion destroyed Reza Shah — but not the Pahlavi state.  The two Allies — joined by the United States in December 1941 — realized that the Iranian state could be useful in achieving the two goals for which they had invaded the country: physical control over oil — the British nightmare in World War II, even more so than in World War I, was loss of these vital supplies: and a land “corridor” to the Soviet Union…To facilitate the flow of both oil to Britain and supplies to the Soviet Union, the Allies found it expedient to remove Reza Shah but to preserve his state…the Allies kept his state but engineered his removal in part to curry much-needed favor among Iranians.  “The Persians,” he wrote, “expect that we should at least save them from the Shah’s tyranny as compensation for invading their country.”

That is from Ervand Abrahamian’s A History of Modern Iran.

That was then, this is now

by  Tyler Cowen in

From 1857:

The Persians were great sticklers for ceremony, it turned out, and now that the treaty was ratified, they expected an exchange of gifts to mark the important occasion.  At Spence’s [a leading diplomat of the time] insistence, the United States spent $10,000 (close to $1 million in today’s money) on diamond-studded snuffboxes and weapons for the shah.  The State Department protested bitterly, as it was not in the habit of spending such outrageous sums, but Spence put his foot down, knowing that these gifts paled in comparison with what Persia had received from Napoleon and others.  Spence’s brother Charles was dispatched to Tehran to deliver the gifts in person — a gesture the shah appreciated so much that he decorates the young man with the Order of the Lion and the Sun, the country’s highest honor.

That is from John Ghazvinian America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, a very good book.

My excellent Conversation with Kim Bowes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.

Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim’s not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome’s unraveling, and much more.

Here is an excerpt with some economics:

COWEN: Say, when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they’re just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?

BOWES: They’re not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It’s just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they’re doing this. What I think is most interesting and what we’re all still wrestling with is, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver.

Then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care, and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs—that’s a little bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, and so people are willing to just suck it up and deal, and they keep using it.

There is inflation, and inflation, we can now tell, thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the first century, the second century, the third century, but it’s not proportional to the amount of silver that’s being pulled out of the coins. People basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, simply by supporting ordinary people’s coin use, that the coins work and that they’re going to back their coins, even though they’re slightly pulling the silver out.

COWEN: Why was there so much decentralized money lending? You would think that banks would have economies of scale, offer better terms, just like I wouldn’t borrow money from my friends, I would go to the bank. Why doesn’t the Roman Empire evolve that way?

BOWES: The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. The Roman big state is really a mask for an empire of friends and family. You borrow money from friends and family. Banks, such as they exist, are really nothing more than friends and family, so even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family.

The difference that you’re making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear-cut in a world in which the bank is your family, or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It’s not that Romans don’t use banks, they do use banks. We can see the most often wealthier Romans using banks. It’s a lot harder to see the 90 percent using banks, and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it’s not such a huge distinction. In a world in which there’s no FDIC, in which the bank isn’t guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is much less clear.

Interesting and engaging throughout, definitely recommended.  You can buy Kim’s excellent book here.