Category: Books
The 19th century was truly bad for Mexico and for Mexicans
From an international perspective, Mexicans' height in the mid-eighteenth century was "not too short"…The declining trend over the second half of the eighteenth century was nothin exceptional in international perspective either. The early nineteenth century, however, was a watershed as the trends diverged: height recovered or stagnated in France, Spain, and other countries, but it continued to decline in Mexico: by the 1830s, Mexicans had finally become "too short." …I have proposed that population growth, and more frequent El Niño events, and real grain prices reduced the availability of food and had a likely detrimental effect on living standards.
That is from an essay by AmÃlcar Challú, from the new and excellent book Living Standards in Latin American History: Height, Welfare, and Development, 1750-2000, edited by Ricardo D. Salvadore, John H. Coatsworth, and AmÃlcar Challú.
*The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do*
That's Eduardo Porter's new book, a behavioral economics treatment of how prices are set. Recommended. I'll be at the book party tonight, look for me if you'll be there too.
Since I cannot reread Heinlein, I should not read a biography of Heinlein
But I can browse one. William H. Patterson's Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Learning Curve 1907-1948, would appear to be definitive. The very thick volume one — over six hundred pages with notes – stops at 1948. It is very well written and engaging and connects Heinlein to broader American history. There is plenty on Heinlein and free love, Heinlein and H.G. Wells, Heinlein in the Navy, Heinlein and Missouri, and many other topics.
In my pile
*The World in 2050*
The author is Laurence C. Smith and the subtitle is Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future.
This book is excellent on at least two questions:
1. Which environmental problems remain real, even taking into account the dynamic adjustment properties of markets?
2. Why the northern countries will grow in economic and political importance over the next forty years.
Excerpt:
Extraction industries will favor projects nearer the water. Looking ahead, our northern future is one of diminishing access by land, but rising access by sea. For many remote interior landscapes, the perhaps surprising prospect I see is reduced human presence and their return to a wilder state.
My main criticism of this book is that it does not direct enough criticism at government water subsidies and their role in worsening this environmental problem.
Here is the book's rather non-Hayekian close:
No doubt we humans will survive anything, even if polar bears and Arctic cod do not. Perhaps we could support nine hundred billion if we choose a world with no large animals, pod apartments, genetically engineered to algae to eat, and desalinized toilet water to drink. Or perhaps nine hundred million if we choose a wilder planet, generously restocked with the creatures of our design. To be, the more important question is not of capacity but of desire: What kind of world do we want?
Definitely worth the read. I don't agree with everything here, but this is a book (very well-written by the way) which should be making a splash. For the pointer I thank a loyal MR commentator.
Markets in everything
Kindle eBook, for $6,431.20 — Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems.
Don't forget, we get a commission if you buy one.
For the pointer I thank Jason Lewis.
Joseph Gibson on how to improve Congress
Chug refers me to this new book. A few of the ideas are:
1. Make Congress a temporary job, a bit more like jury duty or serving in the military.
2. Allow all financial contributions but require full disclosure on the internet.
3. Lower or eliminate the fixed allotment for Congressional staff, to limit the "bubble" which surrounds Congressmen.
4. Do not allow fundraising while Congress is in session, to make sessions more urgent.
5. Require that bills be written in plain English.
6. Allow formal vote-trading, so minority legislators could have some prospect of promoting their better ideas.
7. Make it easier to repeal unnecessary laws.
8. Eliminate the "hold" and make filibusters much harder.
9. Make confirmations quicker and easier.
10. Make the House smaller.
There is more, but that is a start.
In general I find Congressional reform proposals, including filibuster abolition, difficult to evaluate. There is no simple model at hand. Sometimes the median voter model is useful, but in most cases it implies the reforms don't matter, a conclusion which I would not wish to accept so readily. Multi-dimensional cycling models often imply that either a) it still doesn't matter (the agenda setter remains in charge), or b) it matters some huge amount in a way which is difficult to forecast but the entire political equilibrium can shift and not just locally.
There are many "near median voter models," perhaps too many.
There is also the Becker QJE 1983 model about the bargaining power of different interest groups. Still, when it comes to outlining exactly how the procedural reforms shift the political bargain, we are again looking at a black box. The first cut version of the model seems to imply that political procedures don't much matter.
The overall problem is that plausible models generate either no changes or large, non-local changes. Maybe we should take those results seriously, but then in the former case it doesn't matter and in the then-more-relevant latter case we still can't predict the nature or even the direction of the non-local shift.
What are the novels about monetary policy?
Ezra writes:
"It’s too bad 'You Shall Know Our Velocity' isn’t a novel about monetary policy."
That's Matthew Yglesias, and it got me wondering about whether there are any novels about monetary policy. There's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," which some believe to be an allegory for the debate over the gold standard. If you're willing to include novels about the effects of monetary policy, pretty much any novel about the Great Depression counts, and "The Grapes of Wrath" is particularly eloquent on the subject. But is there anything more on-topic than that?
I am reminded of Paul Cantor on Thomas Mann on hyperinflation. Specialists may wish to consult Friedrich Achberger, "Die Inflation und die zeitgenossische Literatur," in Aufbruch und Untergang: Osterreichische Kulturzwischen 1918-1938, Franz Kadrnoska, ed. (Vienna: Europa, 1981), pp. 29-42; there are monetary policy themes in Musil, Zweig, and Broch, among others. Hans Fallada too. Is there a monetary theme in H.G. Wells's The Last War?; Wells was a follower of Frederick Soddy. How about from 19th century England? From science fiction? Isn't there mutual banking in Eric Frank Russell?
Addendum: Here is Krugman's pick. And more here.
*The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters*
Books to crave: *A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth*
From the ever-interesting Alexander Field:
This thoughtful re-examination of the history of U.S. economic growth is built around a novel claim, that potential output grew dramatically across the Depression years (1929-1941) and that this advance provided the foundation for the economic and military success of the United States during the Second World War as well as for the golden age (1948-1973) that followed. Alexander J. Field takes a fresh look at growth data and concludes that, behind a backdrop of double-digit unemployment, the 1930s actually experienced very high rates of technological and organizational innovation, fueled by the maturing of a privately funded research and development system and the government-funded build-out of the country's surface road infrastructure. This substantive new volume in the Yale Series in Economic and Financial History invites renewed discussions on productivity growth over the last century and a half and on our current prospects.
China sentence of the day
When my turn to talk about American politics came, and I tried to explain the Tea Party movement’s goal of “getting government off our backs,” I was met with blank stares and ironic smiles.
The full article is here, possibly gated (TNR), by Mark Lilla. It concerns the high and rising popularity of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt in China. Another excerpt:
Schmitt was by far the most intellectually challenging anti-liberal statist of the twentieth century. His deepest objections to liberalism were anthropological. Classical liberalism assumes the autonomy of self-sufficient individuals and treats conflict as a function of faulty social and institutional arrangements; rearrange those arrangements, and peace, prosperity, learning, and refinement will follow. Schmitt assumed the priority of conflict: Man is a political creature, in the sense that his most defining characteristic is the ability to distinguish friend and adversary. Classical liberalism sees society as having multiple, semi-autonomous spheres; Schmitt asserted the priority of the social whole (his ideal was the medieval Catholic Church) and considered the autonomy of the economy, say, or culture or religion, as a dangerous fiction…Schmitt saw sovereignty as the result of an arbitrary self-founding act by a leader, a party, a class, or a nation that simply declares “thus it shall be.” Classical liberalism had little to say about war and international affairs, leaving the impression that, if only human rights were respected and markets kept free, a morally universal and pacified world order would result. For Schmitt, this was liberalism’s greatest and most revealing intellectual abdication: If you have nothing to say about war, you have nothing to say about politics. There is, he wrote, “absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.”
Seth Roberts offers a Chinese economics joke.
*Kosher Nation*
The author is Sue Fishkoff and the subtitle is Why More and More of America's Food Answers to a Higher Authority. This late arrival is one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year, superb both on its topic and on the history and economics of certification more generally. Here is one excerpt:
"If they want to sell their product in the United States and they are not kosher, no one will buy it," points out Menachem Lubinsky. "Coca-Cola won't buy it, Kellogg's won't buy it. They'll be cut out of the market. If you're in China or Thailand and you want to export, you have absolutely no choice but to seek out kosher certification." Some companies get certification to fill one order from a U.S.-based manufacturer and then drop it when the order is complete, only to reapply when the next order comes in.
Definitely recommended.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Half-Made World, by Felix Gilman. I very much enjoyed this mix of dystopian steampunk and speculative science fiction, reviewed by Henry here.
2. Vassily Grossman, Everything Flows. I found this more fluent and compelling than his longer Life and Fate; it's the story of a man who returns home from a concentration camp. Recommended.
3. Richard Overy, 1939: Countdown to War. I didn't think a book so short on this topic could be good. I was wrong. Overy has a strong overall track record as an author.
4. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. I don't have any objections to this much-touted book, but I expected to learn more from it than I did. It didn't feel like 352 pp.
5. Nicholas Ostler, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel. A provocative book on the forthcoming decline of English as a globally dominant language. I'm not (yet?) convinced, but I'm less unconvinced than I thought I would be. One main point is that more and more business will be done without English at all, often through the BRICS countries. It is interesting to see that fewer people in South Africa are learning English.
Where did game theory come from?
The best book to read on that topic is Robert Leonard's new and noteworthy Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory. Excerpt:
Von Neumann's seminal game paper was part of a rich contemporaneous discussion of the mathematics of chess and parlour games in the first three decades of the century, involving diverse contributors, from Lasker to Zermelo to Konig, Kalmár, and Borel. It was a multifaceted literature, embracing Lasker's philosophical probing of the place of struggle in business and war, Zermelo and the Hungarians' set-theoretic analyses of chess; and Borel's own attempt to create a novel form of social inquiry, blending probability and psychology.
Here is the book's home page, the non-cached copy is not available at the moment. Here are working papers by Robert Leonard, on the history of game theory.
Literary reputations
Somewhat on the way down:
Overall, in other searches also, I see a golden age for "high fiction" in the 1950-1970 period.
Holding steady:
Dwindling:
Up, but down since 2000
On the way up:
Other than very recent authors, these are harder to find than you might think.
Falling off a cliff:
Typing in "Arnold Bennett" is like shooting fish in a barrel.