Category: Books
Mario Vargas Llosa on Liberty
Mario Vargas Llosa in the WSJ:
There are those who in the name of the free market have supported Latin American dictatorships whose iron hand of repression was said to be necessary to allow business to function, betraying the very principles of human rights that free economies rest upon. Then there are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.
What is lost on the collectivists, on the other hand, is the prime importance of individual freedom for societies to flourish and economies to thrive. This is the core insight of true liberalism: All individual freedoms are part of an inseparable whole. Political and economic liberties cannot be bifurcated. Mankind has inherited this wisdom from millennia of experience, and our understanding has been enriched further by the great liberal thinkers, some of my favorites being Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They have described the path out of darkness and toward a brighter future of freedom and universal appreciation for the values of human dignity….
Many cling to hopes that the economy can be centrally planned. Education, health care, housing, money and banking, crime control, transportation, energy and far more follow the failed command-and-control model that has been repeatedly discredited. Some look to nationalist and statist solutions to trade imbalances and migration problems, instead of toward greater freedom.
…The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another’s rights. It is a search to which I’ve dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake.
I am thrilled that Mario Vargas Llosa, Lech Wałęsa and economist Robert Higgs will receive the Alexis de Tocqueville Award from the Independent Institute (where I am research director) at our Gala on Nov. 15, these remarks were written for that occasion.
The very best books of the year 2011 (so far)
This year there are three stand-out winners, which is not usually the case. These are all major books which virtually everyone should read, at least provided you read non-fiction (fiction) at all:
1. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. My review is here.
2. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, interesting on every page and lives up to the hype. Here is a good review by Michael Rosenwald.
3. Haruki Murakami, IQ84. I haven’t finished it yet, but I feel confident putting it on the list (I’m about one-third through). I even agree with many of the reservations expressed in this review but the book is nonetheless a major achievement. There are dozens of reviews here.
Here is the (lame) PW list of the ten best books of the year. And if you are wondering, I have sour impressions of the new Eco and Joan Didion books.
Soon I’ll prepare a longer list of my favorite books of the last year, in part for your gift-giving purposes.
How much does downloading a book increase the weight of your Kindle?
Although the electrons were already present, keeping them still rather than allowing them to float around takes up extra energy – about a billionth of a microjoule per bit of data.
Using Einstein’s E=mc² formula, which states that energy and mass are directly related, Prof Kubiatowicz calculated that filling a 4GB Kindle to its storage limit would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram, or 0.000000000000000001g.
This is roughly equivalent to the weight of a small virus, while the equivalent number of books – about 3,500 – would weigh approximately two tons.
And there you go, pointer courtesy of Mike Rosenwald.
College has been oversold
Here, drawn from my new e-book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance (published by TED) is part of a section on college education. (See also the op-ed in IBD)
Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates than the less educated so why are college students at Occupy Wall Street protests around the country demanding forgiveness for crushing student debt? The sluggish economy is tough on everyone but the students are also learning a hard lesson, going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects. And American students are not studying the fields with the greatest economic potential.
Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.
Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering, math and statistics. Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?
If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying?
In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.
The chart at right shows the number of bachelor’s degrees in various fields today and 25 years ago. STEM fields are flat (declining for natives) while the visual and performing arts, psychology, and communication and journalism (!) are way up.
There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees and these graduates don’t get a big college bonus.
Most importantly, graduates in the arts, psychology and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth. Economic growth is not a magic totem to which all else must bow, but it is one of the main reasons we subsidize higher education.
The potential wage gains for college graduates go to the graduates — that’s reason enough for students to pursue a college education. We add subsidies to the mix, however, because we believe that education has positive spillover benefits that flow to society. One of the biggest of these benefits is the increase in innovation that highly educated workers theoretically bring to the economy.
As a result, an argument can be made for subsidizing students in fields with potentially large spillovers, such as microbiology, chemical engineering, nuclear physics and computer science. There is little justification for subsidizing sociology, dance and English majors.
College has been oversold. It has been oversold to students who end up dropping out or graduating with degrees that don’t help them very much in the job market. It also has been oversold to the taxpayers, who foot the bill for these subsidies.
*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.