Category: Books
In praise of picture books
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?
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
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.
*The Great Stagnation*, excerpt
From my new eBook, here is one bit:
I’m also persuaded by the median income numbers because they are supported by related measurements of other magnitudes. For example, another way to study economic growth is to look not at median income but at national income, gdp, or gross domestic product, the total production of goods and services. Charles I. Jones, an economist at Stanford University, has “disassembled” American economic growth into component parts, such as increases in capital investment, increases in work hours, increases in research and development, and other factors. Looking at 1950–1993, he found that 80 percent of the growth from that period came from the application of previously discovered ideas, combined with heavy additional investment in education and research, in a manner that cannot be easily repeated for the future. In other words, we’ve been riding off the past. Even more worryingly, he finds that now that we are done exhausting this accumulated stock of benefits, we are discovering new ideas at a speed that will drive a future growth rate of less than one-third of a percent (that’s a rough estimate, not an exact one, but it is consistent with the basic message here). It could be worse yet if the idea-generating countries continue to lose population, as we are seeing in Western Europe and Japan.
I do not hold the view that relative stagnation will last forever, only that it has lasted for thirty-seven years and that it will not end immediately. Oddly, it is the so-called "economic right" — which complains bitterly about decades of increasing taxes and regulation and litigation and government privilege — which finds such a claim hardest to accept.
You can pre-order the eBook; the Amazon link is here, Barnes&Noble here, $4.00. I offer further information on the book here.
*Peddling Protectionism*
The author is the excellent Douglas A. Irwin and the subtitle is Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression. The book's home page is here. Excerpt:
The popular perception is that the Smoot-Hawley tariff raised import duties to record levels and helped cause the Great Depression. In fact, the legislated tariff increase was much smaller than commonly imagined, although it still managed to erase 15 percent of America's imports of dutiable goods upon impact. For reasons that will be explained, it was the deflation of prices that accompanied the Great Depression that pushed the tariff to near record levels, restricting trade even more…most economic historians do not believe that the Smoot-Hawley tariff played a large role in the macroeconomic contraction experienced during the Great Depression.
It is well known that Doug is hard at work on what will prove to be "the modern Taussig," a history of international trade, and protection, in the context of the rise of the American economy; one assumes that this more focused book will be feeding into the larger whole.
Stata Resources
Here are some Stata resources that I have found useful. Statistics with Stata by Hamilton is good for beginners although it is overpriced. For the basics I like German Rodriguez’s free Stata tutorial best, good material can also be found at UCLA’s Stata starter kit and UNC’s Stata Tutorial; two page Stata is good for getting started quickly.
Christopher Baum’s book An Introduction to Modern Econometrics using Stata is excellent and worth the price. The world is indebted to Baum for a number of Stata programs such as NBERCycles which shades in NBER recession dates on time series graphs–this was a big help in producing graphs for our textbook!–so buy Baum’s book and support a public good.
I have found it hugely useful to peruse the proceedings of Stata meetings where you can find professional guides to using Stata to do advanced econometrics. For example, here is Austin Nichols on Regression Discontinuity and related methods, Robert Guitierrez on Recent Developments in Multilevel Modeling, Colin Cameron on Panel Data Methods and David Drukker on Dynamic Panel Models.
I found A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics very useful and then I lent it to someone who never returned it. I suppose they found it very useful as well. I haven’t bought another copy, since it is fairly easy to edit graphs in the newer versions of Stata. You can probably get by with this online guide.
German Rodriguez, mentioned earlier, has an attractively presented class on generalized linear models with lots of material. The LSE has a PhD class on Stata, here are the class notes: Introduction to Stata and Advanced Stata Topics.
Creating a map in Stata is painful since there are a host of incompatible file formats that have to be converted (I spent several hours yesterday working to convert a dBase IV to dBase III file just so I could convert the latter to dta). Still, when it works, it works well. Friedrich Huebler has some of the details.
The reshape command is often critical but difficult, here is a good guide.
Here are many more sources of links: Stata resources, Stata Links, Resources for Learning Stata, and Gabriel Rossman’s blog Code and Culture.
*Theories of International Politics and Zombies*
That is a new pocket-sized book by the excellent Daniel Drezner and it is indeed about zombies:
It is indeed to neoconservatism's credit that its doctrine is consistent with extant work on how best to respond to the zombie menace. A war against zombies would, surely, be a war against evil itself.
Here is Dan's preview of the book. A few days ago a loyal MR reader wrote to me and asked, if I were surrounded by a hoard of zombies, and could have only one weapon to fend them off, what would it be? The answer is obvious: the rule of law. Alternatively, a constitutional amendment against zombies.
Ask and ye shall receive
My new eBook — The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better – now is available on European (and possibly other?) Amazon sites. Here it is on Amazon.uk for instance.
Public choice: what to read
Jonathan G asks:
What concepts in public choice economics do you think liberals are under-exposed to? Can you recommend some books or articles?
I am not sure what he means by "liberals" so I will answer the question straight up about public choice. I recommend:
1. Dennis Mueller, Public Choice III. The best survey of the field, though this is an academic rather than a popular book. On voting theory — an overrated area in my view – try Peter Ordeshook.
2. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations. The best applied explanation of the logic of concentrated benefits, diffuse costs.
3. Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter. On the democratic side of the equation. Anthony Downs is still worth reading as well, though it needs a cheaper edition than $75. Also read Daniel Klein on The People's Romance.
4. For "pro-government public choice," see Amihai Glazer and Lawrence Rothenberg, Why Government Succeeds and Why it Fails. Also see my piece, with Glazer (an underrated public choice economist), "Rent-Seeking Promotes the Provision of Public Goods" (gated).
5. Buchanan and Tullock are among the most important public choice economists, but they don't come in canonical, easy to digest form. Any recommendations here? Liberty Fund has done the complete works.
6. Read Robin Hanson's blog posts on "politics isn't about policy."
7. An underrated topic is the application of behavioral economics to politicians and also voters and even special interest groups.
8. For understanding the U.S. system, I very much like David Stockman's The Triumph of Politics; oddly the paperback is priced at four times the hardcover.
9. Overall I recommend comparative approaches with other countries (start with Arend Ljiphart, plus Matt Yglesias has had good blog posts on this topic) and acquiring an anthropological and sociological understanding of political legitimacy and perception of interest. The rational choice literature often neglects those topics.
10. Here is my short review on the public choice of finance and big government.
11. For frontier research, see the papers of Andrei Shleifer and Daron Acemoglu. There is plenty of good applied research in political science, although this is less of a foundational place to start.
From the classics, there is Plato's Republic (a critique of tyranny in my view), Robert Michels Political Parties, Tocqueville's Democracy in America (politics as culture), and various Vilfredo Pareto essays, I am no longer sure which volume they are collected in (edited by Finer?). The Federalist Papers are impressive, but are they impressive to read?
What am I neglecting?
*The Great Stagnation*
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.
That's the title and it's by me, the Amazon link is here, Barnes&Noble here. That's an eBook only, about 15,000 words, and it costs $4.00. If you wish, think of it as a "Kindle single."
Your copy will arrive on January 25 and loyal MR readers are receiving the very first chance to buy it. Very little of the content has already appeared on MR.
Many of you have read my article "The Inequality that Matters," but there I hardly touched on median income growth. That is because I was writing this eBook.
Has median household income really stagnated in the United States? If so, why? Are the causes political or something deeper? What are the important biases in how we are measuring national income and productivity and why do they matter for economic policy? Are we getting enough value for all the extra money we are spending on the health care and education sectors? What do some major right-wing and left-wing thinkers miss about this phenomenon?
How does all this relate to our recent financial crisis?
I dedicated this book to Michael Mandel and Peter Thiel, two major influences on some of the arguments.
Why did big government arise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, what is its future, and why is science so important for macroeconomics? How can we fix the current mess we are in?
Read (and buy) the whole thing.
I wish to thank my publisher, Dutton, for accommodating this experiment in a new medium. I believe it will be one piece of our new publishing future and here is your chance, as a reader, to try it out.
What I’ve been reading
1. John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. By an order of magnitude, this is the best book on the economics of contemporary publishing. It covers the UK scene as well.
2. Adam Feinstein, A History of Autism: Conversations with the Pioneers. A lengthy and informative treatment of how thought on autism evolved, and most of all a tale of how badly science can misfire, even "these days." I am not sure how much the portraits of researchers are intended as positive, but overall I take away from this book the message that many of them are arrogant and also partially incompetent. It is possible that this is a better book (and for different reasons) than the author himself realizes.
3. Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail. An excellent book, based on a blockbuster combination of writer and topic.
4. Jean-Christopher Valtat, Aurorarama. Think French steam punk, Inuit characters, a strange dark ship hovering over an ice-locked retro-futuristic town, and a plot which might have come from an incoherent Japanese anime movie. So far I like it and it's also my favorite book cover in some time:
There were other books which I put down quickly or not quickly enough. I'm also reading more Thomas Bernhard, never a mistake.
Where in the federal government do the economists work?
There has been so much talk lately about ethics and economists and now there is a whole new book out it, the new and useful The Economist's Oath: On the Need for and Content of Professional Economic Ethics, by George F. DeMartino. I was intrigued and surprised by the p.24 chart about where economists (as defined by title, not Ph.d.) work in the federal government, not counting the Federal Reserve System.
1. Department of Labor, 1262 economists, 30.5 percent of the total, 1208 of those are at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
2. Agriculture, 533 economists
3. Treasury, 473
4. Commerce, 462
5. Defense, 225
6. Energy, 168
7. EPA, 163 (is that enough?)
8. HHS, 137
9. Transportation, 88
10. Interior, 86
11. FTC, 74
12. HUD, 62
13. Justice, 61
14. FDIC, 61 (do bank examiners produce the real value there?)
15. All others, 275. The total is 4130 economists in the Federal government, as of 2008, and I believe those numbers are not counting consultants.
Should we make them swear an oath not to act against the truths of their discipline for political gain?
*The Return*
The author is Daniel Treisman and the subtitle is Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev. Is this the first non-fiction book to be making my "Best of 2011" list? Most of all, it argues persuasively that, rather than botching the transition away from communism, the Russians/Soviets did a remarkably good job, relative to what could have been expected. It's also the best all-round book-length treatment of what the subtitle indicates and it is readable as well. Excerpt:
But [under Putin] did the bureaucracy become more effective and the population safer? The state certainly grew. In Putin's eight years as president, about 363,000 additional bureaucrats were hired, mostly federal agents stationed in the regions. Law enforcement mushroomed. In the United States, there are two judges and prosecutorial employees per 10,000 residents. When Putin took over, Russia had eight; when he left, it had fourteen. Federal spending on law enforcement and national security rose from $4 billion in 1998 to $26 billion in 2007.
Despite this influx of resources, most indicators suggest the state became less, not more, effective. It built less housing, paved fewer roads, and laid fewer water mains and gas lines per year than under Yeltsin. The number of public schools and buses in service fell faster than before. Reforms of the education and health systems were repeatedly postponed…As for keeping citizens safe, few saw any improvement.
Here is a recent review of the book from the WSJ; I liked the book more than he did.
I Chose Liberty
I Chose Liberty, a collection of short intellectual biographies of contemporary libertarians edited by Walter Block, is quite entertaining. Richard Epstein, Gordon Tullock, Judge Napolitano, John Hasnas, Ron Paul, Bryan Caplan, myself and many others are included.
Need I tell you whose biography begins:
When I was about thirteen, I decided I wanted to read all of the good books in the public library. I started with the Dialogues of Plato…
You can buy it here or here is the free pdf.
Hat tip: Bryan Caplan.
*FIxing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control*
For centuries, farmers in Austria shot consecrated guns at storms in attempts to dispel them. Some guns were loaded with nails, ostensibly to kill the witches riding in the clouds; others were fired with powder alone through open empty barrels to make a great noise — perhaps, some said, to disrupt the electrical balance of the storm. In 1896, Albert Stiger, a vine rower in southeastern Austria and burgomaster of Windisch-Feistritz, revived the ancient tradition of hagelschiessen (hail shooting) — basically declaring "war on the clouds" by firing cannon when storms threatened. Faced with mounting losses from summer hailstorms that threatened his grapes, he attempted to disrupt, with mortar fire, the "calm before the storm," or what he observed as a strange stillness in the air moments before the onset of heavy summer precipitation.
That is from the new and quite good book by James Rodger Fleming. If you are wondering, Windisch-Feistritz is now in Slovenia and it is known as Slovenska Bistrica. It looks like this.