Category: Books
Ralph Waldo Emerson on books
From his Notebooks, (the best Emerson to read, in my view) circa 1841:
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over & actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages. Even the great books. “Come,” say they, “we will give you the key to the world” — Each poet each philosopher says this, & we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre, but the thunder is a superficial phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the Sage — whether Confucius, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates; striking at right angles to the globe his force is instantly diffused laterally & enters not. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. I have found this to be the case with every book I have read & yet I take up a new writer with a sort of pulse beat of expectation.
Jeff Madrick’s *Age of Greed*
Here is my review, along with Diane Coyle’s review of Tim Harford, and here is an excerpt (from the most negative part of my review):
…I found numerous points to object to. The chapter is titled “Milton Friedman, Proselytizer,” and there is a good deal of (fascinating) information about Friedman’s early years as a “fanatically religious” Jew. One is left with a picture of Friedman as a rather clever but irresponsible simplifier and dogmatist. There is not a comparable discussion of Friedman’s role in insisting on good empirical work and the testing and falsifiability of economics propositions, his building of the University of Chicago department with first-rate scholars and future Nobel laureates, and the numerous times he changed his mind on economic issues, including on monetary theory and policy. Friedman was much more a scientist and a skeptic than this essay lets on.
There are also particular errors and omissions. The discussion of Friedman’s desire to eliminate social programs does not mention that he wanted to replace them with a guaranteed annual income. It is wrong to claim that “the instability of velocity is what finally undid monetarism in the 1980s” when volatile interest rates were a much bigger problem, and in open economies such as Switzerland the exchange rate became the issue (monetary velocity moves in strange ways but it does so slowly). Few economists would agree with Madrick’s claim that “Friedman and Schwartz . . . made little advance over what was already known” or that their Monetary History had little empirical basis. Contrary to Madrick’s view, it is now widely accepted that inflation—or at least ongoing inflation, as Friedman made clear—is always a monetary phenomenon. These aren’t mere accidental oversights; they contribute to a systematic downgrading of Friedman’s legacy of scholarly depth and impact.
Surprising Beach Reading
When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. “I’m also an Art Laffer fiend—we’re very close,” she adds. “And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises,” getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like “Human Action” and “Bureaucracy.” “When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises.”
So who said it? I was surprised.
Bryan Caplan vs. Amy Chua debate
Here I am, sitting on a bench in downtown Budapest, reading the Guardian, when on p.20 I see a published debate between Bryan Caplan and Amy Chua. If I have one wish, it is that Chua would put her anecdotal points in the form of a statistical argument. Which assumption behind the twin adoption studies is she rejecting? Or where are those studies engaged in too much aggregation? I suspect she will never tell us. Coming back to the hotel room, I now find Bryan’s commentary on the debate. The two have very different senses of humor, and I bet she wouldn’t think that Bryan’s jokes are funny either.
The new preface from TGS
It is added to the print version and is available on-line from Reuters, to coincide with the publication of the physical book, which is now in stores. Excerpt:
The original publication of The Great Stagnation was in eBook form only, and I meant for that to reflect an argument of the book itself: The contemporary world has plenty of innovations, but most of them do not benefit the average household. After all, the average household does not own an eReader. It’s not even clear whether the average household buys and reads books. So I viewed the exclusive electronic publication, somewhat impishly, as an act of self-reference to the underlying problem itself. It was therefore a bit amusing when some critics suggested that the new medium of the eBook itself refuted the book’s stagnation theory—quite the contrary.
*Unified Growth Theory*, by Oded Galor
In one scenario, the Neolithic revolution comes earlier to some areas than others; those areas then receive their gains in the form of higher population rather than higher wages, for Malthusian reasons. Under some conditions, some of those regions manage slightly positive per capita income growth for extended periods of time (it is on this question that I find the argument both haziest and most parasitic on other theories; toward the end of the book the stress is on whether an economy has had prior selection for “quality” individuals). That can lower their birth rates, which allows for a take-off out of Malthusian constraints. There may be further positive selection for pro-economic growth humans, which compounds and extends growth.
That is not the entire unified theory but it does offer a flavor of which kinds of mechanisms do the work. There isn’t much talk of government policies, coal, or liberal ideology, although every now and then incentives and intellectual property rights appear on a list of factors relevant for growth.
The book has many equations, right in the text, but the main arguments are explained clearly with words.
I would have found it valuable if the author would have asked a concrete question: “Could the Industrial Revolution have come to Song China (Rome, Baghdad, etc.)?” and told us in terms of the parameters of his theory why or why not. I am never sure what stance he is taking on the degree of contingency in observed outcomes.
It is argued that Africa has too much genetic diversity, Native American populations too little. This seems question-begging, and I wonder if the African populations which actually came into contact with each other on a regular basis, pre-imperialism, had so much genetic diversity.
The most valuable part of the book is the extended discussion of how “time since the Neolithic Revolution” matters and how subtle and indirect the indirect mechanisms of connection can be. I consider those discussions to be a major contribution.
It’s certainly an interesting work, but most of the evidence offered is supporting the more general parts of the argument, not the more controversial or novel parts. Galor is very smart, and anyone interested in economic growth should read this book, but I would not describe myself as a convert to either the conclusions or the overall method.
Here is my previous post on the book.
My TEDx talk on The Great Stagnation
You will find it here.
And tomorrow the physical version of the book is available from Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com, and in book stores.
*Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory*
Patrick Wilcken is the author of this excellent book, excerpt:
Lévi-Strauss began work in the autumn at the New School for Social Research, his name chopped down to Claude L. Strauss, to distinguish himself from the jeans. “The students would find it funny,” he was told by way of explanation. The confusion would plague him throughout his life. “Hardly a year goes by without my receiving, usually from Africa, an order for a pair of jeans,” he told Didier Eribon in the 1980s — though, with fame, Lévi-Strauss found he could almost hold his own. When he gave his name while queuing for a restaurant in San Francisco in the 1980s, the waiter shot back, “The pants or the books?”
Definitely recommended, read the Amazon reviews at the link.
*Pox: An American History*, by Michael Willrich
The Medical Department’s vaccination program had carried vaccination to the people on an unprecedented scale. According to Hoff, the vaccinators had performed nearly 860,000 operations (742,062 vaccinations and 116,955 revaccinations) in a period of five months. And the vaccine produced at Coamo Springs was, by contemporary standards, good, with a reported success rate of 87.5 percent. Colonial administrators always kept the bottom line in view. Hoff noted with satisfaction that the entire vaccination campaign had cost only $43,000.
By the end of June, the “head-fire of vaccination” had stopped variola [smallpox] in its tracks. In the decade before the arrival of the U.S. Army, the annual death rate from the disease had averaged 620 people. From January 1 to April 30, 1900, not a single death from smallpox was reported.
This was done under a form of martial law. The Philippines, under colonial control, was another early example of a largely successful public health program: “Americanized Manila stood as a model of the healthful city.” Who would have thought?
It’s an interesting book.
Not the most controversial paragraph in the book
For, at least, one could say of Hitler and his assassins, that they enjoyed their anti-Semitism. But the Left proceeds, from day to day, in a sort of sad, wistful fury at all the things of life not recognized in its cosmogony.
That is from David Mamet’s new The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture.
Questions that are rarely asked
To Oded Galor:
As the father of unified growth theory, what does it mean to have a single theory that accounts for the entire growth process since the dawn of civilization?
The answer and full interview is here, concerning Galor’s new book Unified Growth Theory. Here is an earlier interview with Oded Galor.
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, is a hallucinatory BBC documentary that hyperwarps across continents and through time to draw shadowy connections between Ayn Rand, Silicon Valley, the “rise of the machines”, anarchism, the financial crisis and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Need, I add and much more!?) Incongruous images and a surreal soundtrack give it a Lynchian feel. Not your usual documentary. Evaluated as a whole, it’s madness but delicious madness. Here is the first episode.
http://youtu.be/Uz2j3BhL47c
FYI, especially interesting in the first episode is Loren Carpenter’s Pong experiment. You can read more about that here.
Am I in a Dutch novel?
Erik Voeten, who blogs at the excellent Monkey Cage, writes to me:
I recently read a novel by a well-known Dutch author (well-known in the Netherlands that is) called Arnon Grunberg. The novel is about a Dutchman who leaves his family and fiancee to teach economics at GMU. In the novel, one of the characters is a GMU professor called Elliot Hegel (no relative) who is “an economist with broad interests who also maintains a blog on which he writes about economics and culinary affairs. His hobby is Chinese food.”
Hegel is not a major character, perhaps his major act is to force the Dutch professor to eat pig ears, but I thought you would nonetheless be amused. The novel is called “Huid en haar.” I don’t think this one has been translated, although some of his earlier books were. Here is the NYT review of his debut novel: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/02/books/sex-drugs-and-slivovitz.html?src=pm
What I’ve been putting down
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, by David Abulafia.
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, by Robert Bellah.
These are very good books for large classes of readers, just not for me. They have garnered, or will be garnering, stellar reviews. The former, for my taste, covers too many eras, has too much detail on matters I don’t care about, and ultimately chooses the wrong organizing principle for its material. The Economist, however, loved it. The latter has too much general material and doesn’t get to the cutting edge points in a sufficiently ruthless manner. For many people, though, it may be the best introduction to the general area.
By the way, I just pre-ordered Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, which looks to be an important book.
Sentences to ponder
Despite the length of On What Matters, we glean little of its author’s view on what really does matter.
That’s Peter Singer reviewing the new Derek Parfit, in the new TLS, never to come on-line. In fact what really matters is that the books are finally coming out! Singer claims, probably with justification, that the two-volume set will prove the most important works on ethics since Sidgwick in 1873.