Category: Books

Preface to the Students

Here is the preface to the students from Modern Principles:Microeconomics, just now out. 

We love economics. We talk economics, argue economics, and think about economics every day. We use economics in our lives, not just when we choose whether or not to refinance our mortgage but also when we choose strategies for dating, keeping a good marriage, and parenting. Yeah, we are weird. But now a warning. If you are afraid of being a little weird, Do Not Read This Book. Once you have been exposed to the economic way of thinking there is no going back — you will see the world differently and that will make you different.

Will what you learn be worth the price? That is for you to decide. But we think economics is important. We need economics to make better investments and better life choices. Citizens in a democracy must evaluate issues of taxes, deficits, trade, health care policy and inflation. These issues and many more cannot be understood without an understanding of economics. Do you want to vote ignorantly or intelligently? The economic way of thinking will help you to understand the issues of the day and to explain them with confidence to others.

We won’t lie: economics can be difficult. Few things worth knowing come easily and to understand economics well you will need to master new tools and new ideas like supply and demand curves, marginal thinking, and equilibrium. We have worked hard, however, to strip away as much jargon and unnecessary verbiage as possible. We are going to give you what is important and not much else. We are also going to have fun.

Welcome to the world of economics.

Tyler and Alex

Not in my department

[Ernest] Rutherford was outgoing, down to earth, given to volcanic temper tantrums and dismissive of grandoise theorising.  "Don't let me catch anyone talking about the universe in my department," he growled.

That is from Graham Farmelow's excellent new book The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Physicist.  This isbook  one of my two must-read biographies of this year, the other being the book on Garcia Marquez.

What I’ve been reading

1. Ulysses and Us: The Art and Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece, by Declan Kiberd.  He argues that Ulysses is a fun book, a popular fiction, and easy to read.  I won't give away my copy to anyone, which you can take as an endorsement.

2. David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries.  The former member of Talking Heads, and compiler of Brazil Classics 1, bicycles through ten cities and reports on them.  Most of the pages have something interesting.

3. Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel.  I found this a difficult book to get a grip on.  To my eye, most of the pages were a kind of empty.  Can you explain to me what made this book good?  The first page has a sentence like: "Any sadness I might have felt, any suspicion that happiness or understanding was unattainable, seemed to find ready encouragement in the sodden dark-red brick buildings and low skies tinged orange by the city's streetlights."  That's not, to my ear, an ugly sentence, but what's in it?

4. The Thirty Years' War, by Peter H. Wilson.  I read about one-third of this lengthy and clearly written Belknap Press book.  After a while I realized I was learning what the War wasn't (not the beginning of religious toleration, not the beginning of the modern nation-state, etc.), but not what the War was.  I guess I'll never know.

5. Danube, by Claudio Magris.  Now this is a splendid travel book.

I'm also enjoying A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which has beautiful language and creates its own world; still, I can't find the thread of the plot at p.100.  And the new Pamuk (which I'm still reading, very slowly) remains sublime and it is becoming one of my favorites.

The Argentine national identity

Yet, unlike the Italian, the Spanish settler transition was incomplete.  Indeed, counterintuitively, the Spanish "actually assimilated to the new land more slowly and more reluctantly than did the "alien" Italians", who were not quick.  The Spanish rate of return was lower than the Italian, but still high at 46 percent by 1930, and in-marriage and voluntary segregation was high in both groups.  Above all, both Spanish and Italian immigrants avoided Argentine citizenship like the plague.  Fewer than 4 per cent of Spanish took citizenship, and the Italian rate was below 2 per cent.  Immigrants received most legal rights without citizenship, with the important exception of voting in national elections.  Aliens were also not liable for military service.  There was therefore "no incentive to become a citizen", and a considerable disincentive.  Nativist fears among the lower classes, and the fear of political competition among the elite, led Argentines to accept this situation.  Immigrants dominated the Argentine lower middle classes…The incomplete settler transition therefore meant that booming Argentina's middle class was much less committed to it, much less politically powerful, and much more prone to send or take its money home, than in the Anglo newlands.  The power and novelty of Spanish settler transitions helps explain Argentina's relative success to the 1920s.  But the incomplete nature of the settler transition also helps explain Argentina's relative failure from the 1920s.

That is from James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783-1939.

*Replenishing the Earth*, by James Belich

How is this for a real estate bubble?

At peak in 1888, over 80 per cent of Victorian private investment went into Melbourne buildings.  Expenditure on housing was even greater than that on rail, and many houses were built without people to live in them, or without jobs for those who did.

In the 1890s Melbourne was an impressive place.  With 500,000 people, it was eighty percent bigger than San Francisco and nine hundred percent bigger than Los Angeles.  Three hundred trains a day serviced the suburbs.  The city had three hundred buildings with elevators and Melbourne was reputed to have more large public buildings than any British city outside of London.  There were plans to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower.

That is all from James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939.  I'll discuss this book more soon, but I'll tip my hand and say it is one of the very best non-fiction books of the year.  Imagine Jared Diamond or Greg Clark (albeit more measured, in each case) but applied to the settlement of the colonies rather than to Europe itself.  This book also has perhaps the best explanation as to why the Argentina growth miracle fell apart.

*Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations*, by Paul Blustein

The subtitle is Clashing Egos, Inflated Ambitions, and the Great Shambles of the World Trade System and the author is Paul Blustein.

I've enjoyed Blustein's books in the past and this one covers the WTO.  It has interesting portraits of Dani Rodrik, Bob Zoellick, Pascal Lamy and others.  Maybe I was in too analytic a mood when I read this book but still I recommend it; there's not nearly enough on the topic, even if I might have wanted something more wonkish on this topic.  I would have liked more discussion as to whether the WTO matters at all (the Andrew Rose debate), or whether some countries should simply stay out for as long as possible, or a public choice take on how unbiased (or not) the whole thing really is.  To be sure all these issues pop up, but I'd like to see Doug Irwin write this book too.

*Mathletics*

The subtitle is How Gamblers, Managers, and Sports Enthusiasts Use Mathematics in Baseball, Basketball, and Football and the author is Wayne L. Winston.

I read only the sections on the NBA.  He proposes a four-factor model to evaluate teams: Effective Field Goal Percentage, Turnovers per Possession, Offensive Rebounding Percentage, and Free Throw Rate, or how often a team gets to the line.  He claims you can raise your PER by taking lots of bad shots and for that reason PER isn't a great measure.  Kevin Garnett was an underrated player.  Playing four games in five nights hurts you by an average of four points.  The raw data, unadjusted for the Lucas Critique, indicate that when you are up by three points, and there are less than seven seconds left, you should not foul the other team.

Some people will enjoy this book.  Baseball receives the most attention.  Each chapter simply ends and the author moves on to another topic without any overarching narrative other than the statistical method itself.

Here is some of his blogging.

*American Homicide* ($40, even though the release date is listed as 10/15)

This book has many good and quotable bits, for instance:

Anglos continued to kill Hispanics at a fairly high rate in the 1880s and 1890s.  Hispanics were five times more likely than the Chinese to be killed in interracial homicides.  They held a wider range of jobs than the Chinese did, moved more freely in society, and enjoyed full civil rights if they were citizens, so they came into contact with Anglos more often and posed a greater threat to them.  They also responded in kind to Anglo aggression, killing Anglos at eight times the rate the Chinese did.  But the Hispanic community, unlike the Chinese community, was becoming less homicidal.

That is from Randolph Roth's new and notable American Homicide (no subtitle, yay!).  Here is a PW summary:

[Roth] distills his argument into several key statistics, all of which hinge upon the fact that Americans are murdered more frequently than citizens in any other first world democracy: U.S. homicide rates are between six and nine per 100,000 people. Roth refutes popular theories about why this is so (e.g., poverty, drugs) and lays out an alternate hypothesis: "increases in homicide rates" correlate with changes in people's feelings about government and society, such as whether they trust government and its officials and their sense of kinship with fellow citizens.

The demons think this is an important book and the genetic influences on my behavior do not appear to contradict that assessment.  I found this bit interesting:

…although the FBI data are incomplete, there appears to have been a steady decline in spousal homicide in recent decades, from roughly 1.5 per 100,000 adults per year to 0.5 per 100,000.

This book is a treasure trove of historical nuggets, data, and clear writing.  It's the single best source on early murder rates in the American republic.  It's especially interesting on how the South evolved to be the most murderous region of the United States.  "There's just a whole lot of people there who need killin'," I recall one man (in another book) opining about Texas and its high murder rate.

Book trade fact of the day

According to his publisher, Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown’s latest book, The Lost Symbol,
sold more copies in its first 36 hours than any other adult hardback
sold in total. (A certain boy wizard is excluded by the artful
qualifier, “adult”.)

That is for the UK I believe (the U.S. book market is in fact less intelligent), where some copies of the book have been selling for less than five pounds.

In case you were wondering: free review copies

The regulators have spoken and they require disclosure.  I would guess that about one fifth of the books reviewed here are advance review copies which I did not pay for.  They were sent to me for free, by demons who wish to addict me.  If am reviewing a book before its publication date, it is almost certainly an advance review copy, sent to me for free.

If I am reviewing a book past its release date, it is only rarely a free review copy. Very often I visit the free public library and walk away with ten or twelve books in my arms.  Just this week I ordered two new books for $40 a piece and I would not have bought them otherwise, but for my desire to please MR readers with my timely reviews (which are forthcoming). 

I hardly ever receive works of fiction.  I am never sent toys or given free trips to Disneyland.

It is reported:

For bloggers, the FTC stopped short of specifying how they must
disclose conflicts of interest. Rich Cleland, assistant director of the
FTC's advertising practices division, said the disclosure must be
''clear and conspicuous,'' no matter what form it will take.

Beware!  You have been warned in a clear and conspicuous manner that the demons control me and I do not in turn control the demons.

Addendum: You might wish to read Tyrone on free will.  The real scandal is that we (possibly) live in a frozen four-dimensional space-time block and that the content of my reviews has been fully determined by the initial conditions of the universe. 

Markets in everything, philosophers’ edition

Essays on Derek Parfit's On What Matters, edited by Juissi Suikkanen and John Cottingham.  This book is due out shortly in late October.

The Amazon description reads, aptly:

In Essays on Derek Parfit's On What Matters, seven leading moral philosophers offer critical evaluations of the central ideas presented in a greatly anticipated new work by world-renowned moral philosopher Derek Parfit.

An Amazon.com search, or for that matter a Google search, reveals no pending release date for On What Matters.  Perhaps the editors have dabbled in the Newcomb problem?  Or have they simply read too much David Lewis?

For the pointer I thank Alex T., a loyal MR blogger.

Economic development and mental illness

Subsequent studies have confirmed that patients in the developing world are much more likely to recover from severe mental illness than patients in the richer countries, well served by psychiatrists and clinical psychologists.

That is from Richard P. Bentall's Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Any Good?  You can think of this book as an updated, more traditionally empirical, less polemic version of Thomas Szasz.  It makes large claims which are difficult to evaluate.  Ultimately I don't find that it offers a persuasive alternative framework for thinking about either mental illness or "mental illness."  Nonetheless the book is stimulating, it relies on substantive argument, and it will induce skepticism about a lot of what passes for treatment these days.  Here is one review of the book, here is another.

*The Fight for Fairfax*

That's a new book by Russ Banham and the subtitle is A Struggle for a Great American County.  It is published by George Mason University Press.  Excerpt:

Among the incorporated towns was Falls Church, which claimed 1,100 citizens and an excellent connection to Washington, D.C., via the Washington, Arlington, and Falls Church Electric Railway.  Electric trolley lines also connected commuters from the towns of Fairfax, Herndon, Vienna, and Clifton to the District.

That was in 1907.  Does anyone know how fast these electric trolleys were?  This source suggests speeds were up to 20 mph.  Is it possible that a mass transit trip from Fairfax or Clifton to DC was quicker in 1907 than today?  With stops, how fast does a bus go at 8:30 a.m.?