Category: Books

*The Order of Public Reason*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title, the author is Gerald Gaus of U. Arizona, and the subtitle is A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World.  This is a big and ambitious work, broadly in the liberaltarian tradition, mixing Rawls and Hayek, pondering the implications of disagreement, and experimenting with the idea that morality itself has a coercive element.  It is Gaus's attempt to lay out the proper foundations for a liberal society and he summarizes the hard-to-summarize book a bit here.

Also new on the market is Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs.  I like the title and I like most of his previous books, but I am not finding this one rewarding to read.  Here is one previous debate on related material.

Sentences to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the comments:

You do not need a Kindle device to read Kindle eBooks. You can download from Amazon and read on your PC, iPhone, Blackberry or iPad.

Another MR reader wrote:

free kindle for PC here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000426311&tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=6737383737&ref=pd_sl_92i9zans8g_b

You also can get an eReader here: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781101502242,00.html

And I am told that some foreign editions (including Canada!) will be ready soon.  I will keep you posted.

Matt Yglesias reviews *The Great Stagnation*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Tyler Cowen’s new ebook How The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better is a bravura performance by one of the most interesting thinkers out there. I also think it’s a great innovation in current affairs publishing–much shorter and cheaper than a conventional book in a way that actually leaves you wanting to read more once you finish it. My guess is that this is the future of books.

Here is much more, and again the book is here.  Here is coverage from Arnold Kling, though I think he (like some MR commentators) is spending too much time on impressions and not considering (at all) the numbers presented in chapter one.

We are now on Facebook

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is correct, the Cowen-Tabarrok text, Modern Principles.  It is a steady stream of resources for using the text, and learning and teaching economics more generally, updated on a very regular basis, organized using the wonders of Facebook.

Don't forget to click the "Like" button. 

http://www.facebook.com/ModernPrinciples

Thank you Mark Zuckerberg!  I rooted for you in the movie too.

Reihan Salam reviews *The Great Stagnation*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Excerpt:

I'm wary of summarizing the book — I really want you to read it for yourself — but the basic idea is very straightforward: Americans have grown accustomed to painless, automatic increases in prosperity. This is true of Americans on the right, who believe that painless tax cuts will deliver prosperity, and Americans on the left, who believe that above-market wages and more public investment funded by painless tax increases on the rich will deliver prosperity. Tyler convincingly argues that we've run out of this "low-hanging fruit."

In 1920, the marginal college student was fully capable of profiting from a rigorous college education. In 2011, the marginal college student is perhaps less capable, due to a confluence of factors. Some believe that credit constraints are the driver of an increase in dropout rates. Others, myself included, believe that traditional college instruction isn't necessarily right for, say, 80 percent of the population, and that the rigidity that defines an education sector that is tightly regulated and fueled by third-party public dollars doesn't lend itself to the kind of specialization that would yield big productivity increases. This is a subject of particular interest to me.

…Many thanks to Tyler for writing a really terrific provocation.

There is much more, including some very good points on commuting.

In praise of picture books

by  Tyler Cowen in

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?

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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*

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Alex Tabarrok in

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*

by  Tyler Cowen in

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.