Category: Books
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.
*Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis*
That is the new book by Paul W. Glimcher, of NYU, Center for Neuroeconomics. This book is especially strong on how valuation takes place in the mind. At times the book feels as if one has stepped into an alternate universe, in which the subjectivist Mengerian Austrians are now doing neuroeconomics instead…
Economics and Michel Foucault
Joshua Miller, a loyal MR reader, asks:
Another cut on local knowledge: what is economics' relationship to Michel Foucault? Often I see folks like you and Hanson making points that the rest of the social sciences and humanities would call Foucauldian, about the role of disciplinary power in knowledge-production, but you don't seem to ever reference or perhaps even read him. Perhaps he is simply not considered very interesting? Given the fact that there is some history of economics in his "Les Mots and les choses," I'd think there'd be more of an attempt to discredit or claim him.
Foucault is interesting, but use him with caution. Most of his books have not held up very well as history, even if he succeeded in drawing people's attention to some neglected factors. On top of that, his theoretical framework is incoherent. Try reading The Archaeology of Knowledge. I find The Order of Things to be an insightful but skewed account of the seventeenth century; detailed objections aside, it goes astray by assuming, implicitly, explicitly or otherwise, that structural categories somehow interact with each other in the world of ideas. It's much more micro and disaggregated than he lets on, but still I am glad I read the book. This volume is a good, readable introduction to his work.
Perhaps Foucault is best on prisons and hospitals, though again caveat emptor on the history. His most valuable insight, both theoretically and historically, is that what appears to be "enlightenment" (or for that matter "Enlightenment") is often anything but.
Foucault is important, and he deserves to be read, but I am not sure he will be much read fifty years from now. I also view "engaging with him" as a much overdone and much overrated exercise, carried in large part by the less salubrious tendencies in Continental and U.S. humanities scholarly discourse. It is better to simply work on the topics he cared about, using his books as a reminder to consider some different angles.
Did you know that Foucault — at least the late Foucault — appreciated Mises, Hayek, and Friedman?
*Progress for the Poor*
That is the new, "Kindle singles-length" book by Lane Kenworthy, who writes the blog Consider the Evidence. It is about how the poor are making, or not making, progress, and also how the poor could make better progress. I especially liked the chapter on how the quality of government expenditure can help alleviate the consequences of poverty. It is due out in 2011, from Oxford University Press, so why are there still no links for the book, Amazon or otherwise? In any case, recommended.
Here is a related paper. Here is Kenworthy on Bill Simmons.
The 19th century was truly bad for Mexico and for Mexicans
From an international perspective, Mexicans' height in the mid-eighteenth century was "not too short"…The declining trend over the second half of the eighteenth century was nothin exceptional in international perspective either. The early nineteenth century, however, was a watershed as the trends diverged: height recovered or stagnated in France, Spain, and other countries, but it continued to decline in Mexico: by the 1830s, Mexicans had finally become "too short." …I have proposed that population growth, and more frequent El Niño events, and real grain prices reduced the availability of food and had a likely detrimental effect on living standards.
That is from an essay by AmÃlcar Challú, from the new and excellent book Living Standards in Latin American History: Height, Welfare, and Development, 1750-2000, edited by Ricardo D. Salvadore, John H. Coatsworth, and AmÃlcar Challú.
*The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do*
That's Eduardo Porter's new book, a behavioral economics treatment of how prices are set. Recommended. I'll be at the book party tonight, look for me if you'll be there too.