Category: Books
*Pakistan: A Hard Country*
That is the new and excellent book by Anatol Lieven, and there is now more reason than ever to read it. Here are a few things I learned from the book:
1. For most of the years since 1947, Pakistan has had higher economic growth rates than did India. Pakistan does not have the same pockets of extreme poverty, or for that matter the extreme wealth. The level of economic equality in Pakistan is relatively high.
2. Charitable donations run almost five percent of gdp, one of the highest percentages in the world and this reflects the emphasis on alms-giving in Islam.
3. A good quotation from a businessmen: “One of the main problems for Pakistan is that our democrats have tried to be dictators and our dictators have tried to be democrats.”
4. Agriculture pays virtually no tax and the government lends lots of money to businesses and doesn’t seriously ask for it back. As a result Pakistan collects far less revenue than does India, even comparing areas of comparable per capita income. If Pakistan were a state of India, it still would be considerably richer per capita than India’s poorest regions, such as Bihar.
5. The Pakistani state is nonetheless a lot more stable than most people think. In part this is because of the conservative structure of kinship and landholder power in the country.
6. The main threats to the future of Pakistan have to do with ecology and water, not politics.
7. The end of the book has a very interesting discussion about how U.S. actions in Pakistan affect different coalitions, feelings of humiliation, relative status relationships, etc.
Definitely recommended, as are Lieven’s books on the Baltics and Ukraine.
The Lost Eden of Childhood. Not Lost. Not Eden.
Jim Manzi warms to Paul Krugman’s nostalgia:
It’s difficult to convey the almost unbearable sweetness of this kind of American childhood to anybody who didn’t live it. The safety and freedom that Krugman describe are rare now even for the wealthiest Americans – by age 9, I would typically leave the house on a Saturday morning on my bike, tell my parents I was “going out to play,” and not return until dinner; at age 10, would go down to the ocean to swim with friends without supervision all day; and at age 11 would play flashlight tag across dozens of yards for hours after dark. And the sense of equality was real, too. Some people definitely had bigger houses and more things than others, but our lives were remarkably similar. We all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows. The idea of having, or being, “help” seemed like something from old movies about another time.
Who doesn’t look upon their childhood with wistfulness for what has been lost? Exile from Eden is one of the oldest stories on record. But don’t mistake personal narrative for reality. When Manzi says “we all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows.” He isn’t talking about African Americans. And was the idea of having or being help, really “from a different time”? Again, not for African Americans. In 1950 more than 40% of African American women in the labor force were domestic servants. (Moreover, given these numbers a back of the envelope calculation suggests proportionately fewer homes with maids today.) See also Megan McArdle on Manzi’s vision and women staying at home.
Growing up in Northern Virginia, my children experience far more ethnic, cultural, racial and sexual diversity and equality than just about any child growing up outside of a commune did in the 1950s and 1960s.
Has childhood freedom been lost? No. Childhood freedom hasn’t been “lost,” it has been taken away by parents. As a child, I too was free to play in the woods but then again my parents didn’t buckle me up in the car, either.
Has safety decreased? It is true that one of the most horrible things we can imagine, homicide, is up. For kids aged 5-14 homicide mortality went from 0.5 per 100,000 in 1950 to 0.8 per 100,000 in 2005. Overall, however, kids are much safer today than in the 1950s. Accident mortality, for example, is down from 22.7 per 100,000 in 1950 to 6.2 per 100,000 in 2005 (see Caplan’s Selfish Reasons for more details). Maybe buckling up and ocean supervision isn’t so bad. Maybe parents today worry too much. Probably some of both.
There have been big improvements in accident risk since even my childhood years. I remember those idyllic summers of the 1970s earning a few extra dollars mowing lawns–80,000 amputated fingers, hands and mangled toes and feet every year back then and just 6,000 today. Would I even let me kid use a mower from the 1970s? Disease mortality is also way down, from 36.6 per 100,000 in 1950 to 8.6 per 100,000 in 2005. For good or for ill, parental fears have increased even as risks overall have fallen.
There is nothing wrong with a bit of personal nostalgia but when nostalgia is taken for reality it biases our thinking in counter-productive ways. One wonders, for example, what those who look back longingly at the freedom of their childhood would say about Lenore Skenazy and her free-range kids. Skenazy let her fourth-grader take the NYC subway home alone. Would Manzi applaud Skenazy for giving her kids the same freedoms he had? Or would he denounce her, as many parents did, for something tantamount to child-abuse?
Tim Harford’s *Adapt*
Tim is probably the single best economist to follow on Twitter, arguably today’s best active popular economics writer, and now I have in my hands his new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. Self-recommending! (If page one is good, should I worry about the rest of the book?)
Chopin’s piano sonata #2, a continuing series
…plans at the University of Denver to permanently move four-fifths of the Penrose Library’s holdings to an off-campus storage facility and renovate the building into an “Academic Commons,” with more seating, group space, and technological capacity, could make the university a flashpoint in the debate about whether the traditional function of storing books needs to happen on campus.
Here is more.
*Compassion, by the Pound*
That is the new book by F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk, and the subtitle is The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare. A few facts:
1. From survey evidence, “Food prices” get an “importance score” of %5.06, while “Well-being of farm animals” gets an importance score of %4.15 (p.192). That’s almost on a par.
2. Fifty-five percent of Americans believe that housing chickens in cages is not humane (p.344).
3. The market share of cage-free eggs has never exceeded two percent (p.261).
I am delighted to see this book out. This is one of the most shamefully neglected topics in all of economics. Let’s hope it receives the attention it deserves.
*A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth*
In his masterpiece, Alexander J. Field writes:
This book is built around a novel claim: potential output grew dramatically across the Depression years (1929-1941), and this advance provided the foundation for the economic and military success of the United States during the Second World War, as well as for what Walt Rostow (1960) called “the age of high mass consumption” that followed. This view, if accepted, leads to important revisions in our understanding of the sources and trajectory of economic growth to the second quarter of the century and, more broadly, over the longer sweep of U.S. economic history since the Civil War.
…Although the Second World War provided a massive fiscal and monetary boost that eliminated the remnants of Depression-era unemployment, it was, on balance, disruptive of the forward pace of technological progress in the private sector.
During 1929-1941, the annual total factor productivity (measure of economic progress due to new ideas) increase in the trucking sector was 12.61 (!) and for airline transport it was 14.45 (!).
This is a) one of the best economics books of the last ten years, b) one of the best books on the Depression era, c) the only economic interpretation of WWII which makes sense, and is supported by the numbers, and d) one of the must-reads of the year.
Here is an interview with Field. You can buy the book here.
*How To Live*
The author is Sarah Bakewell and the subtitle is Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. This book truly brings Montaigne to life — a task I would have thought impossible in a popular publication. I view Montaigne as one of the most important writers and thinkers and perhaps the single most important for anyone in the blogosphere. I had not known, by the way, that Montaigne was mayor of Bordeaux for four years.
Here is Tim Harford on why we are all too sure of ourselves.
For the pointer to the book I thank the excellent Christopher Weber, Citizen of the World.
*Levant* (Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut)
That is the new and excellent book by Philip Mansel and the subtitle is Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, excerpt:
The Beirut dilemma goes to the heart of the Levant. At certain times — Smyrna in the nineteenth century, Alexandria and Beirut for periods of the twentieth — Levantine cities could find the elixir of coexistence, putting deals before ideals, the needs of the city before the demands of nationalism. Like all cities, however, Levantine cities needed an armed force for protection. This could be provided by the Ottoman, British or French armies, but not by the cities’ own citizens, since they were unwilling to shoot co-religionists. No Levantine city produced an effective police force or national guard of its own. The very qualities that gave these cities their energy — freedom and diversity — also threatened their existence. No army, no city.
*Treasure Islands*
The author is Nicholas Shaxson and the subtitle is Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, excerpt:
The Cayman Islands is the world’s fifty largest financial center, hosting eighty thousand registered companies, over three quarters of the world’s hedge funds, and $1.9 trillion on deposit — four times as much as in all the banks in New York City. And it has, at the time of writing, one cinema.
Chris F. Masse draws my attention to this forthcoming documentary on a whistleblower for financial and tax havens. You will find reviews of the book here. I found the quality patchy, but nonetheless it was a useful critique. There is also a direct engagement with the pro-offshore arguments associated with Dan Mitchell (video). As the fiscal crunch proceeds, these issues will move increasingly into the public eye.
By the way, on Bitcoin I’ve read through all the responses in the comments — some vitriolic against me — and I stand by my original arguments.
Which universities spend the most on athletics?
Number one is UT Austin, at $112.9 million a year, followed by Ohio State, U. Florida, Louisiana State, U. Tennessee, Wisconsin-Madison, Auburn, Alabama, U. OK, and then USC, which is still spending $80 million a year.
That is from Charles’s Clotfelter’s very good new book Big-Time Sports in American Universities. Clotfelter is relatively sympathetic to sports in universities and considers their fundraising and civic virtue advantages. Of course those numbers are gross and not net expenditures.
Self-recommending
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty, by Dean Karlan.
Both are about the randomized control movement in development economics. Here is my earlier post on RCTs in development economics.
*The Long Goodbye*
That is Meghan O’Rourke’s new book about dealing with the death of her mother. It is difficult to excerpt usefully, but I found it striking and memorable. It melds prose and poetic styles very effectively (O’Rourke is a well-known poet and a very good one) and it covers some relatively unexplored emotional space. I don’t know a better book on grief.
Here is one good review of the book (1/20). Here is another good review (1/20), combined with a justfied attack on the (to me) virtually unreadable new Francisco Goldman book.
*In the First Circle*
I was reading Solzhenitsyn’s novel during my time in Brazil and I believe he has become oddly underrated. He is too often viewed as a historical artifact rather than as one of his century’s best writers. Here was one of my favorite passages from what is perhaps his best novel (Cancer Ward is another favorite):
“My husband’s been in prison nearly five years,” she said. “And before that he was at the front…”
“That doesn’t count,” the woman retorted. “Being at the front isn’t the same thing! Waiting is easy then! Everybody else is waiting too. You can talk about it openly; you can read his letters to people. But when you have to wait and keep quiet about him, that’s something else.”
Brazil fact of the day
What I’ve been reading
1. Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. There aren’t many new angles for WWII books, but this is one of them. The focus is on food markets during the war and Collingham covers both the Allied and Axis powers, interesting throughout.
2. What Makes a Masterpiece?: Artists, Writers, and Curators on the World’s Greatest Art, by Christopher Dell. The “pick a bunch of mostly classic but occasionally surprising artworks and devote a few pages to each one” can work surprisingly well for popular art books and this is a good example of the virtues of that genre.
3. Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life. This truly vivid biography brings its subject to life through the extensive use of correspondence and quotation. The reader gets an excellent feeling of how Bismarck’s government actually worked, his intensity and also his mediocrities, and also the importance of Bismarck in building up Germany as a European power. The story is as gripping as a good novel. Sadly, almost no attention is paid to the origins of the welfare state. Still, this has received rave reviews and rightly so.
4. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, by Steven Levy. I haven’t finished this yet, but so far it is excellent and full of substance. Unlike a lot of company histories, it has a lot of economics, whether it is Google rediscovering the second price auction technique or the company having to hide how much money it was making from ads. I had my doubts about a book on so popular a topic, but this one delivers.