Category: Books
*The Origins of Political Order*
That is the new book from Frank Fukuyama and the subtitle is From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. A few points:
1. Every page is intelligent and reasonable.
2. It is a useful general overview of what we know about the origins of states, with full coverage given to the non-Western world, most of all China.
3. My single sentence summary would be: “I am showing you how some polities developed workable, strong states, based in accountability, and how others did not.” If that is it, I would rather that the empirical material were more focused on the “model” and less on overall general narrative. Ultimately the organization sprawls. Nonetheless, this book is an important implied revision of public choice economics, with the focus on history and the question of how strong states get built.
4. In its scope and method, this book feels late 19th century.
5. I am not convinced by the discussion of why earlier China did not progress, found in the range of 51% on Kindle. Fukuyama seems to suggest they simply weren’t interested in doing better. I would be happier if so much did not rest on that question.
6. One implication of the analysis is that we should not be very optimistic about the current revolutions in the Middle East.
7. Try this sentence: “The very lateness of the European state-building project was the source of the political liberty that Europeans would later enjoy.”
8. The section on biology could use a major dose of Robin Hanson.
Here is one useful review. Here is a review from The Economist.
Best Rejection Letter Ever
…it is with no inconsiderable degree of reluctance that I decline the offer of any Paper from you. I think, however, you will under reconsideration of the subject be of the opinion that I have no other alternative. The subjects you propose for a series of Mathematical and Metaphysical Essays are so very profound, that there is perhaps not a single subscriber to our Journal who could follow them.
Sir David Brewster editor of The Edinburgh Journal of Science to Charles Babbage on July 3, 1821. Noted in James Gleick’s, The Information.
Serenity Parenting
I wasn’t surprised that Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids has the clearest explanation of the science of behavioral genetics that I have ever read (even clearer than the excellent discussions in Harris’s The Nurture Assumption or Pinker’s The Blank Slate.) Frankly, I was surprised that Bryan’s book is also the most useful parenting book that I have ever read. Selfish Reasons isn’t just clever, it is also wise. Bryan’s views on parenting are often simplified down to “parents don’t matter.” But that’s wrong. Bryan knows that parents matter for all kinds of things, most of all for how parents and children enjoy childhood. Here is some of Bryan’s wisdom:
Once I became a dad, I noticed that parents around me had a different take on the power of nurture. I saw them turning parenthood into a chore—shuttling their kids to activities even the kids didn’t enjoy, forbidding television, desperately trying to make their babies eat another spoonful of vegetables. Parents’ main rationale is that their effort is an investment in their children’s future; they’re sacrificing now to turn their kids into healthy, smart, successful, well-adjusted adults. But according to decades of twin research, their rationale is just, well, wrong. High-strung parenting isn’t dangerous, but it does make being a parent a lot more work and less fun than it has to be.
The obvious lesson to draw is that parents should lighten up. I call it “Serenity Parenting”: Parents need the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, and (thank you twin research) the wisdom to know the difference. Focus on enjoying your journey with your child, instead of trying to control his destination.
Londenio’s four questions
This was his request:
1. How should I explore the German New Cinema (Herzog, Fassbinder, Wenders, etc.) ?
2. If I liked Benedict Anderson’s *Imagined Communities*, what should I read next?
3. Who is the Douglas Hofstadter of Economics?
4. What is the first non-personal question you would ask if you were to wake up from a 10-year-long coma?
Answers:
1. Herzog’s Nosferatu, Kaspar Hauser, und Little Dieter (German-language version only, and a very underrated movie) are my favorites from this tradition, which past Herzog I do not much admire or enjoy. Not long ago I saw Herzog’s early documentary How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?, 44 minutes on Netflix streaming, highly recommended, mostly it is footage of auctioneers talking really really fast, and percussively, to a partly Amish audience.
There is Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, but Fassbinder films I do not enjoy. Try also the TV serial Heimat, which properly can be considered cinematic.
2. Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures, by me.
3. If you mix together Kenneth Boulding, G.L.S. Shackle, and Nassim Taleb, you might get an economics approximation of Hofstadter.
4. Are there major wars going on and how bad are they?
Bryan Caplan, prophet of his time
From today’s NYT:
…not all parents are made wretched by their offspring. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, and the University of Pennsylvania found that people over the age of 40 [my link] are happier with children than without.
To arrive at this conclusion, the demographers Mikko Myrskyla and Rachel Margolis crunched data from the World Values Surveys, looking at self-reported levels of happiness among more than 200,000 respondents from 86 countries.
They studied how individual factors such as age, sex, income and health status affected happiness as well as how the respondents’ institutional and cultural context came into play — whether they lived in countries with a social democratic, conservative or developing regime. This led to some interesting off-shoot conclusions like this one: people in former socialist countries show a strong positive relationship between happiness and child-raising, with parents of three in those countries happiest of all.
But the most striking findings revolved around parenthood and age. Whether it is a function of exhaustion, bickering over diapers or something inherently unpleasant about raising little children, the data doesn’t say, but parents under 30 are decidedly less happy than their child-free peers. Then, once parents hit 40, the relationship reverses and people with children are cheerier than those without.
The more, the merrier, too — at least for older parents. For people under 30, happiness declines with each additional child. Young parents of two are unhappier than young parents with one, and young parents of one child are unhappier than young people with no children. But with parents between the ages of 40 and 50, the number of children has no impact. And after 50, each child brings more joy.
The source paper is here. You can, and should, buy Bryan’s new book here.
Vaclav Smil
His books are excellent, you probably should read them all.
His Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate is depressing, excerpt:
A world without fossil fuel combustion is highly desirable, and, to be optimistic, our collective determination, commitment, and persistence could accelerate its arrival. But getting there will be expensive and will require considerable patience. Coming energy transitions will unfold, as the past ones have done, across decades, not years.
And this:
…do not underestimate the persistence and adaptability of old resources (remember that coal is still more important globally than natural gas) and established prime movers, particularly those that have been around for more than a century, including steam turbines and internal combustion engines. Recall that the latest incarnations of the internal combustion engine, the new DiesOtto machines, have the potential to be more efficient than the best hybrid drives on today’s market.
My favorite book by him is Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines, a better title and subtitle there never was.
Judging by review quality
Matthew Johnson directs my attention to the following:
In our recent (award-winning) WWW2011 paper “Towards a Theory Model for Product Search”, we noticed that demand for a hotel increases if the online reviews on TripAdvisor and Travelocity are well-written, without spelling errors; this holds no matter if the review is positive or negative. In our TKDE paper “Estimating the Helpfulness and Economic Impact of Product Reviews: Mining Text and Reviewer Characteristics“, we observed similar trends for products sold and reviewed on Amazon.com.
*Before the Revolution*
The author is Daniel K. Richter and the subtitle is America’s Ancient Pasts. I admit I am a sucker for books on this topic, but so far it is one of my two or three favorite non-fiction titles of the year. Excerpt:
The end of the Chesapeake chiefs’ efforts to use prestige goods to build power in the traditional way resulted from a more basic factor than the violent refusal of the English to play along. Once substantial numbers of European and Native people began living near each other, it became virtually impossible for any chief to control the flow of goods to his people, even if, as Powhatan apparently tried to do, he redefined prestige in ever more esoteric directions. As early as January 1608 — only a few months after the establishment of Jamestown — Smith complained that ordinary colonists and visiting sailors were trading so much metal to ordinary Indians that corn and furs “could not be had for a pound of copper, which before was sold for an ounce.” Archaeological excavations confirm that the jewelers and metalworkers textbooks have long derided as useless appendages to the lazy Jamestown colonists worked busily to make copper and other metal items to trade with Native people. This might have been the colony’s only productive enterprise in its earliest years. All along the costs — and soon along the interior rivers — of eastern North America, this kind of unregulated trade between commoners was bad news for chiefs like Powhatan, whose power depended on European goods remaining rare and under their personal control. But the opportunities that such trade represented — for both Europeans and Native people — were enormous. Some chiefs found ways to turn the new conditions to their advantage. Others did not.
Definitely recommended. My favorite parts are about the agricultural revolutions experienced in native American societies, before the arrival of the colonists. Here is part of the Amazon summary:
Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoples—Indians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, English—as they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico.
Haiti fact of the day
At the time the United States intervened in Haiti in 1994, the U.S. defense budget of $288 billion was 20 times the entire gross domestic product of Haiti.
[TC: And yet we still did not quite achieve our war aims.] That is from the new and interesting book by Sarah E. Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions After the Cold War.
Here are music videos by Sweet Micky, the new President of Haiti. I’ve seen him in concert three times and it was always enjoyable.
*Understanding Global Trade*
That is the new, short, and readable survey book by Elhanan Helpman, self-recommending of course. Here is Helpman’s home page.
What determined the playing length of an audio CD?
Here is one account:
Sony had initially preferred a smaller diameter, but soon after the beginning of the collaboration started to argue vehemently for a diameter of 120mm. Sony’s argument was simple and compelling: to maximize the consumer appear of a switch to the new technology, any major piece of music needed to fit on a single CD…Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was quickly identified as the point of reference — according to some accounts, it was the favorite piece of Sony vice-president Norio Ohga’s wife. And thorough research identified the 1951 recording by the orchestra of the Bayreuther Festspiele under Wilhelm Furtwängler, at seventy-four minutes, as the slowest performance of the Ninth Symphony on record. And so, according to the official history, Sony and Philips top executives agreed in their May 1980 meeting that “a diameter of 12 centimeters was required for this playing time.”
That is from the new and interesting book by Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli, The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy, the book’s home page, with free chapter one, is here. Speaking of which, Garth Saloner is another very good South African economist and he is now Dean of Stanford Business School.
Tips for book recommendations
Nicoli asks:
Any tips, other than reading this blog, on how to find a good book recommendation? I want something like a netflix for books, but feel that system wouldn’t work given the significantly greater time and attention requirement for reading versus let’s say, watching Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.
1. Go to the public library and browse both the new books section and the “Books Returned” carts.
2. Read the archives of this blog, filed under “Books.”
3. Weight Amazon reviews by the intelligence of the writer, and the length of the review, not by whether it is positive or negative.
4. Every year read some of the classics on Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon.
5. The very best books in categories you think you cannot stand (“gardening,” “basketball,” whatever) will be superb. It is not hard to find out what they are.
WKRP and the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons
The tragedy of the commons occurs when no one has the right to exclude users of a resource and, as a result, the resource is overused. The tragedy of the anti-commons occurs when many people have the right exclude users of a resource and, as a result, the resource is under-used. Case in point:
From Amazon’s review of the DVD of WKRP in Cincinnati:
One of DVD’s most requested titles, WKRP in Cincinnati is a blast from the past and an absolutely golden oldie. But this first-season set is bound to cause static with fans who have eagerly anticipated its release. Because of pesky music rights, the songs don’t remain the same. “Hot Blooded” is not playing when mild-mannered newsman Les Ness
man (Richard Sanders) puts on a toupee in anticipation of an awards-dinner date with bombshell station receptionist Jennifer (Loni Anderson). It’s “Beautiful Dreamer” and not “Fly Me to the Moon” that chimes when Jennifer’s doorbell is sounded. Any number of generic songs have replaced the contemporary and classic rock so vital to WKRP, which is, after all, set at a radio station…
Wikipedia explains
Music licensing deals cut at the time of production were for a limited amount of time (approximately ten years). In addition, the show was videotaped rather than filmed because it was cheaper to get the rights to rock songs for a taped show. Once the licenses expired, later syndicated versions of the show did not feature the music as first broadcast, but rather generic “sound-alikes” by studio musicians to avoid paying additional royalties. In some cases (when the music was playing in the background of a dialogue scene), some of the characters’ lines had to be redubbed by sound-alike actors….
Notice that no one really gains here from the surfeit of copyright, not even the copyright holders. Is Foreigner really better off by excluding listeners from a few well-timed seconds of Hot Blooded? On the contrary, a little youthful nostalgia adds to demand. But the copyright holders, each in their eagerness to profit, raise the transaction costs of producing the whole product so much that it either isn’t produced at all or is produced, as in this case, in a way which greatly reduces consumer value.
WKRP in Cincinnati is not that important in the grand scheme of things but it is an illustration of how copyright and patent thickets can impede innovation.
Hat tip to Michael Heller’s excellent The Gridlock Economy.
Why so little gas station arbitrage?
RSaunders requests:
How does the Exxon at Virginia Ave [in DC] sustain gas prices that are $1 higher than anywhere else in DC (even Adams Morgan). Realize it’s only gas within 3mi and people probably don’t buy a full tank, but can there really be that many people about to run out of gas to buy 1 gal of gas at a time to sustain this differential?
This Exxon comes up right before the entrance ramps to the major highways, right before leaving the NW quadrant of the District for northern Virginia. Some people simply need to fill up and they are intimidated by the notion of getting off the highway in the suburbs, finding a gas station on the right side of the road, making a subsequent U turn, and finding the entrance ramp back on to the highway they wanted. They also may have memories of getting back on the Capital Beltway in the wrong direction, being confused by those ramps where going south is called “Baltimore” and going north is called “Richmond.”
If that ain’t worth $5 for America’s elite, I don’t know what is.
A fellow with almost the same name — rsanders — requested a book on Romanian political history.
In my pile and out the door
1. Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires, An Eighteenth Century History. The story of the Johnstones, in Scotland and around the globe. It appears to have lots of useful information, but it is too far from my current interests for me to read it now.
2. Robin Fox, The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind. Great themes, namely Hayek plus Levi-Strauss. But it’s too diffuse for me to get a handle on.
3. John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. A bunch of weird guys, in the early 20th century, thought they could cheat death but they couldn’t! And it all has something to do with H.G. Wells and a Russian spy. When is the cutting polemic against rationalism going to fall? It doesn’t, and when the book ends it feels as if it is only one-third over. The mood is wistful. I recall once predicting to Jim Buchanan that Gray would someday end up converting to Roman Catholicism. This one is now in the hands of Robin Hanson.