Category: Books
What I’ve been reading
1. Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad. National Book Award for fiction, and it is enjoyed by most people who pick it up,Will Wilkinson reviews it well.
2. Margaux Fragoso, Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir. This book raises questions about the meaning of consent, but despite its quality I was unable to get all the way though it. Too brutal for me.
3. The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht. The author may be 25, Serbian, beautiful, and feted everywhere, but still I found it contrived and overwritten. The substance-obsessed Laura Miller nails it. Against my better judgment I enjoyed and finished Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination.
4. David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: a History of a Land, its Regions, and their Peoples. So far released only in the UK, in this excellent book Gilmour claims that for a while, in the 19th century, Garibaldi was the most famous person in the world.
5. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy. The first third is a superb humane and philosophical response to adversity, namely imprisonment on Buru Island. Of the rest, which is never sent letters to his family, at least half is very good.
6. Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact. Perhaps the best book on what its subtitle indicates.
*Shi’ism*
The author is Hamid Dabashi and the subtitle is A Religion of Protest. This book is excellent in every chapter and on virtually on every page, including in its discussion of cinema and aesthetics. Excerpt:
[In Shi’ism] what we see is the exact opposite of deferred obedience. Instead we witness a permanent state of deferred defiance — a defiance in the making, a defiance to come. What the Shi’is have deferred in the aftermath of the murder of their primordial son is not obedience — it is defiance. Because the central trauma of Shi’ism is the killing of a primordial son and not a primordial father, Shi’ism has remained a quintessentially youthful religion, the religion the young revolutionaries defying the patriarchal order of things.
*Why Marx was Right*
That’s the new Terry Eagleton book, which apparently needs no subtitle. Most of the claims in the book are correct, and they debunk superficial or incorrect readings of Marx. In that regard it is useful and it is also clearly written. Still, I have to judge it as a bad book, for instance:
But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union dragged their citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at however horrific a human cost; and the cost was so steep partly because of the hostility of the capitalist West.
Or:
Building up an economy from very low levels is a backbreaking, dispiriting task. It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships it involves.
Or:
…there is a paradoxical sense in which Stalinism, rather than discrediting Marx’s work, bears witness to its validity.
Try this one:
Revolution is generally thought to be the opposite of democracy, as the work of sinister underground minorities out to subvert the will of the majority. In fact, as a process by which men and women assume power over their own existence through popular councils and assemblies, it is a great deal more democratic than anything on offer at the moment. The Bolsheviks had an impressive record of open controversy within their ranks, and the idea that they should rule the country as the only political party was no part of their original programme.
Ahem. Terry Eagleton…telephone!
*Godzilla on My Mind*
The author is William Tsutsui and the subtitle is Fifty Years of the King of Monsters. Excerpt:
Gojira (1984), echoing its predecessor of thirty years before, also aspired to a sober message, this time about the threat of nuclear brinksmanship and the dangeres of atomic energy in all its forms. Drawing on public insecurity…the new Godzilla was intended as a cinematic wake-up call. “We wanted to show how easily a [nuclear] accident could occur today,” Tanaka remarked, “but vivid images of nuclear war are taboo…Gojira (1984) is not particularly subtle in its sermonizing, depicting the monster gutting a Japanese nuclear power plant and scarfing down a Russian submarine….And as in the original Gojira, helpless, peaceful Japan, caught between the two Cold War goliaths, emerges as the innocent, morally superior victim.
Recommended. The Godzilla movies, by the way, are recommended too. Most of them are good and I am not just referring to the obvious choices here.
*Ferraris for all*
That is a 2010 book by Daniel Ben-Ami, published in the United Kingdom. It is a very good updating of the basis thesis of Julian Simon that economic growth is a strong net positive for humanity. Some MR readers will already know these arguments, but many people should read this book.
America tornado fact of the day
“People are 10 times more likely to die in a mobile home than if the same tornado hit a regular home,” says book co-author Kevin Simmons, an economist at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.
Simmons says mobile homes constitute only 7% of the USA’s housing stock, but his research found that 43% of all tornado deaths are to people in mobile homes, which can be no match for a tornado’s violent winds, clocked as high as 300 mph.
Here is more, and the data are taken from this new book by Simmons and Daniel Sutter, on the economics of tornadoes, the book’s home page is here.
*Understanding Cairo*
The author is David Sims and the subtitle is The Logic of a City Out of Control. It is interesting throughout for anyone studying urban density or informal land titles or urban sprawl or Third World mega-cities. This passage is off the central topics of the book, but I found it an interesting corrective to the usual picture:
There is a misconception held by many Egyptian professionals, especially engineers, that informal housing is haphazardly constructed and liable to collapse. However, such precarious housing is almost unknown in informal areas. Since informal housing is overwhelmingly owner-built without use of formal contractors, it is in the owner’s own best interest to ensure that care is taken in construction. In fact, one of the main features of informal housing construction is its high structural quality, reflecting the substantial financial resources and tremendous efforts that owners devote to these buildings. It is worth noting that in the 1992 earthquake in Cairo, practically all building collapses and the resulting fatalities occurred not in informal areas, but either in dilapidated historic parts of the city or informal areas…where apartment blocks had been constructed by (sometimes) unscrupulous developers and contractors.
*The Way it Worked*
The author is Gordon C. Bjork and the subtitle is Structural Change and the Slowdown of U.S. Economic Growth. I recommend this not-so-well known book, first published in 1999, very highly. Among its other merits, it traces how much of the productivity slowdown results from the switch of the U.S. economy into lower-growing sectors. Excerpt:
Thus, if the 1950s structure of relative output levels and employment were combined with the intra-sector growth rates of the decade ending in 1990, the aggregate intra-sector growth rate would have been 19 percent as opposed to the 13.2 percent it actually was in the decade ending 1990. If the slow-growth decade of the 1980s had had the same output structure as the high-growth 1950s, it would have had higher growth rates than the high-growth 1950s. Conversely, if the 1990 structure had been in effect in the 1950s, the intra-sectoral growth rate for the decade would have been only 11 percent, rather than its actual 17 percent. These two examples of the effect of output structure on average growth rates illustrate the importance of structural change in determining aggregate rates of growth in per worker output by changing the relative size of sectors.
*Economist* symposium on *The Great Stagnation*
You will find it here, with contributions from Viral Acharya, Scott Sumner, Hal Varian, and Paul Seabright. From elsewhere, Noah Smith cautions economists not to invoke technology too often. Brad DeLong chimes in. From a few years ago, Austan Goolsbee measures the consumer surplus from the internet; his numbers do not refute the standard view that median income growth has become much much slower.
What is the consumer surplus of the internet?
Annie Lowrey asks:
But providing an alternative measure of what we produce or consume based on the value people derive from Wikipedia or Pandora proves an extraordinary challenge–indeed, no economist has ever really done it. Brynjolffson says it is possible, perhaps, by adding up various "consumer surpluses," measures of how much consumers would be willing to pay for a given good or service, versus how much they do pay. (You might pony up $10 for a CD, but why would you if it is free?) That might give a rough sense of the dollar value of what the Internet tends to provide for nothing–and give us an alternative sense of the value of our technologies to us, if not their ability to produce growth or revenue for us.
Here is much more.
*The Philosophical Breakfast Club*
The author is Laura J. Snyder and the subtitle is Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World. This is an excellent book about the history and status of science in 19th century England and in particular the contributions of Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones, the latter an economist and of course Whewell debated induction and scientific method with Mill. Babbage too had writings on economics. Here is an excerpt from Snyder:
De Prony had been commissioned to produce a definitive test of logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the newly introduced metric system in France, to facilitate the accurate measurement of property as a basis for taxation.
De Prony had recently read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations…Smith discussed the importance of a division of labor in the manufacture of pins…
De Prony was the first to see that a Smithian division of intellectual labor could be equally valuable in the work of computation of mathematical tables — although his idea had been anticipated by Leibniz, who believed that talented mathematicians should be freed from tedious calculations that could be done by "peasants."
If you enjoy the history of science, this book stands a good chance of being the best one in that genre to come out this year. Here is one good review of the book.
Pre-order your Derek Parfit, *On What Matters*, volumes I and II
*The Social Animal*
The author is David Brooks and the subtitle is The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. I pre-ordered my copy some time ago and it is due out this Tuesday…
What is the ultimate left-wing novel?
Isaac L. writes to me:
I am hoping you and your readers can help settle an issue. I am a left-leaning voter. A conservative friend and I recently discussed Atlas Shrugged, which he said was the ultimate right-wing novel. He challenged me to point him towards a left-wing novel that does for that side of politics what Rand does for the right. I think the book needs to do two things: justify the welfare state and argue the limitations of the invisible hand. While I can think of lots of non-fiction texts, I am drawing blank on fictional offerings.
Do you or your readers have any suggestions? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
What jumps to mind is Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, but if you read the request carefully it does not qualify. Here is a list of thirty famous left-wing novels, heavy on the mid- to late nineteenth century. There is Bronte, Dickens, Hugo, Sinclair, Zola, Gorky, Jack London, and Edward Bellamy. None of these books is as analytically or philosophically comprehensive as the novels of Ayn Rand.
I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways. It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes. Precisely because the story is itself so left-wing, there won't be a definitive example of the left-wing novel. Story-telling encourages context-dependent thinking, although not necessarily in an accurate manner. One notable feature of Atlas Shrugged is how frequently the story-telling stops for a long speech or an extended dialogue, in order to explain some first principles to the reader.
The quality of fiction vs. the quality of non-fiction
Marcos Jazzan, a loyal MR reader, requests:
The quality of fiction seems to be decreasing relative to the quality of non-fiction, or am I just biased against active fiction writers vs. dead ones?
I agree with this assessment, and I see a few mechanisms at work:
1. A lot of good non-fiction is based on current affairs, which are always changing, or progress in science or social science, or biographies of previous uncovered subjects. Fiction doesn't have a comparable source of new material, at least not since the modernist revolutions.
2. The internet makes it easier for people to be interested in a "culture of facts." It doesn't help long narratives in the same manner.
3. For a given level of IQ, people are more likely to agree on what is a good non-fiction book than what is a good fiction book. Internet reviews therefore make non-fiction purchases more reliable to a greater degree than they do for fiction.
4. Arguably literary fiction peaked in the 1920s, with Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Mann, and other important writers. Could it be that fiction took a bruising from the rise of radio and film at that time? Even if we compare the 1960s to today, fiction seemed to be more culturally central then.
What mechanisms am I missing?