Category: Books
Sentences to ponder
Despite the length of On What Matters, we glean little of its author’s view on what really does matter.
That’s Peter Singer reviewing the new Derek Parfit, in the new TLS, never to come on-line. In fact what really matters is that the books are finally coming out! Singer claims, probably with justification, that the two-volume set will prove the most important works on ethics since Sidgwick in 1873.
*1493*
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann, is one of my favorite books ever, in any field. And now there is a “sequel,” namely 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, due out in August. Excerpt:
Incredibly, the Basque-Vicuña war had almost no effect on the flow of silver. Even as Basques and Vicuñas fought in the streets, they cooperated on mining and refining the silver, then shipping it from Potosi. The last was a huge task. One account describes how a single shipment of 7,771 bars left the city in 1549, four years after the lode’s discovery. Each bar was about 99 percent silver and weighed more than eighty pounds. All were stamped with serial numbers by the foundry and marked with the owner’s stamp, the foundry stamp, and the taxman’s stamp. By the time the assayer individually certified its purity with his stamp, the bar looked as if it had been graffiti-tagged by a demented numerologist. Each llama could carry only three or four bars. (Mules are bigger than llamas, but need more water and are less surefooted.) The shipment required more than two thousand of the beasts. They were watched by more than a thousand Indian guards who in turn were watched by squads of Spanish pistoleros.
Is 1493 as good as 1491? That’s hard to say, but I can report this. I am spellbound reading it, it will be one of the best books of this year, and, although I know this area somewhat, I am learning fascinating information on literally every page. Mann stresses how much it mattered to suddenly be living in the “Homogenocene,” where Asia, Europe, and the New World suddenly started becoming more alike. Mexico City had the world’s first Chinatown and was the first global city. The discussion of the importance of the potato, and in general New World agriculture, surpasses previous accounts and he explains the importance of knowing how to make chuño.
I have an irrational fondness for this sentence of Mann’s:
The First World War distracted governments from the task of monitoring insect movements.
Definitely recommended. By the way, here is Mann’s piece on soil erosion and the economics of dirt. Here is Mann’s home page. Journalists, if anyone is crying out to be the subject of a fascinating profile, it is Charles C. Mann.
*The Declaration of Independents*
The authors are the renowned Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch and the subtitle is How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America.
This book is a excellent 2011 statement of what libertarianism should be, though I would say the title is more descriptive of the content than is the subtitle. It’s well written throughout, smart to focus on the areas where libertarianism is strongest, and remarkably for an “ideological” book it never ventures into the absurd or makes indefensible claims.
It stresses government as a dysfunctional institution which forces too much bundling, too little choice, and too little real accountability. It explains why the dynamics of political power are so difficult to avoid. It recognizes the numerous ways in which we are freer than in times past and it stresses the cultural dimensions of both recent progress and libertarian thought. It reads like a book which is much smarter for having read blogs written by people of opposing points of view (just my speculation).
Is the book libertarian or liberaltarian? There’s never quite a recipe for how government might, say, shrink to a much smaller share of gdp. The section on health care stresses that health care is not the major determinant of health and that government policy has driven cost inflation. I am never sure how much the latter claim is true. They call for more choice in the hands of consumers, but the details are murky. They call, correctly, for insurance and provider deregulation. There is a call, correctly, for more competition and portable, non-job-attached health insurance policies. But can all that, combined, lead us to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid and still somehow deal with the “people dying in the streets” problem? That case is not made, nor am I sure how much the authors wish to make it. I am also not so sure that current political markets are a crumbling duopoly; we will see.
This is the up-to-date statement of libertarianism. Not warmed-over right-wing politics, but real, true-blooded libertarianism in the sense of loving liberty and wanting to find a new path toward human flourishing.
*A Convergence of Civilizations*
That’s the new book by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd and the subtitle is The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World. I read it as offering three major messages: a) there is no unique pattern for Muslim demographic evolution, b) there is more civilizational convergence than divergence, and c) the demographic data we observe explain a good deal about various Muslim countries. Here are some specific points:
1. In 1998-1999 about 55 percent of married women in Burkina Faso lived in polygamous relationships. In the Muslim parts of Nigeria, rates of polygamy can run forty to fifty percent, as opposed to about thirty percent in the Christian parts of Nigeria.
2. Demographically, Iran is very much a Western country with a 2.08 fertility rate, and the authors strongly hint that Iran has a reasonable chance of modernizing as Turkey has; the authors also worry that Turkey has not made a complete demographic transition and thus is vulnerable to backsliding. In general the authors seem to believe that the modernizing properties of Shiism are underrated.
3. Less than five percent of Uzbek or Tajik women are unmarried at age thirty. In Morocco it is 41 percent unmarried at age thirty, in Tunisia it is 54 percent, 50 percent in Lebanon, and a staggering 58 percent unmarried at age thirty in Algeria.
4. Palestinian birth rates are not as high as they are often made out to be: “If one takes Israel and the occupied territories together, one can grasp the absurdity of the demographic confrontations: The high fertility rate of Israeli Arabs is an internal threat to the Jewish state, whereas the high fertility rate of the Jewish settlers threatens Palestinian predominance in the West Bank.” (p.67)
5. In Shiite Azerbaijan, there are almost twice as many abortions per woman as live births, 3.2 to 1.7.
6. Among the Muslims of Europe, the Kosovars are arguably the least religious but also the most demographically conservative.
7. The Muslim Malays seem to have combined high birth rates with relatively high status for women.
Speculative throughout, as they say, but always interesting. Here is one short but accurate review. For the original pointer to the book I thank Chris F. Masse. Chris also points us to the DSK prediction market.
*The Great Stagnation* (Retrogression)
June 9 it is coming out in a physical edition, hard cover. Amazon pre-order is here. Barnes&Noble pre-order is here. The text is exactly the same as the eBook edition, although I made a minor addition to one footnote. If you’ve read Borges’s Pierre Menard, you’ll know why I regard the electronic edition as “the real book” and this volume as a kind of postmodern satire. Still, many people demanded a physical edition, sometimes for classroom use, and so now there is one.
*Outsider Art*
This is a poem by Kay Ryan:
Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said —
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture. There never
seems to be a surface equal
to the needs of these people.
Their purpose wraps
around the backs of things
and under arms;
they gouge and hatch
and glue on charms
till likable materials —
apple crates and canning funnels —
lose their rural ease. We are not
pleased the way we thought
we would be pleased.
That poem is cited in the new and enjoyable book by David Orr, Beautiful & Pointless {A Guide to Modern Poetry}.
What I’ve been reading
Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science, by Philip Mirowski.
*The Next Convergence*
The authors is Michael Spence (yes, the Michael Spence and he used to be “A. Michael Spence”) and the subtitle is The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World. The book’s home page is here.
I enjoyed reading this book. It is an entirely sensible take on catch-up growth, a topic which is lacking a good popular treatment and yet deserves one. I found each of the short chapters well-written and to the point. Yet I came away from the work with a strange feeling: I don’t have a good sense of why Spence wrote the book. It doesn’t flex his Nobel-quality analytic mental abilities (unlike this recent piece he wrote), nor is it a rank popularization. It doesn’t promote a “big idea” that his name will be attached to, nor is Spence moving in the Stiglitz or Krugman directions, either politically or in terms of level of pitch. I don’t understand what the book is supposed to be signaling.
I also was baffled when Spence agreed to take on a Deanship, at the peak of his economics research career. Doesn’t one do well academically, in part, to say no to meetings, and to avoid becoming a Dean? Apparently not in this case.
I have no good theory of A. Michael Spence, or for that matter of Michael Spence.
Since his seminal papers and book on signaling, there has been no more important idea in economics.
I see Michael Spence, and A. Michael Spence, as among the most interesting economists out there. They remain ciphers to me, enjoyable ciphers but ciphers nonetheless.
*The Changing Body*
The authors are Roderick Floud, Nobel Laureate Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong, and the subtitle is Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700. Here is one key sentence:
Chronically malnourished populations of Europe universally responded to food constraints by varying body size.
You can write an important and fascinating 400-page book around that sentence, although it will not hold the attention of all readers. Here is a good summary article (1/20) on the book. Here is another excerpt:
Even if it is assumed that the daily number of calories available for work was the same in the United States in 1860 as today, the intensity of work per hour would have been well below today’s levels, since the average number of hours worked in 1860 was 1.75 times as great as today. During the mid nineteenth century, only slaves on southern gang-system plantations appear to have worked at levels of intensity per hour approaching current standards.
It is interesting to read the authors’ estimates of wage growth from 1750 to about 1820. Some estimates suggest zero growth, while a more optimistic study shows that in Great Britain real wages rose about 12.5 percent between 1770 and 1818, and that was during the Industrial Revolution or should that be “during the so-called Industrial Revolution”? Read this piece by Charles Feinstein; the standard of living for the average working class family increased by only 15 percent from the 1780s to the 1850s. Here is an ungated paper with similar results. Great Stagnation-like phenomena are not new and as Arnold Kling noted recently, theories of technological unemployment may yet make a comeback.
Here are two blue-footed boobies.
*The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life*
That’s the new Harold Bloom book, which has all the strengths and weakness of Harold Bloom books (I am a fan). Excerpt:
Picasso is reputed to have said he did not care who influenced him but he did not want to influence himself.
Bloom’s books are very good for motivating rereads of classics, in this case Walter Pater, Paul Valery, Shakespeare, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Leopardi, and Montaigne’s essay “On Experience,” among others. Here is a weaker passage:
I recall first reading the poem when I was thirteen, thrilling to Satan and falling in love with Eve. In those years I fell regularly in love with fictive heroines and encountered Eve after a year of infatuation with Thomas Hardy’s heroines, particularly Eustacia Vye…and Marty South… I all but wept when Marty South cut off her long, beautiful hair, while I joined Milton and Satan in their lust for Eve’s wanton tresses.
Still, he is one of the greatest readers ever, this is probably his last major book, he truly believes in his project, and the point about prompting rereads makes this — whatever its flaws — better than almost anything else you can pick up.
*Dance of the Furies*
The author is Michael S. Neiberg and the subtitle is Europe and the Outbreak of World War I. This book stunned me, in a positive way. It argues for six main propositions, a few of which can be summarized quickly:
First…few Europeans expected a war and even fewer wanted one. Europe was not a place of white-hot nationalist passions looking for a spark…Virtually no one in Europe sought a war to correct supposed inequities stemming from the turbulent nineteenth century or as a way to adjust borders. Even in France, there was no desire for war as a way to avenge the loss of Alsace-Lorraine…
Third, the people of Europe accepted the necessity of war primarily because they believed their wars to be defensive.
Fourth, disillusion with the war…was well in place by the end of the war’s first year.
Sixth, despite their concerns and suspicions, societies kept fighting. Their reasons for doing so included a desire to avenge the losses of 1914, the quite real threats to their existence which remained from foreign armies, and an awareness that the hatreds unleashed by the war as early as the end of the first month made anything short of total victory or total defeat unthinkable.
I do not have the specialized knowledge required to judge these claims, but I found the evidence cited in the book quite strong and I consider myself provisionally persuaded. For those versed in public choice economics, and behavioral public choice, Neiberg’s account is much more intuitive than the popular analyses one often hears. Definitely recommended.
I also found reading this book to be a depressing experience: Neiberg’s third point implies that a major war in our future is more likely than I had thought. For instance the German government was scheming aggressively, but the German people genuinely believed, and with some justification given the information they had at the time, that they were fighting a war of defense.
Books about America, by foreigners, bleg
George Hawkey writes to me:
I know you’ve posted “best books” queries on the site before, so here goes. Do you have any input on the best books about American History and Culture, but written from a non-American point-of-view?
Obviously Tocqueville, and there’s a whole raft of Canadian published books on the US culture as well. What I’m looking for is more like: what would “The Best and the Brightest” be if it were written by a Japanese journalist. Or what if Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters” trilogy was written by a Russian sociologist? “The World Is Flat” but written about the US by an Indian?
In many cases, I’m guessing these texts are not yet or will never be translated, but I’m still interested in finding greater perspective on the US than what’s provided by the traditional pundits, authors and historians.
I’ll recommend these five works of fiction, starting with Nabokov and how about Ayn Rand as well? The comments are open for your further suggestions…
The culture that is Buenos Aires
Argentina is to consider granting a special pension to writers on the grounds that they generate “social richness” but often end up impoverished.
The lower house of congress will study a proposal presented on Tuesday that would give published authors a monthly stipend of £565, well above the state minimum pension.
The idea, inspired by similar initiatives in France and Spain, would offer the pension to those who are aged over 65 and have published at least five books or invested more than 20 years in “literary creation”.
…The city of Buenos Aires, proud of a national literary tradition which boasts Roberto Arlt, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, approved a similar proposal in 2006 which granted a monthly pension of almost £400.
Of around 100 applicants to date 72 have been approved, a low number which should calm those worried about the fiscal implications of the scheme going national, Victor Redondo, a poet and member of the Argentine Writers’ Society, told the BBC.
The article is here.
In my pile
1. Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels, by Heather Shouse. I’ve read enough of this book to know it is true to its title.
2. The Moral Lives of Animals, by Dale Peterson. It looks like Adam Smith’s TMS applied to the moral sense of non-human animals, making the point that the moral sense is not unique to human beings.
3. Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and his Fifteen Quartets, by Wendy Lesser.
4. Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes; so far I love it, imagine a mix of Raymond Chandler, near-future science fiction, and South African grit.
All are worthy of purchase, we will see how they develop. I found The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, the most enjoyable science fiction novel I’ve read in a few years, and it should appeal to fans of Thailand too.
What is a good, short readable book on market economics?
Boswell, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I’ve been asked to select a book that all incoming freshmen will (supposedly) read over the summer and then give a lecture on the topic in the fall. The constraints are two-fold: it should be a short, affordable paperback, and it should be an interesting read that will engage nearly everyone, especially those who have no interest in economics whatsoever.
There must be a good, short book out there on economics that illuminates the power of markets and the economic way of thinking. Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek are out – too heavy and dense for the average reader. Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” was selected a few years earlier. Henry Hazlett is out of date. Any suggestions for possible books? P.J. O’Rourke on Adam Smith? Bastiat’s “The Law”? Charles Wheelan’s “Naked Economics”? Something by Tim Harford? “Fooled by Randomness” by Taleb? John McMillan’s “Reinventing the Bazaar”?
Ideas? There is also Russ Roberts and early Paul Krugman, among others.