Category: Books
Kindle edition of *Create Your Own Economy*
Now ready for pre-order. You get it July 9, the date of the book release.
Ben Casnocha reviews *Create Your Own Economy*
I am delighted with the review, which is more like a review essay, with many interesting observations on internet culture as well as on the book. The essay title is "RSSted Development." Excerpt:
…the intellectual and emotional
stimulation we experience by assembling a custom stream of bits. Cowen
refers to this process as the “daily self-assembly of synthetic
experiences.” My inputs appear a chaotic jumble of scattered
information but to me they touch all my interest points. When I consume
them as a blend, I see all-important connections between the different
intellectual narratives I follow a business idea (entrepreneurship) in the airplane space (travel), for example. Because building the blend is a social exercise real communities and friendships form around certain topics my
social life and intellectual life intersect more intensely than before.
And I engage in ongoing self-discovery by reflecting upon my interests,
finding new bits to add to my stream, and thinking about how it all
fits together.
Cowen maintains that these benefits enhance your internal
mental existence; how you order information in your head and how you
use this information to conceive of your identity and life aspirations
affects your internal well-being. Because a personal blend reflects a
diverse set of media (think hyper-specific niche news outlets in lieu
of a nightly news broadcast that everyone watches on one of three
networks), and because each person constructs their own stories to link
their inputs together, the benefits are unique to the individual. They
are also invisible. It is impossible to see what stories someone is
crafting internally to make sense of their stream; it is impossible to
appreciate the personal coherence of it.
The way the benefits of info consumption
habits accrue privately but are perceived publicly approximates
romance, Cowen adds. Compare a long-distance relationship to a
proximate one. In a long-distance relationship, you have infrequent but
very high peaks when you see each other. Friends see you run off for
fancy getaway weekends when the sweetheart comes to town. Yet
day-to-day it is not very satisfying. In a marriage by contrast you
have frequent, bite-size, mundane interactions which rarely hit peaks
or valleys of intensity. The happiness research that asserts married
couples are happier than non-married ones and especially happier than
couples dating long-distance is not always self-evident. Outsiders see
the inevitable frustrations and flare-ups that mark even stable
marriages. What they cannot see is the interior satisfaction that the
couple derives by weaving together these mundane moments into a
relationship rich in meaning and depth, and in writing a shared life
narrative that is all their own.
After reading the essay, I wonder how many blogs Ben has in his RSS feed…
Video testimonials to the Cowen/Tabarrok Principles text
You will find them here. If you are thinking of using the book for a course, please write us and we will try to get you a review copy. There is a macro book, a micro book, and a combined volume.
In which regards are autistics more rational?
Many bloggers are citing a recent Scientific American piece, one part of which covers how autistics come closer to satisfying some canons of economic rationality. Since I discuss the underlying research in Create Your Own Economy, I should point out that the SA article doesn't quite get it right. They serve up:
One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism…
I would sooner describe the underlying research as showing that framing effects are weaker (NB: not absent) for autistics. That is, for the autistics it matters less whether a given change in endowment is described as a gain or a loss, relative to varying frames. I read the SA account ("when balancing gains and losses") as conflating framing and endowment effects; in any case the exposition is not clear.
SA writes:
…this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior…
An alternative would have been: "The autistics are in this way more rational."
One underexplored question is whether most people distrust those who are not irrational in particular, commonly realized ways. Even the researchers on the original piece considers the superior performance of autistics on the test to be a sign of their processing "failures."
Another part of the piece concerns the skin conductance responses; there is preliminary evidence that autistics approached the framed choices in a less emotional manner, at least by that one measure.
Create Your Own Economy considers a number of possible overlaps between economics and autism, including Vernon Smith's claim that Adam Smith was himself on the autism spectrum. It also considers other ways in which autistics are likely to be more rational, such as being less likely to encode false memories and less likely to resort to excessive use of narrative to organize their memories and explanations.
Aid Realism for the Idealist
The failure of foreign aid to lead to economic development has left many cynics in its wake. For this reason, I enjoyed The Blue Sweater, Jacqueline Novogratz's story of moving from aid-idealism to aid-realism without ever passing through the way-station of aid-cynicism. As a naive, aid-idealist Novogratz spent a lot of time on the circuit in Africa; eventually hard lessons wore away the naivety but not the idealism. Of course, Novogratz learned a lot about the corruption, failure to experiment, and lack of accountability of the aid agencies but she also learned to be realistic about the do-gooders:
Philanthropy can appeal to people who want to be loved more than they want to make a difference.
But the hardest lessons were about the poor. In the late 1980s, Novogratz worked with a group of native women to build up a thriving business in Rwanda. Inevitably some of her friends became terrible victims of the 1994 genocide. Perhaps even worse, some of her friends became perpetrators. Hard lessons like these drove Novogratz's evolution.
I've read the following sort of thing many times:
It is so often the people who know the greatest suffering–the poor and most vulnerable–who are the most resilient, the ones able to derive happiness and shared joy from the simplest pleasures.
I've heard it so many times, I tend to dismiss it but Novogratz follows up with this:
That same resilience, however, can manifest itself in passivity, fatalism, a resignation to the difficulties of life that allows injustice and inequity to strengthen and grow…
Which, for me at least, turned a trite observation into an important insight.
Novogratz's experiences eventually developed into the Acumen Fund, a venture capital firm for aid. The idea is to invest patient capital in scalable, for-profit businesses that deliver services to the poor. The fund, for example, has invested in a firm producing drip irrigation systems in Pakistan, a Tanzanian firm that produces mosquito nets and an Indian firm producing internet-telephone kiosks in small villages.
The fact that the businesses have been for-profit has been critical. In selling bed nets for example the Tanzanian firm learned that talking about malaria doesn't sell. What sells, in the words of one of their top salespersons is, "The color is beautiful, and you can hang the nets in your windows so that your neighbors know how much you care about your family." As Novogratz puts it:
Beauty, vanity, status and comfort….The rich hold no monopoly on any of it. But we're a long way from integrating the way people actually make decisions into public policy instead of how we think they should make them.
Patient capital is no panacea–what is?–but by investing in entrepreneurs who must listen to their customers a charitable venture-capital firm can multiply the effectiveness of its philanthropy.
There is a powerful role both for the market and for philanthropy…Philanthropy alone lacks the feedback mechanism of markets, which are the best listening devices we have; and yet markets alone too easily leave the most vulnerable behind.
Pre-order Gretchen Rubin’s new book
She writes:
Blatant self-promotion alert: If you’re thinking about buying
my book, please consider pre-ordering it. A book gets a big boost from
pre-orders, because that early support shows that people really are
enthusiastic. It’s early,..I’ve ordered my copy! And that made me very happy.
The new link to Gretchen's book is here. Seth Roberts would say that her subtitle leaves out the notion of watching faces early in the morning.
My *Fast Company* article, and no Google is not making us stupid
It is an adaptation of one part of Create Your Own economy; excerpt:
It's a common complaint that the Web makes us more impatient, but most
of us use it to track (or create) long-running stories and debates.
I've been following the career of folk-rock star Roger McGuinn for more
than 30 years, and now I use the Web for that. If anything, the essence
of Web life is that we are impatient to discover the next installment
in our planned programs of very patient long-term interest. That's a
kind of impatience we can be proud of, just as a mother might be
impatient to receive a call from her teenage daughter away at college.
It's a sign of caring and commitment, not superficiality.
Here is the link and full article.
Insightful books on politics, written by politicians
That is another question I was asked yesterday, here are a few nominations:
2. James Madison and John Adams, for the latter Discourses on Davila.
3. Some of Richard Nixon, scattered.
4. Ulysses S. Grant.
5. Tocqueville, J.S. Mill and some other political writers were also politicians of a sort but I am not counting them as I do not view their contributions as stemming so directly from their political experience. Along these lines, you could try John Kenneth Galbraith's book about being ambassador to India.
6. Winston Churchill is a beautiful writer and important historian but I am not sure how insightful he is about politics.
7. Denis Healey, Time of My Life.
8. I've yet to read the new book by Zhao Ziyang.
9. Willy Brandt, My Life in Politics.
My knowledge is weak in this area (here is a list of Canadian political autobiographies and I know not a single one) and Google is surprisingly unhelpful; what else am I missing? And why are there not more? Are politicians so drunk with self-deception that they cannot write insightful books?
Kindle and DRM and Netflix too
After reading this post, I realize I don't understand my status quo DRM rights with Kindle. That's not a good sign. I did notice this sentence, which I didn't feel the need to parse any further:
Here is the major problem with this scenario.
As a reader, I find it good policy to keep the number of books on my Kindle to below twenty. That forces me to read the ones I order and it also protects me from "stranded" consumer durables. Uncertainty and confusion about my rights only strengthens my desire to keep that policy.
As a writer, I expect the Kindle is temporarily in my financial self-interest, as it gets more "influentials" reading my work and perhaps talking it up. In the longer run I suspect it means a lower equilibrium price for books. One question is whether publishers use "sticky" or inconvenient DRM practices as an implicit collusive method for limiting the spread of Kindle.
Today I was struck by this passage about the origins of Netflix:
Netflix's selection of more than 100,000 DVD rental titles is made possible by the "first-sale doctrine" of U.S. copyright law, which permits buyers of DVDs to lend them out without studios' consent.
In Netflix's early days, its buying team would sometimes purchase DVDs at local Wal-Marts or Best Buys if it couldn't get copies through studios, says Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer.
In contrast, to deliver movies and television shows over the Internet, Netflix has to license them from studios. So far, it has gotten only about 12,000 titles, a hodgepodge of older films such as "Diehard," episodes of popular TV shows including "30 Rock" and a smattering of new releases.
That's right, we had more innovation because some of the usual copyright strictures about negotiating rights did not apply. I am pro-copyright, but once again the default settings make it too hard for successful negotiations to occur.
*Create Your Own Economy*, standing on one foot
A number of readers have asked me for a "one-sentence" review of my book to come. I don't so much like the Amazon summary, so let me try a short enumeration instead. The book offers:
1. A "big picture" analysis of how current economic, social, scientific, and political trends all fit together.
2. A new vision for how "autistic cognitive strengths" are a major dynamic element in human history and that includes a revisionist view of the autism spectrum.
3. New ways of thinking about what you're really good at (and not so good at).
4. A view of why education is much more than just signaling, but why you should be cynical about most education nonetheless.
5. An unapologetic defense of contemporary web culture and also social networks. Google is making us smarter, not stupider.
6. How commerce is shaping the culture of the world to come and what I didn't see in my previous writings on this topic. Why culture is becoming more like marriage.
7. Why the Sherlock Holmes stories are a lot more interesting than most people think.
8. What neuroeconomics should be studying and why. Instead of just doing more brain scans, neuroeconomists should look more closely at already-understood cross-sectional variations in human neurology.
9. An account of how behavioral economics misses the importance of marketplace competition and how and why some behavioral results need to be modified as a result.
10. The importance of neurology for unpacking debates about aesthetics, especially when it comes to music.
11. A discussion of Milton Friedman's greatest tragedy.
12. A definite prediction about the long-run future of humanity.
Here is the table of contents for the book. You can pre-order the book here.
*Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry*
The authors are Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard and the subtitle is The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation. Here is one good two-sentence excerpt:
The "evidence" from "oral histories" is even more problematic when economic interests are involved. Oral histories have been known to change when a claim is necessary to obtain access to valuable resources.
This book is too polemic for my tastes and it doesn't try hard enough to understand the other side of the issue. But it makes many very good points backed up by many very real examples. It is strongest when arguing against the lowering of intellectual standards for arguments made on behalf of indigenous groups.
What I’ve been reading
1. Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, by Gene Heyman. This book overstates its claims, but if you wish to see a non-economist defending a (broadly) Beckerian model of addiction, here you go. I couldn't put it down!
2. Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care. I felt I should try one by her to stay in touch. It was better than I had expected though not really smarter than I had expected. Here is an NYT article about her.
3. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. This new translation by Julie Rose is more or less definitive. But it is heavy. If any book ought to be on Kindle…
4. Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, by Alyssa Katz. There is lots of good material about our social and policy infatuation with housing, but she commits a mistake that I have been "waiting for" — she blames part of the housing bubble on the decline of rent control
5. Javier Cercas, AnatomÃa de un instante. A micro-study of one moment of time (Feb.23) when, post-Franco, Spain ended up sticking with the path to democracy rather than falling back to autocracy. The focus is on conservative Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez and the book blends fictional and non-fictional narrative techniques very effectively. Here is one review. This is a very strong book also with relevance to current events in Iran.
6. Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, From Poverty to Prosperity. I've only been reading the Amazon blurb for it — the book isn't out yet — and here is Arnold on the book.
China library of the day
It is supposed to be the world's third largest. Here is the outside view. Here is one good article (with another photo).
*Create Your Own Economy*, table of contents
1. The Future of Thinking Differently
2. Hidden Creativity
3. Why Modern Culture is Like Marriage, in all its Glory
4. IM, Cell Phones, and Facebook [this chapter discusses Twitter as well]
5. The Buddha as Savior and the Professor as Shaman
6. The New Economy of Stories
7. Heroes
8. Beauty isn't What You Think
9. Autistic Politics
10. The Future of the Universe
This is definitely a book you should buy. And unlike Discover Your Inner Economist, no more than a page or two of its content has been presented on MarginalRevolution.
My Bloggingheads with Robert Wright on *The Evolution of God*
It is on theology and religion and you will find it here. They list some of the specific topics as follows:
Bob’s new book, “The Evolution of God” (09:34)
On being a bad secular Buddhist (03:28)
The God Bob believes in (03:17)
Why agnostic Tyler loves the Hebrew Bible (03:26)
How Bob and Tyler came to their personal theologies (06:49)
Quantum physics and king-sized video games as paths to God (07:42)
For me it was a very interesting exchange, but given the topic I cannot predict that everyone will feel the same way. Other points we touched upon were the beautiful elements in Islam and its notion of religious ecstasy, the appeal of Sufism, why Unitarianism is not more popular, the pagan polytheistic versions of Catholicism, penalty and punishment in Haitian voodoo, the preconditions of tolerance, my views on meta-ethics, what does the concept of God really mean anyway, why dogmatic atheism is so unfortunate, and what is the real metaphysical problem that everyone needs to face up to. Bob of course just wrote a book on religion but from my end I view this as a personal dialog rather than me communicating verified scholarly information in an educational manner.
You can buy Bob's book, The Evolution of God, here.