Category: Books
The Singularity is Near
Tom Vanderbilt, author of the excellent Traffic, has a very good piece in the latest NYTimes Magazine on data centers.
The specter of infinitesimal delay is why, when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s oldest, upgraded its trading platform in 2006, it decided to locate the bulk of its trading engines 80 miles – and three milliseconds – from Philadelphia, and into NJ2, where, as Thomas notes, the time to communicate between servers is down to a millionth of a second. (Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.)
…It seemed heretical to think of Karl Marx. But looking at the roomful of computers running automated trading models that themselves scan custom-formatted machine-readable financial news stories to help make decisions, you didn’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate his observation that industry will strive to “produce machines by means of machines” – as well as his prediction that the “more developed the capital,” the more it would seek the “annihilation of space by time.”
I like the quote but doubt that Marx is the best guide to this new world. try Charlie Stross instead.
Assorted links
1. The seven types of bookstore customer. Guess which kind I am?
2. Red playdoh = blue crayon? A study in the nature of humor.
I especially like today's assorted links. I've been thinking about #2 for more than a week.
Fearless Critic
The subtitle is Washington DC Area Restaurant Guide and the author is Robin Goldstein. I am a Contributing Editor and yes he did listen to my most valuable pieces of advice. Described as "brutally honest," this is much, much better than Zagat's and the like. It is the best book of its kind.
Elsewhere on the new book front, there is Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss (I hope to review it) and Robert Wright's The Evolution of God; there is some chance I will be doing a BloggingHeads with Wright on this book.
Shop Class as Soulcraft
This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence I have always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as "knowledge work." Perhaps most surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. This book is an attempt to understand why this should be so.
That's from Matthew B. Crawford, who has a Ph.d. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago yet now runs a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. I would cite shooting baskets, walking, and cooking as three of my analogous "intellectual" activities.
Recommended.
How Cooking Made Us Human
How much can you hate a book that has sentences like these?:
Instinctotherapists, a minority group among raw-foodists, believe that because we are closely related to apes we should model our eating behavior on theirs.
In fact I liked the book — How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham — very much. Here is a good review of the book. The one sentence version is:
We are cooks more than carnivores.
I also liked this fragment:
…a bachelor is a sorry creature in subsistence societies…
Eduardo Barreiros and the Recovery of Spain
That's the new and interesting Hugh Thomas book about the leading Spanish businessman of the 20th century, Eduardo Barreiros. Barreiros entered into car manufacturing, but with the Cuban government as his business partner:
Luis Morente, more subtly, thought that the Cuban government wanted to use Eduardo to see whether Communism could collaborate with capitalism as it has done in recent years in China. Businesses that were half-private, half-state-controlled (empresas mixtas) followed. But there were innumerable difficulties: first, the government would select personnel to work with Eduardo according to their political position; second, the "second-rank executives" often found themselves being analysed by their subordinates; absenteeism was not denounced and indeed not considered as such; in Pinar del Rio, workers had to be allowed off to work in the tobacco harvest; incentives and productivity played no part. The party, the Bank of Cuba, the unions, the provincial government were always intervening; energy supplies were irregular; parts were delivered very slowly; no one cared if supplies deteriorated before delivery; and in 1988, after a hurricane, the factory was flooded. All these things needed Eduardo's continual attention.
It should be noted that, relative to the standards of the Cuban economy, the venture was a success.
Vernon Smith’s autobiography
It's called Discovery — A Memoir and I enjoyed it very much. If you, like me, wish that more books were just a bit wilder, weirder (I mean that in the good sense), and real, you will like this one. Here's one brief bit:
…I will grow up to be a loner, protecting myself from distractions, but thereby projecting an image of aloofness that was never part of what I felt inside.
It's a hard book to summarize. It offers a discussion of whether soda tastes different from the can as opposed to the bottle, a detailed recipe for perfect hamburger, an even more detailed recipe for perfect chili, how and why Vernon used to refer to himself in the third person ("Dingy"), the economic history of Kansas before WWII, Vernon and his mother working for CORE in the 1940s, what it was like to get an economics Ph.d. at Harvard back then, Vernon's lifelong pacifist and anti-war stance, how he almost gave up professional economics and ended up setting rail rates in 1957, a splendid history of thought of economics at Purdue University, an excellent memorial to Jonathan Hughes (and a discussion of Hughes as an ex-Mormon), why experimental economics is important, talk of Vernon's abilities and disabilities when it comes to focus and "attention-shifting," why it is rational to believe in God, and a thought on Kahlil Gibran.
The style eschews silky narration and expects that you can keep up with the flow of information. Not everyone can.
If you think you might be interested, you probably are, One Amazon reviewer writes:
'Discovery' is an unfiltered, entertaining read. There is no spin, no
self-serving revisionism here. A most original and influential
economist tells the reader what happened, what he thought, and how he
thinks.
*Chief Culture Officer*
That's the new Grant McCracken book and do check out the subtitle at this link. It is very exciting, very worthwhile. I need to send Tim Sullivan a blurb and I can't find his current email. How about this?
"Grant McCracken is a leading guru of ideas who combines a mastery of marketing, culture, anthropology, and modern business practice. I love his work and this will prove one of the most stimulating books of the year."
What I’ve been reading
1. From London to Elista: The Inside Story of the Three Matches that Vladimir Kramnik Played for the World Chess Title, by Eugeny Bareev and Ilya Levitov. Via John Nye, the quality and drama of this book stunned me. Chess aside, the use of the dialogic form works remarkably well.
2. The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany. Fun, philosophical, erotic, and a bestseller in the Arab world. Many Americans don't know this book but it is worth picking up.
3. Lanark, by Alasdair Gray, This book is as good as I remember it; I was surprised to see it has only four reviews on U.S. Amazon. Many critics consider it the best and most creative Scottish novel of the twentieth century and of course it has tinges of science fiction and fantasy.
4. Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. If you are drawing inferences, keep in mind this means I had not read this book to date. It is a source for Roissy and also has some early anticipations of behavioral economics. Sporadically interesting, I would say.
5. Time Out Barcelona. The Time Out series is the most useful resource for urban travel, including for food. No other guide book comes close.
Textbook Contest – Results
Many thanks for all the excellent suggestions for an epigraph for Modern Principles. Here were some of our favorites:
"He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past
endurance, it was like listening to someone interminably recounting a
long and stupid dream."
Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"
We liked that this has an exoteric and esoteric meaning but we suspect that it would be hard to get past "the Corporation." (The esoteric meaning? The novel is about a communist utopia so it's really no surprise that the characters (and the author) think that elementary economics texts are boring!). Suggested by Dave C.
N. Gregory Mankiw
Suggested by Eli Dourado.
— and not in a messianic fashion but in an honest fashion."
James J. Heckman
A close one. Suggested by Jared.
Suggested by Alex Tabarrok.
I liked it!
And the winner is:
I thought this phrase, which was suggested by Scott Gustafson, captured the joie de vivre and the love of economics that Tyler and I have tried to bring to Modern Principles. It's unclear who said this first, although nicely for us Russ Roberts used this phrase to describe Tyler's book Discover Your Inner Economist, thus there is some history.
Thanks everyone for your many helpful and excellent suggestions!
Textbook Contest
Tyler and I are looking for a good epigram, quote, maxim etc. which will be placed on the copyright page of Modern Principles of Economics, our forthcoming textbook (micro and macro). It should be no more than a few lines. The person who provides the best entry, as judged by us, will receive a signed copy of our book and, if we use the entry, much gratitude!
The new Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez biography
One day [Alvaro] Mutis climbed the seven flights of stairs, carried two books into the apartment without saying hello, slapped them down on the table, and roared: "Stop fucking about and read that vaina, so you'll learn how to write!" Whether all GarcÃa Márquez's friends really swore all the time during these years we will never know — but in his anecdotes they do. The two slim books were a novel entitled Pedro Páramo, which had been published in 1955, and a collection of stories entitled The Burning Plain (El llano en llamas), published in 1953. The writer was the Mexican Juan Rulfo. GarcÃa Márquez read Pedro Páramo twice the first day, and The Burning Plain the next day. He claims that he had never been so impressed by anything since he had first read Kafka; that he learned Pedro Páramo, literally, by heart; and that he read nothing else for the rest of the year because everything else seemed so inferior.
That is from the new and noteworthy Gerald Martin biography of GarcÃa Márquez. This very impressive (and enjoyable) book was seventeen years in the making. It's also not a bad way to learn about the political and economic history of northern Colombia. This should make any short list of either the best non-fiction books this year or the best literary biographies. The reader also learns the probable origins of the famed spat with Mario Vargas Llosa (p.375); it had to do with a woman, namely Vargas Llosa's wife.
China kiln fact of the day
At around the time of the Industrial Revolution:
Pottery, for instance, was manufactured in both England and China. The
design of the kilns differed greatly, however. English kilns were cheap
to build but very fuel inefficient; much of the energy from the burning
fuel was lost through the vent hole on the top (Figure 4). The typical
Chinese kiln, on the other hand, was more expensive to construct and,
indeed, required more labour to operate. Figure 5 shows how heat was
drawn into the chamber on the left and then forced out a hole at floor
level into a second chamber. The process continued through many
chambers until the air, by then denuded of most of its heat, finally
exited up a chimney. In England, it was not worth spending a lot of
money to build a thermally efficient kiln since energy was so cheap. In
China, however, where energy was expensive, it was cost effective to
build thermally efficient kilns. The technologies that were used
reflected the relative prices of capital, labour, and energy. Since it
was costly to invent technology, invention also responded to the same
incentives.
Check out the accompanying sketch, from a short essay by Robert C. Allen, drawn from his new book The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. The bottom line seems to be this:
Success in international trade created Britain’s high wage, cheap
energy economy, and it was the spring board for the Industrial
Revolution.
Here is what WolframAlpha gives you for "Industrial Revolution."
Amazon as book publisher
Here is the latest:
In its most significant foray into publishing, Amazon has acquired world English rights to a self-published novel by a midwestern teenager called Legacy. The acquisition is the first for the e-tailer's newly launched publishing banner, AmazonEncore. Amazon is re-releasing the fantasy title, in hardcover, in August. The book, by Cayla Kluver, is part of a planned a trilogy–it was published under the banner Forsooth Books, founded by Kluver and her mother–and, according to Amazon, is the first in a currently unknown number of titles from AmazonEncore.
Economic theory predicts that if Amazon were to start publishing, it would publish nobodies rather than established star writers. Can you explain why?
What I’ve been reading
1. Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. If you've read Geoffrey Miller, Karen Dissanayake, Denis Dutton, and Comeuppance, this is the next book in line. It's well-written and intelligent, but also a little underwhelming. The main point is that the arts are an extension of the play instinct. Blog audiences, who expect rapid delivery of the main points, may be especially frustrated.
2. Richard Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Dull for some, definitive for others. If the thesis about commerce sounds a little late to the party, it is only because of Goldthwaite's own previous work.
3. John Reader, The Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. Not as good as his excellent book on Africa, but I liked the sections on potatoes in the Incan empire. This book could have been great, it isn't, but it is still above average.
4. Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day, by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven. A good overview of how the world's poor intersect with financial institutions at the micro level.
5. Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music, by David N. Meyer. A serious and excellent book, noting that every now and then the reader is hit by a strange sentence like: "Of course the temptation to get all bourgeois on Gram's a** is irresistible." Meyer underrates the album Burrito Deluxe, however.