Category: Books
New books in my pile
1. Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy, by Viviana A. Zelizer, home page here. From a browse I learned that many prostitutes spend their "dirty money" more quickly.
2. A Short History of Celebrity, by Fred Inglis, home page here, with chapter one pdf.
3. Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities, by Lucien Karpik, from the French, chapter one pdf and home page.
What is emblematic of the 21st century?
A recent reader request was:
What things that are around today are most distinctively 21st century? What will be the answer to this question in 10 years?
Here is what comes to mind and I think most of it will remain emblematic for some time:
Technology: iPhone, Wii, iPad, Kindle. These are no-brainers and I do think it will go down in American history as "iPhone," not "iPhone and other smart phones." Sorry people.
To read: blogs and Freakonomics, this is the age of non-fiction. I don't think we have an emblematic and culturally central novel for the last ten years. The Twilight series is a possible pick but I don't think they will last in our collective memory. Harry Potter (the series started 1997) seems to belong too much to the 1990s.
Films: Avatar, Inception (for appropriately negative reviews of the latter, see here, here, and here). Both will look and feel "of this time." Overall there have been too many "spin-off" movies. Keep in mind this question is not about "what is best."
Music: It's been a slow period, but I'll pick Lady Gaga, most of all for reflecting the YouTube era rather than for her music per se. I don't think many musical performers from the last ten years will become canonical, even though the number of "good songs" is quite high. Career lifecycles seem to be getting shorter, for one thing.
Television: The Sopranos starts in 1999, so it comes closer to counting than Harry Potter does. It reflects "the HBO era." Lost was a major network show and at the very least people will laugh at it, maybe admire it too. Battlestar Galactica. Reality TV.
What am I missing? What does this all add up to? Pretty strange, no?
p.s. Need to add Facebook and Google somewhere!
*Packing for Mars*
Dust is the lunar astronaut’s nemesis. With no water or wind to smooth them, the tiny, hard moon rock particles remain sharp. They scratched faceplates and camera lenses during Apollo, destroyed bearings, clogged equipment joints. Dusting on the moon is a fool’s errand. Unlike on the Earth, where the planet’s magnetic field wards off charged particles of solar wind, these particles bombard the moon’s surface and impart an electrostatic charge. Moon dust clings like dryer socks. Astronauts who stepped from the Lunar Module in gleaming white marshamllow suits returned a few hours later looking like miners. The Apollo 12 suits and long johns became so filthy that at one point, astronaut Jim Lovell told me, the crew “took off all their underwear and they were naked for half the way home.”
That is from Mary Roach’s new book, subtitled The Curious Science of Life in the Void.
Further German predictions about 2010
Everard Hustler, writing in 1910, predicted that in 2010 tuberculosis patients will conquer the disease by receiving shots of radium and by inhaling streams of radioactive air, with pipes running to their mouths and cloths tied tightly around their heads, and covering their eyes (the accompanying illustration is a good one), to make sure none of the radioactive air escapes.
He also predicted that a hostile nation could destroy the Berlin Rathaus using a beam of radium energy, shot from…a hovering zeppelin.
Radium: good to inject, good to inhale, bad to shoot at a tower from a zeppelin.
That sounds odd, but radiation as a method of medicine starts in the 1920s and it uses the element of radium. Modern chemotherapy does not arise until 1940, with the use of mustard gas. Chemotherapy to attack tuberculosis starts in 1944.
Still, E.H. was not as perceptive as the guy who predicted the iPhone.
Sentences to ponder
Gabriel Josipovici, a research professor at the University of Sussex, is disenchanted with the absence of disenchantment with the world.
Robert Sloss predicted the iPhone in 1910
Well, more or less. Or is it an iPad? In 1910 Stoss published an essay called "The Wireless Century," intending to predict the world of 2010. In this world everyone carries around a "wireless telegraph" which:
1. Serves as a telephone, the whole world over.
2. Either rings or vibrates in your pocket.
3. Can transmit any musical recording or performance with perfect clarity.
4. Can allow people to send each other photographs, across the entire world.
5. Can allow people to see the images of paintings, museums, etc. in distant locales.
6. No one will ever be alone again.
7. Can serve as a means of payment, connecting people to their bank accounts and enabling payments (Japan is ahead of us here).
8. Can connect people to all newspapers, although Sloss predicted that people would prefer that the device read the paper aloud to them (not so much the case).
9. Can transmit documents to "thin tubes of ink," which will then print those documents in distant locales.
10. People will have a better sense of the poor, and of suffering, because they will have witnessed it through their device (not obviously true, at least not yet).
11. People will vote using their devices and this will empower democracy (nope).
12. Judicial testimonies will be performed over such devices, often from great distances.
13. People will order perfectly-fitting fashions from Paris; this guy should be in the Apps business.
14. Married couples will be much closer, and distance relationships will be closer and better.
15. Military targeting and military orders will become extremely precise.
The essay is reprinted in the Arthur Brehmer book Die Welt in 100 Jahren. The book is interesting throughout; a bunch of the other writers thought in 2010 we would be fighting wars with large zeppelins.
Very difficult questions
I have spoken at Jane St. Capital a few times and it is perhaps my favorite audience; everyone wants analytic content and everyone came prepared. All of the questions were tough, but two in particular I was not prepared for.
First, I was asked "Which is the most underrated statistic for judging the value of an NBA player?"
My attempted answer was the player's presence on a very good, consistently winning team. There are many players with impressive statistics, including unselfish statistics such as assists and rebounds, who are only of value on bad teams. We overvalue such players. Overall, really good teams don't keep bad players and really bad teams don't keep good players. If a player has never been on a really good team, he might not be so good, with apologies to the earlier Kevin Garnett.
Second, I was asked who is most likely to write a novel about the financial crisis which will stand the test of time. I do not see any such author around today, but if you have ideas leave them in the comments. "DeLillo, if he were thirty years younger" was the best I came up with. Or maybe something from genre fiction. There are notable works of fiction dealing with the Great Depression, but I can't recall that any of them focus on the financial side. It's a hard topic to be dramatic about, without being either too simplistic or overly technical.
Official U.S. trailer for *Freakonomics* documentary
You'll find it here. It's a well-done preview, the movie is rated PG-13, and it's from the moviemakers behind the superb King of Kong.
I thank some PR guy for the pointer.
*City on the Edge*
The author is Mark Goldman and the subtitle is Buffalo, New York. I loved this book. It is a splendid portrait of twentieth century America, the connection of industrialism and the arts, the decline of manufacturing and the resulting urban casualties, an applied study of the wisdom of Jane Jacobs, and on top of all that it is the best book I've read on how excess parking helped destroy an American downtown. I recommend this book to all readers of serious non-fiction.
*Seeds of Destruction*
That's the new tract by Glenn Hubbard and Peter Navarro; the subtitle is Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs through Washington, And How to Reclaim American Prosperity.
Beyond the usual market-oriented prescriptions, the book defends a price floor for oil imports, price indexing of social security benefits, it is anti-fiscal stimulus, anti-easy money, for job training programs, and for health care it advocates eliminating the tax deduction, removing state-level barriers to competition, and malpractice reform. The authors also devote special attention to criticizing Chinese protectionism as a reason why American job growth hasn't been better.
I take Hubbard to be a (the?) future "kingmaker" for economic policy within the Republican party, with possible competition from Douglas Holtz-Eakin. If you wish to know where those debates and proposals are headed, this is the book to pick up.
*Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945*
The author of this book is Max Hastings. Although this topic may seem like well-trodden ground, this is so far one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year. Excerpt:
It was remarkable how much the mood in Washington had shifted since January. This time, there was no adulation for Churchill the visitor. "Anti-British feeling is still strong," the British embassy reported to London, "stronger than it was before Pearl Harbor…This state of affairs is partly due to the fact that whereas it was difficult to criticize Britain while the UK was being bombed, such criticism no longer carries the stigma of isolationist or pro-Nazi sympathies." Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana declared sourly there "there was little point in supplying the British with war material since they invariably lost it all."
Among other things, it is an excellent book for communicating how military alliances actually work and how much humiliation a nation feels if it keeps on losing military battles or is unable to fight in response. I also had not realized what a folly British policy toward Singapore was. Definitely recommended. Here is one review of the book. Here is an excerpt.
Not everyone in Australia likes Max Hastings.
Good sentences about Japan
In Japan, psychologists evaluate astronaut candidates by, among other things, their ability to fold origami cranes swiftly under stress.
Here is more. The review has at least one other good sentence.
Bruce Cumings and what he deserves
Many of you are objecting to my post on his book, either in the form of comments or emails. You are objecting to his ideology and objecting that he does not denounce the North Korean regime with sufficient fervor and with sufficient recognition of its true awfulness, though he does denounce it, using the word "reprehensible."
On these points I (mostly) agree with you, the critics. Yet it is still a good book and it should open many people's eyes to the history of the Korean War and the not always pretty American role in that war. I haven't seen good comments or reviews finding fault with the book itself (but if I do I will pass them on). The book, by the way, does not allege that South Korea started the war.
Keep in mind how many history or foreign policy books or essays are written by people who are essentially toadies to power or apologists for the U.S. government, or for some other foreign regime. It is expected that we accept those problematic inclinations and affiliations without comment or condemnation. In contrast to many of the works by establishment historians, Cumings is a breath of fresh air.
Overall I seek to narrow rather than widen the following category: "cannot be praised without accompanying symbolic denunciation." If it turns out that, in the process, Cumings reaps more relative status than he deserves (and I am not very influential in shaping the reputations of historians), I'm not especially troubled by that.
In fact maybe I'm happy to see you squirm a bit.
One of my major purposes in writing this blog is to nudge people away from judging political issues, or for that matter books, by asking which groups or individuals rise or fall in relative status.
*The Korean War*
That's the new book by Bruce Cumings and it is as good as the reviews indicate (criticisms here). Here are a few choice excerpts:
For decades the South Korean intelligence agencies put out the line that Kim Il Sung was an impostor, a Soviet stooge who stole the name of a famous Korean patriot. The real reason for this smoke screen was the pathetic truth that so many of its own leaders served the Japanese…
And:
…Two Koreas began to emerge in the early 1930s, one born of an unremittingly violent struggle in which neither side gave quarter; truths experienced in Manchukuo burned the souls of the North Korean leadership. The other truth is the palpable beginning of an urban middle class, as peole marched not to the bugle of anti-Japanese resistance but into the friendly confines of the Hwashin department store, movie theaters, and ubiquitous bars and tearooms.
And:
…Most Americans seem unaware that the United States occupied Korea just after the war with Japan ended, and set up a full military government that lasted for three years and deeply shaped postwar Korean history.
And:
What hardly any Americans know or remember, however, is that we carpet-bombed the North for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties…The air assaults ranged from the widespread and continual use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, finally to the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the last stages of the war.
And, from the entire war:
Perhaps as many as 3 million Koreans died, at least half of them civilians (Japan lost 2.3 million people in the Pacific War).
You can buy the book here.
*More than Good Intentions*
Dean Karlan is one of my favorite young economists and in April he will publish a popular economics book, co-authored with Jacob Appel. The subtitle is How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty.
Consider the book an accessible account of "the new development economics," based on field experiments and randomized control trials. Much of the text focuses on micro-credit, where Karlan has done considerable work, but there is also material on public health, cell phones, and how to get parents to send their kids to school (pay them!).
Anyone interested in a readable treatment of the new development economics should pick up this book.