Category: Books

The information architecture of Kindle 2.0

by  Tyler Cowen in

Chris F. Masse alerts me to this very interesting article.  Excerpt:

Letting customers read a book's initial pages for free is a great
Kindle innovation and makes good use of the digital medium's ability to
dissolve the print requirement to bundle chapters. (Thus, this is a better-than-reality
feature.) The innovation will no doubt sell more books – particularly
for fiction, where people will want to see what happens next once
they're gripped by a story. In fact, for mystery novels, Amazon could
probably give away the first 90% for free and charge the entire fee
just for the last chapter.

The article is interesting throughout on a variety of Kindle-related topics.  The author agrees with my basic claim that the Kindle favors plot-driven fiction over complex non-fiction or for that matter postmodern fiction.  Referring back and forth across sections is a no-no, so goodbye Pale Fire.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum, by Lawrence Rothfield.  The definitive book on its topic.

2. Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture.  A very clear and readable book on a still underrated thinker.

3. The Euro: The Politics of the New Global Currency, by David Marsh.  I can't say this book is fun to read, but it is the new go-to source on an increasingly up-for-grabs topic.  It's at least as much about the EMS as about the Euro.

4. Richard Dowden, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles.  Another mega-book on Africa, with mixed results.  At least half of it is worth reading, and I learned a great deal (or at least I think I did) from the analysis of how Somalia is a relatively ethnically unified nation, by African standards at least.

5. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.  Does our cooperative nature come from our love of babies?  Maybe my expectations were too high, but I found her earlier book more revelatory.

Inside the Fed

by  Tyler Cowen in

I enjoyed this book, which is written by Stephen Axilrod and has the subtitle Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin Through Greenspan to Bernanke.

I liked this part:

John Ehrlichman's arrival toward the end of our visit was the main event, unadvertised as it had been.  He had something very definite to say to us.

His speech went something like this: "When you gentlemen get up in the morning and look in the mirror while you are shaving, I want you to think carefully about one thing.  Ask yourselves, "What can I do today to get the money supply up?"  That was it; that was why we were there — not to explain, but to hear.

p.167 has an interesting (though not quite accurate) discussion of what distinguishes some top economics scholars from obsessive-compulsives.

House of Cards

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is William D. Cohan and the subtitle is A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street.  It's the story of the recent history of Bear Stearns.  Here is an NYT review.  Here is a Business Week review.  Here is an L.A. Times review; note that all reviews are very positive.

I've read only fifteen or so pages and I'm already convinced it's one of the must-read books relevant to the financial crisis.  The other two books which come to mind are Lords of Finance and The Partnership, neither of which covers the crisis directly but both offer essential background.

What I’ve Been Reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. The Enormity of the Tragedy, by Quim Monzó.  Originally written in Catalan, this short novel is popular throughout Europe for its priapic good humor.

2. Imagining India, The Idea of a Renewed Nation, by Nandan Nilekani.  An excellent study of the microeconomics of entrepreneurship in India; I thank Carl Schramm for the pointer.

3. Richard A. Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression.

4. The "hot hand" hypothesis is hurting, according to John Huizenga.

5. Bonsai, Alejandro Zambra, 83 pp., the next literary rage to come from Chile since Roberto Bolaño.

What is driving the eBooks boom?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Via Yves Smith, here is one hypothesis:

What's popular on Fictionwise? Well, once again it seems like
porn is blazing a path to a new media format. Of the top 10 bestsellers under the "Multiformat" category, nine are tagged "erotica" amd the last is "dark fantasy"…People who read erotic romance and 'bodice rippers' love
ebooks because of the privacy they offer, both during purchase and when
reading.

By the way, Andrew Sullivan asks how one is to post 250 times a week and read Ulysses.  The answer is simple: one page at a time. 

One advantage of Kindle is that it provides a new tool for mental accounting.  Call me irrational but formerly I could not read more than seven or eight books at a time without abandoning some of them midway.  Kindle (like Netflix, I might add) gives me a new queue and allows me to have more "hanging," partially unread books at any point in time, yet without disrupting my mental equilibrium.  I'm rereading Moby Dick, one chapter at a time, on plane trips, and next in line are Middlemarch and…Ulysses. 

Reader request on James Wood

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is an old, old request, which somehow I left behind in the archives:

The critic James Wood–despite his formidable intellect and depth of knowledge, he's awfully obtuse. Discuss.

Here are Wood's picks for the best books of the year. Here is a good (negative) review of the new Wood book. Here is writing advice from James Wood.  You read people for their peaks and for me that means thumbs up for Wood.  Here is a good short essay on Wood.

Of all those shouting that the literary emperor has no clothes, he is the most acute observer.  But, most of all, other people have smarter things to say about Wood than I do.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Laurence M. Ball, Money, Banking, and Financial Markets.  A truly modern money and banking text; could this be the best money and banking text ever?  I don't yet see an Amazon link for it but presumably it will be out soon.  (Addendum: Link is now here.)

2. William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction.  An excellent book on why we find fiction and narrative so satisfying; the notion of vindication is central to the hypothesis.  Recommended.

3. David Post, In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace.  This book is written in the style of Jefferson in at least one way.  I mean that as praise.

4. Joel Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and Times of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds.  Fills in many of the pieces about his life and work; it seems he lived part of his life as a practicing Muslim.

The economics of conglomerates

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jessica Crispin reports:

McGraw-Hill Cos., the owner of the Standard & Poor’s
credit-rating service, won’t be publishing a book on the financial
crisis that the author says addresses S&P’s role in the markets’
plunge.

Barry Ritholtz, chief executive officer of equity-research firm
FusionIQ, said he withdrew the manuscript from the New York publisher
and plans to return his advance after the company tried to edit passages critical of S&P. McGraw-Hill says it wasn’t initially able to verify some of the book’s claims.

Addendum: Here is Barry's account.

Keynes on consumption, chapters eight and nine

by  Tyler Cowen in

There are many lovely and insightful discussions in these two chapters; it should be enough to persuade anyone that the GT is fun to read.

For instance Keynes's discussion of the interest elasticity of savings on p.93 persuaded a whole generation of economists.  Or on p.95 he references theories of spending based on expectations about the future; only in their most extreme form will they render Keynesian results impossible.

Much of these chapters are dedicated to the simple idea that consumption does not rise indefinitely with income (and other influences).  The ultimate point is to establish how much aggregate demand relies on investment demand, which it turns out is, to Keynes, highly unstable.

Keynes's continuing allegiance to some elements of classical (!) economics pops up in chapter eight (e.g., pp.100, 105), specifically his view that a society can run out of profitable investment opportunities.  He feared secular stagnation and thought that government management of investment might be needed to stave off this possibility.  We hear all about Keynesian economics and the short run but in reality part of Keynes was still under the spell of Ricardo and Malthus and the idea of the classical stationary state (p.106).

For the same reason Keynes thought the private sector would run out of good investment opportunities, he also thought that by 2009 (what exactly was the date he gave?  Brad DeLong knows) the problem of scarcity might be largely overcome.  It hasn't worked out that way.

A number of commentators keep on bringing up Henry Hazlitt's book on Keynes in the comments section.  Hazlitt's book makes many good points and has many "gotchas" on Keynes's errors.  Still, Hazlitt cannot bring himself to see or admit there are conditions under which Keynes can be right and thus I don't regard it as a convincing critique.  The best critical approaches to the GT are those which figure out under which conditions it might be correct and then examine empirically whether those conditions in fact hold.

The World Between the Wars, 1919-1939: An Economist’s Perspective

by  Tyler Cowen in

I don't know why this book, by Joseph C, Davis, isn't cited more often, as it's one of the best on this period.  Here is one small bit:

In the spring of 1933 a mock-trial of "the economists" was staged at the London School of Economics, Robert Boothby, M.P. representing "the state of the popular mind," charged the economists with "conspiring to spread mental fog," declaring that they "were unintelligible; that they had in general proved wrong; and that in any case they all disagreed."  Four men of high standing (Sir William Beveridge, Sir Arthur Salter, Professor T.E. Gregory, and Hubert Henderson) discussed Boothby's charges without wholly refuting them.  It was sagely observed: "Much of the public's distrust of economics arises from the fact that the economist is compelled to act both as physiologist and doctor at once."  In fact, economists had not been trained to be "economic doctors" or "social engineers," and very few persons had acquired such competence.

I wonder if anyone will restage such a trial today…

Jessica Crispin reads

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am a very keen and regular reader of Bookslut and here is Jessica Crispin:

I have been happily reading Timothy Clack's Ancestral Roots: Modern Living and Human Evolution,
although it covers so many areas I occasionally wish some things had
been expanded. Like the monkeys who went on hunger strike until all
monkeys were receiving grapes. Or the evolutionary explanation for
"beer goggles." Although my favorite part was when he mentioned a study
where women "politely" asked men for no strings attached sex and they
counted how many agreed. (Less than you would think.) So many
questions! Were the results different if they "belligerently demanded"
casual sex? Did they go through with the sex, or did they just say,
"Okay, just wanted to know if you were interested. I'm going home now."
Because that seems mean. I need to find the original study.

The link is here, but that is all there is.