Category: Books
Resumption of Keynes symposium
I've been tied up with some other commitments but I miss reading the book and we are resuming. We'll do chapters eight and nine for Monday; be ready!
What I read some time ago
But they're all coming out this book season and thus I tell you about them now:
1. Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates.
2. Frank H. Buckley, Fair Governance: Paternalism and Perfectionism; a critique of "Nudge" and soft paternalism.
3. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.
There's also another good book on Samuel Johnson, which is what I have been reading, in addition to the new translation of The Canterbury Tales.
Markets in everything, book lovers’ edition
only $7,000 so I feel like it was a HUGE bargain. What value! First let
me say that the book does start off a little slow but once you get into
the third chapter, "Silicon Molecules: We Hardly Knew Ye'", you just
can't put this book down. It isn't without it's moments though. The
contrast between antagonist and protagonist is just simply fantastic. I
highly suggest reading this book by flashlight under the covers or in a
homemade fort/tent in your bedroom. A+ and Highly recommended!
And:
in. I mean, "Chemical Shifts of P-31 Compounds" had me on the edge of
my seat, and "Hyperfine Coupling Constants of the Pnictogens" had a
little something for everybody. I can say this with the conviction that
only comes with love when I say that "Chemical Shifts and Coupling
Constants for Silicon-29" is total crap.
And:
think "for the cost of $8000, one better be able to do rocket science
after reading." Well, I have even better news. After I closed this
book, I realized I had gained the knowledge to spontaneously teleport!
That's right! I don't even need this junky telepod anymore.
And:
I clicked on the "I'd like to read this book on Kindle" link. Can't wait to hear from Springer.
And:
Fascinating, witty, and very subtle in it's criticisms of our modern
times. It's an intensely moving story about how a young Nepalese boy
"Silicon" (age 29) struggles to get by in a city that offers no support
for immigrants as he works a meaningless job to get by. The woman he
loves is a violent criminal, and this book chronicles his struggle to
hold on to his righteousness while simultaneously trying to woo her and
become a couple.
But I won't spoil the ending! Buy this book and you won't be disappointed!
I liked this one-star review:
year grad student knows that you can't manipulate subvolume III/35A
with nuclei B-11 without first lowering the magnetic replicator to -300
ohms! Not to mention that unless you lower the cylindrical volume 4
quarks you'll freeze 90% of the atoms! And don't get me started on
nucleus Si-29, you can't…
Finally:
Africa’s World War
The subtitle is Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe and yes the book truly explains all of these things or at least gives it a noble try. The author is Gérard Prunier. I've been stunned by how much I've learned from this book, which is clear without denying the underlying complexities. I rate it as one of the two excellent books of the year so far, the other being Ted Gioia's book on the history of the blues.
You'll find a very critical review of the book here but I was more impressed by the book than by the review. I liked this excerpt:
Interviewer: What model of democracy do you see as suitable?
Kabila: I cannot say now, you are asking too much. Being a head of state is not like being in a restaurant. I have to have time to think about it.
What I’ve been reading
1. Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, by Richard E. Nisbett. A good compendium of the arguments for environmentalism in the IQ debates. But this book has all the same flaws as The 10,000 Year Explosion — albeit from the other side of the issue — and egads are those people in the comments section touchy. This book, by the way, offers the state of the art rebuttals to genetic explanations of Ashkenazi achievement, if you are looking to advance your understanding of those debates.
2. Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, by Mark Bittman. The best book on "food sanity" to date.
3. Yesterday's Weather, by Anne Enright. I'm not usually a consumer of short stories (Alice Munro is one exception) but the best ones in this (high variance) volume are very very good.
4. Bioethics and the Brain, by Walter Glannon. I wished for more of the author in this book but still I found it a useful compendium on what people are arguing about in the field these days.
5. Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. So far this is the book of the year for me. There are many fine books in this area but this one rises to the top of the heap. It's both the best introduction to its topic and the best book if you've read all the others and feel that nothing more can be said; a major achievement.
Sentences to ponder
I'm not sure if the book is interesting, have any of you read it? But I remembered these sentences from a review:
as a mental patient who tells the intake counselor that she doesn’t
feel “safe” (the magic word) in the real world. (She tries to pay for
these visits herself, but fails: in one of the book’s few funny
moments, her insurance company rebuffs offers of cash, because only
crazy people bankroll such visits themselves.)
Here is more.
As an aside, I was sent this song about the financial crisis.
Keynes’s *General Theory*, chapter seven
There's a lot of shadow boxing in this chapter. Keynes is well aware that he just made a radical move in treating savings as a pure residual (see my discussion of chapter six). Now he is looking to cover his tracks, make it sound reasonable, and show that other people don't really have a better approach.
Section I recaps. When Keynes writes "It would certainly be very inconvenient and misleading not to mean this" you should be just a bit astonished. He knew exactly what he was trying to cram in here and I suspect Keynes himself was smirking when he wrote that line.
Section II covers Hawtrey, an economist hardly discussed these days. (But wait, the issue pops up here, today! And here! Fama I think is wrong but read his 1980 "Banking in the Theory of Finance," Journal of Monetary Economics, for his underlying model)
Section III says that there exists a contorted interpretation of Keynes's earlier Treatise on Money which is consistent with the GT.
Sections IV and V whack the Austrians (again), drawing heavily on Piero Sraffa's 1932 "Dr. Hayek on Money and Capital." Keynes's basic point is that inflation can push around the redistribution of wealth, and expenditure flows, but that the new allocation of resources will be self-sustaining rather than self-reversing. He was basically right, unless you are willing to adopt some ancillary doctrine of market failure when specifying how adjustment processes occur.
The first paragraph of Section V is interesting but I don't think it is a correct account of why the Austrians differ from Keynes on this point. The Austrians had confusing terminology and here I think Keynes is taking them too literally.
The last two paragraphs of this chapter are a nice statement of what macroeconomics is all about.
Psychologically, Keynes feels he has neutralized the alternative approaches to savings and investment, and so he will proceed with the approach which we now call Keynesian. This chapter is Keynes trying to reassure himself, and reassure the reader. It's Keynes, the conscious revolutionary, trying to sound conservative.
Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy
These are two heavy volumes (1328 pp.) and if you read them you will have a very good background understanding of the institutions behind the global economy.
Here is the book's home page with some sample free material. Here is a list of contents. Here is one summary of the book's contents. The editors, Kenneth A. Reinert and Ramkishen S. Rahan,are from GMU School of Public Policy although note that is not the same as the economics department. You can buy it here.
We resume with Keynes’s *General Theory*
We'll do chapter seven for Thursday. If you need to get up to speed, here are previous installments in the series.
By the way, what do you all want for the *next* book club?
The Magician’s Book
A recent MR request asked me which book I wished I had written and now I have a recent answer: Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia. And I'm not even a big Narnia fan (this review aside). Most of all this is a book about what it means to love another book and how deep such a love can run. It also covers the gap between children and adults, how storytelling works, what theology means in art, not to mention it gives an excellent portrait of Tolkien. Every paragraph of this book offers something of value — how many books can claim that? Bravo, and again you needn't love or even know much about C.S. Lewis.
I'll buy Laura Miller's next book, sight unseen, no matter what the topic.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Aztec World, by Elizabeth Brumfiel and Gary Feinman. Long-time MR readers will know Aztec history is a special interest of mine. This book, a companion volume to the Aztec exhibit from Chicago’s Field Museum, is perhaps the best introduction to the Aztecs to date.
2. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. This achieved (justified) rave reviews in the UK but it has hardly made a dent in the U.S. market. It is non-fiction but written in a hybrid form and often feels more like a novel.
3. The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, by Torkel Klingberg. When push comes to shove, the author fails to establish his major thesis. Still, this book is way above average for how seriously it treats the actual science behind its argument. I learned a great deal from it.
4. Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill. A scary and effective memoir about how Athill, a famous editor, dealt with aging and the end of her sex life.
5. Not John Steinbeck.
Here are predicted hot reads for 2009.
Exotic Ethiopian Cooking
That’s the book Yana gave me for Christmas. I hadn’t realized how much the cuisine relies upon red onion and how many of the dishes require a full cup of red pepper paste. Spiced butter is common too. The recipe for red pepper paste starts by suggesting "15 lbs." of New Mexico red chiles. I’m trying it with…15 red chiles. We’ll see how that goes; I’ve also scaled back the "5 lbs. fresh ginger" to 5 pieces of fresh ginger.
If you’re ready with the spiced butter and the red pepper paste (neither is totally simple), most of the recipes take 5-10 minutes and sound quite delicious.
The menu for tonight includes fesenjan chicken, Parsee sweet and sour fish, Parsee lamb with stewed apricots, Ethiopian sauteed beef with injera, and red lentils. I’ll also make Ethoipian pumpkin if I have red pepper sauce left over. Natasha is preparing Russian vegetable salads.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, by Kenneth Whyte. A detailed revisionist account, arguing Hearst was a better progressive and better journalist than his reputation.
2. Tim Blanning, The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art. An overview of the history of music, with many insights from an economic point of view.
3. Elsewhere, U.S.A., by Dalton Conley. Everything by Conley is worth reading. The subtitle to this one is: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. The focus is on technology and markets. Here are numerous earlier posts on Dalton Conley.
4. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (these subtitles are getting more and more all-encompassing!). The author is Steven Johnson, another author always worth reading. The topic is Joseph Priestley. Here is Johnson’s blog. Here is a good review.
5. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck. I’ve long resisted Steinbeck, so we’ll see how far I get in this one.
My Christmas present
It’s the best book of the year and not just because it was my Christmas present. It’s The Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture (good photo excerpts at the link). The book is 812 pp. and also several times larger than a normal book so it is like getting a 2000 pp. book or more. (That’s why it costs $122!) It is very heavy to carry around and it comes in its own plastic case.
The book offers photos and information about the splendid works of architecture that have opened since the beginning of the millennium. It’s amazing how much there is (1037 structures, according to one review) and also you can compare one locale to another; why for instance has Medellin been so active in building innovative structures?
Unintentionally, the book is a paean to the now-passed global real estate bubble. It is an amazing feeling to turn the pages and see how much effort and creativity mankind has put into building. Homes were considered profitable investments and state and local governments had plenty of funds for public buildings. Today, many projects are on-line as half-baked cakes but, overall, the next eight years won’t be anything like these.
Highly recommended.
Lords of Finance
The author is Liaquat Ahamed and the subtitle is The Bankers who Broke the World but no it’s not about today it’s about the 1920s:
This book traces the efforts of these central bankers to reconstruct the system of international finance after the First World War. It describes how, for a brief period in the mid-1920s, they appeared to succeed; the world’s currencies were stabilized, capital began flowing freely across the globe, and economic growth resumed again. But beneath the veneer of boomtown prosperity, cracks began to appear…The final chapters of the book describe the frantic and eventually futile attempts of central bankers as they struggled to prevent the whole world economy from plunging into the downward spiral of the Great Depression.
The 1920s were an era, like today’s, when central bankers were invested with unusual power and extraordinary prestige. Four men in particular dominate this story: at the Bank of England was the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman; at the Banque of France, Emile Moreau, xenophobic and suspicious; at the Reichsbank, the rigid and arrogant but also brilliant and cunning Hjalmar Schacht; and finally, at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Benjamin Strong…
I am enjoying this book very much, though it terrifies me as well. I hadn’t known that Norman, later in his life, thought he could walk through walls. Nor did I know that in the 1920s one-third of the population of the state of Colorado lived there as a (supposed) respite from tuberculosis. You can buy it here.