Category: Books
What I’ve been reading
1. Ukraine & Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry, by Anatol Lieven. I didn't think I needed to read a dated book on Russian-Ukrainian relations, but in fact I did. This has excellent detail and conceptual analysis on every page. Recommended.
2. Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Brain Differences, by Thomas Armstrong. I don't agree with all the details in this book, but so far it is the major popular statement of the position outlined by its title.
3. William Vollmann, Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Hou. What can one say about Vollmann at this point? The title is descriptive, for sure, and the author loves his topic. He's massively flawed to read but still more alive than most writers. Here are earlier MR posts on Vollmann, who issues large and deeply informed tomes at the rate I produce blog posts.
4. Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978. This is a fascinating portrait of the mid-century Arab world, a story of a itinerant childhood, plus it's an account of festering Mideast conflicts, a political Bildungsroman, and, every now and then, a story of what it's like to be an Israel skeptic and also be married to a woman whose parents are Holocaust survivors. Intelligent on every page.
5. Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation. The rise and decline of free trade ideology in Britain, told in scholarly yet exciting fashion. I am just starting this one.
Slavoj Žižek on Sarah Palin
I don't usually blog this topic, but I was struck by this passage, from Žižek's new Living in the End Times. Maybe it's what you would get if Andrew Sullivan were a Lacanian and a Hegelian:
Earlier generations of women politicians (Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, up to a point even Hillary Clinton) were what is usually referred to as "phallic" women: they acted as "iron ladies" who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be "more men than men themselves." …Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out how Sarah Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood. She has a "castrating" effect on her male opponents not by way of being more manly than them, but by using the ultimate feminine weapon, the sarcastic put-down of male authority — she knows that male "phallic" authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked. Recall how she mocked Obama as a "community organizer," exploiting the fact that there was something sterile in Obama's physical appearance, with his diluted black skin, slender features, and big ears. Here we have "post-feminist" femininity without a complex, uniting the features of mother, prim teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public person, and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the "first dude" as a phallic toy. The message is that she "has it all" — and that, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who had realized this Left-liberal dream…No wonder that the Palin effect is one of false liberation: drill, baby, drill!
Then comes the zinger:
What this means — in Hegelese — the class struggle encounters itself in its oppositional determination (gegensätzliche Bestimmung), in its distorted/displaced form, as one among many social struggles. And, in exactly the same way, "anti-elitist" populism in architecture is the mode of appearance of its opposite, of class differences.
I thought this contrast was better than any review of the book I could write. The author, by the way, makes a contrarian argument that the Khmer Rouge didn't go "far enough" (too weak a constructive plan), is joking some of the time, believes that capitalism is doomed, and apparently is still a communist though he refuses to tell us why he has a better alternative than communism as we have known it. His book is entertaining, but he ought to just become a social democrat and do mass transit studies for the Aarhus municipal government.
Claims I wish I understood
There is undoubtedly an elusive quality to the gauge/string duality. As well established as it is on technical grounds, it is just strange to have a fifth dimension that isn't really a dimension like the ones we know and love. It's there not so much as a physical direction, but as a concept that describes aspects of the physics of four dimensions. Ultimately, I'm not convinced that the six extra dimensions of string theory as a theory of everything will be more tangible than the fifth dimension of the gauge/string quality.
That is from Steven S. Gubser's The Little Book of String Theory. There is much in this book I did not understand, but I've seen plenty of popular physics books over the last few years. This is the first one in a long time that I both wanted to read and finished; it's full of fresh material, fresh at least to me.
Here is a podcast on gauge theory and economics, which I have yet to listen to.
True sentences
Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.
That's from Malcolm Gladwell.
What I’ve been reading
1. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. If you drop the normative tone, and read the case studies for "how to" tips, this is a pretty good book.
2. El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, by John Ross. This book evokes vivid memories of Mexico City. At first it feels like "gonzo journalism," but it ends up supplying more factual information than the initial tone suggests. There are few cities I love more.
3. Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present, by George G. Szpiro. A history of social choice theory, with much more detail (yet still readable) than one is used to receiving on this topic. I liked this book very much, plus it has extensive coverage of Ramon Llull, who remains a very underrated thinker. Among his numerous achievements, he understood a significant chunk of Borda and even Arrow in the thirteenth century. The first chapter of the book is here.
4. Social Security: A Fresh Look at Policy Alternatives, by Jagadeesh Gokhale. I've thumbed this one more than I have read it. The author argues that the U.S. social security system is much less solvent than is commonly thought. I could put ten more hours into this book and still it would be hard for me to judge that conclusion. Still, for the time being this appears to be the most fully realized treatment of its issues.
5. Insectopedia, by Hugh Raffles. There's one-quarter of a great book in here, provided you don't mind non-linear literary organization and welcome the notion of "hodgepodge."
The most highlighted non-fiction passage on Kindle
Can you guess the author? The passage is this:
…the more money they made the next day on the streets. Those three things–autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward–are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.
The full list is here and it is worth a good look. Keep in mind that Kindle readers are far more literate than average. And if you need extra background, here is Kevin Drum on The Shack.
Hat tip goes to WillWilkinson.
The best 100 Arabic books?
Here is one list and here are the top five:
1 The Cairo Trilogy by Egyptian (Nobel-prize winning) author Naguib Mahfouz. Yes, of course it’s available in English: Trans. William Maynard Hutchins, Everyman’s Library, 2001.
2 In Search of Walid Masoud by the Palestinian author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. This is available in English, translated by by Adnan Haydar & Roger Allen. Syracuse University Press, 2000. Also, Ghassan Nasr’s translation of Ibrahim Jabra’s The Journals of Sarab Affan, published by Syracuse University Press, was a runner-up for the Banipal translation prize in 2008.
3 Honor, by the great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim. As far as I can turn up, this has never been translated into English. Ibrahim’s Zaat, The Committee, and Stealth are easily available from AUC Press, AUC Press, and Aflame Books. The Smell of It was translated, too, but it’s long since out of print.
4 War in the Egyptian Homeland, by the Egyptian Yousef Al-Qaeed has not been translated. (Oops! Hilary notes that War in the Land of Egypt by Yusuf al-Qa’id–see where a non-standard transliteration will get me–was published by Interlink in 1997, translated by Olive and Lorne Kenny and Christopher Tingley. Yes, and my title translation was lame. Worse, I’ve read that translation….)
5 Men in the Sun, by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, was translated by Hilary Kilpatrick and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers in 1998.
Hat tip goes to Literary Saloon.
John Gray on Michael Oakeshott
John Gray often misfires, but still he is one of the smartest and most knowledgeable generalists around:
…Oakeshott was not without illusions of his own. He was able to disparage ideology because he believed tradition contained all that was needed for politics; he could not conceive of a situation in which a traditional way of doing politics was no longer possible. Yet that has been the situation in which the Conservative Party has found itself over the past generation. The leader and his cabal of modernisers could hardly expect to undo the more radical modernisation Thatcher had unwittingly imposed on the party. As Cameron will discover, one way or another, an ideologically driven Conservatism is here to stay – even if it means the party once again drifting into limbo.
The full review, which covers British politics and the forthcoming election, is here. Here is Gray, trying to dismantle A.C. Grayling's rationalism (hat tip The Browser), worth a read.
*Lifecycle Investing*
That's the title of the new book by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff and the subtitle is A New, Safe, and Audacious Way to Improve the Performance of Your Retirement Portfolio. Their point is simple: if diversification across asset classes is so good, why not also seek greater diversification across time periods? In other words, you should want to hold stocks for longer periods of time and to do this when you are young you should incur additional debt to play the market.
Yikes!
They propose a fifty percent down payment on stocks when you are young, with the rest financed by leverage. At another place in the book, they mention aiming to spend a constant fraction of lifetime savings on stock.
But is this less risky? To what extent is this multiplication of risks (adding more time periods) and to what extent is it subdivision of risk (spreading a given sum of money across more stocks or across more time periods)? To what extent does early investment sidestep the price risk of later periods, if you're holding the assets through that period anyway? The authors do present various simulations where this strategy works out well. They also argue that if you are pessimistic you should invest less in stock, but still spread out your investing over time.
If I were a young man, I would not take this plunge, mostly out of fear that a historically unique equity premium configuration was doing the major work of the argument. Still, I found this to be a stimulating and well-written book with a clearly demarcated proposal for betterness.
It was published by Basic Books, which also is putting out Jeff Miron's Libertarianism: From A to Z.
*The Dead Hand*
The author is David E. Hoffman and the subtitle of this recent Pulitzer winner is The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy. I recommend it highly, especially if you are too young to have remembered the middle years of the Cold War. I hadn't thought of this before:
"The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our East Coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six or eight minutes. Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?"
That's a quotation from Ronald Reagan. There's also this bit:
…Guk [a KGB leader] was told that an "important sign" of British preparations for nuclear war would probably be "increased purchases of blood and a rise in the price paid for it" at blood donor centers. He was ordered to report immediately any changes in blood prices.
If you want to feel better about today's world, I recommend you read this book. Until the last section or so, at which point you will feel worse about today's world again. I shuddered at this sentence:
In the Soviet system, people were under stricter control than the fissile materials.
Daniel Okrent’s *Last Call*, a history of prohibition
My review, in the latest Business Week, is here. Excerpt:
…Last Call does a lot to help situate the impulses of the era, and yes, make them seem a little less crazy. At the same time as temperance was flowering, so were crusades for clean water and sanitation, which saved millions of lives. Alcohol, seen as a major scourge of civil society, looked ripe for a once-and-for-all ban that would put mankind on a new course. "Figuring per capita," Okrent writes, "multiply the amount Americans drink today by three and you'll have an idea what much of the nineteenth century was like."
The introduction of the income tax made Prohibition fiscally feasible. Women's suffrage made it politically feasible. World War I created a surfeit of patriotism, a willingness to sacrifice, and an embrace of the expansion of federal power. By 1920 everything was in place for a bold new government intrusion into everyday life.
The end of my review considers in more detail why so many drugs are still illegal while alcohol is not. You can buy the book — which is very good — here.
*Offshoring in the Global Economy*
That's the title of the new Rob Feenstra book. In the first section, he, like Paul Krugman, tries to resurrect the view that trade patterns explain recent wage movements. For a published book, however, I'm not sure how much he has come up with:
As I have just shown, a factor content calculation can potentially give us a large impact of trade on factor prices, once we imput the factor intensities corresponding to disaggregate trade flows. Additional work is needed to confirm this result for the United States, since I have made simplifying assumptions in the calculations; the estimates in table 1.5 use an input-output matrix from 1982, and the final years all use domestic shipments data from 1994. In addition I have not experimented with constraining the Baldwin-style regressions to be stable across years, which might explain why the 10-digit results for 1997 give only a small impact of factor contents on the implied effective factor ratio, unlike what was found for 1994 and 2000. And of course, it is most important to check my assumption that the coefficients of the Baldwin-style regression run at the 4-digit SIC level can actually be applied at more disaggregate[d] levels. But even with all these considerations, the preliminary results are promising enough to convince us that headway can be made on the aggregation problem in factor content calculations. In future work we can expect to find more profound impacts of offshoring as measured by the factor content of trade.
File under "If it were true, I'd expect it to be more obvious than that." Still, I commend Feenstra for his thoroughness and straightforwardness. It is in any case a stimulating book for the economist reader.
Here is Feenstra's home page.
Cloning thoughts
I am disappointed in many of the responses which you offered to Bryan on the cloning question. First, I think he is assuming that cloning can work, not postulating hundreds of unethical experiments to try to get there.
So many of you cited reasons why you didn't like it, but hardly anyone performed a sober assessment of the relevant trade-offs. It seems we get an extra person out of the deal, for one thing, and I am taken aback that a number of you would regard this person as a net negative. For others, "I can find some reason to object to this" seemed like a decisive argument. Bryan's joy in the arrangement seemed to bug the readers all the more; I had the feeling many of you would have found it perfectly OK if he had expressed resignation at something like this being an accidental occurrence.
I don't have the same preference as Bryan, far from it. I think most of us desire children who are "too similar to us" and there are obvious Darwinian reasons why this is the case. Nonetheless we should try to overcome this attitude and there are many successful instances of adopted children or various other "mixed" arrangements, such as foster parents. We can only hope there will be more and that means we need a greater flexibility of intuitions about parenting and inheritance.
As a proud step-parent, I find it increasingly odd how many of you insist on the "fifty percent solution." Ew! What if it — heaven forbid — looks like you? What if you're both economists named Keynes? But there's more: the rest of your daughter looks just like the woman you chose to marry? Yuck!!!!! And so on. Maybe you all think that fifty percent is great but one hundred percent is unacceptable, when it comes to the genes. Good luck arguing that one with a committed nominalist. And I bet most of you don't find it repugnant if a father wants a son rather than a daughter, but similarity of gender is pretty important too.
If I have any criticism of Bryan, it's that he's pro-natalist (fine in my book) but I've never heard him promote the idea of adopting a child or defend the idea of raising a biological child who is, for whatever reason, very different from his or her parents. (Don't overreact here and interpret his silence in a negative way, I'm simply goading him to take up these issues, which I think will force him to revise his thought.) Furthermore I think his intuitions about similarity, and child-rearing, will change once (some of) his kids start rebelling against him.
Most of all, I found this thread to be a lesson in how quickly smart people will side with their Darwinian intuitions, and attack another smart person with intolerance, just because something feels icky to them. It's not so different from how some people find gay people, and also "what they do," to be disgusting. They also don't want gay people to be adopting children because they see that as offensive too. It's not, least of all for the child.
That all said, I guess he shouldn't put the passage in his book.
Margin notes in books: why bother?
Chug asks me:
Tyler, do you scrawl notes in the margins of the books you read?
No. The key constraint for me is finding the page, not remembering the associated idea, and I find it odd that other people are not also this way. (That said, I do know I am the outlier. But really: do you write the notes to actually remember something? Or do you do it to make the reading experience more real in the first place, much like taking notes in class?) So in some of my books I dog-ear the pages which are important for me. In other books I write those page numbers on the inside book jacket.
In the longer run I expect "annotated" books will be available for full public review, though Kindle-like technologies. You'll be reading Rousseau's Social Contract and be able to call up the five most popular sets of annotations, the three most popular condensations, J.K. Rowling's nomination for "favorite page," a YouTube of Harold Bloom gushing about it, and so on.
Bryan Caplan’s cloning confession
I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally. Not only do they insult the identical twin sons I already have; they insult a son I hope I live to meet. Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I'm sure we'd share. I'm confident that he'd be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me. I'm not pushing others to clone themselves. I'm not asking anyone else to pay for my dream. I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone. Is that too much to ask?
The link is here and he is asking whether he should cut that paragraph from his forthcoming book on why people should have more children. If you don't like his proposal for a cloned son, I will ask why you think your preferred degree of genetic similarity — between you and your next kid — is right and Bryan's is wrong.