Category: Books
Ramban, a 12th century Jewish Biblical Commentator
Doni Bloomfield sends me this passage:
Set aside a sum of money that you will give away if you allow yourself to be angered. Be sure that the amount you designate is sufficient to force you to think twice before you lose your temper… (Ramban: A letter for the Ages translated by Avrohom Chaim Feuer Reishit Chochmah, Shaar Ha'anavah Chapter 3)
The link to the source is here.
Serendipity in Istanbul
I am walking along the main shopping street, seeing many Turks but actually thinking it would be nice to read more on Edwin Chadwick, when I stumble across a bookstore with a largish section of Augustus M. Kelley reprints, no Chadwick but they do have the everyone-should-now-reread-it Herbert Feis, Europe the World's Banker, 1870-1914, and I stumble upon the section on Greece and the International Finance Commission of 1898.
A bit of Googling yields the following (JSTOR):
The I.F.C. was set up in 1898 as a result of Greece's disastrous defeat in the 1897 Greco-Turkish War. The powers involved in its creation were Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. The purpose of the commission was to control the collection and employment of the revenues assigned to…[various foreign loans, mostly to the aforementioned powers]…on which the country had defaulted in 1893, as a result of the slump in the currants trade.
The Greeks ended up raising the money through state monopolies on their customs ports, kerosene, salt, matches, playing cards, emery and cigarette paper, plus taxes on tobacco and stamp duties.
At $40, I pass on the book and I will see the story reenacted in any case.
Plunked on my doorstep
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, by Paul Seabright, revised edition. But I must run, and cannot report on how the new edition differs. Here is the book's home page.
Books in my pile
In various stages of undress:
Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing, reviewed by Virginia Postrel here. Stephen M. Davidson, Still Broken: Understanding the U.S. Health Care System (intelligent book, bad timing since it pushes a non-Obama reform). Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe; good book but I've read too much on this topic lately. What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, has the pluses and minuses of an edited collection. Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance; interesting hypothesis but I wanted to see more on regression toward the mean. Stuart Buck, Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation, a politically incorrect reexamination of what the title suggests. Matthew E. Kahn, Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in a Hotter Future. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains; is the joke "I couldn't finish it" or "I'm still reading it"? Daniel Rigney, The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begs Further Advantage, I wonder how much his last book sold.
Incorporated Men and Women
In my post on The Unincorporated Man “framing” writes:
Instead of saying that a corporation can own shares in your income, how about saying it is like a loan that you wont get into trouble ever paying back, but will have to pay more if you become rich.
Exactly. In fact, I have written about income-contingent loans before and how one of them got Bill Clinton through college. At the PSD blog Ryan Hahn also points to Lumni, a new firm that is investing in human capital in the developing world:
Lumni designs, markets and manages “Human capital funds”, an innovative investment vehicle for financing education. Students agree to pay a fixed percentage of their individual incomes for a predetermined number of months after graduation. The arrangement traspases part of the risk of investing in education from the student to the investor, who is in a better position to diversify it.
Lumni is the brainchild of economics professor Miguel Palacios. Here is his book and Cato paper on human capital contracts.
Adam Wheeler’s resume
You'll find it here. He's the fraud who lied his way into Harvard. Here is the description of his "book" (supposedly) under review at Harvard University Press:
The Mapping of an Ideological Demesne
– Under review with Harvard University Press 2008-2009
The massive proliferation, from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, of technologies for measuring, projecting, and organizing geographical and social space produced in the European cultural imaginary an intense and widespread interest in visualizing this world and alternative worlds. As the new century and the Stuart era developed, poets and dramatists mediated this transformation in the form of spatial tropes and models of the nation. I examine the geographical tropes by which Tudor and Stuart writers created poetic landscapes as a mode of engagement with the structures of power, kingship, property, and the market. Accordingly, each of the texts that I examine betrays an awareness of writing as a spatial activity and space as a scripted category. The critical topographies that these writers created are maps of ideology, figural territories within which social conflict and political antagonism are put into play.
I've read worse. How you react to that description is a Rorschach test of sorts, especially if you are not thinking it is fraudulent. Here is a TNR post on Wheeler. Here is a Princeton University Press post about Wheeler and the book he claimed to have under contract with them, to be co-authored with Marc Shell, a very well-read scholar.
Why are none of the sources reporting how well he actually did at Harvard and elsewhere? Isn't that an interesting question? How much would the world differ if Harvard reserved a fifth of its entering class for those individuals who showed the most talent for fraud? I don't mean that question in a cynical light, it is one genuine way of trying to think about how education adds value to labor market outcomes.
*The Upside of Irrationality*
The author is Dan Ariely and the subtitle is The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home. It is in my hands. It will not be left at Newark Airport. It is written with his characteristic clarity and good humor.
Here is Dan's page of riddles.
Investing in the Poor
The Unincorporated Man is a science fiction novel in which shares of each person's income stream can be bought and sold. (Initial ownership rights are person 75%, parents 20%, government 5%–there are
no other taxes–and people typically sell shares to finance education and other training.)
The hero, Justin Cord a recently unfrozen business person from our time, opposes incorporation but has no good arguments against the system; instead he rants on about "liberty" and how bad the idea of owning and being owned makes him feel. The villain, in contrast, offers reasoned arguments in favor of the system. In this scene he asks Cord to remember the starving poor of Cord's time and how incorporation would have been a vast improvement:
"What if," answered Hektor, without missing a beat, "instead of giving two, three, four dollars a month for a charity's sake, you gave ten dollars a month for a 5 percent share of that kid's future earnings? And you, of course, get nothing if the kid dies. Now you have a real interest in making sure that kid got that pair of shoes you sent. Now it's in your interest to find out if he's going to school and learning to read and write. Now maybe you'll send him that box of old clothes you were thinking of throwing away. Under your system you write a check and forget about the kid, who'll probably starve anyway. Under our system, you're locked into him.
…the real benefit comes about when those 'evil, selfish, horrible corporations' get involved. How long will it take for a business to realize that there's a huge profit to be made in those hundreds of millions of starving children?…Imagine a world where a bank gives a loan to a corporation to build a school, hospital or dormitory. Not because its the right thing to do; who cares! They'd do it because it's the profitable thing to do. And because of that, my system, not in spite of greed and corruption and incorporation, but because of it, will work better than yours in any time period with any technology you choose."
So who do you stand with, JC or Hektor?
Hat tip to Robin Hanson for lending me the book and from whom I cribbed the description of ownership rights. Hanson offers other thoughts on the novel. And here are earlier comments from Reihan Salam.
I got this letter in the mail
Travelers Aid
Newark Liberty International Airport
Newark, NJ 07114
Mr. Cowen:
This book was left at the Terminal B Travelers Aid counter.
[Signed]
By the way, it was this book, enclosed in the package, sent to my work address. It was, or rather had been, my book.
*More Money than God*
That is the new book by the very smart Sebastian Mallaby and it is a history of hedge funds, told from a relatively sympathetic point of view.
Here is an earlier MR post on Mallaby on hedge funds, Sebastian's article here.
The best-selling book of all time
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, two hundred million copies.
Next in line is Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts book and then Lord of the Rings.
The full list is here, interesting throughout. For the pointer I thank BrainPicker. Here is a related post from Andrew Gelman.
*Liberated Cooking*
I've been browsing this 1987 book, edited by Marty Zupan and Lou Villadsen, of recipes from libertarians and classical liberals. Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan offers up his take on Middle Tennessee Fried Corn, claiming "Properly done, this is the best dish in the world!"
Select several ears of fresh field corn (not sweet corn), preferably Hickory King white corn. Husk ears, then cut tips of kernels into bowl. Then scrape remaining milk of kernels into bowl.
Add water and salt to mixture. Add 2 tbsp. lard (or other fat) to mixture.
Put in skillet and cook over moderate heat (simmer) for one hour. Add water as needed. Stir to prevent sticking.
You'll also find recipes from Robert Heinlein, Murray Rothbard (he claims his favorite dessert of Cherry Clafouti violates the otherwise praxeological law of diminishing marginal utility), two from David Friedman (medieval and Icelandic), Buchanan's pizza recipe, Ron Paul, David Henderson, Henry Hazlitt, and last but not least Milton Friedman's account of the stuffed cabbage which Rose cooked for him, inspired by her mother Sarah Director. Buchanan's is the only one which sounded tasty to me, possibly the Friedman recipe also.
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.