Category: Books
What I Haven’t Been Reading
1. Red State Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, by the consistently impressive Andrew Gelman.
2. Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic; so many smart, virile young men, all writing about destruction.
3. Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust, by Elena Panaritis. An update on the debates on Hernando de Soto and the associated land and property issues.
4. The Mirrored Heavens, by David J. Williams. A science fiction story for people who take the idea of space elevators for granted.
5. The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth, by the noted law and economics scholar Robert C. Ellickson.
If I’m not reading them, it’s because I’ve been spending my time with Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Norris’s McTeague, both for my Liberty Fund conference in Cleveland.
Are books overwritten?
…having said that, spending a lot of time on the internet, as I have
since 2002, has rubbed my nose in something that hadn’t really bothered
me before then: namely just how overwritten so many books and magazine
articles are. Seymour Hersh? He’s great. You could also cut every one
of his pieces by at least 50% and lose exactly nothing. And I’m not
picking on Hersh. At a guess, I’d say that two-thirds of the magazine
pieces I read could be sliced by nearly a third or more without losing
much. That’s true of a lot of books too.
Here is the full piece, by Kevin Drum. My view is that many readers want overwritten books to tranquillize themselves, just as they enjoy dull, soothing voices on the radio.
Readers, do you agree that most books are overwritten? Please write your opinion of Kevin Drum’s point in the comments and feel free to refer to specific books. My favorite rock star, the extraordinary Hillel, would like to again create a song from your opinions. I will link to the song once it is ready. Hillel assures me that the quality of his song will reflect the quality of your input. Be poetic! Think music! Overwrite, if you wish!
Who first predicted the mortgage crisis?
The Mortgager and Mortgagee differ the one from the other not more in length of purse, than the Jester and Jestee do in that of memory. But in this the comparison between runs, as the scholiasts call it, upon all four; which, by the bye, is upon one or two legs more than some of the best of Homer’s can pretend to; — namely, That the one raises a sum and the other a laugh at your expense, and think no more about it. Interest, however, still runs on in both cases; — the periodical or accidental payments of it just serving to keep the memory of the affair alive; till, at length, in some evil hour, — pop comes the creditor upon each, and by demanding principal upon the spot, together with full interest to the very day, makes them both feel the full extent of their obligations.
That is Laurence Sterne, from Tristram Shandy, chapter XII.
C, a sampling
Charientism (n.) A rhetorical term to describe saying a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way
Compotation (n.) An episode of drinking or carousing together
Constult (v.) To act stupidly together
Again, that is from Ammon Shea’s excellent book.
Reading the OED
atechny (n.) A lack of skill; a lack of knowledge of art.
Reading through the dictionary, I am struck again and again by the fact that many words that describe common things are obscure, while many words that describe obscure things are widely known. For example, everyone knows that word dinosaur, even though no one has ever seen or met one. Yet, even though we are faced each and every day with artistic ignorance and lack of skill, very few of us know the word atechny.
That’s from Ammon Shea’s superb Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.
Astorgy is the lack of natural affection when it would normally be present.
Accismus is an insincere refusal of a thing that is desired.
Agathokakological means made up of both good and evil.
And those are just some of the A words.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life and Legacy of the Byrds’ Gene Clark, by John Einarson. I loved this book though partly for idiosyncratic reasons. Failed creative wonders make for memorable stories plus of course I saw Clark perform many times. There are many ways to kill yourself and this book outlines one of them.
2. Alvin Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America. I’m not actually reading it, it’s just sitting here, intimidating me with its length. It looks very good but you’re reading a blogger long fixated upon Gene Clark.
3. Irish Food & Cooking, by Biddy White Lennon [a great name to write a book like this, no?] and Georgina Campbell. Don’t laugh, this book is a revelation. It’s selling on Amazon for $49.95 and in the front of my Borders for $5.99. If you need to start taking Irish cooking seriously, this is step #1.
4. Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations, by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel. This is a very good summary of what is known about corruption.
The best books with the worst titles
Richard Squire writes to me:
Some friends and I last night came up with a parlor
game, Best Books with Worst Titles. Here were
our finalists:Freakonomics
The Audacity of Hope
The Beautiful and Damned
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Moby Dick (winner)
I agree with the middle three picks but think that Freakonomics and Moby Dick are both very good titles. I’ve never actually liked the title Ulysses, as used by James Joyce. I know all about the structural parallels with Homer’s Odyssey but to me they are superfluous to enjoying the work. The title stresses those parallels and so it irritates me. What nominations do you all have?
Stuffed Shark review — the link
Sorry for the mix-up, for my review here is the missing link, so to speak! The book was excellent.
The Gridlock Economy
How many popular economics books offer a message which is (mostly) true, non-trivial, and understandable? Michael Heller’s The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives satisfies that troika. The key message is that the "tragedy of the anti-commons" is often a bigger problem than the better-known tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the anti-commons arises when too many veto rights are exercised. Here is one simple example:
Tarnation, a spunky documentary on growing up with a schizophrenic mother, originally cost $218 to make at home on the director’s laptop. It required an additional $230,000 for music clearances before it could be distributed.
Or try tracking down orphaned copyrights or proceeding without explicit permission. Furthermore many new drugs are more costly to market, or end up not being marketed, because there are so many possible patent infringement issues. By the way about half of the patents litigated to judgment are not upheld. Too many interest groups have veto power over infrastructure development, such as wind power or a new oil refinery (my examples). The U.S. allocates its spectrum far less efficiently than either Japan or South Korea. Holdouts lower the rate of property redevelopment; I learned that The New York Times used eminent domain to build its new headquarters because otherwise assembling such a large parcel of land in midtown Manhattan was very difficult. It all boils down to the story of too many tolls on the medieval Rhine.
Yes, the author does give full credit to Buchanan and Yoon for their work on the anti-commons.
Heller does not cover the deeper question of whether a society can respect minority rights to the desired degree without encountering too strong a problem of the anti-commons. Most of us are for the right to appeal, for the right to a fair trial, for various courses of redress, for the right to sue, for basic rights of intellectual property, and so on. Some set of interest groups has to support those regimes. Can those interest groups be so empowered without the excesses outlined in this book? Would we still want to abolish the anti-commons problems if it led to a more general weakening of minority rights?
The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
An overview is here, the list of contributors is very prestigious (disclaimer: I wrote the article on the social discount rate), and the Palgrave name is golden. The old Palgrave Dictionary of Political Economy still makes for fascinating browsing. Yet the price tag for the new edition is over $2000, $2500 on Amazon.
Not everyone is good at using Google and Wikipedia.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. Government and the American Economy: A New History, no editor but the book is dedicated to Bob Higgs by Price Fishback. Imagine essays by economic history luminaries, mostly classical liberals, covering many different eras of American economic history. For some this is a gold mine.
2. The Third Domain, by Tim Friend. An overview of archaea, those odd life forms that survive where nothing else can. A fascinating look at a still mysterious topic. It’s not as well written as the top-drawer popular science books but since you probably know little or nothing about the topic the amount you will learn is high.
3. Empires of Trust: How Rome Built — and America is Building — a New World, by Thomas F. Madden. This book is avowed pro-Roman, pro-American, and sees strong parallels across the two regimes; part of the thesis is that neither wanted to build an empire but had to.
4. The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America, by Maury Klein. This is a big, clunky book with lots of poor exposition. It also covers a vital era — the real Industrial Revolution — which has remained oddly neglected by too many economic historians.
5. The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. This is the most important book on modern U.S. inequality to date; here is my previous coverage of their ideas. I’m still waiting for Paul Krugman to write a critique but right now their core hypothesis is looking strong.
Which books to take to Africa?
Niall writes me:
I have an optimization problem that I thought you and other loyal MR
readers, like myself, could help me with.The Question: How should I go about selecting books to bring with me for
a year of field research in rural Africa?Conditions:
1. I have a limited amount of weight I can carry on the flight
2. There is little or no access to additional books where I will be
3. I only expect to return to the US once during that yearThanks for continuing the to make MR the most educational blog on the web.
Sadly I do not know this fine gentleman. But I’ll suggest the following five books: Moby Dick, The Bible (but it must be a serious translation), Plato’s Dialogues, Homer’s Odyssey, and a long, fun book of science fiction or fantasy that you haven’t already read. LOTR would be a fine first choice if it fits that bill, otherwise ask around. The basic principles are that the works should be long, deep, divisible into smaller parts, capable of sustaining rereadings, culturally central in some way, and last of all you need one piece of pure fun. Readers, can you improve upon these tips?
I’ll add that if you read some language other than English, and thus read more slowly in that language, pick a book or two there as well.
The best sentence I read yesterday
Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.
That is from Adam Phillips, in the new book Intimacies.
Why you should throw books out
I’m guest-blogging for Penguin just a bit, to promote the paperback edition of Discover Your Inner Economist. Here is my post on why you should throw books out. Natasha, alas, does not agree and sometimes she pulls them out of the trash and scolds me. But here is an excerpt in my defense:
Here’s the problem. If you donate the otherwise-thrashed book
somewhere, someone might read it. OK, maybe that person will read one
more book in life but more likely that book will substitute for that
person reading some other book instead.So you have to ask
yourself — this book — is it better on average than what an attracted
reader might otherwise spend time with? No I’m not encouraging
"censorship" of any particular point of view, but even within any
particular point of view most books simply aren’t that good. These
books are traps for the unwary. A lot of books don’t make the cut of
"above average to those readers they will attract" and of course since
you’ve spent some time with the volume you ought to be in a position to
know. (But note the calculation is tricky. Sometimes a very bad book
can be useful because it might appeal to "bad" readers and lure them
away from even worse books. Please make all the appropriate
calculations here.)
Note that the smarter and more discriminating are your friends, the higher the standard your book donations to them must meet. Toss it!
Grand New Party
The authors, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, invited me to their book party at Borders — and I wanted to meet them — but no I must stay home and read and blog their book! (I wrote this post last night.) If there was rush hour road pricing, as indeed they propose, I would have been there in a flash but no I am munching on cherries on my sofa.
The subtitle is "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" and the Amazon link is here. Their favored policies include the following (with varying degrees of enthusiasm/utopianism on their part):
1. Family-friendly tax reform.
2. Sprawl is OK or at least it could be with rational traffic management policies.
3. Government reinsurance for catastrophic health care expenses, plus they consider the Brad DeLong health care plan.
4. Abolition of the payroll tax for many lower-income earners.
5. Allocate money to public schools on a student-weighted basis, as is done in San Francisco.
6. Reallocate funding toward lower-tier state universities and away from flagship schools.
7. Don’t expect old-style unions to come back.
That is only a sampling. The broader vision is that the Republicans can and must find a way to be more friendly to the non-rich. Personally I don’t see any reason to tie all of this to the Republican Party but I agree with most of their proposals. There’s a great deal of common sense here and it stands as one best general policy books in a long time.
The deep question is why something like this hasn’t already happened. You’ll find the superficial "Republicans are just pro-corporate crooks" answer from bloggers like Kathy G. Another possibility is that Republicans don’t get much electoral credit for pro-poor initiatives (just as many voters simply won’t believe that "Democrats can be tough"). The more competitive political messaging becomes, the more this constraint binds and so the policies of upward redistribution are more likely to be enacted by Republicans in the resulting political equilibrium. If the authors are to get their way somehow this dynamic must be reversed.
Addendum: I’ve met Reihan only in passing and I have not had substantive correspondence with either of the authors. Nonetheless the authors thank me in the conclusion for having saved them from "all manner of errors"; maybe this is another instance of the influence of blogs.
Second Addendum: You’ll find links to video and audio on the book at Ross’s blog.