Category: Books
Laissez-Faire Genetic Engineering
Every few minutes, every one of the microbes in your body (and the ocean, and the soil, and the air) is defying precaution and the sacred, playing God, performing an act illegal in Europe — swapping genes around in the endless search for competition or collaborative advantage.
Another good sentence from Steward Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
Are there hidden codes in Plato?
Take this one with a grain of salt, but here is the latest:
Kennedy's breakthrough, published in the journal Apeiron this week, is based on stichometry: the measure of ancient texts by standard line lengths. Kennedy used a computer to restore the most accurate contemporary versions of Plato's manuscripts to their original form, which would consist of lines of 35 characters, with no spaces or punctuation. What he found was that within a margin of error of just one or two percent, many of Plato's dialogues had line lengths based on round multiples of twelve hundred.
The Apology has 1,200 lines; the Protagoras, Cratylus, Philebus and Symposium each have 2,400 lines; the Gorgias 3,600; the Republic 12,200; and the Laws 14,400.
Kennedy argues that this is no accident. "We know that scribes were paid by the number of lines, library catalogues had the total number of lines, so everyone was counting lines," he said. He believes that Plato was organising his texts according to a 12-note musical scale, attributed to Pythagoras, which he certainly knew about.
Do note this:
Kennedy believes his findings restore what was the standard, mainstream view which held for 2,000 years "from the first generation of Plato's followers, up through the renaissance". This held that "he wrote symbolically and that if you worked hard and became wise you could understand the symbols and penetrate his text to his underlying philosophy." Only in the last few hundred years has an emphasis on the literal meanings of texts led to a neglect of their figurative meanings.
It also explains why it is that Aristotle, Plato's pupil, emphatically claimed that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras, to the bafflement of most contemporary scholars.
I used to consider allegiance to this idea (Montaigne, also, for symbolic codes) as one of my absurd beliefs, but maybe now it is looking better. I will have to look elsewhere.
Profile of David Mitchell
Here is one good bit of many:
“I can’t bear living in this huge beautiful world,” Mitchell said, gesturing to the rolling green hills and the glittering calm sea, “and not try to imitate it as best I can. That’s the desire and the drive. But it’s maybe closer to hunger or thirst. The only way I can quench it is to try to duplicate it on as huge a scale as I can possibly do. I want to capture that,” he said, turning in a circle on the sand and gesturing beyond the beach and the hills, “all the way around the world and all the way to your home and all the way around and back. I want to do all of that here and transmit it through ink.”
What I’ve been reading
I've been trying not to read too much during my stay in Berlin, as an experiment in information processing and to see how it changes my thoughts. Still, I've been reading a bit and here are a few of the books:
1. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, by Eric D. Weitz. A bit stolid, but a good general overview of an era I very much would like to be able to visit. That said, deflation and fascist political movements make for an obviously nasty combination.
2. My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic, an interview with Charles Saatchi. Entertaining throughout, plus you can read it in a few minutes time. This is the sort of book Felix Salmon would blog. Saatchi claims that Pollock, Warhol, Judd, and Hirst are the four artists from recent times who will pass into history as the immortals. The others will be swept away.
3. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention, by William Rosen. This is a popular treatment of some of the themes in Jack Goldstone's excellent work on engineering culture in England. I don't think this book has anything fundamentally new, but about half of it I found to be worthwhile reading. The other half is OK summaries of various economic theories.
4. William Voegeli, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State. Voegeli has a good basic point, namely that a) the welfare state is here to stay, and b) we need to set limits to it. At some point the book runs into diminishing returns. Arnold Kling wrote a good review of the book, plus he had lunch with the author.
5. Herta Müller, assorted. When she won the Nobel Prize last year, I was skeptical. In Berlin I've been reading her work, much of which is set in Berlin, and I like it. It helps if you have a connection to those who have left formerly communist countries. In English, I suggest The Land of Green Plums as a starting point.
6. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses. This one is a re-read, as I will teach it next spring in Law and Literature and I am studying it well in advance. This is Rushdie's most significant achievement and one of the truly excellent novels of the last thirty years. It's not an easy read, but worth the commitment if you haven't already done so. Sadly, this book seems to have fallen into a commercial black hole; you can't even get it on Kindle.
Paul Einzig, from 1932
It is often argued that Governments are in a position to inflate by carrying out ambitious schemes of public works. Undoubtedly during the earlier stages of the crisis such measures might have produced the desired effect. At present, however, they could hardly be adopted on any large scale. Practically every Government has a huge budgetary deficit, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to raise loans for meeting the extraordinary expenditure of such public works. Any attempt to borrow for such purposes would inevitably lead to a further accentuation of distrust, which must be avoided at all costs.
No matter what your point of view on fiscal policy, you can find that quotation to be scary. That is from this book, p.103, and I thank Michael Reddell for the pointer.
*The Age of the Infovore*, paperback edition
This is the paperback of Create Your Own Economy, with (to me) a better title and better cover. I am pleased to have persuaded the publisher in this regard. It is out this coming Tuesday, one week from today. You can pre-order it on Amazon here (Kindle too), Barnes&Noble here, and Borders.com here.
Of my books, it is my clear favorite and not just because it is the latest. It is the one whose ideas I use and think about most often.
Saramago dies at 87
Here is one obituary. Of his works, I find Blindness the most compelling, Ricardo Reis the deepest and most lyrical, and The Double as the most fun and the easiest. Most of the others I do not like at all (if you've tried only the others I say try again), but those three I recommend very highly.
My favorite things *Modern Principles* (Cowen and Tabarrok)
I'm writing to thank so many of you for your interest in Modern Principes: Microeconomics, Modern Principles: Macroeconomics, and the two-in-one edition. Alex and I have been pleased to see how many of you have adopted the book or shown interest in it; all the books are doing great and thanks to your interest. Translations to other languages are already in the works.
Here are a few of my favorite things Modern Principles:
1. It has the most thorough treatment of the interconnectedness of markets and the importance of the price system; most texts only pay lip service to this.
2. It is the most Hayekian of the texts on micro theory without in any way ignoring the importance of externalities, public goods and other challenges to markets.
3. It has an entire chapter on ethics and economics. We do present economics as a value-free science, yet we all know how much ethics shapes people's economics views. The book helps the student sort out common confusions and explains the ethical presuppositions behind many "economic" arguments.
4. It has an entire chapter on incentives and incentive design (e.g. piece rates, tournaments, pay for performance). Oddly, many micro books do not discuss this crucial topic.
5. International examples–from Algeria to Zimbabwe–are written into the core of the book and not just ghettoized in a single "international chapter."
6. It is obsessed with the idea of teaching students to think like economists.
7. It is grounded in the belief that reading an economics text should be fun, not a chore.
8. It has balanced coverage of neo-Keynesian and real business cycle approaches.
9. It covers Solow "catch-up" growth, and Paul Romer's increasing returns, much more thoroughly than do the other texts. The macro book (section) starts off with the idea of why growth matters and is central to macroeconomics.
10. The financial crisis was written into the core of the book, rather than being absent or treated as an add-on. This means for instance plenty of coverage of financial intermediation and asset price bubbles.
11. The book's blog, a teaching tool with lots of videos, powerpoints and other ideas for keeping teaching exciting, is lots of fun and updated regularly (FYI, this is a great resource for any instructor of economics.)
In addition, of course, there is a full range of supplements including lecture powerpoints, test banks, student's guide, Aplia support and coming in the fall EconPortal (even better than Aplia, IMHO).
More Assorted Links
1. What economists and sociologists can learn from Akerlof and Kranton's Identity Economics; a review by Tom Slee.
2. Everyone on TV reads the same newspaper.
3. The Rise of the Order of Assassins.
4. Clay Shirky: "It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity."
Books in the house are correlated with good outcomes for children
A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is "as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father." Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.
That's from Laura Miller.
China Fact of the Day
One of my students, Helen Yang, writes from China:
I encountered Tyler's book at a small bookstore. They were pirated English copies. Guess how much? 2 dollars per kilogram! I bought one and paid 1 dollar because it weighed 0.5 kilo.
I wonder if this is what Tyler meant by Create Your Own Economy?
*Wolf Among Wolves*, by Hans Fallada
Originally published in 1938, it just came out in English for the first time in complete form. I'm only on p.200 (of about 800), but so far it is a gripping albeit slightly schlocky Continental novel of ideas, set in 1923 Berlin, and pitched roughly at the level of a John Forsythe novel. It's also notable for its incorporation of monetary theory throughout the narrative. Fallada had a good grasp of the costs of hyperinflation, the associated accounting problems, the difficulty of personal economic calculation, how inflation destroys savings, and the evolution of parallel currencies; Thomas Mann also explored these themes.
I've yet to see any major English-language reviews, but it's been selling very well in the UK.
Raghuram Rajan on health care in India
Hospitals in the United States could learn more from each other, as well as from hospitals elsewhere, including India, where costs have been brought down by bringing mass-production techniques perfected in manufacturing to health care. Indian hospitals have found that error rate are reduced when their doctors specialize and perform many procedures of a similar kind. The time for operations is also cut down, with no loss of safety. A focus on eliminating unnecessary frills and on utilizing expensive resources like doctor time most effectively also helps even though good surgeons in India earn about as much as surgeons in the United States, the cost of operations is often an order of magnitude lower. Regulations that force hospitals in the United States to be "full-service" hospitals rather than permitting specialization tend to drive up costs. Greater competition between hospitals could also bring down costs; an easy way of encouraging cross-border competition is to authorize Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for procedures performed by authorized hospitals in other countries, like Mexico and Thailand.
That is from Rajan's Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Most of this book is on the financial crisis — and not health care — and it is one of the two or three best books on that topic.
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.