Category: Books

My favorite things Japan, literature edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

I do not know Japanese literature well but nonetheless I recommend the following:

1. Out: A Novel, by Natsuo Kirino.  Vicious fun.  Dark, violent, etc.

2. Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes.  He has been called the Japanese Stanislaw Lem.  Why do I never hear about this book?  The movie by the same name is good too.

3. Yasunari Kawabata, both The Go Master and The Snow Country.

4. Mishima, Spring Snow, others.

5. Haruki Murakami.  My favorite is Hard-Boiled Wonderland (one of my favorite books period) and then Underground, a modern classic of social science (really).  I like most of them but I feel he is repeating himself as of late.

6. Shusaku Endo, Silence.  Very powerful and I remain fascinated by Japan’s so-called "Christian century."

7. Kenzaburo Oe: I like Teach us to Outgrow Our Madness.

Question: Is Tale of Genji actually fun to read?  I would say about half of it, so yes it is worth the time.  The best parts are very beautiful and mysterious and unlike anything else in literature.  Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is fun and is a good introduction to the period.

The bottom line: There is lots and lots more that I have never heard of, not to mention manga.

How to find new books to read

by  Tyler Cowen in

TLV, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I’ve always been curious about how Tyler goes about choosing new books
to read. Most people rely on recommendations from others, but Tyler
seems like someone who generates a lot of recommendations rather than
relying on them. What is your process?

Children, do not try this at home, but here goes: visit Borders every Tuesday to look for new books, go to a local public library every other day and scan the new books section, subscribe to TLS, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, noting that you should spend more time with the ads than the book reviews, read the blogs Bookslut and Literary Saloon, read the new magazine BookMark (recommended), read the NYT, FT, and Guardian and their books sections, review lots of books on your blog and peruse the numerous review copies you get in the mail (thanks, you mailers and yes I do look at each and every one; keep them coming!). 

It’s rare that I rely on recommendations from other people.

Oh, yes, you should get free shipping on Amazon.com.

Why are books so outrageously expensive in Brazil?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That’s from a reader request.  I’m no expert on Brazil, but here are a few possibilities:

1. Most Brazilians do not read.  I don’t mean they can’t read, I mean they don’t read for leisure so much.  I was stuck at the Sao Paulo airport for seven hours and did not see a single person reading a book, not once.

Taking that as given, low demand means high prices.  That’s why Stephen King paperbacks are cheap and Edward Elgar (the name of an academic publisher) tomes go for $100 and up.

2. Brazilian retailing is not in every way efficient.  Efficient retailing in the traditional sense is, by the way, bad for the quality of your food because it means it is easy to serve large numbers.  And Brazil has some of the world’s best food, and so inefficient retailing for its books.

3. No other supply source is right nearby and the Portuguese language does not produce an extremely thick market.  Note that the Portuguese of Portugal is very different from the Portuguese of Brazil.

4. The Brazilian currency may be overvalued at the moment, at least in purchasing power parity terms, due to Brazil’s commodity exports.

Spot the Contradiction

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Daniel Gross’s review of Sachs’ Common Wealth was bizarre.  Consider this:

Even congenital optimists have good reason to suspect that this time
the prophets of economic doom may be on point, with the advent of
seemingly unstoppable developments like….the explosive growth of China and India.

Huh?  What kind of upside down logic makes high growth rates proof of economic doom?  Proving this was no idle slip Gross goes on to say:

Things are different today, [Sachs] writes, because of four trends: human
pressure on the earth, a dangerous rise in population, extreme poverty
and a political climate characterized by “cynicism, defeatism and
outdated institutions.” These pressures will increase as the developing
world inexorably catches up to the developed world. (emphasis added)

Silly me, I thought rising life expectancy, increasing wealth, and lower world inequality, which is what it means to say that the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world, was a good thing.  And then there is this:

The combination of climate change and a rapidly growing population
clustering in coastal urban zones will set the stage for many Katrinas,
not to mention “a global epidemic of obesity, cardiovascular disease
and adult-onset diabetes.”

Ok, climate change will create problems but how clueless do you have to be not to understand that a large fraction of the world’s people would love to live long enough to die from obesity and other diseases of wealth?

Don’t misunderstand, I know that growth brings problems.  My dispute with Gross is not that he thinks the glass is half-empty and I think it is half-full; my dispute is that Gross thinks the fuller the glass gets the more empty it becomes.

Addendum: Dan Gross writes to say that he was summarizing Sachs’ argument.  Point noted.

Network Power

by  Tyler Cowen in

Indeed, while this convergence in ways of thinking and living may extend to influence cultural forms like music or food, it need not necessarily do so.  It is striking that in this moment of global integration producing massive convergence in economic, linguistic, and institutional standards, we should be so worried about restaurant chains and pop music, neglecting much more significant issues.  Famously, Sigmund Freud argued that nationalist rivalries between neighboring countries reflected the "narcissism of minor differences," a pathological focus on relatively trivial distinctions driven by the desire to keep at bay an anxiety-provoking recognition of fundamental sameness.

That is from David Singh Grewal’s Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, one of the most interesting books on cultural globalization in recent years.  He uses the ideas of social networks and peer effects to argue that widespread cultural convergence is occurring, most of all in ways of life.  Here is the book’s home page.

There is much wrong in the central thesis.  "Ways of thinking" may be less diverse across countries (France is more like Germany than it used to be) but ways of thinking are now much more diverse within countries and in fact within the world as a whole.  What’s so special about having diversity distributed according to geographic or political criteria?  Once you get over the geography fetish, many of the author’s main mechanisms don’t hold up as accounts of growing sameness of ways of life and thinking.  Has the author spent much time poking around Second Life?

Nor is he capable of simply coming out and saying that lots of countries in the world *ought* to be doing more to emulate Anglo-American ways of thinking.

The following claim is also questionable:

To reshape or reduce the power that the social structures we create have over us, we can only summon the organized power of politics.  The large-scale voluntarism of sociability, by contrast, has always delivered the most varied and elaborate forms of individual subjugation.

Cranky Tyler is about to come out of his shell, so maybe it is time to end this post.  It’s still a book worth reading and thinking about.

On a not totally unrelated topic, here is a good post on babies and globalization.

The Post-American World

by  Tyler Cowen in

The American political system has lost the ability for large-scale compromise, and it has lost the ability to accept some pain now for much gain later on.

That is from Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, a book remarkably full of common sense.  It’s #7 on Amazon and a good overall guide to globalization and why it matters that America no longer dominates the world, either economically or culturally.

Ezra Klein on Kindle

by  Tyler Cowen in

At the end of the day, the true advances won’€™t come in the Kindle, but
in the content. Just as the capabilities of the device will shape what
authors decide to do with it, so too will the decisions of authors
shape the evolution of the device. The Kindle a€™s homepage already
features videotaped testimonials from such literary luminaries as Toni
Morrison, Michael Lewis, James Patterson, and Neil Gaiman. But what the
Kindle, and Amazon, need is not their kind words, but more of their written
words, composed with an eye toward the possibilities offered by
electronic text. Just as the early television shows were really radio
programs with moving images, the early electronic books are simply
printed text uploaded to a computer. Amazon could use its unique
position to change that.

Here is more.  Here is Megan McArdle on Kindle: "Best thing since sliced bread."  Here is me on Kindle, before and after trying it.

The Man Who Loved China

by  Tyler Cowen in

That’s the new Simon Winchester book and it concerns Joseph Needham, who wrote the famous series on the history of science in China and focused the attention of the scholarly world on the question: why no capitalism in China?  This books offers a love story, a story of a quest, a story of science, a tale of politics, and did you know that Needham (unwittingly) was the guy who taught the Unabomber to use explosives?

Here is one short bit from the book:

In 1989, more than half a century after they first met, Needham and Lu Gwei-djen were married in Cambridge.  She died two years later, whereupon Needham invited three other women to marry him.  All politely declined.

Definitely recommended.  The subtitle is "The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom."  Here is one review.

I hate perfume

by  Tyler Cowen in

I really, really do.  All perfume, and yes that means yours too.  But I loved the book Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.  If you are rating this book along the single dimension of how skillfully it informs the reader, it is one of the best non-fiction books I have read, ever.

Plus it has good sentences like:

Nobody ever died from wearing Mitsouko, but lots of babies were born as a result of it.

And:

Fragrances for men are mostly identical crap, designed to trap you and give you away as a lout.

Recommended.

What I’ve Been Reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, by Bill Ivey.  The concrete discussions of cultural issues are consistently interesting and thoughtful; the overall talk of cultural rights which frames the book is not even well-developed enough to be called absurd.  The book is best on copyright and least interesting on the NEA, which Ivey once ran.  Most of all the book reflects a creeping horror that the internet will make its entire series of debates irrelevant.

2. Apples are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared, by Christopher Robbins.  A substantive travel book about you-know-where; it is both fun and full of substance.  Recommended.

3. The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History, by Robert L. Hetzel.  This is a very serious treatment of what is, from a historical point of view, an understudied topic.  Recommended; note that while the monetarist point of view is not heavy-handed, it may not appeal to everybody.

4. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century.  A lengthy and thoughtful volume on how WMD are *the* problem of the future, though I found it didn’t get me further to thinking through my views.  A good start, however, for those who don’t buy the premise.

5. 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die.  One of the best books for browsing I have seen, though don’t expect much from the index.  I was most surprised by the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, have any of you been there?