Category: Books
My Law and Literature reading list, Spring 2010
The semester is underway!
The New English Bible, Oxford Study Edition.
In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott.
Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, by Fernando Verrissimo.
Glaspell’s Trifles, available on-line.
Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Novels and Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, volume 1.
I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov.
Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville, excerpts, chapters 89 and 90, available on-line.
Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis.
Kathryn Davis, The Walking Tour.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir.
Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale.
Henning Mankell, Sidetracked.
Edgar Allen Poe, The Gold-Bug, available on-line.
Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome.
We also will view a small number of movies.
Public Domain Day
Today is Public Domain day and James Boyle reports:
In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, Fahrenheit 451, a “fireman” is a man who burns books “for the good of humanity.” Written at the height of the Cold War, the book paints a shockingly dystopian picture of a culture at war with its own printed record, one deeply infused by Bradbury’s love of books. When the book was written, Bradbury got a copyright term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years if he or his publisher wished. Most authors and publishers did not bother to renew – very few have a commercial life longer than a few years. That meant that about 93% of books and 85% of all works from 1953 passed into the public domain within 28 years. But Bradbury’s book was a commercial success. The copyright was renewed and as a result it would have been entering the public domain tomorrow – January 1, 2010 – Public Domain Day.
You could reprint it, make a low cost educational version, legally create a braille or audio book edition, even base a new film or play on it. All without asking permission or paying a fee. But copyright law has changed since then. Copyright terms have been twice retrospectively extended. Now, Fahrenheit 451 is not slated to enter the public domain until 2049.
African Successes
From Shanta Devajaran at the World Bank’s blog Africa Can…End Poverty, a post on African Successes.
In recent years, a broad swath of African countries has begun to show a remarkable dynamism. From Mozambique’s impressive growth rate (averaging 8% p.a. for more than a decade) to Kenya’s emergence as a major global supplier of cut flowers, from M-pesa’s mobile phone-based cash transfers to KickStart’s low-cost irrigation technology for small-holder farmers, and from Rwanda’s gorilla tourism to Lagos City’s Bus Rapid Transit system, Africa is seeing a dramatic transformation. This favorable trend is spurred by, among other things, stronger leadership, better governance, an improving business climate, innovation, market-based solutions, a more involved citizenry, and an increasing reliance on home-grown solutions. More and more, Africans are driving African development.
A very interesting list of examples and case studies follows. My colleague at the Independent Institute, Alvaro Vargas Llosa has also edited a recent book on this theme titled, Lessons from the Poor.
Question: How does focusing on successes change our view of development?
Hat tip J-J Rosa.
Fischer Black’s *Exploring General Equilibrium*
Coming out in paperback, March 2010, for only $20. You can pre-order now.
Mostly it's Black's views on business cycles, growth, and equilibrium. It's not an easy book for most people to read, as Black just comes out and states what he thinks, without much in the way of trappings or preliminaries or traditional narrative structure. There are also no models, just strings of statements about models. That said, virtually every sentence has substance. It is one of my favorite books in economics and it still contains many unmined insights. I'm tempted to order an extra copy, just for the pleasure of buying it.
Gretchen Rubin’s *The Happiness Project*
The book is now out and yes it does add to her blog.
My current take on "happiness" (not the same as Gretchen's) is:
1. I believe in the "set point" theory, at least when our health and the health of our loved ones is at an acceptable level.
2. People should strive to be more interesting and more responsible. Happiness may result as a byproduct, but those are more important values. I would like to read a book called The Interesting Project.
3. Shopping and going to the public library (i.e., shopping at p = 0) make people happier, at least for a while. You can do these activities repeatedly.
4. Most people aren't as interested in being happy as they claim, or seem to claim.
5. On net, Gretchen's tips will enhance your happiness.
Here is Gretchen's post on making effective New Year's resolutions.
Books of note
1. David W. Galenson, Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art. We've covered Galenson in these posts.
2. Richard A. Posner, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. Due out in April, this book is 400 pp. The press release notes it "presents what Judge Posner has learned about the econom since writing [his last book]…[and he] thinks we're in for a financial aftershock because of the amount of money the government has poured into the economy to save it."
3. Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, new translation by Breon Mitchell. I've only browsed this, but it appears to be far better than the earlier English-language translation.
4. Scott Berkun, Confessions of a Public Speaker. If you get only one good tip from this book, it's worth it.
5. Peter Singer Under Fire: The Moral Iconoclast Faces His Critics. The critics include Bernard Williams, David Schmidtz, Jan Narveson, Michael Huemer, and myself'; Singer responds to each essay.
Managua
With over 600 barrios, a definitive breakdown of Managua safety is a book in itself. As a general rule, don't ever walk more than a few blocks anywhere in Managua. There are almost no police during the night time and with no centre there are few places where the streets will be busy. The Metrocentro area is safe, but it's still best not to walk alone. The only place that lends itself to walking is the malecón and central park area of old Managua, but do not walk here at night under any circumstances. Even during the daytime take precautions, don't carry any more than you need and avoid walking alone. Be careful when visiting the Catedral Nueva, which is next to a barrio with many thieves. Having said all of this, in comparison with other Central American capitals Managua is safe for the visitor, although theft is common at bus stations and outside the more affluent neighborhoods
That's from my guidebook. It seemed fine to me.
*The End of Influence*
The subtitle is What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money and the authors are Stephen S. Cohen and Brad DeLong. Here is an excerpt:
The Asian export-led growth model must — over time — transform itself to domestic consumption and prosperity models. The American borrow-and-import model will also have to shift — again, this takes considerable time — to a model of consumption-at-the-level-you-produce. And the need to keep the confidence of those who have the money that their money is well placed in the United States serves as a constraint on U.S. policy in a way that it has never been before.
In the last three paragraphs of the book the authors describe the various stimulus attempts as something that will "buy time," but will not be sufficient to alter this basic trajectory.
What I’ve been reading
1. Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape our Work, Wages, and Well-Being, by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton. There's a general question of how satisfying largely non-empirical treatments of this topic can be, but still the original papers behind this popular book are seminal.
2. Paul Collier, The Plundered Planet: Why We Must — and How We Can — Manage Nature for Global Prosperity. The book is not due out until May, yet I have a review copy. I admired Collier's essay on the ethical dimension of global warming, and I loved his The Bottom Billion, but I struggled to find a meaty part of this book.
3. Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. I can't recall having read a more sprawling, messy, obsessive, and personal biography than this one. Here's a typical bit: "Still, this fan, who knew all about cats, was allowed to select a seal-point Siamese kitten for Pat, and he and his aunt sometimes looked after Pat's cats on her trips away. One night — the circumstances were complicated and involved a fight with current lover, Jacqui — Pat ended up sleeping in the aunt's bed, where, for once, Pat herself was on the receiving end of an unwelcome sexual advance."
I don't think I can read it through to the end, but still I wish to issue a yelp of approval. By the way, she kept 300 snails as pets. Read the first Amazon review. This biography did cause me to order more of her work, namely the first novel, with the lesbian love story. Here is an NYT review of the book, which is in any case unique and revelatory.
I've been reading, and putting down, lots of other books. I've also been reading the complete letters of van Gogh, for a longer review. They are splendid.
Wall of knowledge
Here is the link, via Kat, and that is a design concept (not real) for the Stockholm Library.
Another reason not to be a Civil War revisionist
As if you needed one:
Although southerners rebelled against growing centralization of the federal government, they had no qualms about establishing a strong national state of their own. Scholars have classified the Confederate central government as a form of "war socialism." The Confederacy owned key industries, regulated prices and wages, and instituted the most far-reaching draft in North American history. The Confederacy employed some 70,000 civilians in a massive (if poorly coordinated) bureaucracy that included thousands of tax assessors, tax collectors, and conscription agents. The police power of the Confederate state was sometimes staggering. To ride a train, for example, every passenger needed a special government pass…Political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel writes that "a central state as well organized and powerful as the Confederacy did not emerge until the New Deal and subsequent mobilization for World War II."
That is from John Majewski's excellent Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation.
One implication is that the United States kept "small government" for an artificially long period of time, due to North-South splits and the resulting inability to agree on what a larger government should be doing.
The Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan
Walton Francis has a new and very substantive book on health care policy, with the exciting title: Putting Medicare Consumers in Charge: Lessons from the FEHBP. It starts with a simple premise:
During the last half-century, the United States has operated a half-dozen major health-care financing systems in parallel, each operating in its own world, and with only minimal attempts to observe and learn lessons in program A that could be useful in program B.
Francis studies one of these programs, namely FEHBP, in detail. He portrays FEHBP as "premium support" in contrast to the "defined benefit" approach of Medicare. On top of it all are competing private insurance plans and the details of the plan you end up with are decided by competition, combined with some regulation. I now think of FEHBP as a somewhat indirect voucher scheme, albeit with complications. Francis argues that FEHBP is a better model for health care reform than is Medicare and that FEHBP is better for both offering diverse programs and inducing cost control. The employee pays about a quarter of the price and FEHBP also covers many retirees, apparently with reasonable success. Here is Wikipedia on FEHBP. Here is the program's own home page and it does I should add touch the Cowen family.
One question I have is what FEHBP would look like when scaled up to an entire country, including to people who have never had enough human capital to work for the U.S. government. (Here is one critique of a scaled-up FEHBP but I don't find it so convincing, at least not compared to the problems with other approaches.) Still, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in health care policy. I can't call it exciting, but it is a model of clarity and substance throughout.
Here is one report, from last night, that a modified version of the FEHBP idea will be substituted in for the public option. I don't yet have reliable details on what this might mean, or who it might cover (just the people on the exchanges?) but that is why I am accelerating this post even though I do not have fully formed thoughts on FEHBP as a model for broader reform.
Addendum: Michael Tanner offers related comments.
Meta-list for fiction, best books of 2009
I've read through the lists of many other sources, and these are the fictional works which recur the greatest number of times, in my memory at least:
1. Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs.
2. Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin.
3. Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply: A Novel.
4. David Small, Stitches: A Memoir.
By the way, via Literary Saloon, here is a French best books of the year list. They pick Let the Great World Spin as the book of the year, non-fiction included. I will be reading it soon.
My favorite works of fiction this year were the new Pamuk, Gail Hareven's The Confessions of Noa Weber, and A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias.
Cato dialog on Tom Palmer’s new book
Here is a YouTube of Tom Palmer presenting his new book, with yours truly commenting, at the Cato Institute. David Boaz summarizes part of my comment. Here is my previous post on Tom's new book and the book, Realizing Liberty, is available for purchase on-line, Tom points us to this podcast of him criticizing me; his comment reflects some of the differences in our points of view.
One question in the dialog was to what extent an adherence to liberty — at the level of an entire polity — is likely to be culturally specific. I see pro-liberty ideas as more likely to be Anglo-American than Tom does or at least more northwestern European. It is for this reason, I think, that he favors free immigration whereas I, although very pro-immigration relative to the political debate, favor legal limits in many cases, including the United States, Switzerland, and Iceland.
A second question is to what extent ideas about liberty can be supported without encouraging "the paranoid style" in American politics. Too often advocacy of individual liberty ends up bundled with the paranoid style of reasoning and overly simple good vs. evil narratives. I have yet to see a good explanation for why.
Overall I am more suspicious of "ideology" than is Tom. He sees ideology as having driven many very beneficial social movements, such as the abolition of slavery. I accept that point but still fear that ideological reasoning is likely to end up biased away from an emphasis on abstract concepts. That will mean ideology is often useful for ending very concrete social injustices, but that ideology is unlikely to bring people to a deep understanding of "better economics," especially when the distinction between the seen and unseen is important. The strongest ideologies also tend to be nationalistic.
*What Works in Development?*
The subtitle is Thinking Big and Thinking Small and the editors are Jessica Cohen and William Easterly. Usually essay collections are of low value but this is the single best introduction (I know of) to where development economics is at today. Contributors include Dani Rodrik, Simon Johnson, Michael Kremer, Lant Pritchett, Ricardo Haussmann, and Abhijit Banerjee, among others. Even better, there are two published (short) comments on each essay, a practice which should be universal in every collection, if only to establish context. My favorite piece was Banerjee's on why development economics should "think small" rather than just doing macro issues. Recommended.