Category: Books
Charlie Brooker on eBooks
Anyway: eBooks. They're the future. The only thing I'd do to improve them is to include an emergency button that automatically sums the entire book up in a sentence if you couldn't be arsed to finish it, or if your plane starts crashing and you want to know whodunit before exploding over the sea. Ideally it'd shriek the summary aloud, bellowing something like "THE BUTLER DID IT" for potboilers, or maybe "THE SCULPTRESS COMES TO TERMS WITH THE DEATH OF HER FATHER" for highbrow fiction. Which means you could effectively skip the reading process entirely and audibly digest the entire contents of the British Library in less than a month. That's ink-and-paper dead, right there.
The article is here and hat tip goes to The Browser.
Joel Mokyr on living standards during the Industrial Revolution
One of the notable arithmetical truths about the period of the Industrial Revolution is that it is quite possible (if not certain) that biological living standards in both urban and rural areas rose and yet average living standards declined. This can happen if urban living conditions are significantly worse than rural ones, and the proportion of people living in cities is rising because of migration from the countryside to the towns. It seems likely that the biological measures of living standards were especially sensitive to urbanization. While urban areas may have offered some positive amenities (such as entertainment and more choice in shopping), healthy living conditions were surely not among them.
That is from Mokyr's new and notable The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850. The obvious question of course is why so many people moved into cities. Did "new goods" make the urban living standard higher than some measures might suggest? Was it to avoid boredom? To avoid "rural idiocy" and invest in future IQ externalities for children?
Here is my previous post on the book.
What are the most borrowed books from UK libraries?
Circa 2009, three out of the top four are by James Patterson. Eventually Ian Rankin and Ruth Rendell make the list. Dan Brown I believe too many people have bought or already read. None of the Booker Final Six from the previous year make the list.
Catherine Cookson used to dominate these metrics but she has been swamped by American popular authors and is down to number ten for the decade. Number one for the noughties is in fact Jacqueline Wilson. That's an odd status to hold: "worth reading, just not worth buying."
A broader point is that non-fiction does very poorly on the "most borrowed" list. I'll offer up the hypothesis that low-brow fiction is what most people actually want to read, whereas many people will buy but not read non-fiction, for purposes of affiliation with the author or the concepts associated with the book.
Overall borrowers are more conservative than buyers, in the literal sense of wanting to borrow the same authors over and over again, yet in different titles.
Hat tip goes to the always-excellent Literary Saloon.
Predators and multiple marginalization
Abraham Rosenwald likewise encountered a bewildering array of different groups in the forest after he escaped from Tartak [a concentration camp in Poland]. First, he encountered Bolek, who would not take his group of Jews since they had no weapons. A second partisan group robbed them of their few possessions. To live, "we went to the fields and gathered potatoes. The peasants ambushed us and beat us up." A third group of partisans murdered one of Abraham's companions, Israel Rosenberg, because they coveted his clothes. In one village they encountered a fourth group of partisans, whose commander would not let them join but nonetheless gave them some grenades for self-defense. Members of a fifth group of partisans robbed them once again, but this time the commander returned the stolen goods. A sixth partisan group agreed to take any Jews with prior military experience but subsequently murdered them. Abraham was finally allowed to joint a seventh group, from whom he received rifle training, but he became separated in escaping a German encirclement. An eighth group, led by "Piotor," allowed Jews to join but only to perform menial work, not fight. And the Jews were not allowed to stay with Piotor when he crossed over to the Russian lines. At this point, Abraham encountered Shlomo Einesman, who had left his hiding place. Einesman suggested the others return to that hiding place with him, since he had sufficient money. Instead, Abraham persisted in going east and this time made it across to the Soviets.
That is from Christopher R. Browning's new book Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp.
In my pile
1. Sebastian Edwards, Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism.
2. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, The Road from Ruin: How to Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top.
3. Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present.
4. David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, editors, The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times.
*The Cartoon Introduction to Economics*
It's now out and my review copy has arrived; the authors are Yoram Bauman and illustrator Grady Klein. It is the next step in economics education. You can buy it here.
Bauman is not just a good economist he is a very good economist, with an insightful philosophical bent and the natural inclinations of an educator, in the best sense of that term. His website is www.standupeconomist.com.
Here is Yoram (and others, including Paul Krugman) on PBS, discussing economics and humor.
*Cosmos*
The author is John North and the subtitle is An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology. Excerpt:
Other alternatives to Einstein's general theory of relativity were the theories of gravitation developed by G.D. Birkhoff, A.N. Whitehead, and J.L. Synge. All of them had cosmological implications. They were symptomatic of a period of great intellectual vitality. They were no doubt partly motivated by a desire to create something comparable with what Einstein had produced. Some ideas of a very different kind were then being put forth by Hermann Weyl, Eddington, and Dirac — the first two in 1930, and Dirac in 1937-38. They seemed to many to be suggesting that cosmological observation was superfluous, and that all could be deducted from the constants of physics. Eddington, for instance, thought that all the dimensionless constants (pure numbers) obtained by suitably multiplying and dividing powers of the constants of physics — the mass of a proton, the charge on an electron, and so forth — turn out to be close to unity, or of the order of 10 raised to the power 79. This vast number he thought might characterize the number of particles in the universe.
This is a truly splendid history of science book, especially if you are snowed in for a weekend. It has plenty of material on the early history of astronomy and on the one topic I know something about — the Aztecs — it seems very good to me and very accurate.
Revisiting the Marriage Supermarket
In comments to yesterday's post on the effects on dating style of a declining number of university men a number of people asked why a relatively small change in the sex ratio (m:w) from 50:50 to say 40:60 should make such a big difference. In the Logic of Life, Tim Harford gave a characteristically excellent explanation.
Imagine, says Tim, a marriage supermarket. In this supermarket any man and woman who pair up get $100 to split between them. Suppose 20 men and 20 women show up at the supermarket, it's pretty clear that all the men and women will pair up and split the $100 gain about equally, $50,$50. Now imagine that the sex ratio changes to 19 men and 20 women. Surprisingly, a tiny change in the ratio has a big effect on the outcome.
Imagine that 19 men and women have paired up splitting the gains $50:$50 but leaving one woman with neither a spouse nor any gain. Being rational this unmatched woman is unlikely to accede to being left with nothing and will instead muscle in on an existing pairing offering the man say a $60:$40 split. The man being rational will accept but this still leaves one women unpaired and she will now counter-offer $70:$30. And so it goes.
If you follow through on the logic it becomes clear that in the final equilibrium no married (paired) woman can be significantly better off than the unmarried woman (otherwise the unmarried woman would have an incentive to muscle in with a better deal) and so because the unmarried woman gets nothing the married women can't get much more nothing. Thus when the sex ratio is 20:20 the split is $50:$50 and when the sex ratio is 19:20 the split is more like to $99:$1 in favor of the men.
The key simplification of the marriage supermarket is that the next best option to marriage (pairing) is worth $0–thus there is a long way to fall from the equal sex ratio equilibrium of $50. If the outside option is worth more then changes in the sex ratio will have smaller effects. Nevertheless, the logic of the marriage supermarket explains why a relatively small change in the sex ratio can lead to a large change in sexual and other mores affecting the marriage equilibrium.
What I’ve been reading
So much has happened in the world lately that I've neglected to keep you posted on which books have crossed the threshold. Here are a few of the more memorable ones:
1. R.W. Johnson, South Africa's Brave New World. In the U.S. there is only the Kindle edition, but I ordered a British edition through the library. This is a comprehensive political history of the country since the fall of apartheid; I thought I wouldn't finish it but I did.
2. Juan Goytisolo, Juan the Landless. It's odd that such a splendid author is read so little in this country. Beware, though — this one lies in the territory somewhere between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It is very powerful for those inclined in this direction and now I can see why his name in mentioned in connection with a Nobel Prize.
3. Steven C.A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution. A clearly written, well-argued book, which on top of everything else is better than most books on the Industrial Revolution, hardly its main area of focus. The main point is that the Glorious Revolution was more radical than is commonly portrayed and it represented the culmination of a struggle between two very different kinds of modernizing forces in England. Chapter 12 — "Revolution in Political Economy" — is a gem. This is a very impressive book.
4. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
5. Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel. The premise — an alternative literary version of Homer's story — sounds contrived but I was surprised at how good and how moving this was. Here is one good review of the book.
6. Kent Annan, Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle: Living Fully, Loving Dangerously. What is it like to be a Christian missionary in Haiti? This is a surprisingly insightful and moving book, one of the best Haiti books but of general interest as well. Most of all, it's about the author's struggle with himself. Chris Blattman likes it too, here is his review.
*On the Brink*
The subtitle is Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System and the author is (?) Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
I don't consider myself a member of the anti-Paulson brigade but this book is a boring whitewash. At least up through p.100, everyone is brilliant, charming, etc.
He explains that as a Christian Scientist he is comfortable relying on prayer rather than formal medicine. I guess that doesn't hold for the banking system.
So far the best line is had by Nixon, who on p.29 eviscerates the idea of a VAT. Everyone else sounds like a cliche. There may be revelations in the later chapters, but I probably won't get to them.
Why not fix doctoral programs in length?
It's simple: cap the program at a fixed number of years (TC: five?) and let the market clear with whatever people have done in the meantime. It's not fair to people who get sick but if that's the only cost maybe it's still worth doing. (Is there a credible way to make exceptions?) And instead of a dissertation require one good published article.
Anyway, that's the proposal in the new Louis Menand book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.
There is a behavioral argument for this policy — it is anti-procrastination – and a zero-sum status game argument for it, namely that if more people went on the market "unfinished" the stigma would lessen and everyone would save some time. The overall rank ordering probably wouldn't be much different.
But are these people ready? Menand has an effective zinger:
The argument that they need the [extra] training to teach the undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates.
Overall his book is a stimulating read, whether or not you've spent more than five years in graduate school.
*The Cleanest Race*
This is a very interesting book about the ideologies behind North Korea. The author is B.R. Myers and the subtitle is How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why it Matters. Excerpt:
One searches these early works in vain for a sense of fraternity with the world proletariat. The North Koreans saw no contradiction between regarding the USSR as developmentally superior on the one hand and morally inferior on the other. (The parallel to how South Koreans have always viewed the United States is obvious.) Efforts to keep this contempt a secret were undermined by over-confidence in the impenetrability of the Korean language and the inability of all nationalists to put themselves in a foreigner's shoes. The Workers' Party was taken by surprise, for example, when Red Army authorities objected to a story about a thuggish Soviet soldier who mends his ways after encountering a saintly Korean street urchin — another child character symbolizing the purity of the race.
I liked this bit as well:
The lack of conflict makes North Korean narratives seem dull even in comparison to Soviet fiction. Rather than try to stimulate curiosity about what will happen next, directors and writers try to make one wonder what has already happened. Films introduce characters in a certain situation (getting a medal, say), then go back and forth in time to explain how they got there. Nowhere in the world do writers make such heavy use of the flashback. But we should beware of assuing that people in the DPRK find these narratives as dull as we do. The Korean aesthetic has traditionally been very tolerant of convention and formula. (South Korean broadcasters rework the same few soap-opera plots every year). According to refugee testimony, however, most North Koreans prefer stories set either in the "Yankee colony" or in pre-revolutionary times, with real villains and conflict.
I also recommend the new book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick. Excerpt:
North Koreans have multiple words for prison in much the same way that the Inuit do for snow.
From the WSJ, here is a joint review of the two books.
*The Enlightened Economy*
The subtitle is An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 and the author is Joel Mokyr. This is now the most comprehensive and indeed the currently definitive history of the British Industrial Revolution. Here is a short excerpt:
Despite the protestations of some scholars who call it "a misnomer," the idea of the Industrial Revolution will remain an essential concept in the economic history of Britain and the world. It was, in a narrow sense, neither exclusively industrial nor much of a revolution. But it remains in many ways the opening act of the still-developing drama of modern economic growth coupled to far-reaching change in society.
The main thesis (apart from the comprehensive coverage) is that ideas were of the central importance for the British take-off. Here is the book's website. Here is a blog review. I would not describe the book as "fun" but it is clearly written and does not require the knowledge of a specialist.
There is another new book on the Industrial Revolution, namely Robert C. Allen's The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. It's all about how the British had high wages and cheap energy, a kind of Heckscher-Ohlin approach to why we're not eating mud cakes. It's good enough on its own terms, but it's a) question-begging in parts, and b) startling what a small role ideas play in the basic story. Indirectly, this book is proof that Mokyr's contribution is an important one.
One paragraph plus a sentence
Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other exotic enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box.
But was he writing?
The rest of the Salinger obituary, interesting throughout, is here.
My predictions about the iPad
Jason Kottke has some observations. My theory is that Apple wants to capture a chunk of the revenue in this nation's enormous textbook market — high school, college, whatever. Why lug all those books around? The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys. Apple takes a chunk of the market revenue, of course, plus they sell the iPads and some AT&T contracts. There are lots of schoolkids in the world.
As Kottke says, it is a device you use sitting down. And it fails to solve the "sunlight on your reading screen" problem/ Those both point to somewhat sedentary uses.. And it doesn't seem to have a camera.
In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university. It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle. The device also seems to allow for collaborative use.
Can you imagine one attached to every hospital bed or in the hands of every doctor and nurse?
It will take some business away from Kindle but that will not be the major impact. The commercial book trade just isn't that big in terms of revenue and arguably that sector will shrink with digitalization, as recorded music has been doing.
The story here is one of new markets, not cannibalization or even competition.
Most of the commentary I've read hasn't been very imaginative about what the content might be.
Addendum: Chris F. Masse, who sometimes reads my mind, sent me this article (before this post was up):
“The book will never die. But the textbook probably will,” says Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis. Inkling is working directly with textbook publishers. First, they’ll port their existing tomes onto Apple’s iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they’ll create all-new learning modules – interactive, social, and mobile – that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust.
Read the whole thing, it's the best piece I've seen on the iPad so far.