Category: Books
*From Poverty to Prosperity* watch
That's the title of the new and self-recommending book by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz. This work has text by the authors, interspersed with interviews with famous economists, including Robert Fogel, Robert Solow, Joel Mokyr, Doug North, Bill Easterly, Edmund Phelps, Amar Bhide, William Lewis, and Bill Baumol. Here is Paul Romer:
It's the kind of culture that can tolerate rap music and extreme sports that can also create space for guys like Page and Brin and Google. That's one of our hidden strengths.
You can buy the book here. The subtitle is Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity.
Economics and biography
I think of the biographer as standing up and demanding that economists take their own method seriously. Surely the economist should at some point be required to explain something in the life of an actual human being.
That is from my (favorable) review of E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget, Economists' Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics. The review will be published in a journal called Biography.
The Big Questions
In The Big Questions, Steven Landsburg ventures far beyond his usual domain to take on questions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Beginning with Plato, mathematicians have argued for the reality of mathematical forms. Rene Thom, for example, once said "mathematicians should have the courage of their most profound convictions and thus affirm that mathematical forms indeed have an existence that is independent of the mind considering them." Roger Penrose put it more simply, mathematical abstractions are "like Mount Everest," they are, he said, "just there."
All this must make Steven Landsburg history's most courageous mathematician because for Landsburg mathematical abstractions are not like Mount Everest, rather Mount Everest is a mathematical abstraction. Indeed, for Landsburg, it's math all the way down – math is what exists and what exists is math, A=A.
Read the book for more on this view, which is as good as any metaphysics that has ever been and a far sight better than most. Moreover, Landsburg's view is not empty, it does have real implications. Since there is no uncertainty in math, for example, Landsburg's view supports a hidden variables or multiple-worlds view of quantum physics.
Speaking of quantum physics, The Big Questions, has the clearest explanation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that I have ever read. In fact, this is a necessary consequence of Landsburg's metaphysical views; since it's all math all the way down, the explanation of the uncertainty principle is the explanation of the math and any true uncertainty or mystery is simply a fault of our own misunderstanding.
Turning to epistemology, the theory of beliefs and knowledge, two chapters stand out for me. I learned a lot from Landsburg remarkable clear explanation of Aumann's agreement theorem–and I say that despite the fact that in the office next to mine is Robin Hanson, one of the world's experts on the theorem (see Robin's papers on disagreement and also his paper with Tyler, but read Landsburg first!).
Landsburg's skills of explanation are also brought to bear in a wonderful little chapter explaining the theory of instrumental variables and of structural econometric modeling – and this from an avowedly armchair economist!
Finally for those, like me, who loved The Armchair Economist and More Sex is Safer Sex there is also lots of economics in The Big Questions. Highly recommended.
Jeremy Taylor quotes Richard Wrangham on the domestication of human beings
I think we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50,000 years have been domesticating ourselves. If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior. And the amazing thing once you start thinking in those terms is that you realize that we're still moving fast. I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves. The way it's happening is the way it's probably happened since we became permanently settled in villages, 20 or 30,000 years ago, or before.
That's from Taylor's interesting new book Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human. Taylor does stress that this hypothesis is speculation rather than established fact.
By the way, our skulls are becoming thinner, a process known as gracilization.
Why do vampires attract so many readers and viewers?
Here is a WaPo piece which suggests it has to do with the transition from adolescence. I recall another piece suggesting it had to do with the female fascination with gay men (is there one?).
Vampires are hardly "my thing," but I do like early Anne Rice, The Night Stalker, Herzog's Nosferatu, and I thought Coppola's Dracula movie was better than its reviews. On the other hand, I couldn't get five pages into Twilight. (Should I try True Blood?)
I believe vampire books and movies offer a few attractions:
1. You know from the beginning that the plot twists will have to be extreme. Few movie makers offer up vampires who think pensively, talk inordinately, and live out ambiguous endings, sitting around in coffee shops. A real vampire story is going to deal with death.
2. We are fascinated with the idea that people may be something other than what they appear to be. You will notice that discovery and detection of vampires often plays a key role in the plot lines, sometimes commanding an inordinate amount of attention.
3. Vampire stories offer a platform for exploring the theme of pure, limitless, and eternal desire, yet without encountering the absurdities that might result from planting that theme in a realistic, real world setting, such as a man who loves cheese studded with raisins above all else.
4. Vampires play "hard to get" with women and they (for a while) embody Old World ideals of chivalry, in a plausible [sic] fashion. Yet since they are fundamentally different beings, we can enjoy watching their strategies while simultaneously distancing ourselves from them.
5. Men may like vampire movies for date movies, for uh…priming reasons. The movies prompt dramatic, emotional reactions in their companions. Women may feel that such movies "test" how their men respond to highly fraught stories, with a potential for demonstrating protectiveness. Or vice versa.
6. Vampires do not seem to mind social disapproval, and in this sense many teens look to them as role models.
7. Some of the popularity is arbitrary with respect to the vampire theme itself. There is a clustering of production in any successful cultural meme, once that meme gets underway. You might as well ask why there is so much heavy metal music today.
8. Viewers and readers, who know vampire lore and thus vampire vulnerabilities, feel better informed than the high-status people who, in the drama, are fighting the vampires.
9. There are few successful songs or paintings about vampires, so the story-based aspects of the topic appear to be important in setting their popularity.
Here is an unorthodox answer to the question.
What I’ve been reading
1. Momofuku, by David Chang and Peter Meehan. This Nelson/Winter treatise on industrial organization teaches you the evolution of recipes and restaurants and (most of all) the mistakes made along the way. Smokiness is an important concept in Japanese food, pickling and fermentation are underrated cooking techniques, a cook can learn from a heart surgeon, people will pay $80 for a ribeye steak without fancy decor, and you can cook semi-safe sous vide at home (suck the air out with a straw). Recommended.
2. Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York, by William Grimes. A book like this has to have something interesting and indeed this one does. There is an excellent chapter on how oysters once were "New York City food," akin to lobster in Maine or crab in Maryland. No more. The rest of the book remains oddly distant from the eating experiences of real people and overall I was disappointed.
3. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, by Ken Auletta. In the abstract this is quite a good book and if someone woke up from a time capsule from 1969 you would start him with this. Too much of it was familiar to me, though.
4. Timothy Egan, Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. Impeccably written and well-researched, but it bored me. Spellbinding portraits of characters, etc. Not enough of a point and of course the fire was not what saved America. Many people like it, though, so don't let me put you off.
5. The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind, by John S. Allen. A very good Belknap Press introduction to recent research on cognition, especially cognition and language. An antidote to many things you have read in Pinker. It's a bit of a "tweener" book: it doesn't take you "by the hand" through the results but it also doesn't assume that you are a research scientist. It was written at a good level for me, but some readers may wish for more explanation of the results.
*The Art of Not Being Governed*
The subtitle is An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and the author is James C. Scott of Yale University. Here is a summary from the Preface:
…I argue that the [Southeast Asian] hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. Most of the areas in which they reside may be aptly called shatter zones or zones of refuge.
Virtually everything about these people's livelihoods, social organizations, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm's length. Their physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structure, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders effectively serve to avoid incorporations into states and to prevent states from springing up among them. The particular state that most of them have been evading has been the precocious Han-Chinese state.
Highly recommended, this is a book Gordon Tullock would love. So far it has received surprisingly little publicity but it strikes me as essential reading about Afghanistan as well. Here is a much earlier Crooked Timber post on Scott.
*You Are What You Choose*
Scott DeMarchi and James T. Hamilton have a new book out and the subtitle is The Habits of Mind That Really Determine How We Make Decisions. I take this to be the key paragraph:
It's called fast food, but your decision-making process in ordering a chicken sandwich can be incredibly complex. In the following section, we describe six core habits of mind that affect how you make decisions in all areas of your life. We call these TRAITS: Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, meToo, and Stickiness.
Here is a review and explication of the book.
The test of time?
Eighty years ago the Manchester Guardian (as this paper then was)
ran a poll to discover from its readers' votes the "novelists who may
be read in 2029".George Simmers, on his literary
greatwarfiction blog, has jumped the gun by 20 years with some
satirical reflections on the top five novelists in that poll.Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky:
They are John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), H. G. Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455), J. M. Barrie (286).What
of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy
Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This
distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in
with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max
Beerbohm, it's pleasing to note).
I love Galsworthy and for that matter Wells. Here is the article. Here is further commentary. By the way, no one back then voted for Agatha Christie, who is now probably the most frequently read of the British writers from that era.
For the pointer I thank the always-excellent Literary Saloon.
Ayn Rand
With two new biographies being covered in all the major newspapers, The Daily Show, and elsewhere, Ayn Rand is in the news. Yet all of the reviews that I have seen have focused on her personal life rather than her ideas. Nearly five years ago Tyler and I both wrote on Rand’s ideas on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her birth. It seems like a good time to reprise. Here is my post with links.
—
Here, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, are some thoughts on Ayn Rand. See also Tyler’s post and Bryan Caplan’s excellent series (links.)
It used to be commonly said that “Until Robinson Crusoe is
joined by Friday there is no need for ethics on a desert island.” Rand replied that it was on a desert island
that ethics was most needed because on a desert island you cannot free ride on
the virtues of others; if you are to survive you must yourself exercise the
virtues of rationality, independence, and productiveness. As her reply indicates, Rand was an exponent
of virtue ethics,
the Greek/Aristotelian idea that ethics is about how one should live. Indeed, although she does not get much
credit, Rand is the most prominent and lucid, contemporary exponent of virtue ethics.
I think Rand’s version of virtue ethics is compelling
because it is explicitly modern – where the recent literature still sometimes seems to focus
on the virtues required of a Greek olive grower, Rand’s virtue ethics is post
industrial-revolution, a virtue ethics for the capitalist world.
If ethics is about the virtuous man then politics is about
the social requirements for the virtuous man to exist (the modern literature
lags behind Rand in connecting ethics and politics). One can understand Rand’s novels as an
extended disquisition on virtue ethics and the political and social requirements
necessary to practice such an ethics. In particular, she argued that rights, a legal concept creating a protected sphere for
independent action, were a necessary condition to live a life of virtue.
One need not buy Rand’s deductive argument that laissez-faire
capitalism is the sine-qua-non of ethical action to appreciate her insights
connecting the good man and good woman with the good society. Relatedly, I do think that Rand was absolutely right to say that capitalism requires a moral
defense. Moreover, the only plausible defense must involve the virtue of
selfishness. It is all too obvious that
capitalism promotes and rewards self-interest and, Mandeville nothwithstanding, no defense which simply
excuses this fact will succeed.
Rand’s language hasn’t done much to advance her case and
indeed it has obscured areas where her insights are now widely accepted. Today, for example, you can find many books
attacking the evil of altruism. Surprised? Of course, the books
don’t use those terms, instead they call it the problem of codependency (or
some other such). Relatedly, it’s no
accident that Hillary Clinton was once an avid Randian (recall her political
career started with Barry Goldwater) because Rand
is an important feminist. Rand’s
portrayal of strong, independent, intelligent women is coming to be recognized
as a landmark in fiction but in addition Rand’s attacks on self-sacrifice have
special meaning in a culture that has long used the “caring ethic” to bind
women to the service of others.
Of weaknesses there are many, most of which flow from the combination of Rand as philosopher, novelist and powerful
personality. John Galt, for example, is
but one instantiation of the Randian/Aristotelian virtue ethic, an
instantiation which was created for a particular aesthetic purpose by a
particular person. Too often both Rand and
her detractors have taken the instantiation for the class thereby limiting
the vision.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy, by Bill Simmons. Could this be the best 736 pp. book on the diversity of human talent ever written? It starts slow but eventually picks up steam. It's also devastatingly funny. That said, if you don't know a lot about the NBA, it is incomprehensible. (I could not, for instance, understand the section of Dolph Schayes because that was not the NBA I know.) In the historical pantheon, he picks David Thompson, Bernard King, and Allen Iverson as underrated. The 1986 Boston Celtics are the best team ever, he argues. And so on. I found this more riveting than almost anything else I read and yes I think it is very much a work of social science, albeit in hermetic form.
2. Paul Auster, Invisible. Auster is back in top form. The French, of course, think of him as a deeper writer than do most of his American critics and readers. Is he more like Hitchcock (also appreciated early on by the French) or more like Starsky and Hutch? Read this book and decide. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between.
3. Delirious New Orleans: Manifesto for an Extraordinary American City, by Steven Verderber. An excellent photo-essay on all the marvelous signs and small architectural wonders trashed by Hurricane Katrina. This book goes micro, not macro, and it catalogs a now-disappearing America from the age which I find most precious in our history.
4. Derrida, an Egyptian, by Peter Sloterdijk. I'm spending some of next summer in Berlin so I've been trying to catch up on what they're reading over there. (Any recommendations?) On every page it feels as if Sloterdijk is intelligent, yet I came away empty-handed and feeling like a frustrated Robin Hanson ("why doesn't he just come right out and say what he means?). No way should you buy the hardcover for $45.00, in return for 73 pp. of actual text. Ultimately he's writing about the boxes, not writing about the world. Yet at least three Germans loved it.
What I’ve been reading
1. John Derbyshire, We are Doomed. He complains because most Western culture today does not live up to the standards of Carol Burnett and Saturday Night Fever.
Really. If there's one thing that can be said, it is that yesterday's
cultural pessimists were more interesting than the pessimists of today.
2. Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son.
I ended up enjoying this more than I do his trendy fiction. This
supposed paean to family life collapses quickly into narcissism, but
that's in fact what makes it work. I was surprised but not shocked by
the part where he deliberately tortures his infant son.
3. Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should be Led by Top Scholars,
by Amanda H. Goodall. I actually laughed when I read the subtitle.
She discusses fundraising in the second to last paragraph of the book.
More generally, you can take this book as a radical attack on economic
reasoning: she believes that having a Ph.d. will cause a person to
ignore the incentives that face non-Ph.d.-holding individuals in the
same position.
4. John Keay, China: A History.
The clearest and more intelligible treatment I've seen — ever — of
all those dynasties and murky sides of Chinese history. Yet if I
understand this book on early Chinese history — and no other — should
I in fact be suspicious?
5. J.M. Coetzee, Summertime.
I bought my copy up in Edmonton, where it is available for $32.99 or
so. I thought it was excellent, but also that few people will
appreciate the extent to which the story centers around an autistic
protagonist.
My review of Joel Waldfogel’s *Scroogenomics*
It's locked away in Books and Culture, A Christian Review and I don't know if it will show up on-line. Anyway, here is a bit from that review:
…For all his polemic, Waldfogel never recognizes that the instrumental nature of gift-giving can alienate us from the true meaning of Christmas and other holidays and celebrations, not to mention alienating us from the true virtue of giving.
Nor, on the other hand, does Waldfogel consider the best available defense of gift-giving — namely, that it is a useful form of social theater. His economist biases reveal themselves when he considers only the value of the gift and not how the gift may enhance (or damage) the associated relationships. Don't we all use gifts to judge who really understands us and thus who is worthy of our time? To put it bluntly,I wouldn't marry or even continue to date a woman who gave me The Da Vinci Code for my birthday. But if I receive the book, maybe that's for the best: then I know the relationship doesn't have a future. In a world where we are looking at a large pool of people for the potential of closer ties, poorly chosen gifts in fact may be the greatest gift we can receive. Using economic terminology, a lot of gifts are about sorting and signaling. A world of perfect gifts is also a world where I don't meet many new people or take many chances in relationships.
I should note that I liked the book more than that excerpt, taken alone, indicates. As is often the case, the parts where I praise the work are simply less interesting. You can order the book here. In case you don't remember, he's the guy who did the first work on the "deadweight loss of Christmas." The book has come out just in time for…the Christmas season.
Thomas Pynchon
One of the recent reader requests is to give my opinion of him. It's pretty simple. The first half or so of Gravity's Rainbow is extraordinary. V is a superb novel, his most consistent work, and it is best read by not trying to make much sense of it. The Crying of Lot 49 feels like an excellent novella but over time it slips away from you and is probably a minor work. The rest of it I cannot finish — or even get far in — and my best guess is that it is wheel-spinning and it will not last. I haven't tried the latest book and it is not high on my list. He's certainly an important figure and worth reading and indeed rereading. But I view him as belonging to the somewhat distant past.
Here is the Twitter stream on Thomas Pynchon, as good a place to start as any.
The request by the way comes from this blog. Here is a post on Vincent Ostrom, husband of Elinor, and an oddly neglected figure in recent times.
*Too Big To Fail*
That's the new book by Andrew Ross Sorkin and the subtitle is The Inside Story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves. Last night I read through to p.132. So far it seems to be the single best narrative of the crash and its aftermath. I haven't seen anything theoretical or on root causes, etc. I chuckled at reading this sentence, which starts with Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers picking up the phone:
"I know this call may be a little unusual," [Treasury Secretary] Paulson began. "You and I have been trying to kill each other for years."
I'll let you know if my judgment changes, but so far this falls into the "recommended" category, noting again that it is narrative not theory.
Addendum: Here is Yves Smith on the book, very good post. See also Felix Salmon.