Category: Books

What I’ve Been Reading

1. Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet, by John Armstrong.  The author does not demonstrate overwhelming expertise but this is nonetheless not a bad place to start on the most neglected of all the great writers.

2. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla.  Why Schleiermacher really matters, how Kant painted himself into a corner trying to solve the problems laid out by Rousseau, and why it all springs from Hobbes.  I found this well above average for its genre, though you must have a taste for Straussian-like books where big ideas clash at the macro level and there is little attempt at any kind of empirical resolution.

3. How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom, by Garry Kasparov.  This is a fun book, except that life mostly doesn’t imitate chess.  Chess is characteristic for its lack of self-deception; it is hard to avoid knowing where you stand in the hierarchy and excuses are few and far between.  That’s why most chess players are depressed.  Kasparov seems to save his self-deception for politics; let’s hope he is still alive a year from now.

4. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, by Richard Rhodes.  This favorite book of Jason Kottke is first-rate non-fiction, it is also one of the best books on the Cold War.

5. The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa.  One of the best studies of the psychology of political power and the connection between tyranny and the erotic.  A fun albeit sometimes harrowing read.  Another superb translation by Edith Grossman, might she be the best translator ever?

Supercapitalism, by Robert Reich

Finally, I will come to some conclusions you may find surprising — among them, why the move toward improved corporate governance makes companies less likely to be socially responsible.  Why the promise of corporate democracy is illusory.  Why the corporate income tax should be abolished.  Why companies should not be held criminally liable.  And why shareholders should be protected from having their money used by corporations for political purposes without their consent.

That’s from Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism.  I’m coming late to this party, but mostly I liked the book.  It’s full of fresh thinking and most of all it is excellent on just how much invisible hand mechanisms shape an economy.  It has the best explanation (and partial defense) of high CEO pay I’ve seen, namely supply and demand.  If you think it is exploitation of shareholders, take a look at how much private equity pays its CEOs.  And as the above quotation indicates, Reich is willing to rethink just about all the old left-wing shibboleths (what a biased word) about corporations.  He separates the analysis from the moral narrative, so when you disagree with him, that point is an isolated one and it does not infect everything he says.

Reich recommends that we strengthen atrophied democratic constraints on capitalist outcomes; in his view special interest politics are just another form of capitalism and special interests are crushing voter influence.  "Bryan Caplan, telephone!"

By the way, make sure you read this piece on the futility of campaign finance reform, which counts as one of the most overrated ideas.

Here is Greg Mankiw on the book.  Here is another take on the book

Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory

That’s the new book from Randall Collins. The main argument is that people are not as predisposed to violence as we might think.  Collins cites a wide array of evidence, from military behavior in the field to, most intriguingly, video studies of the micro-expressions of violent perpetrators.  People are more naturally tense and fearful, sometimes full of bluster but usually looking to avoid confrontation unless they have vastly superior numbers on their side.  The prospect of violence makes people feel weak and scared.  The greatest dangers of violence arises from atrocities against the weak under overwhelming conditions, ritualized violence enacted in front of supportive audiences, or clandestine terrorism or murder.

"Violence is not primordial, and civilization does not tame it; the opposite is much nearer the truth."  Similarly, most political violence does not follow from centuries-old grudge matches, but rather from recently fabricated, dynamically dangerous social ritual interactions.  Violence can appear on the scene rapidly but it can vanish as well, so there is hope for Iraq.

In reality most violent encounters end almost immediately, contrary to TV and the movies.  Someone runs away or a single punch ends the struggle.  The actual gunfight at O.K. Corral took less than thirty seconds, whereas the famous movie scene extends for ten minutes.

In combat it is just as dangerous to be a medic as a soldier, but medics experience far less combat fatigue.  Collins argues this is because killing is in so many ways contrary to human nature.

This book has soo many interesting parts, including the micro-dynamics of the Rape of Nanjing, how British soccer stadium designs were (but now less) conducive to violence, how demonstrations can turn into violent confrontations with the police (lines break down and micro-situations of overwhelming power arise), which children and schools are most conducive to bullying, why basketball has fewer fights than football or hockey (no padding), the dynamics of a mosh pit, and how hired assassins motivate themselves, among many other topics.

You economists all spend so much time studying voluntary interaction, surely you can devote one book’s worth of effort to the study of violence, and yes I mean violence at the micro level.

I don’t agree with everything in this book.  I think Collins too quickly downplays the importance of evolutionary biology (most fights are between young males), and it is not always clear if he has a systematic theory or instead a catalog of causes of violence.

Here is the book’s home page, including chapter one.  Here is a page on Collins.  Here is an interview with Collins.  He is now working on a theory of sexual interactions.

Quite simply, Collins is one of the most important writers and thinkers today.

I know many of you have a bit of book fatigue from MR, but that is because it has been such a splendid year for the written word.  Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory is one of the most important social science books of the last few years. I’ll go even further and say the same is true for any random one hundred pages you might select from the volume; it is also a wonderful for browsing.

It’s due out January 10, you can pre-order at the links.

How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

What a wonderful title.  This new sensation, by French intellectual superstar Pierre Bayard, tells how to liberate our reading habits from the oppression of our most formidable peers (we carry around books to look cool) and more importantly from our own ever-more-demanding selves, which pursue the perfect reading experience but for largely misconceived and self-destructive Freudian reasons; rather than improving our reading, we should instead perfect a new kind of "anti-reading," and as part of a broader program of reconciling antinomies, de-objectifying the book, revising Barthes to fit a new and partially unhidden world where structures can be liberating, and uncovering the not yet fully recognized Proustian roots of the modern sensibility.

Highly recommended, it comes out tomorrow.

What I’ve been reading

1. David Linden, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God.  My standards for popular science books have tightened in the last ten years but this still exceeds them.  A good rule of thumb is to read anything that comes from Belknap Press at Harvard, unless of course it is Michael Sandel’s question-begging critique of transhumanism and genetic engineering.

2. God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, by Walter Russell Mead.  Yes there is a uniquely Anglo-American way of looking at the world, here’s how it came about, and also why the rest of the world resents it.  And why Tony Blair fought the Iraq War.  Consistently interesting and readable, recommended.  In passing it is also one of the best books for understanding the rise of the West.

3. Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America, by Jonathan Gould.  I loved this book, and yes I was already sick of books about the Beatles.  Not only is the musical analysis first-rate (it pinpoints what is wrong with the arrangement of "Got to Get You Into My Life"), but it is close to an economic history of the Beatles.  Of course they started Apple, their record label, to shift labor income into capital gains, yet they were not up to running a music company.  Who needs the Laffer Curve?  You can (in part) blame high marginal tax rates for the breakup of the Beatles.

4. Michael Dirda, Classics for Pleasure.  As with popular science books, I am long since jaded with the genre of "let’s read my short essays about the classics so you don’t have to go bother reading those long, nasty books yourself."  But this one delivers a true odyssey of discovery; I dog-eared a dozen or so pages to follow up on the recommendations.  Will tracking down John Aubrey’s Brief Lives pay off?  Who knows, but don’t we live on hope as it is?

What I’ve been reading

1. Days on the Family Farm, by Carrie Meyer.  An interesting economic study of life on an early twentieth American family farm, based on personal diaries, and an antidote to anyone who thinks that all GMU economics faculty are like the bloggers you know.

2. Theory of Clouds, by Stephane Audeguy.  I loved this novel, which was the rage in France but sadly will die here stillborn.  Think Julian Barnes, Sten Nadolny, or Kazuo Ishiguro.  Short, fun, dreamy, and conceptual.  Its quality illustrates one of my favorite book-buying algorithms, which is to snap up serious foreign fiction translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so severe.

3.  Free Trade Reimagined, by Roberto Unger.  This is the fourth book this year to challenge the doctrine of comparative advantage, a more important fact than any argument in the books themselves.  The book is weak on empirics but it does present the sophisticated version of the anti-free trade arguments.  I don’t believe in open borders, so I suppose I’m not a free trader either.  Unger is smart, smart, smart, but that doesn’t mean he should be Minister of Long-Term Planning in Brazil, which he is.  Here’s the whole thing on-line.

4. The Bad Girl, Mario Vargas Llosa.  That makes two wonderful novels in one week.  I don’t enjoy all of his recent work, but this one is very fun, hearkening back to the tradition of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.  The Edith Grossman translation is first-rate as always.

5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross.  Ross won’t quite say it, but he tries to convince the reader that
the twentieth century is the best century for music, ever.
That’s without pushing serialism too hard or resorting much to popular
music.  Sibelius, Janacek, Messiaen, and John Adams are among the heroes in this story.  If you
are only going to buy (and read) ten books on music, ever, this should be one of
them.  Here is one good review.  Here is a Jason Kottke interview with Ross, very interesting.

It was an amazing week for reading (the best since I’ve started doing MR) mostly because it was an amazing week for flying.  There’s more to come…

Will any future book series approach the success of Harry Potter?

I’d long wanted to offer my thoughts on this topic, so when Today’s Machining World approached me, I thought they were an ideal outlet.  I wrote:

Absolutely. Most of all, the Harry Potter series is a social phenomenon. It’s not mainly about the books. It’s about kids – and often adults – sharing a common reading experience. We crave this kind of social connection – that’s what  Oprah’s Book Club is about too. We like to look forward to the same books, read them at the same time, and talk about them afterwards. If you took these same kids, put them on a desert island,  and just gave them copies of Harry Potter, with no further information or explanation, most of them wouldn’t be so impressed.

With the current Potter series now over, we are looking for something else to latch on to. We may not find it right away, but when we do, the world will be wealthier and have more readers. Some other book series will trump the popularity of Harry Potter – it is simply a question of when.

For a differing point of view, scroll to p.50 to read Megan McArdle, and on p.51 is Kevin Hassett.

Chic Ironic Bitterness

The ironists of frequent lament, then, far from being the evidentiary beings that willfully corrode society, in fact withhold their trust from a politics and culture undeserving of it.  In doing so they hold dearly and implicitly the ultimately Protestant values of sincerity and authenticity that civic trust needs but has forgotten.  In a world that seems to value the opposite, they must express those values ironically.  Through this move they take temporary inward recourse, leaving the world to realize just how upside down it has become.  And as they lean inward, they take their trust with them.

That is from the new and sometimes intriguing Chic Ironic Bitterness, by R. Jay Magill.  The focus is on how America didn’t much change after 9-11, how the supply and demand for irony stayed pretty much the same, and how Stephen Colbert refutes or at least counters Kierkegaard’s critique of Schlegel.  (Not everyone liked the book.)  Every now and then there is an author’s cartoon (e.g., "Immanuel Kant Bobble-Head Doll"), and on p.5 he stops and writes a stand-alone paragraph:

I’ll be citing the Pew Research Center in a few pages to back this up.

Recommended, ironically of course. 

Paul Krugman, pussycat

The Conscience of a Liberal is um…not that polemic.  It’s not that shrill.  There is an argument, to be sure, but the book has much more economic history than I had expected, and much more political history.

I’ve already blogged on The Great Compression; Krugman’s more detailed account in the book does emphasize the role of war, wage and price controls, and very high rates of taxation.  Normative questions aside, Krugman’s positive analysis isn’t as far from mine as I had been expecting from his blog post.

Some claims in the book are simply wrong: "…if there’s a single reason blue-collar workers did so much better in the fifties than they had in the twenties, it was the rise of unions."  (p.49)  Of course it was instead greater capital investment per head and better technology; if Krugman means relative status he needs to say so.  This conflation of relative and absolute magnitudes is a running problem throughout the first part of the book.

Most of all, today’s world — or even an extrapolated version thereof — isn’t nearly as like the Gilded Age as Krugman suggests.  Absolute standards of living really do matter, and most Americans today live very fine lives, or if they don’t the economy is not at fault.

Krugman writes of "the vast right-wing conspiracy" repeatedly, and in these moments he verges on the shrill.  But Bush receives virtually no attention; perhaps Krugman is simply sick of writing about the guy

Conservatism rose in the 1980s in large part because the mid to late 1970s were such an economic mess and because American had lost so much relative status internationally.  Krugman won’t face up to that; instead he blames the Republican manipulation of "the race card," even though at the time racial tensions arguably were lower than ever before.  Of course in a relatively close election any single factor can be called decisive but I found this discussion well below the standards of the political science literature, even the popular political science literature.

Krugman calls for single-payer health insurance, tax hikes, and raising the minimum wage.  He doesn’t come off as all that radical.

His theory of government failure is that wealthy right-wingers hijack the state to redistribute wealth to themselves, and that’s all we hear on what’s wrong with government.  That’s the part of the book I find hardest to swallow, but if you’re asking "should I read this?" the answer is yes.

My prediction: For lack of red meat, this book won’t sell nearly as well as Naomi Klein’s latest.  At my Borders, circa 4 p.m., they hadn’t even unpacked it.  "Yeah, we have that in the back somewhere, I haven’t seen it yet." was what the guy said.

My question:  Is Paul Krugman willing to come out and simply pronounce: "Margaret Thatcher turned the UK around and for the better"?  If so, how does this square with his broader narrative?  And if not, why not?

Addendum: Here is Ed Glaeser’s review.

Nanny State

The government really doesn’t have the right to tell you what to do, provided you are respecting the rights of others.  Yes maybe public order is at stake and restriction leads to greater liberty, such as when we pay taxes for public goods.  Or maybe the line between liberty and fraudulent behavior is hard to define and we should err on the side of restriction to limit criminal activity.  Or maybe you can imagine a paternalism so "soft" (brussels sprouts in the SEC cafeteria?) that no one could rightfully call it coercion.

But in the majority of cases, government really doesn’t have the right to tell you what to do. 

You can huff and puff and tell me all about socially constructed individuals and the moral arbitrariness of the market’s bargaining solution.  But the more you chip away at the rights of the individual, the more you are weakening the case for the morality of state authority as well.  On a day-to-day basis states are made up of acting individuals.  Bureaucracy can, if used properly, be an enabler of individual autonomy.  But the case for bureaucracy, when indeed that case holds, relies on the intrinsic and instrumental values of individual autonomy.

Knocking down the moral status of me — the victim — does not elevate the moral status of the guy who works at the Department of Agriculture.  Should reading Rawls raise your opinion of The Ministry of Silly Walks?

I want my non-pasteurized, not-aged-for-six-months cheese!

If you agree with the sentiments expressed in this post, you should read David Harsanyi’s new and forceful Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning American into a Nation of Children.

Tyler Cowen gets mean and mad

I’ve now done a full review of Naomi Klein:

Most of the book is a
button-pressing, emotionally laden, whirlwind tour of global events
over the last 30 years: Katrina, the invasion of Iraq, torture in Chile,
the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The book offers not so much
an argument but rather a Dadaesque juxtaposition of themes and
supposedly parallel developments in the global market. Above the
excited recitation stands Milton Friedman as the überdemon of the march
toward global tyranny and squalor…

Often Ms. Klein’s proffered
connections are so impressionistic and so reliant on a smarmy wink to
the knowing that it is impossible to present them, much less critique
them, in the short space of a book review…

Ms. Klein also tellingly remarked, "I believe people believe their own bullshit. Ideology can be a great enabler for greed."

When it comes to the best-selling "Shock Doctrine," that is perhaps the bottom line on what Klein herself has been up to.

Here is the full review; just imagine if I hadn’t liked the book!