Category: Books
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.
What I’ve been reading
1. The American Civil War, by John Keegan. Maybe I was prejudiced by the early reviews, but I didn't think there was much substance here. Like all of Keegan's work it is very well-written but if you have basic knowledge about the events it doesn't hold your interest.
2. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin. The Indo-Pak quaint narrative tale is an overexplored genre these days, but still I enjoyed this very much. It is "full of life," while sidestepping the cliches of other books that are described as such. Or were all those cliches enjoyable in the first place? Recommended, surprisingly.
3. The Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, by Jonathan Bate. This book offers plenty of good information but it didn't bring Shakespeare to life for me. Should I prefer the less reliable yet more Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt book?
4. Stitches, by David Small. By now I've concluded that I'm not good at reading graphic novels, except for the Sandman series for some reason. This much-heralded story of a sick child, mistreated by his parents, struck me as professionally done but pointless.
5. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. Is "magisterial" simply a fancy word for "boring"? Since I won't read past p.100 in this book, I guess I'll never find out.
6. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, by Benjamin Moser. I loved this book. She's an interesting writer with a fascinating biography, plus the book doubles as a history of Brazil and a history of Judaism in 20th century South America. This is one of the sleeper books of the year. Here is Wikipedia on Clarice Lispector, with a good entry. This is one of the sleeper books of the year.
Meta-list for best non-fiction books of 2009
I've been reading lots of year-end "best of" lists, from serious outlets that is, and these are the books which I see recurring with special frequency:
1. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
2. Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey.
3. David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.
4. Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic.
5. Columbine, by David Cullen.
8. By Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.
9. Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World.
10. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout.
I thought all of those were well done but Lords of Finance was the only one I loved. My favorites are here and Lords arguably would be third on that non-fiction list of two. In fairness to the authors I've only browsed Gordon Wood (report coming soon) and I haven't yet read Pops but suspect I might like it very much (report coming soon).
If you wish, you can dig into some of the book source lists I used for this meta-list here. Have someone ready to throw you a rope.
Here are some "best albums" lists, if you wish to wade through those. They are harder to aggregate and I haven't found a useful way of doing it.
*Unchecked and Unbalanced*
This book represents an attempt to explore the problem of the discrepancy between the trends in two phenomena: knowledge is becoming more diffuse, while political power is becoming more concentrated.
That's the first sentence of Arnold Kling's second new book; in another context I might have called it "Words of Wisdom." My blurb on the back was:
This is essential reading on the political dangers facing us today and the risk of excess centralization. Arnold Kling is one of my favorite commentators.
Here Arnold explains his two books.
The Navajo mother-in-law taboo
It's not what I had expected:
Observing an old and curious Navajo taboo, Narbona was not allowed to look at his mother-in-law, nor she at him. It was a custom designed to keep the peace and, apparently, to avoid sexual tension. In fact, many mothers-in-law in Navajo country went so far as to wear little warning bells on their clothing so that a son-in-law would not round a corner and inadvertently find himself staring at her. This was no small thing, especially if he happened to look her in the eye. Even an accidental violation of the mother-in-law taboo might require that the family hire a healer to perform an elaborate — and expensive — nightchant to undo all the harm that had been done.
That is from Hampton Sides's quite interesting Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West. From the specialized academic literature, here is an entire study of the mother-in-law taboo (JSTOR); I'm not sure any of the offered hypotheses or explanations are persuasive. It seems the taboo lasted well through the twentieth century. Here is another discussion, under the more general heading of Navajo taboos:
The only explanation ever given for this custom is that “it avoids a lot of trouble in the family.”
Best books of the year, with an eye toward Christmas gifts
This year my three favorite books were:
1. The new Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez biography.
2. Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome, and
3. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, read it slowly in small bits.
A very good gift book is Eric Siblin's new The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece. It signals the sophistication of both the giver and receiver and yet it is short and entertaining enough to actually read. Package it with the recent Queyras recording of the Suites, if need be.
My favorite classical recording this year was Alexandre Tharaud playing Satie for piano.
The practical value of economics as a science
I know of three very good books on the actual (or sometimes hypothetical) application of economic ideas to real world problems:
1. Alex Tabarrok's Entrepreneurial Economics: Bright Ideas from the Dismal Science.
2. Some other book I haven't read and can no longer remember.
There is now a third:
3. Better Living Through Economics, edited by John J. Siegfried. It covers emissions trading, the EITC, trade liberalization, welfare reform, the spectrum auction, airline deregulation, antitrust, the volunteer military, and Alvin Roth algorithms for deferred acceptance. The contributions are uniformly excellent and written by top economists.
*The Unincorporated Man* and slavery
As long as we are on the topic of slavery, why not consider fiction? This science fiction novel has an intriguing economic premise: you're born a slave and you're not free until you can buy yourself back from your owner (which may be a corporation).
It may sound funny to think that a slave can save money but arguably an optimal slavery contract in a high-productivity society will give the slave some residual claimancy and some property rights, in order to spur work effort.
At some point you wonder whether a slave in this futuristic society is better off buying the rights to himself or herself. (Then he has to find individual health insurance!) If the system of slavery is truly secure, it's like living under Laffer Curve-maximizing taxation. That's oppressive, but many people have lived under worse. There would be lots of "Nudge" as well and with advanced technology very effective monitoring and control.
Is it possible that in such a world you would trust only a person who was a slave?
In many historical instances, slaves cannot precommit to "no revolt." So slaves aren't allowed to earn at the Laffer maximum point, for fear they will rebel or otherwise receive or lobby for greater rights. Real world slavery is much much worse than this hypothetical portrait might make it seem.
I won't have time to read through the novel (the new Alice Munro is out, for one thing) but I thought the premise was an intriguing one. The Amazon reader reviews are favorable.
*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.