Category: Books
What could be more self-recommending than this?
Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.
Due out in November. Here is my first CWT with Fuchsia, here is my second, there will be a third.
Who first declared that God is dead?
According to Michael Sonenscher it was German romantic Jean Paul Richter:
I had gone through the midst of the worlds. I mounted unto the suns, and flew with the milky way across the wilderness of heaven; but there is no God. I plunged down as far as Being flings its shadow and pried into the abyss and cried, ‘Father, where art thou?’ But I heard only the everlasting tempest, which no-one sways. And the glittering rainbow of beings was hanging, without a sun that had formed it, over the abyss, and trickling down into it. And, when I looked up towards the limitless world for the eye of God, the world stared back at me with an empty bottomless eye socket; and Eternity was lying upon chaos, and gnawing it to pieces, and chewing the cud of what it had devoured. Scream on, ye discords! Scatter these shades with your screaming. For He is not!
That Richter is excerpt is from Sonenscher’s new and interesting book After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought. One unique feature of Richter’s account is that Christ is the one bearing the news that God is dead. There are so many complainers about the Enlightenment these days, but how many go to the now-grossly underrated source of Richter?
*The Monetarists*, by George S. Tavlas
The key here is the subtitle The Making of the Chicago Monetary Tradition, 1927-1960. Have you wondered about the oft-underrated macroeconomics of Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, Lloyd Mints, Paul Douglas, Clark Warburton, and many more? By no means did monetarism start with Milton Friedman, and this is the new go-to book on the topic.
*The Ruble: A Political History*
That is the new, highly useful, and thorough book by Ekaterina Pravilova, here is one excerpt:
Reutern was adamant about exterminating private currencies, but not everyone in the government shared his view. The minister of justice, Konstantin Pahlen, argued, for instance, that the right to issue private notes should be granted “to all Russian subjects.” Anyone willing to issue private monetary units should simply inform that local governor about the amount of issue, denominations, and the place these notes could be exchanged for state credit bills. The issue should also place an “exchange fund” consisting of state money or securities at the disposal of the local administration and order the printing of notes at the Expedition for the Production of State Papers, which would guarantee them against counterfeiting. In other words, private money should mirror the system of state credit bills and compensate for their deficit…
The debate between the opponents and the proponents of private money revealed an interesting ideological paradox. Private money in Russia stood for the ideological legacy of serfdom: a system that substituted an entire structure of local administration, p olice and judicial authority, and financial management, all concentrated in the figure of one landowner.
Of course most of the rest of the book covers the rather different directions that we taken. You can buy it here.
*All Desire is a Desire for Being*
A new collection of essays by Rene Girard:
Edited by Cynthia L. Haven, self-recommending, buy it here.
Rereading *Jane Eyre* (the experiment kiss)
Jane narrates:
She pushed me towards him. I thought Diana very provoking, and felt uncomfortably confused; and while I was thus thinking and feeling, St. John bent his head; his Greek face was brought to a level with mine, his eyes questioned my eyes piercingly–he kissed me. There are no such things as marble kisses or ice kisses, or I should say my ecclesiastical cousin’s salute belonged to one of these classes; but there may be experiment kisses, and his was an experiment kiss. When given, he viewed me to learn the result; it was not striking: I am sure I did not blush; perhaps I might have turned a little pale, for I felt as if this kiss were a seal affixed to my fetters. He never omitted the ceremony afterwards, and the gravity and quiescence with which I underwent it, seemed to invest it for him with a certain charm.
Recommended, in case you have never read or reread it. And here is a recent Henry Oliver Substack on Jane Eyre.
The Road to Socialism and Back: An Economic History of Poland, 1939–2019
For four decades during the latter half of the 20th century, Poland and its people were the subjects of a grand socio-economic experiment. Under the watchful eye of its Soviet masters, the Polish United Workers’ Party transformed the mixed economy of this nation of 35 million into a centrally planned, socialist state (albeit one with an irrepressible black market). Then, in the closing decade of the 20th century, under the leadership of Polish minister of finance Leszek Balcerowicz, the nation was transformed back into a mixed economy.
In this book, we document the results of this experiment. We show that there was a wide chasm between the lofty goals of socialist ideology and the realities of socialism as the Polish people experienced them. We also show that while the transition back from a socialist to a mixed economy was not without its own pain, it did unleash the extraordinary productive power of the Polish people, allowing their standard of living to rise at more than twice the rate of growth that prevailed during the socialist era. The experiences of the Poles, like those of so many behind the Iron Curtain, demonstrate the value of economic freedom, the immiserating consequences of its denial, and the often painful process of regaining lost freedoms.
That’s the opening to an excellent new book (pdf) from the Fraser Institute written by Boettke, Zhukov, and Mitchell. More than an economic history of Poland, this book is also a very good introduction to the economics of socialism.
My Conversation with Noam Chomsky
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Noam Chomsky joins Tyler to discuss why Noam and Wilhelm von Humboldt have similar views on language and liberty, good and bad evolutionary approaches to language, what he thinks Stephen Wolfram gets wrong about LLMs, whether he’s optimistic about the future, what he thinks of Thomas Schelling, the legacy of the 1960s-era left libertarians, the development trajectories of Nicaragua and Cuba, why he still answers every email, what he’s been most wrong about, and more.
I would stress there is no representative sample from this discussion, so any excerpt will not give you a decent sense of the dialogue as a whole. Read the whole thing, if you dare! Here is one squib, in fact it is the opener, after which we ranged far and wide:
COWEN: If I think of your thought, and I compare it to the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt, what’s the common ontological element in both of your thoughts that leads you to more or less agree on both language and liberty?
CHOMSKY: Von Humboldt was, first of all, a great linguist who recognized some fundamental principles of language which were rare at the time and are only beginning to be understood. But in the social and political domain, he was not only the founder of the modern research university, but also one of the founders of classical liberalism.
His fundamental principle — as he said, it’s actually an epigram for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — is that the fundamental right of every person is to be free from external illegitimate constraints, free to inquire, to create, to pursue their own interests and concerns without arbitrary authority of any sort restricting or limiting them.
COWEN: Now, you’ve argued that Humboldt was a Platonist of some kind, that he viewed learning as some notion of reminiscence. Are you, in the same regard, also a Platonist?
CHOMSKY: Leibniz pointed out that Plato’s theory of reminiscence was basically correct, but it had to be purged of the error of reminiscence — in other words, not an earlier life, but rather something intrinsic to our nature. Leibniz couldn’t have proceeded as we can today, but now we would say something that has evolved and has become intrinsic to our nature. For people like Humboldt, what was crucial to our nature was what is sometimes called the instinct for freedom. Basic, fundamental human property should lie at the basis of our social and economic reasoning.
It’s also the critical property of human language and thought, as was recognized in the early Scientific Revolution — Galileo, Leibniz — a little later, people like Humboldt in the Romantic era. The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle.
Humboldt’s formulation was that language enables language and thought, which were always pretty much identified. Language enables what he called infinite use of finite means. We have a finite system. We make unbounded use of it. Those conceptions weren’t very well understood until the mid-20th century with the development of the theory of computation by Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and other great mathematicians, 1930s and ’40s. But now the concept of finite means that provide infinite scope is quite well understood. In fact, everyone has it in their laptop by now.
COWEN: Was it the distinction between natural and artificial language that led Rousseau astray on politics?
I will say that I am very glad I undertook this endeavor.
Game theory and the First World War
By Nobel Laureate Roger Myerson:
Books by Scott Wolford and Roger Ransom show how economic theories of games and decisions can be fruitfully applied to problems in World War I. This vital application offers fundamental insights into the analytical methods of game theory. Public random variables may be essential factors in war-of-attrition games. An assumption that nations can coordinate on Pareto-superior equilibria may become less tenable when nations are at war. Interpreting a surprising mistake as evidence of an unlikely type can have serious consequences. The ability of leaders to foster consistent beliefs within a cohesive society can create inconsistency of beliefs between nations at war.
Just published in the (ungated) Journal of Economic Literature.
The new public library?
This article is set in Canada, but some of these developments are more general:
Vicky Varga, a twenty-four-year veteran of Edmonton Public Library, described how the city had moved toward fully integrating social work into the activities of its main library branch. “People really do seek this out, because it’s the last truly public space, as I’m sure everybody in this room knows,” she said…
Every library branch in every city has its own specific issues, but in conversations with workers across the country, the broad strokes of the crisis are the same. Librarians say they’re seeing more people with more complex needs than ever before. In Toronto, the number of recorded “incidents,” a term which includes violent, disruptive, or threatening events, spiked from 7.16 per 100,000 visits in 2012 to 35.74 in 2021. In Edmonton, where librarians are offered training to administer naloxone, 2022 saw ninety-nine opioid poisonings across the system. On Vancouver Island, some workers went on strike for nearly two months over workplace concerns and a lack of wage growth. In a letter to library trustees, they argued that “management has refused to agree to many important proposals—including solutions to workplace violence and mental health impacts.” Library workers across the country report being attacked, spat on, threatened, sexually assaulted. They describe the emotional toll that results from not having the necessary resources to help the people who come to them, day after day. They talk about picking up the phone to call for help and realizing that nobody’s coming.
Here is the full piece by Nicholas Lune-Brown and Dorothy Leung, in The Walrus, and interesting throughout. Via (the excellent) The Browser.
*The Economic Government of the World, 1933-2023*
By Martin Daunton, retired economic historian from Cambridge. 1024 pp., and full of information, so yes many people should read this book. It is a major achievement, but somehow I wanted something with more economics and a sharper framework? Here is a very positive Adam Tooze FT review, who describes the narrative as “postheroic and disillusioned.” Multilateralism is covered in great detail.
You can pre-order it here, I picked up my copy in London at Daunt.
*Goodbye Eastern Europe*
The author is Jacob Mikanowski and the subtitle is An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Might this be the best overall book on how Eastern Europe ended up so different (but not entirely different) from Western Europe? I’ll be doing a CWT with him later this fall (hold your suggestions for now, and I’ll hold further commentary as well), but though I would flag this book for you in the meantime. I hope it gets some good publicity as the release date is approaching.
*Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter*
Ian Mortimer is the author of this excellent book, here was one of my favorite bits:
It may seem preposterous today to describe a 5 mph increase in the maximum land speed as revolutionary. It sounds like someone pointing to a hillock and calling it a mountain. But it was revolutionary, for a number of reasons. Like a one-degree rise in average global temperature, it represents a huge change. This is because it is not a one-off event but a permanent doubling of the maximum potential speed. By 1600 the fastest riders could cover 150 miles in a day and individual letters carried by teams of riders could travel at speeds of up to 200 miles per day. This significantly reduced the time it took to inform the government about the goings-on in the realm. If the Scots attacked Berwick when the king was at Winchester, and the news came south at 40 miles per day, as it is likely to have done in the eleventh century, it would have taken nine days to arrive. After the king had deliberated what to do, if only for a day, the response would have travelled back at the same speed — so the north of the kingdom would have been without royal instructions for almost three weeks. If, however, the post could carry the news at 200 miles per day, the king and his advisers could decide on a response in less than two days. After a day’s discussion, the king’s instructions would have been back in the Berwick area less than five days after the danger had arisen — two weeks faster than in the eleventh century.
It is hard to exaggerate the political and social implications of such a change. The rapid delivery of information allowed a king far greater control over his realm…The rise in travelling speeds subtle shifted the balance of power away from territorial lords and towards central government.
The speed of information thus created a demand for more information.
That meant, among other things, more spies. And there was this:
Looked at simply as a statistic, an increase in speed of 5 mph is not very impressive. In terms of the cultural horizons explored in this book, however, it is profoundly important. Imagine the rings spreading out from where you are now — the first ring marking the limit of how far you can travel in one day, with a further ring beyond it marketing two days, and then a yet further ring marking three days. Now imagine all those moving further and further outwards, each one twice as far…you haven’t just doubled or trebled the area you could cover in one, two or three days, you’ve increased it exponentially…With the collective horizon also increasing exponentially, you can see how a doubling of the distances people could travel in a day had a huge impact on the nation’s understanding of itself and what was going on within and beyond its borders.
Interesting throughout, this one will make the year’s “best of non-fiction” list. You can buy it here.
My excellent Conversation with Peter Singer
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Peter joined Tyler to discuss whether utilitarianism is only tractable at the margin, how Peter thinks about the meat-eater problem, why he might side with aliens over humans, at what margins he would police nature, the utilitarian approach to secularism and abortion, what he’s learned producing the Journal of Controversial Ideas, what he’d change about the current Effective Altruism movement, where Derek Parfit went wrong, to what extent we should respect the wishes of the dead, why professional philosophy is so boring, his advice on how to enjoy our lives, what he’ll be doing after retiring from teaching, and more.
Peter described it as “like aerobics for the brain.” Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How much should we spend trying to thwart predators?
SINGER: I think that’s difficult because, again, you would have to take into account the consequences of not having predators, and what are you going to do with a prey population? Are they going to overpopulate and maybe starve or destroy the environment for other sentient beings? So, it’s hard to say how much we should spend trying to thwart them.
I think there are questions about reducing the suffering of wild animals that are easier than that. That’s a question that maybe, at some stage, we’ll grapple with when we’ve reduced the amount of suffering we inflict on animals generally. It’s nowhere near the top of the list for how to reduce animal suffering.
COWEN: What do you think of the fairly common fear that if we mix the moralities of human beings and the moralities of nature, that the moralities of nature will win out? Nature is so large and numerous and populous and fierce. Human beings are relatively small in number and fragile. If the prevailing ethic becomes the ethic of nature, that the blending is itself dangerous, that human beings end up thinking, “Well, predation is just fine; it’s the way of nature.” Therefore, they do terrible things to each other.
SINGER: Is that what you meant by the moralities of nature? I wasn’t sure what the phrase meant. Do you mean the morality that we imply, that we attribute to nature?
COWEN: “Red in tooth and claw.” If we think that’s a matter that is our business, do we not end up with that morality? Trumping ours, we become subordinate to that morality. A lot of very nasty people in history have actually cited nature. “Well, nature works this way. I’m just doing that. It’s a part of nature. It’s more or less okay.” How do we avoid those series of moves?
SINGER: Right. It’s a bad argument, and we try and explain why it’s a bad argument, that we don’t want to follow nature. That the fact that nature does something is not something that we ought to imitate, but maybe, in fact, we ought to combat, and of course, we do combat nature in many ways. Maybe war between humans is part of nature, but nevertheless, we regret when wars break out. We try to have institutions to prevent wars breaking out. I think a lot of our activities are combating nature’s way of doing things rather than regarding it as a model to follow.
COWEN: But if humans are a part of nature flat out, and if our optimal policing of nature leaves 99.9999 percent of all predation in place — we just can’t stop most of it — is it then so irrational to conclude, “Well this predation must be okay. It’s the natural state of the world. Our optimal best outcome leaves 99.99999 percent of it in place.” How do we avoid that mindset?
Recommended. And the new edition (much revised) of Peter’s Animal Liberation is now out.
Ian Dunt on how Westminster works, or doesn’t
I enjoyed his new book How Westminster Works…And Why It Doesn’t.
Here is one short excerpt:
The continued use of Downing Street is an act of pathological national sentimentality, the product of a country that has come to value tradition over function and its past over its future.
Various attempts have been made to reform it, but they all came to nothing. Powell tried to convince Blair to swap it for open-plan space in the nearby Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, but was twice defeated. In August 2008, Gordon Brown set up a horseshoe-shaped work centre in the chief whip’s office in No. 12 Downing Street. Cameron dropped it as soon as he entered government. Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Boris Johnson, moved to 70 Whitehall to create a kind of space station information nerve centre, but the project died when he was sacked.
Instead, the British government has simply made do with a physical structure that prohibits it from working effectively.
Dunt defends the House of Lords (!) as one of the most functional parts of British government, calls for proportional representation, and most of all he wants to open up candidate selection to the public.
Here is his summary take on what is wrong:
At the heart of the problem with Westminster is machismo. It’s a sense, deep at the base of our assumptions, about what politics is about and how we conduct ourselves: that we do not need to seek consensus or compromise, that the winner takes all, evidence can be ignored, the government must get with civil servants who are moved so quickly they cannot sensibly advise on what is happening, and would be undermined by a spad caste even if they could.
Spad cast refers to special advisors.