Category: Books

Here is one nomination for the most overrated novel of the 20th century.

I wonder about Gide and Sartre as well.  J.D. Salinger is too easy a target, as is John Barth.  How about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird?  I keep on thinking there is an obvious and juicy British nomination (just look up how the Penguin Guide to Classical Music treats Elgar recordings), but I can’t settle on a single glaring name which stands above all others.

For the most overrated major author, I’ll pick Carlos Fuentes.  I love Mexico (and I’ve tried reading his works in Spanish), but I find he deadens the place rather than bringing it to life.  Had he not been around for the fashionably left-wing, anti-imperialist 1960s, he’d just be another guy with a pen.

The most overrated good book is Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, which although very good is far from his best work.

What are your picks?

The Lott-Levitt dispute is a distraction but John Lott’s Freedomnomics has plenty of interesting economics.  I liked this bit regarding free-riding and the early history of radio:

…free-riding problems initially seemed almost insurmountable in providing radio service….some peope doubted there was any way to make listeners pay.  In 1922, Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, declared: "Nor do I believe there is any practical method of payment from the listeners."  Others assumed that radio transmissions would eventually be funded by paying subscribers, but no one could devise a method for limiting broadcasts to subscribers’ receivers.  Consequently, some believed that government would have to provide the service…

So what happened?  Did private businessmen throw up their hands and invite the government to run the industry?  Was society denied the benefits of radio because no one could solve the free-riding problem?  Of course not.  The problem was eventually resolved in 1922 when AT&T discovered that it could make money by selling radio advertising airtime….With enough at stake, companies find amazingly creative ways to solve free-riding problems.

Over time, the typical ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground, for example, contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, nine hundred-plus tons of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete.  To that add a volume of formallin sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer to keep the gravehard preternaturally green.

That is from the really quite interesting Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, by Mark Harris.  As you may have guessed, the book is a plea for eco-friendly burials.  As for me, I would like my body to be disposed of at a profit, though I doubt if we will have seen enough sectoral deregulation by then…

This newly translated novel is as good as they say it is.  You can add it to My Favorite Things Norwegian.

Buy it here.  Here is the first chapter. 

I wish to thank the many loyal MR readers (buyers!) who pre-ordered my Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.  On Amazon.com it went from non-existent in the rankings to a peak of #220, hovering most of the day in the mid-200s.

The offer of access to my secret blog still stands; pre-order the book and write to [email protected]. 

By the way, here is Daniel Klein on the use of tying to produce public goods.  Or think of the economics this way: ex post copyright brings monopoly rents to some producers.  Some of those profits are competed away by advertising, except in this case "the ad" is intended to provide real (not just persuasive) benefits to the consumers.  Here are books and papers on efficient rent-seeking.

Addendum: I’ve now been adding new posts to it, but of course I can’t tell you their topics!

It is simple.  Pre-order a copy of my forthcoming Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.

It is by far the most fun book I have written, and it was written with you in mind.

Here is the Amazon link, which also offers a book synopsis.  Here is Barnes&Noble.  Then, just send an email to [email protected] and tell me you bought the book.  I’ll send you the site address right away. 

But please, in receiving the site address you are making a pledge not to give it away, publish it, blog it, or otherwise reveal it.  Please don’t, it is our agreement.  You are also pledging your word that you actually pre-ordered the book.  I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

My secret blog has 43 posts, plus who knows I may blog there a bit more or take special requests over there.  I would describe it as quirkier and more offbeat than MR, sometimes ribald, and in some ways more personal. 

This offer won’t last forever, and the secret blog won’t be up forever, so pre-order the book now!

And please, do forward this post to at least two (or maybe more) of your friends.

Marc Andreesen gives a list, what do you think?  Marc just started, he is already one of the best bloggers out there.

The book is very stimulating, here is one excerpt from my review on Slate.com:

Another human failing stems from the nature of happiness.  In the short run, people’s happiness is often shaped more by how many "positive events" occur in their day than by the arrival of one important piece of good news.  Winning $100,000 in the lottery feels almost as good as winning $1 million.  We therefore look, consciously or not, for small but repeated successes when we should be shooting for "one large win."  It’s easy to see why:  Big payoffs come only rarely, and perhaps late in life; in the meantime, who wants to keep on feeling like a loser?

Here is another bit:

Oddly, Taleb’s argument is weakest in the area he knows best, namely finance. Only on Wall Street do people seem to give proper credence–not too much, not too little–to very unlikely events. It is easy enough to use hindsight to identify the black swans Wall Street has missed, such as stock-price crashes. But it is harder to argue that the market undervalues surprise more generally. Stock and bond markets offer simple ways to bet on black swans. In financial terminology, you can purchase an option that is "deeply out of the money"; for instance, you can bet that Google shares will rise or fall in value an enormous amount over the next three months. These investments pay off precisely when the rest of the market does not anticipate the scope for surprise. Yet "long-shot" strategies are well-studied, and they do not yield extra profit. In other words, organized securities markets track rare and unpredictable events as well as the current state of knowledge will allow. If you don’t believe me, it is easy enough to bet on the Los Angeles Clippers to win the 2008 NBA title, or to bet on the longest odds at the racetrack. Such actions are hardly the path to either happiness or riches.

Here is my previous post on the book.  Here is Taleb’s podcast on EconTalk.  If you’ve read the book, do tell us what you thought of it…

I will talking about my book (with Eric Helland) Judge and Jury: Amercian Tort Law on Trial at the Harvard Club in NYC this Thursday (June 14, 07), 12pm-2pm.  The event is sponsored by the Manhattan Institute.  You can RSVP here.

Lots of catch-up from time abroad:

1. Liza Mundy, Everything is Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women, and the World.  Excellent stories, even-handed, and surprisingly philosophical.  How can you not read a good book on this topic?

2. Janos Kornai, By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey.  Charming memoirs of one of the major economists from the Communist bloc.  An intellectual autobiography, an account of how and why human beings change their minds, and an explanation of why he was more creative in Hungary than with the mainstream at Harvard.

3. Trevor Corson, The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket.  The first few chapters are an excellent overview and history of sushi, after that the book is a lame account of a bunch of losers taking a sushi course.

4. Brink Lindsey, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture, on how America became so libertarian, reviewed here by George Will.

5. Hermann Broch, Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers).  Broch remains one of the most underrated authors of the 20th century, this may be his masterpiece but start with his shorter Death of Virgil.

Chris Anderson…talk[s] about the possibility of giving away online his next book – which he fittingly intends to title “Free” – to readers who were willing to read it with advertisements interspersed throughout its pages.  (He still intends to sell the book traditionally to readers who’d rather get their text without the ads.)

Here is the longer story.  I love free books.  I would find it easy to skip the ads (if you are good at skipping text, you can be good at skipping ads), though perhaps I am naively unaware of the publisher’s counterstrategies in this war.  In another direction, I recall hearing of free long distance service, at least provided you are willing to have your call interrupted periodically with advertisements.  If we are willing to pay people to hear or watch ads, why stop there?  How about "free life"?  Corporations subsidize or create extra babies, under the proviso that the guardians agree to have their little ones doused with particular ads.  What if you could addict your kid to Coca-Cola, or some other product, before birth, what sort of market would arise?  What if you could stamp a permanent tattoo on Jimmy’s forehead?

Bookies are certain Harry’s a goner. William Hill Plc, a London-based bookmaker, is so sure of Harry’s demise that it stopped accepting wagers and shifted betting to the possible killers.  Lord Voldemort, who murdered Potter’s parents, is the most likely villain, at 2-1 odds, followed by Professor Snape, one of his teachers, at 5-2.  "Every penny was on Harry dying, and it became untenable,” said Rupert Adams, a William Hill spokesman.  "People are obsessed about this book.”

Here is the full story.  The pointer is from John De Palma.

To all of you who have responded to my posting on Marginal Revolution, many thanks. I have enjoyed the dialogue and the sparring.  All of us, I believe, have our country’s interests at heart even though we may come at these issues from different perspectives. My purpose in writing The Price of Liberty – which, as I have noted in several postings is a quote from Hamilton about Revolutionary War debt and not about the Iraq War – was to trace the history of wartime financing from the Revolution through the War on Terrorism to see what we can learn from the past and how we can do things better. I think even those who have taken issue with me about the current set of policy issues will enjoy the history contained in the book.  I hope that whatever you think, you will let me know your thoughts, your comments and your criticisms. I hope you at least find it interesting – even if there are parts of it you disagree with.

Thanks again to Marginal Revolution for hosting me as a guest blogger this week.

Warm regards,

Bob Hormats

author of The Price of Liberty