Category: Books

*Imperial*, by William Vollmann

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is glorious in its 1100 pp. plus of text, analytical diatribes, love stories, monomaniacal rants, ecological analyses, and unevenly eloquent prose.  I'm on p.206 and so far it's a first-rate book on the Mexican-American border (Imperial is a county in California), low lifes, the desperation of America's empty spaces, and this is from an author who issues books like others do blog posts.

Suddenly I turn the page and see a heading: Warning of Impending Aridity.  Some text follows:

This book represents my attempt to become a better-informed citizen of North America.  Our "American dream" is founded on the notion of the self-sufficient homestead.  The "Mexican dream" may be a trifle different, but requires its kindred material basis.  Understanding how these two hopes played out over time required me to cultivate statistical parables about farm size, waterscapes, lettuce prices, etcetera.  I have harvested them (doubtless bruising overripe numbers on the way), and now present them to you.  Some of them may be too desiccated for your taste.  If you skip the chapters devoted to them, you will finish the book sooner, and never suspect the existence of my arithmetical errors.  As for you devotees of Dismal Science, I hope you will be awestruck by my sincerity about Mexicali Valley cotton prices.

Jason Kottke has an excellent post on Vollmann's book, with links and excerpts.  One description is: "Just write that it's like Robert Caro's The Power Broker," she said, "but with the attitude of Mike Davis's City of Quartz"…but even that turns out to be inadequate:

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.

How's that for the best sentence I read last night (it's from Sam Anderson)?  As Vollmann himself once said: 'I used to think the Imperial Valley was hot, flat and boring,'

You can buy it here.  Here is an Imperial slide show.

Newsweek coverage for *Create Your Own Economy*

by  Tyler Cowen in

…the author has crafted a how-to guide for living in the
information-glutted 21st century, and a convincing defense of our
just-Google-it culture, which many say is dumbing down the species. His
four best ideas:

The Rain Man stereotype is wrong.
Many people with autistic traits function quite well in society. In
fact, we can learn from this neurodiversity," since autistics excel at
mentally ordering information, a key trait in the digital age.

Our
constant Twittering and e-mail checking may look like ADD, but they
actually mean we're paying better attention to long-running stories,
such as a presidential election or a family member's career.

Google is making us smarter. The Internet has rendered it
unnecessary to store a lot of "general knowledge" in our heads.
Instead, we can specialize in the areas that truly matter to us.

As
culture moves online, it becomes easier to copy and share. "When access
is easy," writes Cowen, "we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the
bitty." Hence the rise of Twitter, six-word memoirs, and other small
doses of culture.

The link is here.

When to stop reading a book

by  Tyler Cowen in

Kelly Jane Torrance has a very good article on this question.  This part is quoting yours truly:

"People have this innate view – it comes from friendship and marriage –
that commitment is good. Which I agree with," he says. That view
shouldn't, he says, carry over to inanimate objects.

It's not that he's not a voracious reader – he finishes more
than a book a day, not including the "partials." He just wants to make
the most of his time.

"We should treat books a little more like we treat TV
channels," he argues. No one has trouble flipping away from a boring
series.

There is more:

"If I'm reading a truly, actively bad book, I'll throw it out," he
says. His wife will protest, but he points out that he's doing a public
service: "If I don't throw it out, someone else might read it." If that
person is one of the many committed to finishing a book once started,
he's actually doing harm.

Mr. Cowen, who says he couldn't finish Alexandre Dumas' "The
Three Musketeers" or John Dos Passos' "U.S.A.," offers a more direct
economic rationale. He notes that many up-and-coming writers complain
they can't break through in a best-seller-driven marketplace. "We're
also making markets more efficient," Mr. Cowen says. "If you can sample
more books, you're giving more people a chance."

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Genesis, by Bernard Beckett.  A dystopia by a Kiwi author who writes (broadly) in the style of Margaret Atwood.  My complaint that it was too short is one of the better complaints you can have about a book.

2. Calvin, by F. Bruce Gordon.  This excellent biography brings French Renaissance theology to life.  Recommended.

3. Bangkok Days, by Lawrence Osborne.  Books on this topic are tricky because they have a tendency to exploit cheap salaciousness but this one is quite good and also conceptual in nature.  It prompted me to order more books by the author.

4. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes.  It's a well-written book with a great cover, a nice title, favorable reviews everywhere, and good information on each page.  Still, I don't quite see what it all adds up to.  But if you're inclined to read it, I don't see any reason not to.

5. The Generalissimo: Chiang-Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China, by Jay Taylor.  A new and apparently exhaustive biography, based on many new sources.  The first fifty pages (all I've read so far) read very well.  I am told that Chiang was "incorruptible" — who would have known?  "Brutal, but underrated" seems to be the takeaway.  This could well be one of the more important non-fiction books of the year.

*In Fed We Trust*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle is Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic and the author is David Wessel.  Here is one good excerpt:

For Ben and Anna Bernanke, excitement was jointly doing the New York Times Crossword puzzle nearly every day — although they skipped the easier beginning-of-the-week puzzles.  "That's the one thing we do together," Bernanke joked.  "It's shows our sexy social life.  We're pretty good.  We can do the Sunday puzzle in about forty minutes."

This is so far the most entertaining and most readable book on the financial crisis.

*Your Religion is False*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Joel Grus and the link to the book is here.  I am a pro-religion non-believer, but if you wish to hear from an anti-religion non-believer, this is the place to go.  He will tell you that your religion is false.

In addition to its humor, I prefer the content of this book to the better-known "new atheist" tracts.  Grus yields many of the strongest arguments.  For instance the biographical and sociological correlates with belief (most people choose the religion they grew up with, or encountered through a friend, etc.) suggest that, in this area, intuitions which feel "certain" simply cannot be trusted.

Good advice from the FT

by  Tyler Cowen in

Tyler Cowen, the economist, advises readers to “snap up foreign fiction
translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so
severe”: in order for a publisher to think a work of fiction worth the
risk of translating and promoting to a foreign audience, its quality
has on average to be higher than the average for homegrown work.

Here is more.  The best place to follow new releases of such fiction is the blog Literary Saloon.

Intrade vs. MSM: Sotomayor Nomination

by  Alex Tabarrok in

What tells you more about the Sotomayor nomination, all of the chatter and debate in the MSM over her "controversial" remarks or the single number from intrade: bids at 98,5, i.e. an estimated probability of confirmation of 98.5% (as of July 14, 11:12 pm EST)?

Loyal-reader Jim Ward writes: 

Do reporters and news Agencies even know to check the betting markets? Or do they just ignore it, because “X sure to happen, nothing to see” is not a story?
Or they don’t want to seem biased, and have to provide 2 sides to every story…Why not just throw Intrade odds into every story as an addendum?

I'm actually amazed at how far prediciton markets have come.  In Entrepreneurial Economics I wrote:

…perhaps one day, instead of quoting an expert, the
New York Times editorial section will refer to the latest quote on "health
care plan A" available in the business pages.

At the time, I didn't think that day would be just a few years in the future. Admittedly, we are not quite there yet but during the last election it was common for media outlets to refer to the prediction markets.  I think this trend will continue.  Can futarchy be far behind?

*A Brain Wider than the Sky*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Andrew G. Levy and the topic is migraine headaches:

Even more remarkably, triggers seem to be culturally particular.  French migraine researchers, testing a French population, found widespread complaints about white wine and chocolate.  British researchers, testing their own countrymen and women, found red wine and cheese to be the more potent triggers.  Such anomalies might point to flaws in the studies, but more likely, they point to something mysterious about the human temperament that migraine reveals.  It's not the chemical in the wine that triggers the migraine generator, but something else inside the wine entirely, something in what the wine means to the drinker — something that might change by region, by individual, by culture, that simply obliterates the border between the somatic and the psychosomatic.

The subtitle is A Migraine Diary and you can buy this very interesting book here.  Levy outlines his struggle with migraines, their possible roots, and what they reveal about the broader human condition.  According to Levy, Asians and African-Americans are less prone to migraines and the differences may be partly genetic in origin.

*A Happy Marriage*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of the new novel by Rafael Yglesias.  Here is a tiny excerpt:

Although a credulous consumer, Enrique was a skeptical lover, and he demanded to know what was wrong.

I devoured this book eagerly on a plane flight and I recommend it highly to those who are married, have been married, will be married, should be married, and should not be married. 

The blogger son Matt, in the form of a fictional persona, makes numerous cameo appearances.  The economist Paul Joskow, in the form of a fictional persona, makes a cameo appearance.  In real life he is Matt's uncle.

How many other novels explain to you — tongue in cheek — the exact difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics?

In my view Rafael Yglesias is one of the best American novelists of the last twenty years and probably the most underappreciated.  Here is my earlier post on his earlier novel Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil.

Thanks for bearing with me

by  Tyler Cowen in

I have many, many hundreds of emails to go through.  I will get you the freedom chapter and my apologies for the delay, it will still take me some days.  I prefer to respond personally to each email rather than farming this out to an assistant.  Your patience is appreciated.  I am pleased that they will be doing a third printing of the book this Monday.