Category: Books
The Life and Times of Raul Prebisch 1901-1986
The author is Edgar J. Dosman and this is a clear winner for most neglected book of the year. It is a very good economic and intellectual history of Argentina, a first-rate history of economic thought on the idea of import substitution, and an excellent biography, all at the same time.
It cost me $40 and I haven't regretted it. Every page is full of content. It's not easily excerpted but on Thanksgiving here is one bit I enjoyed:
Raúl and Adelita were now impatient to get home; they had been away for a full three months, but there was no escaping the boredom of wartime travel in the Americas, with one uncomfortable and bumpy flight after next and numerous stopovers — Miami, Mexico, Panama, Lima, Santiago, and finally Mendoza, where they boarded a train for the last leg to Buenos Aires.
You can buy it here. And if you agree with Dani Rodrik more than you agree with me, you may like the book more yet.
The Superorganism
The subtitle is The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies and that is the new book by Bert Hölldobler and Edmund O. Wilson.
This is another plausible candidate for best non-fiction book of the year. I liked this paragraph:
Here is another good bit:
Whenever two kinds or organisms live in close mutualistic symbiosis, as is the case in leaf-cutting ants and their fungus, we should expect communication between the two mutualists. The fungus may signal to its host ants its preference for particular vegetable substrates or the need for a change in diet to maintain nutritional diversity or even the presence of a harmful substrate.
Here is a New York Times review of the book. The photos are wonderful too. Here is a short paper on the work of Barlow and Proschan and the general topic of "reliability"; it has implications for the financial crisis as well.
Iowa City fact of the day
In 2006, for a population of 63,027, there were 63,713
public library patrons; borrowers as a percentage of population reached
101 percent.
Is Will Wilkinson now one of them? Here is more. In another life, I would write a whole blog just on public libraries. UNESCO, by the way, has just designated Iowa City as the world’s third City of Literature. Edinburgh and Melbourne are the other two.
Why are music reviews so positive?
The perspicacious Peter Suderman writes:
…the critical medium that suffers most [from overly positive reviews] is pop music criticism, which
skews toward generally positive reviews of most everything, no matter
how bland or terrible. Scan the sidebar of Metacritic’s music page.
Nearly all of the review averages are positive or very positive, and
almost none of them are straightforward pans. In fact, right now I
don’t see a single album with a review average that gets a score
categorized "generally negative reviews." Contrast this with the movies page,
which contains more than a dozen films with low averages. Even the
limited release indies – the "artsy" films – are often given low marks.
But why? When it comes to a movie, you might actually go see the movie if you read a good review. Therefore the newspaper must be careful not to mislead you too many times and that implies a certain amount of criticism. But even a well-reviewed CD you are unlikely to buy, if only because there are so many CDs out there and there are so many well-defined genre preferences. So the MSM source courts many good music reviews, to give readers a sense that they are learning about "interesting product"; in any case only the fans will buy the stuff.
One testable prediction of this hypothesis is the following: when musical taste was less fragmented, and a review was more likely to influence buying decisions, music reviews would have been more critical. Similarly, if the outlet is pure niche, and thus being read by potential buyers only, the reviews should be more critical as well.
In the comments on Suderman, William Brafford comes close to this view.
I might add that Washington Post restaurant reviews are far too positive. If WP readers were simply told "There are hardly any good restaurants in your crummy little city," this wouldn’t do much for WP circulation or advertising revenue.
The less that people buy books, the more positive book reviews should become.
The Price of Everything
Our colleague, Russ Roberts, will be speaking about his novel novel, The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity on Monday at noon at Cato in Washington, D.C. More info here – note that the event is free, which seems peculiar!
More book awards: high standards in Iran
Yes, it’s that time of year again: they named the winners of the Sacred Defense Book of the Year awards in Iran…
Yet in ten major categories, including "Fiction," no books were deemed worthy of the honor. The category "Children’s War Poetry" was left open as well. Here is further information. Here is a photo of the event, plus a list of the books that were honored. Numerous second prizes were given even though no first prizes were awarded.
Outliers
The book is getting snarky reviews but if it were by an unknown, rather than by the famous Malcolm Gladwell, many people would be saying how interesting it is. The main point, in economic language, is that human talent is heterogeneous and that the talent of a particular person must mesh with the capital structure of his or her time if major success is to result. The book is best read as a supplement to Ludwig Lachmann’s Capital and its Structure. The main enduring insight of both Lachmann and Gladwell is simply how much we live in a world of complementarity rather than substitutability.
Nowhere in the book does the name Dean Keith Simonton (check out the headings to these links) appear nor does the phrase "multiplicative model of human success." A lot of the content here has already been done with more rigor and empirical support and also in readable form I might add. Everyone should read Simonton, noting that his hypotheses fare better in the arts than in politics.
If you ask too much from Outliers it will fall apart. It is too easy to find contingency in the world and Gladwell doesn’t begin to look for a theory of which contingencies are interesting or not. For instance arguably Ludwig van Beethoven would not have been a great composer if:
1. An extra butterfly had died two million years ago.
2. The outcome of the Thirty Years’ War had been different.
3. The Germany of his time had not had fortepianos.
4. His parents had conceived their child one second earlier.
5. Haydn had not paved the way.
#3 and #5 seem more interesting than #1 and #4 but that’s because some contingencies just don’t help us understand the world very much. Gladwell never gives us enough theoretical structure to see why his contingencies are the relevant ones. Simply showing the contingencies in personal histories is not, taken alone, very enlightening.
Gladwell’s contingency stories skid out of control. At one point it seems the main claim is that the steady accumulation of advantages is what matters, but once you ask which advantages end up "counting," the claim collapses into tautology.
There is also a "PC" undercurrent in the book of "don’t write anyone off" but if everything is so contingent on so many factors, maybe writing people off isn’t such a big deal. It could go either way. It depends.
Gladwell deliberately steers us away from the contingency of genetic endowment (even for a given set of parents, which sperm got through?), but if you hold everything else fixed you can assign a very high marginal product to the genetic factor if you wish, usually up to 100 percent of a person’s outcome. That mental exercise is verboten but somehow it is OK to hold the genetic endowment constant and vary some other historical factor and regard that as a meaningful contingency. See the discussion of Beethoven above, especially #4 on the list.
Gladwell descends into the swamp of contingency but he is unwilling to really live in it and take it seriously or, alternatively, to find a way out.
In reality the complementarity concept is easier to work with and also more fruitful for thinking about policy implications or for that matter the implications for management or talent training. Success is fragile but foster competing cultures based on clusters of talent motivated by rivalry and emulation. Don’t filter out the eccentrics or the risk takers. That’s about where David Hume ended up but Gladwell never gets anywhere close.
It’s still a good book and a fun book. You can order it here.
Meta-list of the “best of” books of the year
Not all the "best of" book lists are out, but I can issue a preliminary report, with possible updates to follow. This year opinion about best books seems unusually diverse. Not so many books have been intellectually central to the market. I have seen the following titles pop up repeatedly on "best of" lists:
Roberto Bolaño, 2666. Duh. After four hundred pages of reading, I see it as less perfect than The Savage Detectives but it has greater world-historic reach and even some sprawl. A clear first choice in almost any year.
Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened Of. I like some of Barnes’s work, most of all Flaubert’s Parrot, but I am embarrassed that such a shallow book would receive any favorable notice at all.
The Forever War, Dexter Filkins. The quality of the journalism is high but for me it was insufficiently conceptual so I put it down after fifty pages or so.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel, By David Wroblewski. I liked the 150 or so pages I read but just didn’t have the time or the love to finish it. It reminds me of Stephen King’s better work.
I’ve drawn from the lists you will find here, among others.
During the year I saw many favorable reviews for Alexsandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (I liked it) and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (I haven’t read it yet), though neither seems to be popping up on so many "best of" lists. Perhaps Robin Hanson would view such lists as signaling rather than a honest statement of preferences.
Book medley
Burton Folsom, New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Legacy has Damaged America; this book has a good compendium of free market critiques of Roosevelt, although I would not look here for a balanced review of the evidence. Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya; this is now my favorite novel from either Honduras or El Salvador, depending how you classify the nationality of the author. Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. A fun inside history of the Chicago Great Books series. Lily Tuck, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante; I liked this book very much, without even being a previous devotee of Morante. Gilles Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East. Both Kepel and Belknap Press are wonderful, but there’s not much here. Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics, with a new section on the 2008 crisis. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, a new edition. I wanted to read this again but in fact it is unreadable, I am sorry to report. After about forty pages I believe that 2666 is as good as the reviews, here is the latest survey of them.
Spin-Free Economics
The subtitle is "A No-Nonsense, Nonpartisan Guide to Today’s Global Economic Debates" and it is by Nariman Behravesh.
I was shocked by how much I liked this book. I think of it as a kind of contemporary Capitalism and Freedom, although it comes across as less partisan and the coverage is much more global. I agreed with almost everything the author said and I thought the framing was effective and spot on just about all the time.
Many MR readers already know too much to be the appropriate audience here, but if you wish to give someone an economics book as a gift, or as an introduction to thinking about economic policy, here you go. I’m still astonished at how remarkably good this book is and yes I did read it all the way through. Greg Mankiw wrote a very nice blurb for it.
You can buy it here. Here is the book’s home page. I haven’t seen any serious reviews yet, nor has Google.
Profile of Malcolm Gladwell and *Outliers*
Ever the optimist, Gladwell’s theories assume the good intentions of
everyone involved. Today, as he watches the world’s financial systems
collapse and people’s life savings go kaput, he radiates calm. Rather
than joining the mobs seeking to hang villainous CEOs from the nearest
lamppost, Gladwell counsels his followers to step back, take a deep
breath, and find the procedural flaw in the system that can be fixed.
“I don’t think anybody was being venal or corrupt. It’s not a scandal
as we normally understand scandals,” he says. “It’s a case of the
system being, the risk models being broken, the system not functioning
as it should, regulation not being appropriate to what people were
doing.” Tinker with the risk models, increase the regulatory structure,
Gladwell says, and the problem is solved. That may not be as
emotionally satisfying as punching out a CEO on a treadmill, but it’s a
lot more comforting.
Here is the whole piece, interesting throughout. Thomas Schelling and Megan McArdle are among those making cameos. Hat tip goes to Andrew Sullivan.
2666
It comes out Tuesday, here is a splendid review (more reviews here).
Credit default swaps, here and here
Let the Right One In is the movie to see, not Synecdoche
Ben Bernanke on the New Deal
I’ve been rereading some of the essays in Ben Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression, which of course is self-recommending. I thought this passage summed up some relevant truths:
Our [with Martin Parkinson] own view is that the New Deal is better characterized as having "cleared the way" for a natural recovery (for example, by ending deflation and rehabilitating the financial system), rather than as being the engine of recovery itself.
Bernanke notes that there were "remarkably strong" productivity gains throughout much of the 1930s, even though there was no capital deepening. This is a central puzzle which any account of the New Deal, or New Deal recovery, must incorporate. These gains seem to span more sectors than could be accounted for by New Deal policy alone, and note that most government interventions, even good ones, don’t bring productivity gains over such a short time horizon and in such a regular and sustained fashion.
Bernanke does suggest that some of the gains came from forced unionization and "efficiency wage" effects and yes that would credit the New Deal. But I doubt that is the best hypothesis and of course it contradicts the traditional account of profit-seeking behavior from businesses (why weren’t they paying the higher wages in the first place?). Rick Szostak’s work suggests that the New Deal saw lots of labor-saving, process innovations, which meant both high productivity gains and pressure on labor markets at the same time. In my view most of these gains were simply the result of working through the implications of the earlier fundamental breakthroughs of the preceding twenty years.
Whatever is the case (and we genuinely don’t know), these productivity gains are central to the story of New Deal recovery. Roosevelt may deserve credit for some of them, or for allowing them to proceed, but don’t assume that the New Deal caused such gains just because you see them in the gross data.
You can find different drafts of the relevant Bernanke-Parkinson paper here, with various forms of gating.
Heroes and Cowards, part II
The single most important determinant of camp survival was the number of men in POW camps. If everyone had been in a camp holding 7,500 men, survival probabilities would have been less than 60 percent instead of more than 80 percent. With greater camp populations survival probabilities would have been even lower. Another important determinant of camp survival was age. Had all men been of Thomas Withington’s age (47), only 70 percent of them would have survived. The next most important determinants of camp survivial were the number of friends, rank, and height. Men who were not either commissioned or noncommissioned officers fared poorly, as did those with no friends and those of Hnery Haven’s height.
Of course that is from the Civil War and it is from the new book by Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn. Here is my previous post about the book, see also the links suggested by Matt in the comments. You can buy the book here.
Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War
Company socioeconomic and demographic diversity was the single most important predictor of desertion [in the Civil War].
Age and occupational diversity were especially important. For all-black regiments, former slave status (or not) and plantation of origin are important diversity measures for predicting desertion.
That is from the forthcoming book by Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn. I have not yet finished it but I believe this book will make a big splash. Here is the book’s home page. Here is a blog post by Matt Kahn on the book. Here is Matt Kahn on holding hands.