Category: Books
Markets in less than everything
But to other writers and editors, the Kindle is the ultimate bad idea whose time has come. Anne Fadiman,
the author, was relieved to learn that her essay collection, “Ex
Libris,” was not available on Kindle. “It would really be ironic if it
were,” she said of the book, which evokes her abiding passion for books
as objects.
Here is the article, interesting throughout.
What I’ve been reading
1. Siddharth Kara, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. A serious research effort and the best book so far on its topic.
2. Joseph Contreras, In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico. A neglected side of recent Mexican history; one of the best books on where Mexico is headed. Here is a recent article on related progress in Mexico's legal system.
3. Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. This revisionist account argues the conflict is political rather than racial and that the notion of "genocide" is an externally imposed category for international political reasons. I found the arguments of this book hard to assess but it made for stimulating reading.
4. George Scialabba, What are Intellectuals Good For?, recommendation via Henry. Fascinating essays on 20th century intellectuals, from an "ethical left" point of view. I especially liked the piece on Pasolini (a favorite director of mine).
5. Dying Inside, by Robert Silverberg. This 1972 classic has just been republished. Is it science fiction or speculative fiction? In any case it is full of social science; the basic premise is about how other people react to a man who has the ability to read peoples' minds and how psychologically destructive this power turns out to be. If you wish to read every great science fiction book this is a must.
False Economy, by Alan Beattie
I enjoyed the book, most of all the chapter comparing Argentina and the United States. I was struck by this bit:
New York is the only one out of the sixteen largest cities in the northeastern or midwestern states whose population is larger than it was fifty years ago.
Over that same time period our national population has roughly doubled. The subtitle of the book is A Surprising Economic History of the World.
The Addict
The author is Michael Stein and this is possibly the most interesting and engaging book I have read this year. The subtitle is “One Patient, One Doctor, One Year.” The ongoing dialogue between a doctor and his addicted patient defies excerpt but here is one small (non-dialogic) bit:
There is violence inside hospitals, and I am often surprised there isn’t more. In my experience it breaks out most often in the emergency room, the airport terminal of the hospital, the site of comings and goings, of transience, the stopover for travelers, the first landing for the already hurt. There is pain and fear, there is the anger and frustration that comes with bad luck’s arrival, compounded by the delays — for blood work and X-ray results — where it is clear that the staff is taking care of many people, where you aren’t the only one, just the one they are slowest to assist.
This book covers the notion of rational addiction, how and why people kick addiction, whether addicts are different in the first place, self-deception, the motivations of doctors, what doctors really do, how platonic yet romantic bonds develop, and many related issues. It is a memoir rather than formal science and it reads as well as masterful fiction, while being thought-provoking on many levels. Here is one very good review.
The bottom line: I just bought his other non-fiction book.
“Memory”
Gustav Flaubert wrote:
That is from his quite interesting Bouvard and Pecuchet. This unfinished book is a parody of self-education and perhaps of gay marriage as well.
Why are we willing to disparage our memories so much more than we will admit to failings in our other mental processes?
Respecting the elephant
I would not go so far as some who would insist that a Hindu is not the person to ask about Hinduism, as Harvard professor Roman Jakobson notoriously objected to Nabokov's bid for chairmanship of the Russian literature department: "I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of zoology?"
That is from Wendy Doniger's new and noteworthy The Hindus: An Alternative History. Here is a favorable Michael Dirda review of the book. Read the Wikipedia section on "Criticism" of Wendy Doniger, some of it from fundamentalist Hindus. Here is a defense of Doniger.
China book fact countercyclical asset of the day
The People’s Press – the biggest publishing
house for China’s orthodox revolutionary books – reports that Marx’s
anti-capitalism opus "Das Kapital" has been selling about 4,000-5,000
copies nationwide a month since last November. That’s a big jump from
before the economic crisis, when the book sold well under 1,000 copies
per month on average.
The "Selected Works by Mao Zedong," a book
owned by almost every Chinese citizen a few decades ago, is also
witnessing a big jump in sales since late last year, according to Mr.
Pan from the People’s Press circulation department.
Here is the full story and I thank Ryan Tetrick for the pointer.
Taiwan fact of the day
Discover Your Inner Economist is about to come out in Taiwan, in Chinese of course.
I thank George Hwang for the pointer.
Economists and Societies
That's by Marion Fourcade and the subtitle is Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain & France, 1890s to 1990s.
I very much liked this book and I might call it one of my favorite history of economic thought books, period. It skips textual exegesis and looks at what the economics profession actually did — in the comparative sense — in the United States, England, and France.
On France, I liked the data on p.6. Circa 1981, only 52 percent of French economists thought that rent control reduced the quantity and quality of the housing stock. Only 49 percent of French economists thought that flexible exchange rates were "effective," compared to 94 percent in the United States and 92 percent in West Germany. Remember Alex's blog posts on this topic, here and here?
The extent of hierarchy in the profession in England shocked even me:
Joan Robinson, for instance, did not become a professor until the ripe age of sixty-two. And such a well-respected economist as Roy Harrod never rose higher than a readership at Nuffield College.
Definitely recommended. Here is the book's home page.
The Genial Gene
That's the new book by Joan Roughgarden and the subtitle is Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness. I'm not sure how true this book is, but if you're looking for a new popular book on evolutionary biology which is engaging, this is the first one in some time.
The book rejects the "Red Queen" hypothesis for why there is sex (e.g., outracing parasites by frequently rolling the genetic dice) and presents a "portfolio diversification" view:
The explanation for why asexual species keep popping up and quickly dying compared with sexual species would seem to be completely explained by thinking of asexual species as genetic versions of get-rich-schemes and of sexual populations as genetic versions of long-term mutual funds, without any need to invoke cost-of-meiosis considerations.
In other words, sex brings a genetic diversity which protects against rapidly changing environmental conditions and thus favors parental genes.
The author also argues against signaling theories of the peacock's tail and against sexual selection more generally (especially on that latter topic I was not convinced but the discussion of sexual dimorphism and why it doesn't always hold is nonetheless interesting). She presents "social selection" as an alternative and if you turn to pp.237-8 you will see an excellent page-and-a-half summary of what the book is about. Male promiscuity, for instance, is viewed as a genetic "tactic of last resort."
Recommended, but with caution. It is a must for anyone who reads about evolutionary biology and by the end of the book I was less skeptical than when I started it.
What I’ve been Reading
1. Gail Hareven, The Confessions of Noa Weber. This newly translated Israeli novel was a great deal of fun, without being too light. Recommended.
2. 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, by Tom Moon. It's mostly popular music but a mix of everything. I was amazed how much this guy's taste, including on particular classical recordings, matched my own. This is a more serious book than the packaging indicates.
3. Miles, Ornette, Cecil, by Howard Mandel. I never considered putting this one down. It appeals to readers who are already fans but it is also a good start for expanding your horizons beyond "traditional" jazz.
4. Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956. A very good book arguing the case for New Deal public works projects, primarily on grounds of growth (not stimulus). I also enjoyed Robert D. Leighninger's Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal.
5. Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England. His Religion and the Decline of Magic is one of my favorite history books ever (he tells us that, in equilibrium, a certain number of people should pretend to be witches, to get what they want). The new one is impeccably researched and written, but I don't see so much original material there. I can honestly call it a good book but for me it was a disappointment.
Tom Foster on the Kindle
Tom, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
I've been following your Kindle posts for a while now and something that struck me is the signalling effects of reading a book versus a reading using a Kindle – yes I read Robin Hanson's blog too!
Reading with a Kindle, the signal is relatively constant and, at the moment, is something like "I'm an early technology adopter and I like to read". As the Kindle gets more commonplace the efficacy of this signal will, I think, diminish. Compare this with the signalling effects of reading a traditional book, where you signal to people not only that you like to read, but crucially what you are reading.
I wonder if Kindle advocates are underestimating how important it is for people to show those around them not just that they like to read, but also what they like to read?
What Steven Johnson likes about the Kindle
He wrote a list of pluses and minuses, but this one stuck out at me:
When he was on John Stewart, Jeff Bezos mentioned that the Kindle was
great for one-handed reading, which got a salacious chuckle from the
audience (and Stewart), but I think it's best for no-handed
reading: i.e., when you're reading while eating a meal, one of life's
great pleasures. It's almost impossible to read a paperback while
eating, and you really have to snap the spine of a hardcover to get it
to lie flat, but the Kindle just sits there on the table helpfully
while you cut up your teriyaki.
The final referee report
Pirates and economics may not be sexy subjects for a book, but
economists tend to see things and do things a bit differently. So it
made sense for Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University,
to propose to his girlfriend in the preface of his forthcoming book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. He presented the finished book (and a ring) to her on Friday–and she said yes.
Leeson’s publisher, Princeton University Press, made arrangements
for the author to receive the first copy of the book’s printing.
Everyone at the press kept the proposal a secret and even went to the
trouble of extracting that section of the book–which read, “Ania, I
love you; will you marry me?”–from the advance galleys that were mailed
out to the press.
“The book, of course, very much reflects my personality, thinking
and passions,” said Leeson. “But it also reflects many of the things I
love about Ania, such has her incredible brain, her creativity, and her
phenomenal support of everything I do, all which I relied on to write
the book, and all of which, consequently, became critical ingredients
to its progress.” Princeton will publish The Invisible Hook in June.
Here is the link.
Do men and women read books differently?
A study of reading habits showed almost half of women are 'page
turners' who finish a book soon after starting it compared to only 26
per cent of men.
The survey 2,000 adults also found those who
take a long time to read books and only managed one or two a year were
twice as likely to be male than female.
Men are also more likely to have shelves full of books that have never been opened.
The
only similarities between the sexes came among those who have two books
on the bedside table at once and who start one book on the middle of
reading another, switching easily. Twelve per cent of women were in
this category – exactly the same number as men.