Category: Books

Should your library consist mostly of read books, or of unread books?  The avid and loyal MR reader will already know we are adjusting for "number of books read" in posing this query.

If you own mostly read books, you use your library for reference and remembrance.  Your collection is like Proust’s madeleine.  If you own mostly unread books, your library yields exciting discovery but also lots of clunkers.  Each step to the shelf offers a chance to redefine your life and your loves in unexpected ways, or perhaps crashing disappointment.

My (small) personal library is virtually 100 percent already read books, plus Gone With the Wind and Shantaram, both of which I am saving up for long plane trips to distant climes.  But I think of my real library as the local public library, which is still mostly unread books.

If you are one of those Austrian economists who believes in the all-importance of unquantifiable Knightian uncertainty, I hope your shelves are full of unread books (we now, by the way, have the means to make this otherwise murky concept operational).  Otherwise you are livin’ a dirty, stinkin’ lie.  Karmic retribution will be swift and, yes, certain.

For further musings on this topic, see Nassim Taleb’s new The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a stimulating look at surprise.

Boo!

Here.

Full explanation here.

Pointers are from BookSlut and Yana.  What words do you wish to purge from your library?

1. Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice, edited by Ed Stringham.  712 pages of debate about libertarian anarchy, just about everything intelligent written on the topic, and then some.  The book has two essays by yours truly on why libertarian anarchy cannot avoid reevolution back to government; you’ll also find them on my home page.

2. Daniel Drezner, All Politics is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes.  An underexplored topic in public choice, Dan shows it still all boils down to national politics.  Here is chapter one.

3. Dan Simmons, The Terror.  One of his best books, a thrilling Arctic adventure, well-paced, 769 pp., but ultimately not conceptual.  My decision to stop reading at p.200 or so marks a watershed in my life.

4. Christoph Peters, The Fabric of Life.  A German vacationer witnesses a murder in Istanbul and delves into seamy society to figure out what happened.  It is so hard to get a translation into English published these days that a rule of reading only translated contemporary literature is one of the better filters.  Recommended.

5. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows.  Reader’s feast of subtle and penetrating observations, dysfunctional family, etc.

6. Spence on Schelling, via Greg Mankiw.

7. Maybe I’m Amazed.

Radicalis for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, by Brian Doherty.  I hope to write more on this book for Cato, and they get first dibs on my thoughts.  But you all should know the book exists and is likely to prove the definitive history of its topic.

Here is Bryan Caplan on the book, which by the way even covers me.

No, I am not referring to other bloggers, I mean Allen Shawn (son of William, by the way, former editor of The New Yorker, and brother of actor Wallace).  He is deeply phobic, about many things, and his new Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life outlines the phenomenology of his fears.  I learned:

1. The greatest thing he has to fear is fear itself.

2. The imprinting of painful memories, such as knowing to avoid a lit fire, can backfire and create persistent phobias.  His phobias are remarkably specific.

3. There is a deep and poorly understood connection between phobias and the more general phenomenon of neurodiversity.

4. Self-awareness ain’t no guarantee of nuthin’.

5. He claims that people placed in concentration camps (Theresienstadt) became depressed, but that their phobias usually disappeared.

6. The author has a deep interest in atonal music, which supports my hypothesis that it is mostly the neurodiverse who enjoy this art form.  Other people simply can’t hear the patterns, and furthermore the music gets on their nerves.

Half of the discussion is deadly dull, but it is still one of the more interesting books so far this year.

The Science of Success: How Market Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company, by Charles Koch, due out this coming Tuesday.  This is Koch’s account of how the economics of Hayek and Polanyi (Michael, not Karl!) helped him do it.

Here is Mark Skousen’s class on free market management.  Here is a bibliography on Austrian economics and management.  Here is Hal Varian on Kaizen, recommended.

That is the title of this new book by Philippe Legrain, and no I don’t know how you can buy it outside the UK.  Legrain is also the author of the excellent Open World, a defense of economic globalization. 

This work is the single best non-technical defense of a liberal immigration policy.  What I liked most was how
it put U.S. debates in a broader context; most American sources don’t
do this.  For instance how normal or extreme is the American experience
compared to other histories of absorbing immigrants?  The book is original in this regard, yet without moving beyond easily
understood arguments.

I do understand the
concerns raised by Steve Sailer and others against immigrants, and I
readily grant that the idea of open borders is a non-starter.  But is
the United States today in a position where Latino immigrants are
tearing us apart?  I think not.

Yes I know your anecdotes, but here is what it would
take to budge me.  Do a study of real estate prices in San Diego, Santa
Ana (a largely Mexican part of Orange County), and the relevant
sections of Houston, among other locales.  Show me that real estate values in those areas
are falling or even plummeting, and yes I do mean in absolute terms and
no the recent collapse of the real estate bubble doesn’t count.  Then I’ll
give the issue another look.  Otherwise the worst I am going to believe is that "things are not getting better as rapidly as they might otherwise be," and that, whether or not you like such a possible state of affairs, does not represent the sky falling.

But for purposes of balance, here is the most anti-immigration post I have written.  Here is an interesting recent paper on migration.

Addendum: Here is a good article on immigrant entrepreneurs.

I’ve loved Rafael Yglesias’s book Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil for about ten years, but only Friday, when browsing in the library, did it occur to (silly) me it was also The Best Novel By A Father of A Major Blogger.

The story, told by literary flashback, turns around a doctor who encourages his patients to relive their childhood traumas but goes one step or more too far.  One review: "Entertaining, thought-provoking, shocking, enlightening, puzzling, this fascinating work
tackles many issues such as incest, insanity, the nature of love, the drive for power,
religious, business and political creeds, therapeutic ethics — and, of course, what (or who)
is evil."

Somehow, unjustly, the book never captured the "For Smart People Who Are Looking for Conceptual Yet Fun Fiction Along the Lines of Byatt, Eco, and Calvino" slot that grabs so many readers.  It seems largely forgotten. 

By the way, here is the son’s post on government contracting.  Here is yet another generation up.

…one of the major causes of higher priced new textbooks is the used
textbook market.  For example, if the fixed cost of producing a textbook
is $500,000 and 5,000 units of the book are sold each year for 4 years
then each textbook would bear $25 of the fixed cost.

However, if, due to the used textbook market, only the first 5,000
units are sold and, in each of the remaining three years these same
5,000 units are sold as used textbooks, then the publisher still has
the $500,000 in fixed costs spread out over only 5,000 books.  Thus each
new textbook bears $100 of fixed costs, resulting in higher retail
prices for all textbooks.  This example demonstrates what has been
happening in the textbook market over the past several years: As the
used textbook market has expanded so have the market prices of new and
used textbooks.

Here is more, but is that correct?  To the extent this is a superstars market, where the leader becomes a focal choice and earns rents, the downward price pressure won’t induce a proportionate supply reduction.  (There would be, however, less ex ante competition to obtain this spot, which may involve supply reductions.)  For less successful books, which inhabit a more competitive sector of the market where costs more likely bind, this analysis is more likely correct.

Paraphrasing Alex, I might note: "We know that textbook innovation saves lives and has a very high benefit to cost ratio.  Thus, price controls or other restrictions that reduce prices are almost certainly a bad idea."

Just out, buy it here, and here is Tim’s schedule of talks on his U.S. tour.  Here is Tim on whether women should propose marriage to men.  Here are Tim’s early columns that never got published.

Addendum: Here is Tim on Diane Coyle.

It is easy to hate his self-important puffery, but Norman Mailer remains one of America’s best writers.  His books include:

1. The Naked and the Dead – Outdated, but still full of powerful writing, and lacking many of the later objectionable mannerisms.

2. Advertisements for Myself – A collection of journalism, a mixed bag, but the peaks are high.

3. Armies of the Night – About the 1968 Chicago Convention, I’ve never read it but it gets consistent raves.

4. Of a Fire on the Moon – The story of America’s space program, and one of the best non-fiction books period.  As a writer, one of the books I most envy.

5. The Executioner’s Song – The story of Gary Gilmore, the first half is incredible — a candidate for "The Great American Novel" — although the second half meanders.

5. Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery – I usually hate historical fiction but this is gripping.

6. Harlot’s Ghost – His best book, 1168 pages of panache and joy.  One of the most underrated and underread of the important American novels. 

The thing is, he has many other books too.  His new The Castle in the Forest, a psychological autobiography of the young Hitler, is better than his bad books but it does not compare to the books on this list.

1. I don’t agree with the most notorious claim of the book, namely that income inequality hasn’t gone up over the last few decades.  Gary Burtless has a good, non-polemical look at the data.  See also Bruce Bartlett.  Personally I am struck by what I know about philanthropy, art markets (booming prices, driven by wealth) and academic salaries.  At the micro-level each of these areas appears to reflect a trend of rising income inequality.  Even before I had heard of Piketty and Saez, I felt I was seeing their result right before my eyes.  In terms of more formal data, I also was much influenced by the Thomas Lemieux piece I cited earlier today (Reynolds cites it too, I might add, approvingly, though without considering this angle), which shows that composition effects virtually require income inequality to be rising.  Reynolds would have had a better book if he simply stated that income inequality isn’t going up as much as some people have claimed.

2. The book is of course polemical in style, so it is no surprise it would occasion polemical responses.  Nonetheless I have been disappointed by much of the critical reaction to the book, most typically Jonathan Chait at NR.  With any book, whether you like its attitude or not, the first questions are what the book gets right and what we can learn from it.  (I am someone who had GMU economics Ph.d. students read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed.)  Many of the critics aren’t asking these questions but rather they are using debating points, or attacks against Reynolds, to dismiss the book altogether.  On many issues Reynolds is correct or at least he makes arguments worth considering.  Often he is simply a massive tonic of common sense when countering the fuzzier-minded of egalitarian arguments.

Neither Reynolds nor the critics try hard enough to get at the real issues, namely which kinds of inequality are present, which are problems, and which are worth worrying about.  The Reynolds book would have done better to try to give us a deeper understanding of the actual problems, whatever they may be, and less to respond to the critics number-by-number; the latter approach rarely convinces many people. 

On specific points, the critics are too dismissive of consumption data, and Reynolds defends them too passionately.  And what about happiness?  Are there special problems concerning unequal health care?  Just how bad is emergency room care relative to gold-plated insurance plans?  Is the biggest problem of the poor, as one MR commentator points out, simply having to hang around other poor people?

Overall both philosophy (a rigorous treatment of which complaints are exactly complaints about inequality) and sociology are badly needed in this debate.  On both sides of the fence I yearn for just a bit more Amartya Sen.  The numbers, one way or the other, taken alone, aren’t going to convince very many people.

Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World, by John Taylor.

Here is the scoop, I just ordered my copy.  Here is my earlier post on Nobel Laureate (and my former advisor) Thomas Schelling.