Category: Books

To boost sales, retailer Borders Group is taking a simple but radical approach, our colleague Jeff Trachtenberg reports in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Borders is increasing the number of books that it displays with the
cover facing out (rather than the spine facing out), even though this
shelf-space-eating approach will require cutting inventory at each
store up to 10%. Says one analyst: “Breakfast cereals are not stocked
end-of-box out. […] It’s a little bizarre that it’s taken booksellers
this long to realize that the point of self-service is to make the
product as tempting as possible.”

The link is here.  I understand the basic model as follows.  Superstores first invest in high inventory and a tony reputation.  You start thinking of them as "the place to go" for books, or in an earlier era, for music.  They then devote more and more of their space to non-book items.  The number of greeting cards and chocolates stocked by my Borders has risen steadily over time, as have the size of the coffee shops.  Having more books "face out" — at least they are books — is one of the lesser aspects of this more general problem.  It’s related to why most trendy restaurants peak in the first year and a half of their operation, followed by decline and then stagnation.  Once they have a high enough (and sticky enough) reputation, it is time to cash in and lower the quality of the product to the informed and more sophisticated buyers.

The always-interesting Richard Florida has a new book out, namely Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live The Most Important Decision of Your Life.

The book tells you how to find the city for you (for me it is Los Angeles, but somehow closer to everything else, and with better bookshops) and why the mood of a city matters. 

Is the following true:? The class of city you live in matters less than before, because you can use Amazon or Starbucks in either Manhattan or Chattanooga.  But within a class of city, personality now matters more precisely because people can sort themselves on the basis of personality rather than convenience.

What about me?  I enjoy living in an area which is not totally flat and I also enjoy the feeling that I can drive from one mini-region to another and experience changes; Maryland and DC really do differ from Virginia.  I felt hedged in living in Wellington, New Zealand and in general I don’t like having my back to the water.

Last week Robin Hanson and I discussed which would be the best city to live in if a) all your basic needs were taken care of, and b) you could not otherwise spend any money.  Oxford, even with mediocre weather, seemed like a strong pick.  There is a true intellectual community and everything there costs a lot anyway; not being able to spend any money isn’t so different from the reality.

Chris Blattman offers up his list in two parts, here and here, the second relying on suggestions from Elliot Green.  I’ll add a few suggestions to these lists, including P.T. Bauer’s West African Trade, Stanislav Andreski’s The African Predicament, The Da Capo Guide to African Music, Martin Lynn on the palm oil trade, and Robert Klitgaard’s Tropical Gangsters. 

But I am forgetting lots so please help out in the comments…

1. Predictocracy: Market Mechanisms for Public and Private Decision-Making, by Michael Abramowicz.  A good compilation of current knowledge on prediction markets; he also argues for letting prediction markets determine many social decisions.  Here is his debate with Robin Hanson on the same.

2. Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, by Robin Wright.  An intelligent and experienced book on current trends in the Middle East and why we should be optimistic that pluralism will triumph.  Here is one good review.

3. "What makes Finnish kids so smart?"

4. Superior, Nebraska: The Common Sense Values of America’s Heartland, by Denis Boyles.  Contra "What’s the Matter with Kansas?", Boyle argues that the Midwestern values of individual responsibility are wise and sophisticated and that the Republican Party embodies much of this wisdom.  The author lives…in France.  By the way, here are maps for per capita Starbucks and Wal-Mart.

5. Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality.  This seems to be less popular than Synthetic Worlds but in terms of social science I think it is better and deeper; recommended.  Here is a Russ Roberts podcast with Castronova.

This entry is cross-posted at orgtheory.net, the social science and management blog. Also, please check out my on book politics and universities, From Black Power to Black Studies. Thanks for reading!

            We’ve reached the end of Logic of Life, Tim Harford’s engaging tour of economics and its lessons for everyday life. Harford ends the book on a highly speculative note about technology, economics, and growth. Tim does a good job summarizing the emerging consensus. The “normal” state of human life is poverty and near zero economic development. Once a community establishes reasonable institutions for commerce and trade, people can quickly produce and exploit technological advances. The effects are cumulative: once a nation allows markets to work beyond a certain threshold, the population experiences exponentially increasing benefits. The economists’ summary of world history is: “no capitalism = no growth, some capitalism = growth, growth, growth!!”

            This discussion is interesting because of the connections to ideas outside the normal realm of economics, especially in areas like psychology and, my own area, sociology. Here’s just one example. Harford discusses the idea that population size should correlate with innovation. Simply put, if you have a hundred million people, you’ll get a least a few geniuses. The inventions of these geniuses can be mass marketed, which fuels later growth episodes. Fair enough.

But where do “geniuses” come from? Turns out, there is a fascinating literature on creativity and achievement. A few names: R. Keith Sawyer, a sociologist/psychologist, writes eloquently on the emergence of genius from networks and groups. Sociologist Randall Collins wrote a highly regarded book on prominent philosophers showing that “genius level” philosophers tended to be clustered in space and time, suggesting that genius is made possible by very specific kinds of “hot house” situations. Other research, pioneered by Florida State psychologist Anders Ericsson, shows that high level performance isn’t just a matter of talent. It’s also a matter of specific training techniques and immersion in a topic. Basically, it’s not just talent that leads to achievement, it’s also the right kind of social environment.*

What’s the point? It’s this: Economics, as understood for hundreds of years, has played out. The major problems of econ 101 have been solved. We know about supply and demand, marginal utility, choice under uncertainty, and budget constraints. We have a wide variety of tools, ranging from game theory to econometrics, that help us identify  these processes in situations ranging from war, to car sales, to dating. We are also seeing how these processes plug into classic macroeconomic issues, such as growth and international trade.

However, the market system itself, as indicated by Tim’s concluding chapter, depends on population, innovation, and liberal economic institutions. These, in turn, depend on psychology, group culture, and networks, the domain of sociologists, psychologists, historians, and anthropologists. Economists have shown how the market system processes the inputs, but there’s still much, much more to be said about where the inputs come from. That’s what’s going to be exciting in the decades to come, and I can’t wait to see it.

* Author David Shenk nicely covers this research on his blog The Genius in All of Us.

Having said A, one must say B.  Ezra Klein poses this question and receives many responses.  I’ll nominate William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, Richard Rorty on cruelty, Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice, and Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.  Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail deserves consideration although it does not exactly fit the category.  Rachel Carson wrote an important book but not really a good book.  Carol Gilligan is an interesting dark horse selection.

Jane Jacobs, by the way, might win either prize if you are allowed to count her as either a conservative or a liberal.  But which is she?  John Dewey and Walter Lippmann are two other figures who could be nominated for either prize.

If you think this list beats the conservative one, you are right.  Note, however, that the conservative list excluded economics (and libertarians), which is where most of the contributions have come on the Right over the last fifty years.  Plus the all-important Chicago School focused on ideas and articles, not books.  So the comparison is not as lopsided as these posts, taken alone, might indicate.

Just a few weeks ago, Bryan Caplan and I decided that Rawls’s Theory of Justice wins the prize for "least Hansonian book ever."  For all the evident philosophic care, in the final analysis Rawls was just making stuff up.

What are your nominations?

Addendum: Thinking back, Wilson’s On Human Nature might be a good pick for the conservative prize, even though I do not believe Wilson is himself a conservative.

Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut
your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art,
if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very
busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous
to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

That’s from one review of the newly translated Roberto Bolaño book.  (Might it have been titled "Conservative Fascism"?)  This work is not a structured narrative but rather a series of impressionistic portraits of how easy it is for some people to slip into being horrible and stay that way.  Imagine a fictional bestiary of creepy aesthetes who are playing at human relationships, sleepwalking through their dreamlike yet trivial obsessions, and in the meantime pledging allegiance to tyranny.  Literature is a "surreptitious form of violence" throughout.

Here are excerpts from other reviews.  At this point it goes without saying that everything by Bolaño is essential reading; however you may find many parts baffling if you don’t have a strong background in things Latin American.

Harford writes that voters aren’t fooled into thinking their
votes affect the outcome and that most people vote because it makes them feel
good. These ‘expressive’ explanations
help us preserve the idea that people are rational (a great book is by Brennan
and Lomasky).  But is this an actual account of why people
vote? Until we have better survey data, anecdotal evidence will have to do.

Go to a diner, bus stop, retirement home or even a college
campus and almost invariably people will tell you that their vote counts. What
does ‘count’ mean here?  It might mean
they think their vote is important because it satisfies a civic duty to support
democracy (but why would so many think this
is the best way to discharge that duty unless they think their vote counts in
the more literal sense). Or maybe it means they think their vote somehow
encourages more people to vote (but why isn’t lying more efficient? And why
would people get influenced into voting, unless they think it matters? ) Isn’t
it possible to think that people actually believe their votes count?  But if this were true, how could we best make
sense of it? One way is to bite the bullet and accept that (a lot of) people
might just be irrational.

Voting does of course increase with education level, but
this doesn’t defeat the claim that voters might be irrational. Most of our civic/political
education in high school and college centers on the details of how democracy
functions and why voting is important, and not on the trivial impact of our
votes.

And remember the way that voting works in the U.S. at least—through some freaking inscrutable thing known as the electoral college.
On my not so good days, I still have no idea how this works and, like most MR
readers, have above average education. Does my vote count more in states with
fewer delegates, or not at all in some locations, or because this is a
republican state does this mean my vote for a democrat wouldn’t matter or would
it matter more, and where is this school? My neuronal synapses die just a little.

Also, without voter irrationality it’s hard to make sense of
the success of campaigns such as “a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush” in resonating
with potential voters—the aim of these kinds of slogans is to encourage people
to vote in a particular way. If people don’t believe their votes count,
why would these slogans be effective and why would the slogan designers
anticipate they would be effective? Harford seems to hint at this kind of
problem when he points out that while voters don’t go to the polls to impact
results, they don’t realize that what they do once they get to the booths
doesn’t matter—but I wish he gave us his thoughts on this sort of inconsistency.

The fact that people don’t simply vote, but vote for a
particular candidate, at best suggests that if people feel duty-bound it’s not
to some abstract ideal but to particular parties and groups, which raises another,
and not incompatible, potential motivation for voting.

Some might think that their votes count not individually,
but as part of a group. Harford and other economists aside (including this
one), people don’t always act on their (individual) self-interests.  (for just some examples, see Fehr and Fowler on
altruistic punishment)

There are good evolutionary reasons to think that we
frequently adopt the perspective of “what is good for us”.  You don’t have to believe in the
group-selectionist theories of people like Sober and Wilson.

If that makes you feel dirty—selfish
gene will get you there if there are enough genes shared in common among a
group. And, a la Robert Frank, what
starts out as emotional incentives to act on behalf of a fairly specified,
narrowly defined, and kin-based group gets co-opted and extends (irrationally?)
to larger, less cohesive groups. The group in this case would simply be the
class of people thought to share the same values and beliefs.

Of course, like all evolutionary explanations, this is a
just-so story and needs to be tested, but so does the rational voter idea. We still don’t have very good insight into
the motives of voters, and until we do we should remain skeptical of any one
model.

I’m not a hater–in many (maybe most) areas of life, the rational
choice model makes damn good sense. In
some areas of politics, however, emotions run high and irrationality can be
bliss, and these may be areas where dynamic writers like Harford should resist the
model a little.

Back to TC: Readers, do tell us what you think…

Tom Stoppard weighs in on the burn it/don’t burn it debate about Nabokov’s unfinished work: "It’s perfectly straightforward: Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it."

That is from Bookslut, but Stoppard is wrong.  Dead people don’t count in the social welfare function. (If they did, how many of them would prefer non-democratic or racist outcomes?  And would we count that?  We shoudn’t and we don’t.)

Don’t destroy the output.  Nor is there an incentive problem.  If we release Nabokov’s papers as a book, maybe the next Nabokov will burn the manuscript in the first place.  We’re no worse off, compared to not releasing such manuscripts.  Kafka told Max Brod to burn his works, but we’re all glad Brod didn’t.  Think of the current generation as a player in the multiple selves game of the author (he could have burnt it himself long ago) and then the right answer is obvious.

Descubre al Economista que llevas dentro.  That’s the Spanish language translation of my Discover Your Inner Economist, due out in Spain February 19.

You can order copies through some of these sources.

The translation is very well done and accurate, though it is odd to read myself sounding like a Spaniard instead of a colloquial Mexican.  Whenever I go to Spain I am in fact shocked to discover that there is an entire European country in which the people speak Spanish.  And they speak it well.

If you want to come to my talk in Madrid next week, here is the link.

The Logic of Life contains an excellent chapter explaining statistical discrimination but does the theory hold up?  Bryan Caplan says no. 

…[Tim] heavily emphasizes a few experiments showing that statistical
discrimination could be a "self-fulfilling prophesy." For example, he
describes a resume experiment where otherwise identical fake resumes
with "black names" were less likely to get a response. "High-quality
applicants were more likely to be invited for an interview, but only if
they were white. Employers didn’t seem to notice whether black
applicants had extra skills or experience." If that is how employers
treat black applicants, what’s the point of trying? As Tim asks, "Why
bother to get a degree or work experience if you are young, gifted, and
black?"

But is it really true that the market fails to reward blacks for
getting more education? Is it even true that the market rewards them
less? I tested these claims using one of the world’s best labor data
sets, the NLSY.  The results directly contradict Tim’s self-fulfilling prophesy story.  Blacks actually get a substantially larger
return to education than non-blacks! The same goes for experience,
though the result is not statistically significant. The real lesson of
the data is that if you are young, gifted, and black, you should get a
ton of education, because it has an exceptionally large pay-off.

Why would this be so?  I’m not sure, but one simple story is that counter-stereotypical
behavior stands out. When my sons were young, my wife was working a
lot, so I often took my kids places on my own. Funny thing: Time and
again, strangers came up and said, "Wow, you’re such a great dad!" But
there were moms of young kids doing the same thing in plain sight, and
the strangers rarely praised them.  Why not?  Because a dad taking care of two babies is counter-stereotypical, which grabs people’s attention. 

Purely anecdotal, yes. But it is consistent with the small academic
literature on counter-stereotypical behavior. If you clearly violate
expectations, people not only notice; they often over-react.

The upshot is that stereotypes may actually be self-reversing
rather than self-fulfilling. The marginal payoff of distinguishing
yourself from the pack is high if people think poorly of the typical
member of the pack.

Bryan has much more on the unpleasant truths about discrimination.  Read the whole thing.

Tim Harford has the best exposition of Tom Schelling’s segregation model I have read.  Maybe no one prefers segregation, but if you mind being a minority in a neighborhood an invisible hand process can lead to segregated outcomes.  Individuals will move closer to their compatriots, giving rise to an overall separation of groups.  This paper has some good models and fills out the main conditions behind the result.

But is it true?  Schelling would be the first to admit he created only a partial model.  Human genetics show more and more out-breeding over time.  Those first cousins just don’t cut it any more.  No, the earth isn’t flat but outmigration is increasing and many more people are choosing to live as minorities in foreign lands, most of all in the EU.  I live in Northern Virginia, one of the most successfully integrated regions of the United States, whether it be along lines of race, religion, or nationality.  Latino arrivals are concentrated in the American Southwest but over time they are spreading out to many other states.  What is the segregation model missing?

Gains from trade, in a nutshell.  If I’m the first Mexican to arrive in North Carolina, yes maybe I feel lonely.  But I also can fill some empty economic niches and overall it may beat East L.A.  Other immigrants will follow, but if too many come some of them will move on to South Carolina.  And so on.

High levels of inequality often bring more integration, at least in terms of spatial proximity.  Even with high rents there is a large community of Latinos living just outside of Aspen, Colorado.  Guess why.  They don’t live right next to the very rich but they do live among non-Latinos.  And the greater availability of cheap services is one reason I prefer life in the United States to Western Europe.  Cheap shipping of goods means I still can get French cheese and German books.

It is harder to ship services.  The more we become a service economy, the more you have to live near the people you trade with.

So what’s the problem in Newark, NJ or for that matter Northeast Washington?  Schelling’s model seems to work better there perhaps because of high unemployment and fewer services.  That said, both areas have seen considerable Latino integration over the last twenty years, as well as outmigration to the suburbs.

Thus the more general model starts with the idea of gains from trade and then asks when those gains won’t be especially strong, or when they won’t require much physical proximity.  Note that Schelling’s original paper, published in 1971, very much represents a 1960s perspective on its topic.

Addendum: Tim Harford also discusses urban crime and its control; here’s a good new paper on that topic.

Here is a short piece of mine on Slate.com:

The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman. This book is essential to anyone looking for a) a love letter to Los Angeles, b) a chance to cultivate an obsession with Raymond Chandler, or c) a new model for writing intelligent nonfiction. It’s a colorful local history of the California metropolis in the first half of the 20^th century plus an erotic biography with lots of speculative commentary interspersed, most of all on how Chandler conducted his unorthodox love life (he married a woman 18 years his senior). Freeman often veers into the first person, yet she retains some level of objectivity by always presenting multiple hypotheses. The Long Embrace sheds more light on its subject than do most standard biographies. It turns out that Chandler’s love for his wife, Cissy, is essential to understanding how he constructed his female temptresses. And in evoking a centerless Los Angeles, Freeman helps us appreciate the essential vision of the Chandlerian mystery: that people, like the vast cities they inhabit, are really unknowable.

Here is the whole winter books symposium.