Category: Books

*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.

Thanks for your interest

by  Tyler Cowen in

It's been great (#1 Business book on Amazon yesterday) and I'm working to "fill the orders" as fast as I can.  If I'm not sending you your chapter *now*, it is because a) I am blogging, b) I am sending someone else the chapter, or c) I am getting on a flight.  I will get to it, it's also very good to hear from you all, and keep the orders coming.

If you're having trouble clicking through to other book outlets, the link for Barnes&Noble.com is here, the link for Borders.com is here.

Markets in Everything: Dead and Live Souls

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Wikipedia describes the history behind the plot of Gogol's Dead Souls:

The [Russian] government would tax the landowners on a regular basis, with the assessment based on how many serfs (or "souls") the landowner had on their records at the time of the collection. These records were determined by census, but censuses in this period were infrequent, far less so than the tax collection, so landowners would often find themselves in the position of paying taxes on serfs that were no longer living, yet were registered on the census to them, thus they were paying on "dead souls."

It is these dead souls, manifested as property, that Chichikov seeks to purchase from people in the villages he visits; he merely tells the prospective sellers that he has a use for them, and that the sellers would be better off anyway, since selling them would relieve the present owners of a needless tax burden…

Chichikov's macabre mission to acquire "dead souls" is actually just another complicated scheme to inflate his social standing (essentially a 19th century Russian version of the ever popular "get rich quick" scheme). He hopes to collect the legal ownership rights to dead serfs as a way of inflating his apparent wealth and power. Once he acquires enough dead souls, he will retire to a large farm and take out an enormous loan against them, finally acquiring the great wealth he desires.

All this leads Marina Gorbis guestblogging at Boing Boing to note: 

So every time I see another article or an ad about how to acquire more followers on twitter, friends on Facebook, or otherwise collect more "souls" for money, fame, or reputation, I start thinking about Chichikov. He did come to an ignominous end, finally fleeing town. Makes me wonder.

*Create Your Own Economy*, special offer

by  Tyler Cowen in

As an economist I believe in the power of incentives.

If you order or buy my book before midnight tomorrow (it comes out tomorrow in stores), I will send you a free, special bonus chapter.  If you've already bought or ordered the book, don't worry, you still qualify.

Just email me and tell me you bought the book, I will take your word for it.  You can send me a copy of your on-line order if you wish.

No, it's not a bonus chapter from Create Your Own Economy.

Did you know that for years I have been, on and off, drafting a book on the philosophic foundations of a free society?  The book is still years from completion.  It won't even be my next book to come.  But I do finally have an introductory chapter for that book which I will send you.  This book is my no-holds-barred attempt to answer all of the tough questions about the philosophic foundations of our belief in freedom.  It also gives a shorthand version of why I have significant reservations about the standard neoclassical approach to economic policy.  No, it is not the book's full treatment of these issues but the chapter outlines the scope of the argument and the six major problems that any philosophy of freedom must solve. 

In return I ask only that you give me your word you will not post the chapter on-line. (Comments, however, are welcome.)

This offer will not be repeated and I do not expect other people to see this chapter (much less the manuscript-in-progress) for some time to come.  So now is the best, highest return time to order or buy Create Your Own Economy.

If you're having trouble clicking through to other book outlets, the link for Barnes&Noble.com is here, the link for Borders.com is here.

*Realizing Freedom*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That's the title of the new Tom Palmer book and the subtitle is apt: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice.  It delivers what it promises plus the very short essays (Iraq, gay pride in Moscow) are quite interesting.  I view this book as defining one of the main threads in modern libertarian thought:

1. Cato-influenced (for lack of a better word).  There is an orthodox reading of what "being libertarian" means, defined by the troika of free markets, non-interventionism, and civil liberties.  It is based on individual rights but does not insist on anarchism.  A ruling principle is that libertarians should not endorse state interventions.  I read Palmer's book as belonging to this tradition, broadly speaking.

2. Rothbardian anarchism.  Free-market protection agencies will replace government-as-we-know-it.  War is evil and the problems of anarchy pale in comparison.  David Friedman offered a more utilitarian-sounding version of this approach, shorn of Misesian influence.

3. Mises Institute nationalism.  Gold standard, a priori reasoning, monetary apocalypse, and suspicious of immigration because maybe private landowners would not have let those people into their living rooms.

4. Jeff Friedman and Critical Review: Everything is up for grabs, let's be consequentialists and focus on the welfare state because that's where the action is.  Marx is dead.  The case for some version of libertarianism ultimately rests upon voter ignorance and, dare I say it, voter irrationality.

5. "Hayek libertarianism."  All or most of the great libertarian thinkers are ultimately compatible with each other and we have a big tent of all sorts of classical liberal ideas.  Hayek and Friedman are the chosen "public faces" of this approach.  "There's a classical liberal tradition and classical liberal values and we can be fuzzy on a lot of other things."

What am I leaving out?  And which will win out as the dominant strand?

Matt Yglesias reviews *Create Your Own Economy*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The review is here, excerpt:

It’s a bit hard to do the book justice because the subject matter is so unorthodox. So I’ll put it this way instead. I first cracked the book one afternoon intending to read for about ninety minutes and then go get on my bike and meet someone. While reading, I decided to change plans and take the bus instead so as to create more time (both coming and going) when I could read more Create Your Own Economy. There’s no real discussion of policy issues here, but you do get a fascinating analysis of Sherlock Holmes.

You can buy the book here.

What I’ve been Reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, by Vladislav Zubok.  This excellent Belknap book focuses on the question of how the Soviets had much of an intelligentsia at all.  More fun and more readable than expected and consistently interesting throughout.  Soon this book will be put through the occasionally idiosyncratic "Natasha test."

2. Economics Does Not Lie: A Defense of the Free Market in a Time of Crisis, by Guy Sorman.  He is a French classical liberal, defending a market-oriented point of view.

3. Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa from Mandela to Zuma, by Alec Russell.  An excellent book which shows how messed up this country is likely to remain.  Zuma in particular is a nasty piece of work.

4.

The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters, by Richard Bernstein.  When I first saw this book I swore I wouldn't read it or buy it.  Then the excellent reviews started piling up.  Eventually I broke down.  It turns out the writing is superb and it has plenty of informative content.  But you know what, it is still a bad book and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  The always-excellent Laura Miller reviews it.

5. The Book of Psalms, translated by Robert Alter (my favorite Biblical translator).  Recommended.

Ben Casnocha reviews *Create Your Own Economy*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am delighted with the review, which is more like a review essay, with many interesting observations on internet culture as well as on the book.  The essay title is "RSSted Development."  Excerpt:

…the intellectual and emotional
stimulation we experience by assembling a custom stream of bits. Cowen
refers to this process as the “daily self-assembly of synthetic
experiences.” My inputs appear a chaotic jumble of scattered
information but to me they touch all my interest points. When I consume
them as a blend, I see all-important connections between the different
intellectual narratives I follow a business idea (entrepreneurship) in the airplane space (travel), for example. Because building the blend is a social exercise real communities and friendships form around certain topics my
social life and intellectual life intersect more intensely than before.
And I engage in ongoing self-discovery by reflecting upon my interests,
finding new bits to add to my stream, and thinking about how it all
fits together.

Cowen maintains that these benefits enhance your internal
mental existence; how you order information in your head and how you
use this information to conceive of your identity and life aspirations
affects your internal well-being. Because a personal blend reflects a
diverse set of media (think hyper-specific niche news outlets in lieu
of a nightly news broadcast that everyone watches on one of three
networks), and because each person constructs their own stories to link
their inputs together, the benefits are unique to the individual. They
are also invisible. It is impossible to see what stories someone is
crafting internally to make sense of their stream; it is impossible to
appreciate the personal coherence of it.

The way the benefits of info consumption
habits accrue privately but are perceived publicly approximates
romance, Cowen adds. Compare a long-distance relationship to a
proximate one. In a long-distance relationship, you have infrequent but
very high peaks when you see each other. Friends see you run off for
fancy getaway weekends when the sweetheart comes to town. Yet
day-to-day it is not very satisfying. In a marriage by contrast you
have frequent, bite-size, mundane interactions which rarely hit peaks
or valleys of intensity. The happiness research that asserts married
couples are happier than non-married ones and especially happier than
couples dating long-distance is not always self-evident. Outsiders see
the inevitable frustrations and flare-ups that mark even stable
marriages. What they cannot see is the interior satisfaction that the
couple derives by weaving together these mundane moments into a
relationship rich in meaning and depth, and in writing a shared life
narrative that is all their own.

After reading the essay, I wonder how many blogs Ben has in his RSS feed…

In which regards are autistics more rational?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Many bloggers are citing a recent Scientific American piece, one part of which covers how autistics come closer to satisfying some canons of economic rationality.  Since I discuss the underlying research in Create Your Own Economy, I should point out that the SA article doesn't quite get it right.  They serve up:

One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism…

I would sooner describe the underlying research as showing that framing effects are weaker (NB: not absent) for autistics.  That is, for the autistics it matters less whether a given change in endowment is described as a gain or a loss, relative to varying frames.  I read the SA account ("when balancing gains and losses") as conflating framing and endowment effects; in any case the exposition is not clear.

SA writes:

…this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior…

An alternative would have been: "The autistics are in this way more rational."

One underexplored question is whether most people distrust those who are not irrational in particular, commonly realized ways.  Even the researchers on the original piece considers the superior performance of autistics on the test to be a sign of their processing "failures."

Another part of the piece concerns the skin conductance responses; there is preliminary evidence that autistics approached the framed choices in a less emotional manner, at least by that one measure.  

Create Your Own Economy considers a number of possible overlaps between economics and autism, including Vernon Smith's claim that Adam Smith was himself on the autism spectrum.  It also considers other ways in which autistics are likely to be more rational, such as being less likely to encode false memories and less likely to resort to excessive use of narrative to organize their memories and explanations.

Aid Realism for the Idealist

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The failure of foreign aid to lead to economic development has left many cynics in its wake. For this reason, I enjoyed The Blue Sweater, Jacqueline Novogratz's story of moving from aid-idealism to aid-realism without ever passing through the way-station of aid-cynicism.  As a naive, aid-idealist Novogratz spent a lot of time on the circuit in Africa; eventually hard lessons wore away the naivety but not the idealism.  Of course, Novogratz learned a lot about the corruption, failure to experiment, and lack of accountability of the aid agencies but she also learned to be realistic about the do-gooders:

Philanthropy can appeal to people who want to be loved more than they want to make a difference.

But the hardest lessons were about the poor.  In the late 1980s, Novogratz worked with a group of native women to build up a thriving business in Rwanda.  Inevitably some of her friends became terrible victims of the 1994 genocide.  Perhaps even worse, some of her friends became perpetrators.  Hard lessons like these drove Novogratz's evolution.

I've read the following sort of thing many times:

It is so often the people who know the greatest suffering–the poor and most vulnerable–who are the most resilient, the ones able to derive happiness and shared joy from the simplest pleasures.

I've heard it so many times, I tend to dismiss it but Novogratz follows up with this:

That same resilience, however, can manifest itself in passivity, fatalism, a resignation to the difficulties of life that allows injustice and inequity to strengthen and grow…

Which, for me at least, turned a trite observation into an important insight.

Novogratz's experiences eventually developed into the Acumen Fund, a venture capital firm for aid.  The idea is to invest patient capital in scalable, for-profit businesses that deliver services to the poor.  The fund, for example, has invested in a firm producing drip irrigation systems in Pakistan, a Tanzanian firm that produces mosquito nets and an Indian firm producing internet-telephone kiosks in small villages.

The fact that the businesses have been for-profit has been critical.  In selling bed nets for example the Tanzanian firm learned that talking about malaria doesn't sell. What sells, in the words of one of their top salespersons is, "The color is beautiful, and you can hang the nets in your windows so that your neighbors know how much you care about your family."  As Novogratz puts it:

Beauty, vanity, status and comfort….The rich hold no monopoly on any of it.  But we're a long way from integrating the way people actually make decisions into public policy instead of how we think they should make them.

Patient capital is no panacea–what is?–but by investing in entrepreneurs who must listen to their customers a charitable venture-capital firm can multiply the effectiveness of its philanthropy.  

There is a powerful role both for the market and for philanthropy…Philanthropy alone lacks the feedback mechanism of markets, which are the best listening devices we have; and yet markets alone too easily leave the most vulnerable behind.