Category: Books
*The Hidden Victims*
The author is Cormac Ó Gráda, the renowned Irish economic historian, and the subtitle is Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars. This is a first-rate and also horrifying of a still underdiscussed topic. Here is one excerpt:
The death rate from famine in Greece was probably higher than in any other European country with the exceptions of the Soviet Union and Poland. Following its occupation by Axis troops in April-June 1941, the British Navy, which controlled the Mediterranean, blocked sea access to Greece. Greece was one of the few Nazi-occupied economies that depended on imports for much of its food. The theft of meat and dairy cattle in the area around Athens for army use quickly followed occupation. Very soon, essential foodstuffs became scarce, particularly in Athens, which led to a famine at its most intense in 1941-42. The capital and its port city of Piraeus and some of the islands were hit particularly hard. The context was one of hyperinflation, an Allied blockade, and state-sponsored theft by the occupation forces.
This important book will make my best non-fiction of the year list.
Rampell On Harris’s Economic Policy
Here is the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell on Harris’s price control policy:
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Some far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.
…If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.
And here is a primer on Nixon’s price controls announced 53 years ago yesterday. Read Modern Principles for more.
The new Nate Silver book
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. It is great fun, and has something real or interesting on every page. If I haven’t covered it more, that is because I have a CWT coming with Nate, 100% on the book itself (alas no Paul McCartney or “which is the best white creme in Central America?” questions, but I do ask about Luka). In the meantime I just wanted to give it this plug.
What I’ve been reading, or not reading
1. August Strindberg, The People of Hemsö. Hardly anyone (non-Swedish?) reads this classic novel any more, but it holds up as one of the more compelling creations of its time. Direct and compelling. Swedish people on an island, but will this marriage work? Why has it so faded from our attentions? I’ve long loved Strindberg, so why did it take me until so late in life?
2. Michael McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism. Another very good book no one told me about, somehow I stumbled on it browsing Amazon. You can make Rushdoony sound like a nut, but you also can make him sound like one of the most influential figures in the 20th century history of American conservatism and also libertarianism. Would the modern home schooling and Christian home schooling movements exist without him? And yet he believed in extreme theocracy. This book also has plenty of meaty material on the Volker Fund, Gary North, FEE, and much more.
3. Dawn Ades and David F. Hermann, Hannah Höch. As part of my attempt to brush up on the Weimar period, I have been reading and browsing through this excellent picture book of works by one of Germany’s most famous dada artists. Here are some images.
4. Paul Collier, Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places. Spoiler: he does not say “tax them so people leave.” If I had a nickel every time he misrepresented the views of Milton Friedman and market economics… We are told that shock therapy failed in Russia, but not that it succeeded in Poland, which followed through with it consistently and ran less corrupt privatizations. Somehow each subsection in this book is too short. He ends up in a sensible state capacity view, but it would have been much simpler if he had started there.
5. Marina Münkler, Anbruch der Neuen Zeit: Das Dramatische 16. Jahrhundert. An excellent analytical overview of the 16th century, which of course is what set the stage for so much of what was to follow. Not surprisingly, has more of a Central European emphasis than many Anglo works on the same period.
Paul Cooper, Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline covers classic themes with intelligence.
Justene Hill Edwards, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedmen’s Bank is a good contribution to economic history and also black history.
I have not yet been able to start Jeffrey Ding, Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition.
My excellent Conversation with Paul Bloom
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Together Paul and Tyler explore whether psychologists understand day-to-day human behavior any better than normal folk, how babies can tell if you’re a jerk, at what age children have the capacity to believe in God, why the trend in religion is toward monotheism, the morality of getting paid to strangle cats, whether disgust should be built into LLMs, the possibilities of AI therapists, the best test for a theory of mind, why people overestimate Paul’s (and Tyler’s) intelligence, why flattery is undersupplied, why we should train flattery and tax empathy, Carl Jung, Big Five personality theory, Principles of Psychology by William James, the social psychology of the Hebrew Bible, his most successful unusual work habit, what he’ll work on next, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I have some questions about intelligence for you. If we think of large language models, should we let them feel disgust so that they avoid left-wing bias?
BLOOM: [laughs] Why would disgust make them avoid left-wing bias?
COWEN: Maybe we’re not sure it would, but there are various claims in the literature that for people on the right, disgust is a more fundamental emotion, and that a greater capacity to feel disgust encourages people in some ways to be more socially conservative. Debatable, but I don’t think it’s a crazy view. So, if you build LLMs, and you give them, say, a lot of empathy and not much or any disgust, you’re going to get left-leaning LLMs, which you might say, “Well, that was my goal.” But obviously, not everyone will accept that conclusion either.
BLOOM: I wouldn’t want woke LLMs. I think there’s a lot in extreme —
COWEN: You’ve got them, of course.
BLOOM: I’ve got them. I think Gemini is the one, if I wanted to go — the woke LLM of choice. Because I think the doctrine called wokeness leads to a lot of moral problems and makes the world worse in certain ways, but I wouldn’t mind left-wing LLMs.
In fact, I’m not a fan of disgust. You’re right that disgust is often associated with right-wing, but in the very worst instantiation of it. Disgust is what drives hatred towards gay people. It involves hatred of interracial marriage, the exclusion of immigrants, the exclusion of other races. If there’s one emotion I would take away from people, it would be disgust, at least disgust in the moral realm. They could keep their disgust towards rotten food and that sort of thing. That’s the one thing I wouldn’t put into LLMs. I’d rather put anger, pity, gratitude. Disgust is the one thing I’d keep away.
COWEN: So, you wouldn’t just cut back on it at the margin. You would just take disgust out of people if you could?
And:
COWEN: I think at the margin, I’ve moved against empathy more being a podcast host, that I’ll ask a question —
BLOOM: Wait. Why being a podcast host?
COWEN: Well, I’ll ask a question, and a lot of guests think it’s high status simply to signal empathy rather than giving a substantive answer. The signaling-empathy answers I find quite uninteresting, and I think a lot of my listeners do, too. Yet people will just keep on doing this, and I get frustrated. Then I think, “Well, Tyler, you should turn a bit more against empathy for this reason.” And I think that’s correct.
Paul cannot be blamed for doing that, however. So substantive, interesting, and entertaining throughout.
My excellent Conversation with Alan Taylor, on American history
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Taylor take a walking tour of early history through North America covering the decisions, and ripples of those decisions, that shaped revolution and independence, including why Canada didn’t join the American revolution, why America in turn never conquered Canada, American’s early obsession with the collapse of the Republic, how democratic the Jacksonians were, Texas/Mexico tensions over escaped African American slaves, America’s refusal to recognize Cuban independence, how many American Tories went north post-revolution, Napoleon III’s war with Mexico, why the US Government considered attacking Canada after the Civil War, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, here’s a quotation from your writings, page 37: “One of the great ironies of the American Revolution was that it led to virtually free land for settlers in British Canada while rendering land more expensive in the United States.” Could you explain that, please?
TAYLOR: Sure. The war was very expensive. All the states and the United States also incurred immense debts. How are you going to pay for that? This is the time when there’s no income tax, and the chief ways in which governments could raise money were on import duties and then on selling land. There was a lot of land, provided you could take it away from native peoples. All of the states and the United States were in the business of trying to sell land, but also they’re reliant within the states on these land taxes. All of these go up, then, to try to finance the war debt.
Whereas in British Canada, the British government is subsidizing the local government. They’re paying the full freight of it, which means that local taxes were much lower there. It also meant that they could afford to basically give away land to attract settlers. They had this notion that if we offer free land to Americans, they will want to leave that new American republic, move back into the British Empire, strengthen Canada, and provide a militia to defend it.
Substantive and interesting throughout. And can you guess what in his answers surprised me most?
What I’ve been reading
James J. Walsh, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries. Eccentric, published long ago, not correct, yet full of vitality and insight. So many of the key pieces of the West already were in place by that time. So recommended, this one just has been reissued. How was the Giotto chapel in Padua possible? Parsival? This book gives you a start on those questions.
Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America 1934-1971. Yes, it made me order and want to read the first volume as well. This is likely the best biography of Stravinsky and his musical times.
Rochelle Gurstein, Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art. On the importance of classics, and common standards for classics, if art is going to challenge and improve us. The book is also sufficiently appreciative of Canova, one of the most impressive artists of all time but somehow these days underdiscussed.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, offers a scientific look at how fatherhood and raising children changes the minds, bodies, and behaviors of men.
Sulmaan Wasif Khan, The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between. I’ve been following this issue for a long time, so I don’t feel I learned much from this book. But for most people, especially younger people, it is a very good introduction to the longer history.
Douglas Porch, Resistance and Liberation, France at War 1942-1945. Too detailed for my purposes, so I stopped reading it. But this volume seems to be a major historical achievement, and a must read for at least some subset of humans.
Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road. This is the British novel that now everyone there is reading and talkinig about. A “cast of characters” and “biting portrait” sort of thing, reflecting modern Britain, most of all London, today. I read about fifty pages, found it highly engaging, and then decided the rest would be a waste of my time.
Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revoluton
Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.
After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.
In a remarkable new paper, Juhász, Sakabe, and Weinstein show how the key to this transformation was a massive effort to translate and codify technical information in the Japanese language. This state-led initiative made cutting-edge industrial knowledge accessible to Japanese entrepreneurs and workers in a way that was unparalleled among non-Western countries at the time.
Here’s an amazing graph which tells much of the story. In both 1870 and 1910 most of the technical knowledge of the world is in French, English, Italian and German but look at what happens in Japan–basically no technical books in 1870 to on par with English in 1910. Moreover, no other country did this.
Translating a technical document today is much easier than in the past because the words already exist. Translating technical documents in the late 19th century, however, required the creation and standardization of entirely new words.
…the Institute of Barbarian Books (Bansho Torishirabesho)…was tasked with developing English-Japanese dictionaries to facilitate technical translations. This project was the first step in what would become a massive government effort to codify and absorb Western science. Linguists and lexicographers have written extensively on the difficulty of scientific translation, which explains why little codification of knowledge happened in languages other than English and its close cognates: French and German (c.f. Kokawa et al. 1994; Lippert 2001; Clark 2009). The linguistic problem was two-fold. First, no words existed in Japanese for canonical Industrial Revolution products such as the railroad, steam engine, or telegraph, and using phonetic representations of all untranslatable jargon in a technical book resulted in transliteration of the text, not translation. Second, translations needed to be standardized so that all translators would translate a given foreign word into the same Japanese one.
Solving these two problems became one of the Institute’s main objectives.
Here’s a graph showing the creation of new words in Japan by year. You can see the explosion in new words in the late 19th century. Note that this happened well after the Perry Mission. The words didn’t simply evolve, the authors argue new words were created as a form of industrial policy.
By the way, AstralCodexTen points us to an interesting biography of a translator at the time who works on economics books:
[Fukuzawa] makes great progress on a number of translations. Among them is the first Western economics book translated into Japanese. In the course of this work, he encounters difficulties with the concept of “competition.” He decides to coin a new Japanese word, kyoso, derived from the words for “race and fight.” His patron, a Confucian, is unimpressed with this translation. He suggests other renderings. Why not “love of the nation shown in connection with trade”? Or “open generosity from a merchant in times of national stress”? But Fukuzawa insists on kyoso, and now the word is the first result on Google Translate.
There is a lot more in this paper. In particular, showing how the translation of documents lead to productivity growth on an industry by industry basis and a demonstration of the importance of this mechanism for economic growth across the world.
The bottom line for me is this: What caused the industrial revolution is a perennial question–was it coal, freedom, literacy?–but this is the first paper which gives what I think is a truly compelling answer for one particular case. Japan’s rapid industrialization under the Meiji Restoration was driven by its unprecedented effort to translate, codify, and disseminate Western technical knowledge in the Japanese language.
*Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI*
By Anil Ananthaswamy, an excellent book, it will make the end of year best non-fiction list. It focuses on machine learning and its offshoots, and you can read it for the story even if you don’t followall of the matrix algebra and the calculus. It is also the best book I know on how science advances by laying different “bricks,” and later bringing them all together toward a practicable solution. Recommended.
Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise Reviewed by Furman
Jason Furman (eight years as a top economic adviser to President Obama) is an excellent economist who reads a lot of books. His Goodreads has 2300 books read, with some 1200 reviews in economics, fiction, history and science. I greatly enjoyed his latest review of Zola’s The Ladies Paradise which came about after he “asked a colleague in the English department if any fiction had positive depictions of business and capitalism (other than Ayn Rand).” Here is Furman’s review:
A 19th century novel that is a paean to the consumer welfare standard.
…The department store is really the leading character in this book, the protagonist of the Bildungsroman. It is like a living, breathing creature with needs, desires and most importantly constant growth. It becomes increasing complex, mature and alive as it develops. From a few departments to many, takes over more and more of the square block—eventually engulfing the one stubborn holdout. The novel also has amazing depictions of innovations, not just classical invention (e.g., an improved type of umbrella at one point) but also management of inventory, holding sales, selling some products at a loss, advertising, managing inventories, and more. I never thought an entire chapter of a novel (and they’re long chapters) devoted to inventory management could be so thrilling but that one was nothing compared to the description of the sale.
In the shadow of the Ladies Paradise are a number of small shops that are having an increasingly difficult time competing. The larger shop buys out some, builds on innovations by others, and aggressively competes on price with still others. Émile Zola does not sugarcoat the pain of all of this, depicting deaths and suicide attempts in the wake of the store. But he does not blame all the maladies on the Ladies Paradise itself and, consistent with the consumer welfare standard, he keeps the focus on the ways in which this profit ultimately benefits customers. Moreover, some of the small businesses do innovate in ways that help keep themselves in business: “longing to create competition for the colossus; [a small business owner] believed that victory would be certain if several specialized shops where customers could find a very varied choice of goods could be created in the neighbourhood.”
Interestingly there is a chapter that reads like an explanation of an economic model, Bertrand competition, in which two competitors keep lowering prices by smaller and smaller amounts until they are pricing as low as they possibly can (their marginal cost). What made this especially interesting to me was that The Ladies Paradise was published in 1883, the same year Joseph Louis François Bertrand published his model.
And it is not just consumers. The novel depicts how the productivity gains the Ladies Paradise makes as a result of its scale and its innovations are passed through to workers in the form of higher pay and improved benefits. For example, early on there is a brutal depiction of the process of laying off workers during the slow time of year. Later on, the store develops a system that is more like furloughs with insurance. And also, unlike the small shops in the area, it has opportunities for advancement within the store, moving up the ranks of managerial positions. Notably, all of this is not because of the benevolence of the owner (as it is in a few other 19th century novels) but because of competition from other stores so the need to attract and retain talent.
All of this makes employment in the colossus considerably better than the smaller, neighboring shops where people are poorly paid, lack opportunities for advancement and face harassment. Although it is still not all wonderful—for example, the department store frowns on women who are married and dismisses them when they have children.
Overall, the combination of low prices for consumers and high expenses—including pay and benefits to attract and retain employees—mean that the business has a very thin profit margin but applies that margin to a very large base: “Doubtless with their heavy trade expenses and their system of low prices the net profit was at most four per cent. But a profit of sixteen hundred thousand francs was still a pretty good sum; one could be content with four per cent when one operated on such a scale.”
The biggest wrinkle in the consumer welfare standard is some of the ambivalence Zola has about consumer preferences themselves….The idea that people—or women to be more specific—are buying things they do not “need” but “desire” is an issue it grapples with. And that desire can even rise to the level of a mad frenzy, like the sales it depicts or the shoplifters, some of them affluent but driven by an almost mad desire to acquire lace, silk, and more.
All of this is embedded in a larger economic and technological system that is operating in the background: large factories in Lyon that are producing at scale in a way that is symbiotic with the department store, rail transportation to bring the constant inflow of goods, a mail system that supports catalog purchases, and more.
…I’m still astounded about how breathtaking fiction can be made which understands and depicts the ways in which innovation and scale combine with competition to generate benefits for consumers and workers—while also not sugarcoating the many that lose from this process.
What I’ve been reading
1. Kimmo Rentola, How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War. An excellent book, especially good on linking the Winter War with the fighting of 1944 and also the postwar settlments. Winner of the Lauri Jäntti prize, who would have thought otherwise?
2. Sjeng Scheijen, Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935. My biggest learning from this volume was simply how important Vladimir Tatlin was as a leader of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s. He might have mattered as much as Malevich? It is worth buying and reading a book for an insight such as that. Here is a short video of a good Tatlin exhibit from Basel, twelve years ago. The book also offered this sentence: “The affinity between the anarchists and the futurists is not so surprising.”
As a follow-up, I’ve also been reading Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution, also very good.
3. Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann. What is it like to be an unusual woman writer, with unusual proclivities, and have to build up or rebuild your work life in the countryside? There is now a whole book on this topic. Does it really mean you have to write down a complete inventory of all household possessions? (apparently) Beautifully written, very British, will frustrate those who seek generalization but recommended nonetheless.
4. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings, edited by Emiliano Bugatti. Mostly a picture book, this one convinced me I need to visit Treviso, Italy. The Brion Tomb is nearby, not to mention the Canova museum, both designed by Scarpa. He also showed that first-rate architecture never quite ended in Venice proper. I hadn’t known that Scarpa’s earliest works date as far back as the mid-1930s, and that he died by falling down a flight of stairs.
5. Céline, War. A newly unearthed novel by a great classic author is rare to come by, but here we have one. The text is not fully intact, but enough is there for reading to be a sufficiently integrated experience. It is in fact one of the best novels on the horrors of war, and now is not such a bad time to revisit that theme.
I enjoyed Susan Tomes, Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives, but it is too skimpy on the moderns. No coverage of Uchida or Ursula Oppens or Angela Hewitt?
Jack Weatherford, Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China is a good follow-up to his earlier work.
In my pile is Anthony Gregory, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State.
Bryan Caplan on YIMBY in the NYT
Here is one excerpt:
What few appreciate is that the overregulation of housing has blocked a classic American path: moving to a higher-wage part of the country to secure a better life. A paper by the economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag shows that housing costs now routinely outweigh wage gains: While janitors and waiters do indeed earn higher salaries in the Bay Area, they have to spend much more than their extra pay on rent. Programmers and lawyers who move to gold-rush regions still come out ahead, but the rest of the workforce is gradually getting out of Dodge. In a functional society, self-interest inspires workers to relocate to wherever they are most productive. In our society, strict housing regulation has decoupled movement and value, leading to the mass migration of lower-income residents away from geographic centers of technological progress and economic growth.
Here is the entire article, and don’t forget about Bryan’s new book on housing deregulation Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation.
My excellent Conversation with Brian Winter
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
It’s not just the churrasco that made him fall in love with Brazil. Brian Winter has been studying and writing about Latin America for over 20 years. He’s been tracking the struggles and triumphs of the region as it’s dealt with decades of coups, violence, and shifting economics. His work offers a nuanced perspective on Latin America’s persistent challenges and remarkable resilience.
Together Brian and Tyler discuss the politics and economics of nearly every country from the equator down. They cover the future of migration into Brazil, what it’s doing right in agriculture, the cultural shift in race politics, crime in Rio and São Paulo, the effectiveness and future consequences of Bukele’s police state in El Salvador, the economic growth of Colombia despite continued violence, the prevalence of startups and psychoanalysis in Argentina, Uruguay’s reduction in poverty levels, the beautiful ugliness of Sao Paulo, where Brian will explore next, and more.
And here is one excerpt;
COWEN: What’s the economic geography of Brazil going to look like? All the wealth near Mato Grosso and the north just very, very poor? Or the north empties out? How’s that going to work? There used to be some modest degree of balance.
WINTER: That’s true. Most of the population in Brazil and the economic center, for sure, was in the southeast. That means, really, São Paulo state, which is about a quarter of Brazil’s population but roughly a third of its GDP. Rio as well, and the state of Minas Gerais, which has a name that tells its history. That means “general mines” in Portuguese. That’s the area where a lot of the gold came out of in the 18th and 19th centuries. That’s gone now, so it’s not as much of an economic pull.
You’re right, Tyler, though, that a lot of the real boom right now, the action, is in places like Mato Grosso, which is in the region of Brazil called the Central West. That’s soy country. I’m from Texas, and Mato Grosso is virtually indistinguishable from Texas these days. It’s hot. It’s flat. The crop, like I said, is soy. There’s cattle ranching as well.
Even the music — Brazil, as others have noted, has gone from being the country of bossa nova and the samba in the 1970s to being the country of sertanejo today. Sertanejo is a Brazilian cousin of country music with accordions, but it’s sung by people — men mostly — in jeans, big belt buckles, and cowboy hats. They’re importing that — not only that economic model but that lifestyle as well.
COWEN: What is the great Brazilian music of today? MPB is dead, right? So, what should someone listen to?
Recommended, interesting throughout.
New Ross Douthat book
Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, pre-order here. Self-recommending, some would say God recommends it too. Here is the chain of links to my earlier exchange with Ross on whether one should believe in God.
What should I ask Christopher Kirchhoff?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. In case you do not know, Christopher self-describes as:
Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office and has led teams for the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. He recently worked special projects at Anthropic. Previously, Dr. Kirchhoff helped design and scale $1 billion in philanthropic programs at Schmidt Futures. He also founded and led the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Office, Defense Innovation Unit X, which piloted flying cars and microsatellites in military missions and created a new acquisition pathway for start-ups now responsible for $70 billion dollars of technology acquisition. During the Obama Administration, he was Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council and the senior civilian advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I very much enjoyed his new book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, co-authored with Raj M. Shah. Here is his home page. The book just received a very strong review from the FT.
So what should I ask Christopher?