Category: Books

Lynne Munson reviews my book

She covers Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, in The Weekly Standard.  Here is the link, which offers only a bit of the review to non-subscribers.  Here is an excerpt from the critical part of her review:

…few critical observers would agree that contemporary American art has put its best work forward in recent decades, when our artists and art institutions have enjoyed more riches than at any other time in history.  Contemporary American artmaking has been monopolized for nearly a half-century by postmodernism, a politics-obsessed formulaic approach that has yielded such shock-art masterpieces as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (which finds itself in numerous museum collections).  Artists who do not work in the postmodern mode are excluded from museum exhibitions and the best galleries.

Of course, no better can be said of the products of the European art world, whose denizens have, at best, striven to vie with their postmodern American counterparts for the prize of Most Shocking.  But to argue, as Cowen does, that "the American model encourages artistic creativity [and] keeps the politicization of art to a minimum," is to be unaware of how narrow and prescriptive American artmaking has become.  The simple fact is that artmaking in America has been taken over by a single bad idea, despite the ample and diverse funding it receives.

Her last sentence is a good illustration of how two people can look at the same facts and see such very different patterns.

Why People Die By Suicide

The studies on those who attempt suicide multiple times and on the vigorous association between past and future suicidality (even accounting for "kitchen sink" variables) are consistent with the view that people habituate to self-injury and thereby gain the ability to enact increasing severe suicidal behaviors.

That is the main argument of Thomas Joiner’s Why People Die by Suicide.  Here is the book’s home page.  Here is an excerpt.  Here is a summary.  By the way, athletes, who are used to harming themselves, commit suicides at relatively high rates.

The traditional economic approach compares the costs and benefits of staying alive, with option value thrown in for good measure.  It seems more realistic to treat people as having periodic suicidal urges, but (fortunately) usually lacking the capability to execute those urges.  Why some people find reason to work their way "up the ladder" of capabilities is the next question.  Perhaps the mechanisms behind suicide have more to do with employment, and with economic growth, than we used to think.  Rather than making an analysis of suicide more like modern economics, should economics become more like the theory of suicide? 

More people die by suicide in New York City than are murdered; here are twenty facts about death.  Have I mentioned?  It seems to be "Death Day" over at MarginalRevolution this lovely Tuesday…

Theories of Teenage Comparative Advantage

In high school, though, everyone suddenly seemed to realize that Sam Hellerman probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, and had kind of weird hair and a funny walk, and really didn’t have anything to offer that couldn’t be acquired much more cheaply and efficiently from someone else.  The market, which had once rewarded him slightly for being the same height as the average eighth grader, had now determined that his services were needed elsewhere, and so he ended up at the bottom of the totem pole and at my house every now and then palming Vicodins and swallowing them with some bourbon from Carol’s entertaining area.

That is from the witty King Dork, one of the hippest novels of the year.

Elsewhere in the new fiction department, I stayed up late to finish the much-heralded The Keep, by Jennifer Egan.  Imagine a shorter and more coherent version of John Fowles’s The Magus, but with periodic satirical pokes at eighteenth century gothic novels.  Here is a concordance of reviews, courtesy of Bookslut.

The Dark Ages were Dark

It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued.  The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both the East and the West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form.  However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view; it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries.  This was a change that affected everyone, from peasants to kings, even the bodies of saints resting in their churches.  It was no mere transformation — it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization.’

That is from Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization.  This recent book is the best integration of archaeology and economics I have seen; it is also a first-rate economic history in its own right, as well as a history of pottery.  Highly recommended for those who think they might like it.

Econospinning

Econospinning: How to Read Between the Lines When the Media Manipulate the Numbers, by Gene Epstein, economics editor at Barron’s.

Imagine lengthy polemics against the use of numbers in the work of Paul Krugman (most of all), the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal, Brad DeLong, Steve Levitt, and Barbara Ehrenreich, among others.  Except the vehicle isn’t the blogosphere, it is a book!

This one is guaranteed to ruffle feathers.  Here is the book’s home page.

An interesting bit I read today

…we love identity — because we don’t love class.  We love thinking that the differences that divide us are not the difference between those of us who have money and those who don’t but are instead the differences between those of us who are black and those who are white or Asian or Latino or whatever.  A world where some of us don’t have enough money is a world where the differences between us present a problem: the need to get rid of inequality or to justify it.  A world where some of us are black and some of us are white — or biracial or Native American or transgendered — is a world where the differences between us present a solution: appreciating our diversity.

That is from Walter Benn Michaels’s forthcoming The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.

Climbing the Mountain

Here is Derek Parfit’s new book manuscript, on-line.  Thanks to Robin Hanson for the pointer.

Addendum: Parfit’s 1984 Reasons and Persons remains my favorite contemporary work in moral philosophy.  He is also the most important thinker on social choice paradoxes since Kenneth Arrow.  Since that time Parfit has been working on multiple volumes on the major problems of philosophy.  Many people who have seen advance drafts of Climbing the Mountain claim to be disappointed.  I will read it soon.

Macro book bleg

Most of my reading list consists of technical macro articles (I’ll post the new one when it is ready).  But all students — even in Ph.d. macro — deserve a break.  At least one of the readings should be literary and mostly fun, albeit stuffed with substance.  Last year I used Paul Blustein’s And the Money Kept Rolling In, a study of Argentina.

I will use Blustein again but I might add another book.  It should be readable, not too long, about something that matters, and of course have macroeconomic themes.

Please leave your suggestions in the comments.

Here is Brad DeLong’s book bleg; he wants to show his class that modern institutions are contingent rather than necessary.  I want to inform them about current events or perhaps history.

Here are responses to Brad from CrookedTimber, none of which are very useful for a Ph.d. macro class.  They are focused on economic anthropology.

Michael Schaub of Bookslut failed economics

There’s something really irritating about discovering that books you
love are out of print. Even though used bookstores, and sites like Abebooks, Alibris and Powell’s
have made it pretty easy to find them, it sucks that the publishing
industry has given up on some great work from some great authors, while
books like M is for Murder and N is for No, Seriously, Murder and O is for Oh My God Someone Just Got Murdered
are readily available at every chain bookstore in the land. You might
say that there’s a good economic reason for this, to which I respond: I failed economics, bitches. So take that!

Here is the link.

Der Besuch der Alten Dame

An wealthy old woman comes to a broken down old town and promises the community a large sum of money if they will assassinate her old beau; he had once spurned her.  At first the citizenry refuses.  But suddenly people start spending more and borrowing more.  The woman’s promise is like a strongly expansionary monetary policy.  The circulating debt becomes liquid.  Prices rise.  Output rises too.

But there is still a free rider problem.  Who will kill the old beau?  Let someone else do it.

The clock ticks and prices, expenditures, and debts all continue to rise (what game-theoretic solution concept brings this result?).

At some point personal indebtedness is so high that it becomes privately rational to kill the old beau.  Remember the 1984 Bliss and Nalebuff piece about dragonslaying?  Someone will be the least cost killer, relative to benefit.

Bang.

Suite Francaise, part II

They were alone — they felt they were alone — in the great sleeping house.  Not a word of their true feelings was spoken; they didn’t kiss.  There was simply silence.  Silence followed by feverish, passionate conversation about their own countries, their families, music, books…They felt a strange happiness, an urgent need to reveal their hearts to each other — the urgency of lovers, which is already a gift, the very first one, the gift of the soul before the body surrenders  "Know me, look at me.  This is who I am.  This is how I have lived, this is what I have loved.  And you?  What about you my darling?"  But up until now, not a single word of love.  What was the point?

And no, I am not going to tell you what happens…

PJ O’Rourke on Moral Sentiments

PJ O’Rourke is so funny you sometimes forget how smart he is.  I learned more about economic growth from Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics than from many a mathematical treatise.  In particular, in Eat the Rich O’Rourke pounded home the point that absence of government led to very different outcomes in 19th century America than in post-communist Albania.  Economists have only just begun to try to explain why.

Here is a recent review from O’Rourke of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Smith claimed that what we do,
when we develop morality, is shape our natural sympathies into the
thoughts and actions that we would expect from an Impartial Spectator
who is sympathetic, but objective and all-knowing, yet still
sympathetic anyway.

"When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so
selfish, how comes it," Smith asked, "that our active principles should
often be so generous and so noble?" The answer is "the inhabitant of
the breast . . . the great judge and arbiter of our conduct." Looking
at things from the Impartial Spectator’s point of view instructs us in
the self-discipline that we need to behave well in our condition of
natural liberty. Consider how toddlers or drunks behave, who haven’t
yet received, or who have temporarily forgotten, their instructions.

If, Smith wrote, the Impartial Spectator did not teach us "to
protect the weak, to curb the violent, and to chastise the guilty,"
then "a man would enter an assembly of men as he enters a den of
lions." Or toddlers. Or drunks. Or Jack Abramoff’s office.

How to write a book on foreign aid

The current books critical of foreign aid all catalog the failings of that aid.  They should instead start with and study the foreign aid successes.  The next question is whether those successes, once we understand them better, are replicable.  Maybe not, but then we would know.  And if they are replicable then we could, um, replicate them.

No one has written the book I am asking for.  Are you surprised?