Category: Books
I hate perfume
I really, really do. All perfume, and yes that means yours too. But I loved the book Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. If you are rating this book along the single dimension of how skillfully it informs the reader, it is one of the best non-fiction books I have read, ever.
Plus it has good sentences like:
Nobody ever died from wearing Mitsouko, but lots of babies were born as a result of it.
And:
Fragrances for men are mostly identical crap, designed to trap you and give you away as a lout.
Recommended.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, by Bill Ivey. The concrete discussions of cultural issues are consistently interesting and thoughtful; the overall talk of cultural rights which frames the book is not even well-developed enough to be called absurd. The book is best on copyright and least interesting on the NEA, which Ivey once ran. Most of all the book reflects a creeping horror that the internet will make its entire series of debates irrelevant.
2. Apples are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared, by Christopher Robbins. A substantive travel book about you-know-where; it is both fun and full of substance. Recommended.
3. The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History, by Robert L. Hetzel. This is a very serious treatment of what is, from a historical point of view, an understudied topic. Recommended; note that while the monetarist point of view is not heavy-handed, it may not appeal to everybody.
4. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. A lengthy and thoughtful volume on how WMD are *the* problem of the future, though I found it didn’t get me further to thinking through my views. A good start, however, for those who don’t buy the premise.
5. 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die. One of the best books for browsing I have seen, though don’t expect much from the index. I was most surprised by the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, have any of you been there?
Guesstimation, or The City in the Sky
On average, how many people are airborne over the US at any given moment?
That’s a typical question from the new Princeton University Press book by Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam. The title is Guesstimation and the subtitle is: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin.
What’s your guess and why; let us know in the comments and I’ll post their answer later today. The book also tackles such hoary chestnuts as "How many piano tuners are there in Los Angeles," although for mysterious reasons (are they mostly part-timers?) they fall far short of the actual number in the L.A. Yellow Pages.
This book isn’t for everyone but if you think you might like it you probably will.
Addendum: I post the authors’ answer at about comment #31.
The Cowles Foundation Monographs in Economics
You’ll find them here, free and on-line, courtesy of Division of Labor and Michael Greinecker. The most famous is Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values but there are many classics in the series; in fact the hit rate is remarkably high even if they are not all recommended for the general reader. Here is Wikipedia on the Cowles Commission, and by the way it is pronounced "coals." Here is much more background, including links to photos. Here is the current home page of an institution which is no longer distinctive precisely because it triumphed. How is this for a casual sentence:
Several Cowles associates have won Nobel prizes for research done while at the Cowles
Commission. These include Tjalling Koopmans,
Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu,
James Tobin, Franco Modigliani, Herbert Simon,
Lawrence Klein, Trygve Haavelmo and Harry Markowitz.
Should smart men prefer the fiction of the past?
Razib thinks so:
I think that it is somewhat peculiar that many
of us find fiction from the past more engaging than popular
contemporary works. Aupelius’ Golden Ass gets my attention; most contemporary fiction does not. I
am arguing here that this is partly due to the fact that in the past
those who read copiously were, on average, much more like me than they
were like the typical human. Not only were readers by and large
men (usually of some means and comfort), but they were often also
disproportionately eggheads who were eccentric by their nature. How
many elite scholars were there such as Claudius
who were not attracted to the public life of politics and do not appear
in the annals of history? With the printing press, cheaper paper, and
the rise of mass literacy, things changed, the distribution of taste shifted. And so did the distribution of genres.
Read the whole thing. I believe that literary "market taste" was closest to mine in the 1920s, a remarkable decade that saw the publication of major works by Proust, Mann, Joyce, Rilke, Kafka, and numerous other masterpieces. That may be more a "spirit of the times" effect than an audience composition effect, since I prefer it to earlier and more elite periods as well. (Or maybe only by then did fiction get dumbed down to my level!)
When it comes to Roman literature there is also a significant selection effect, namely what later manuscript collectors thought was worth preserving and protecting. Many novels were written during Roman times, but not many of them have come down to us and thus the average quality of Roman literature may look artificially high, just as the average quality of today’s literary menagerie looks artificially low.
In case you weren’t paying attention…
James Joyce, Ulysses, Kindle edition, $3.19. Free shipping, too.
Is the book market going the way of the music market, where there is a systematic redistribution of the surplus toward suppliers of the hardware rather than suppliers of the content?
What’s a New York Times ad worth for a book?
Dani Rodrik tries an experiment:
Princeton University Press ran a small ad for my book last Sunday in the New York Times book review. I was curious if it would have any effect on sales, so I ran a little experiment. I checked the book’s sales ranking in amazon.com at periodic intervals starting on Saturday afternoon.
But the ad didn’t matter so much (see also the comments on the post). I would note a few points of speculation:
1. Below the top tier, a book can rise rapidly through the Amazon rankings without selling so many extra copies.
2. Amazon buyers are better educated and not representative of the market as a whole.
3. It is an open question whether the Amazon rankings are "honest," or strategically designed to sell what is hot at the moment, by making it look especially hot.
4. The best question to ask is: Is your book in Wal-Mart and Costco?
5. The next best metric is to check its location in Barnes and Noble.
6. Success of a book in Borders is less representative of overall success than it used to be; Borders (which is on the verge of going under, I might add) is now closer to an "indie" book store in many ways than it is to B&N.
Addendum: Chug writes in the comments: "display ads for books are not to sell books. they are for good relations between the publisher and the author…."
Nabokov’s last work will not be burned
Surprise. That’s against his deathbed instructions, in case you haven’t been following the controversy.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. The World is What It Is, by Patrick French. This authorized (yes, authorized) biography digs up all the dirt on V.S. Naipaul; I’ve never read anything like it. Here is a Paul Theroux review. Here is another rave review. Theroux’s own self-loathing, quasi-fictional biography of his "friendship" with Naipaul — Sir Vidia’s Shadow — remains one of my favorite books but this is a wonderful sequel. And if you haven’t read through Naipaul’s ouevre you should, especially A Bend in the River, A Turn in the South, and Among the Believers, among others. There is something to be said for misanthropy raised to an art form and packed with intellectual content.
2. Paradise with Serpents, by Robert Carver. The only question is whether this is the first or the second best book on Paraguay in the English language; here is the other contender.
4. Problems with farm price futures, worth a read.
Bad Money
That’s the new book by Kevin Phillips. He concludes:
The thirty- to forty-year tumble from national preeminence that made life more glum for most folk in seventeenth-century Spain, and eighteenth-century Holland, and the Britain from the 1910s to the 1950s may be somewhat moderated for the United States because of a position as a North American continental economic power with a large resource and population base…
Boo hoo, I say; I’ll be crying all the way to Rio. Overall this book is a catalog of the usual arguments about the financial problems of the United States, peak oil, the potential weakness of the dollar, and related worries. Phillips doesn’t seem to think that finance is much of a productive economic sector. He is keen on the "inflation is larger than we realize" line, citing high growth rates for M3 (he doesn’t realize how much the different aggregates can move around and differ from each other) and then the Fed’s discontinuation of that statistic. But who has been tricked? Either the current market estimate of inflation is the best estimate available, or you know that it is wrong and you will be a very rich man. I find the former scenario more plausible.
If there’s anything wrong with gdp statistics, it’s either environmental problems or that we don’t have good measures of the productivity of government itself. Those problems are built into how the number is calculated and there is no conspiracy to make America look much richer than it really is.
There is remarkably little on future expected productivity growth or whether America will solve the problem of educating its non-upwardly-mobile, which are both (the?) major issues for our economic future. The author should spend a week locked in a room with the Solow model. There is also precious little recognition that America in twenty years’ time will almost certainly be a good bit wealthier than today. Given that no other country is about to take us over, does relative international status really matter so much for the happiness of Americans? I don’t think so. The richer the Chinese get, the more I feel good about living in the world’s first country to be a true product of The Enlightenment. If only Phillips could feel the same way.
Ain’t My America
The author is Bill Kauffman and the subtitle is The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. Here is one excerpt:
Above all, they feared empire, whose properties were enumerated well by the doubly pen-named Garet Garrett: novelist, exponent of free enterprise and individualism, and a once-reliable if unspectacular stable horse for the Saturday Evening Post. Writing in 1953, he set down a quintet of imperial requisites.
1. The executive power of the government shall be dominant.
2. Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.
3. Ascendancy of the military mind to such a point at last that the civilian mind is intimidated.
4. A system of satellite nations.
5. A complex of vaunting and fear.
He could have listed this too. In my view this book goes wrong by failing to consider that the right-wing, anti-militarist tradition was wrong on some pretty critical cases. Nonetheless if you are looking for a well-informed, well-written, and up-to-date book on that tradition, consider this your go-to source.
Ontdek je innerlijke econoom
The Dutch edition is out now, or at least I have copies in my hands. You can buy it at these places. The Korean edition is out as well, but I don’t know how to Google the title.
The Horse the Wheel and Language
The tribes Europeans encountered in their colonial ventures in Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas were at first assumed to have existed for a long time. They often claimed antiquity for themselves. But many tribes are now believed to have been transient political communities of the historical moment. Like the Ojibwa, some might have crystallized only after contact with European agents who wanted to deal with bounded groups to facilitate the negotiation of territorial treaties. And the same critical attitude toward bounded tribal territories is applied to European history. Ancient European tribal identities — Celt, Scythians, Cimbri, Teoton, and Pict — are now frequently seen as convenient names for chamelon-like political alliances that had no true ethnic identity, or as brief ethnic phenomena that were unable to persist for any length of time, or even as entirely imaginary later inventions.
That is from David W. Anthony’s The Horse The Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppe Shaped the Modern World. In particular this book focuses on the origin of the Indo-European language group and the relationship between archeology and linguistics. He is also skeptical of Jared Diamond’s well-known thesis that early Europe had much diffusion of innovation in the East-West direction. Recommended.
Climate solutions and carbon dividends
Peter Barnes, Climate Solutions: A Citizen’s Guide is the full title. This simple book is written in the form of punchlines and cartoons but it’s still one of the more insightful treatments of the topic. He is skeptical of a carbon tax:
A carbon tax will never be high enough to do the job.
A low carbon tax would create the illusion of action without changing business as usual.
His alternative proposal has four steps:
1. Carbon cap is gradually lowered 80% by 2050.
2. Carbon permits are auctioned.
3. Clean energy becomes competitive.
4. You get an equal share in the form of permit income.
The "carbon dividends" of course are intended to make the tax politically palatable. Naturally I am worried by the idea of revenue addiction, not to mention the general practice of redistributing income from business to citizens simply because it is popular to do so. It might feel pretty good at first but we don’t want to encourage Chavez-like behavior on the part of our government.
A broader question is whether the carbon dividends in fact make the citizenry better off. First there is the question of the incidence of the initial carbon tax, which of course falls on individuals one way or another. Second, does just sending people money, collectively, make the populace better off? Aggregate demand effects aside, will the fiscal stimulus make the citizenry as a whole better off? No. Will printing up more money and sending it to everyone, even if that is popular, make people better off? No.
(As an aside, does the Humean quantity theory experiment redistribute wealth from corporations — which don’t sleep on pillows and thus cannot wake up in the morning to "more money" — to individuals, who do sleep on pillows? Or is the corporate veil fully pierced? Just wondering…)
I fear versions of this idea whose (possible) popularity rests on tricking voters. Being pro-science also means being pro-economic science.
The general point remains that most discussions of global warming focus on prices and technologies alone, without incorporating realistic models of politics. By the way, if you think John McCain is a straight talker, try this for yikes.
Readsplat
The Economist has a new travel blog, the new Fuchsia Dunlop book is only "good," the first issue of Reason magazine under new editor Matt Welch is out (so far I like it; it’s less cultural, less left-wing and more current affairsy than before), finally I am into Wilco, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple is an interesting account of the blend between Indian politics and religion, Arthur Brooks’s Gross National Happiness argues that the traditional conservative recipe makes people happy, Ramon Llull is a much underrated medieval thinker, here’s a blog on giving away your rebate, and here’s Ryan Holiday on how to master what you read; his technique is the opposite of mine which is simply to read and move on. And here is why congestion pricing died in New York.