Category: Books

Harry Potter and the Mystery of Inequality

by  Alex Tabarrok in

J.K. Rowling is the first author in the history of the world to earn a billion dollars.  I do not disparage Rowling when I say that talent is not the explanation for her monetary success.  Homer, Shakespeare and Tolkien all earned much less.  Why?  Consider Homer, he told great stories but he could earn no more in a night than say 50 people might pay for an evening’s entertainment.  Shakespeare did a little better.  The Globe theater could hold 3000 and unlike Homer, Shakespeare didn’t have to be at the theater to earn.  Shakespeare’s words were leveraged.

Tolkien’s words were leveraged further. By selling books Tolkien could sell to hundreds of thousands, even millions of buyers in a year – more than have ever seen a Shakespeare play in 400 years.  And books were cheaper to produce than actors which meant that Tolkien could earn a greater share of the revenues than did Shakespeare (Shakespeare incidentally also owned shares in the Globe.)

Rowling has the leverage of the book but also the movie, the video game, and the toy.  And globalization, both economic and cultural, means that Rowling’s words, images, and products are translated, transmitted and transported everywhere – this is the real magic of Ha-li Bo-te.

Rowling’s success brings with it inequality.  Time is limited and people want to read the same books that their friends are reading so book publishing has a winner-take all component.  Thus, greater leverage brings greater inequality.  The average writer’s income hasn’t gone up much in the past thirty years but today, for the first time ever, a handful of writers can be multi-millionaires and even billionaires.  The top pulls away from the median.   
The same forces that have generated greater inequality in writing – the leveraging of intellect, the declining importance of physical labor in the production of value, cultural and economic globalization – are at work throughout the economy.  Thus, if you really want to understand inequality today you must first understand Harry Potter.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and its Secret Past, by Giles Tremlett.  An engaging survey of contemporary Spain.

2. Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, by John Ghazvinian.  Why Africa is even more messed up than you think; this book has lots of good economics.

3. Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives.  I’ve gone on about him before, but this newly translated work (the translation gets an A+) is one of the major Latin American novels of the twentieth century. 

4. It’s enough to think you are exercising.

5. Persistence running.

6. Thomas McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse.  A good history of the restaurant, plus it makes you wonder what percent of the female population is motivated primarily by ***ual desire.

Reviewing Landsburg’s Errors

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In the Armchair Economist, Steven Landsburg argues that the people who read his book are likely to find that it wasn’t as good as they expected.  The logic is impeccable – people who over-estimate the value of the Armchair Economist are more likely to buy it and thus discover their over-estimation (sadly, under-estimators never learn of their mistake).  Nevertheless, despite the logic, I and many others discovered that Landsburg was wrong.  The Armchair Economist and every Landsburg book exceed expectations. 

Landsburg is back with More S-ex is Safer S-ex, and another error.  This time Landsburg suggests that writing his book was socially destructive.  Again, the logic is impeccable – a good book creates a lot less value than its price because to a large extent it displaces the second best book which was almost as good.  Authors however are paid based on price and not on social value and thus write too many books.  And yet, I must again disagree for Landsburg’s new book is a treasure.  There is something to learn on almost every page.

Here’s one idea I learned.  In the debate over the economics of global warming the correct discount rate to apply to future generations is a key variable with those arguing that we should do something now, implicitly (and explicitly) arguing for a low discount rate.  But if we count future generations highly we ought also to be in favor of reforming social security.  Investing social security in the stock market "royally screws" current retirees but increases the savings rate which will be benefit future generations.  Thus, a low discount rate ought to weigh in favor of doing something about global warming and investing social security funds in the stock market.  Not many people come out consistent on these grounds (I think Brad DeLong is one of the few.)  I know, I don’t but Landsburg has got me thinking.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography, by Georgi Derluguian.  How did the Soviet Union come to be, come to collapse, and was the ethnic trouble in the Caucasus brought on by globalization?  This book has a unique narrative style, while the content draws upon Wallerstein, Tilly, Randall Collins, and others.  There is wisdom and analysis on virtually every page.

2. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark.  The sad story of how murder and population exchanges have made the nations of the modern Mediterranean more monocultural; someone needs to write on Egypt as well.

3. Good Bread is Back, by Steven Kaplan; the subtitle says it all: A Contemporary History of French bread, the way it is made, and the people who make it.  Here is Alex’s earlier post on French bread.

4. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan.  This short novel is about young British newlyweds trying to have/trying to not have sex in 1962.  Critics are calling it a return to form, but it feels slightly overwrought to me.  Can the British really be like that?  If so, do I have to read about it?  I did find the last ten pages strikingly beautiful.  I got my copy early on Amazon.co.uk, the American edition is out in June.

The Sushi Economy

by  Tyler Cowen in

The centers of the sushi economy in the twenty-first century are sites of exchange and connection.  Today, the places with the freshest fish — and often, the telltale aroma that draws attention to such privileged locations — are airport cargo hangars and refrigerated storage facilities located near highway interchanges.

That is from the splendid The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, by Sasha Issenberg.  Most people do not know how much sushi is shipped across borders, and how much the very "freshest" fish has in fact been frozen.

Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard

by  Tyler Cowen in

In grading his daily performances, he gave himself numerical credit for writing and research — including his endless effort to master mathematics — but seldom for teaching, counseling students, or any other duty.  He enjoyed reading Latin and Greek texts, as well as European novels and biographies — Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Morley’s multivolume Gladstone, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.  Sometimes he indulged himself with Ellery Queen and other detective novelists.  He loved to dine out and to attend art exhibitions and classical music concerts.  But he regarded most of these activities as unseemly distractions.  The only thing that really counted as work.  On that dimension Schumpeter held himself to unattainable standards and wrestled constantly with his conscience.  He was still trying to work out an "exact economics; and in doing so he was setting a real intellectual trap for himself.

That is from Thomas McCraw’s superlative Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.  Here is David Warsh on the book.

Casanova reminds me of Robin Hanson

by  Tyler Cowen in

The girl’s quick mind, unrefined by study, sought to have the advantage of being considered pure and airless; it was conscious of this, and it made use of this consciousness to further its ends; but such a mind had given me too strong an impression of its cleverness.

That is from History of My Life.  Is that why human self-deception has evolved?  If we don’t know our own artifices, we can more successfully conceal them from others.

The Old Way

by  Tyler Cowen in

Sharing was perhaps the most important element of the social fabric.  Fear that others would not share was the constant preoccupation of many people.  I remember a woman talking about sharing: "I am sick," said the woman as if speaking to herself although in fact she was speaking to my mother, who was nearby.  "That is why I don’t go out for plant foods.  I want my mother to give me some and she does not give me any.  I am lying down sick.  I am starving.  If my mother were here, she would give me some plant foods…That place is far…The people who stay there are not people who favor others.  Not sympathetic.  They do not give food.  When they see people from a far place coming to their place, their hearts do not feel good.  I do not want to go to see those people."

That is from Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, a fascinating study of a hunter-gatherer society, the Ju/wasi in the Kalahari.

It is not often a book just blows me away

by  Tyler Cowen in

Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, by Thomas K. McCraw.  It is beautifully written, suspenseful throughout, full of love and intrigue, a story of European migration, also a history of Harvard economics, reassesses Schumpeter’s thought, and is as good a biography of an economist as has ever been written.  I do not make the latter claim lightly.