Category: Books
The world isn’t flat, installment #736
Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong, is the most widely read book in China since Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. In the United States it’s been out since March 27 and still it has only one Amazon review and a negative one at that. So far I find it compelling and I am enjoying its panpsychic vulgarities. It’s also a good guide to how the Chinese think about their foreign policy.
Heads in the Sand
That’s by Matt Yglesias (son of Rafael Yglesias) and the subtitle is How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats. Anyone who reads books on foreign policy should buy this book. Most of all it is a critique of recent practice and a defense of liberal internationalism. He calls for negotiating with Iran, not digging in deeper in Iraq, and more generally accepting multilateral frameworks for the use of American military power. I agree with the policy recommendations though I would package them differently. I view liberal internationalism as a kind of noble lie which will in any case be superseded by American exceptionalism, most of all because of differing European and American experiences in WWII and differing degrees of religiosity. Rightly or wrongly, Americans are more likely to see menaces abroad and of course America is the only country that can even try to do much about them. Of course we’ve shown we’re not up to the job, noting that Afghanistan (a just war, I might add, and do note it commanded international support for a while but that turned out not to matter) is probably going even worse than Iraq by standards of long-run viability. If our interventions are counterproductive then constraints on those interventions are beneficial and in that regard we can embrace internationalism for practical reasons.
But I can’t have a high opinion of internationalism per se, perhaps because I’ve spent too much time actually working in multilateral institutions. The incentive is to negotiate at the margin, and eke out a somewhat better deal for one’s nation and carry victories to diplomatic superiors back home, rather than to actually solve the international problem in cooperative fashion. If there is any good solution to be had, the large number of negotiating parties usually requires America to play von Stackelberg leader (remember Yugoslavia?), noting that our ability to do this has broken down for reasons that go beyond the failures of Bush. The EU now precommits to a greater role in global decisions and many more countries are wealthy and have global interests. Media spin means that no one wants to take too many sacrifices. I think once a Democrat assumes the Presidency it will become clear just how much the old order has broken down, probably forever. European diplomats were cynical in the first place and don’t forget that the Security Council still has two members whose influence is more or less pure poison. I can’t imagine what liberal internationalism means, for instance, when it comes to allocating the thawing bits of the Arctic and the associated oil wealth. What will happen if/when the Russians simply try to grab more than international conventions allow them?
Note, by the way, that Saddam and Chirac really were gift-giving friends; that’s not just a right-wing fantasy. At some level American voters understand much of this, albeit in excessively provincial terms, and they simply won’t, in the electoral sense, allow the Democrats to inhabit the old space of internationalism.
In game-theoretic terms I would say the key question is what is the "threat point" America adopts when it offers to join international coalitions. Whatever Matt’s answer might be (his book is not written in that sort of lingo) that is now the key question, noting that whatever threat point you specify you have to be willing to live with. One paradox is that the more internationalist your default threat point is, the less effective a country actually will be in leading an international coalition.
In short, I’m all for talk of liberal internationalism as long as we don’t take it too seriously on its own terms. My prediction is that, doctrinally, Matt will eventually end up somewhere else, even though his practical advice is very sound and very well articulated and doesn’t much need to be changed. I hereby sentence him to one full month spent working at the United Nations.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. Steven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement. It covers the Federalist Society, GMU School of Law, Institute for Justice, among other institutions. The material rang true to what I know; Orin Kerr comments.
2. Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters. This one blew me away; you don’t even have to like poetry, it is more like reading letters. You do need to know a little about his life with Sylvia Plath to appreciate it. A modern masterpiece, highly recommended.
3. 2666: A Novel, by Roberto Bolaño, you can pre-order it here. So far I’m only reading the Amazon site every few days or so, thinking about when the book will come.
4. Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?. Maybe the best book on why Guatemala is such a mess but also on why there is hope. Make sure you read the dissenting reviews on Amazon.
5. Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe, revised and updated, by Robin Kerrod and Carole Stott. Stunning. Most smart people make the mistake of not reading enough picture books. It’s not just that the pictures are good; the text must concentrate on what is truly essential.
Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America
That’s the subtitle, the title is Bound for Freedom and it is by Douglas Flamming. This book is a good antidote to libertarians who assign too much blame to state governments, and not enough blame to voluntary norms, when it comes to Southern segregation and Jim Crow. Early in the twentieth century, Los Angeles was devoid of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that were so common in the South. In fact California had some (unenforced) laws prohibiting discrimination according to race. Yet according to one survey only three of two hundred saloons would serve blacks. Most hotels did not accept blacks either and that was in direct contradiction to state law. Both Hollywood and the petroleum industry for the most part refused to hire blacks, even for jobs of unskilled labor. On the positive side, many of the businesses along Central Avenue were fully integrated, serving Latino and Japanese customers as well. Blacks did have, overall, a much better existence in LA than in the South but this volume shows that Jim Crow cannot simply be blamed on oppressive government regulations.
Here is my earlier post on Jim Crow in sports.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.
I liked Alan Schwartz’s Amazon review: ""Buy on apples, sell on cheese" is an old proverb among wine merchants. Taking a bite of an apple before tasting wine makes it easier to detect flaws in the wine, and the buyer who does so will not as easily make the mistake of paying more than the wine is worth. Cheese, on the other hand, pairs well with wine and enhances its flavor, so a seller who offers cheese may command a higher price for the wine (and may even deserve it, if the wine is intended to be drunk with cheese).""
2. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Yes, that’s the Clay Shirky. This is (implicitly) a very good Hayekian, spontaneous order treatment of social software on the web. The book poses a simple and important question: what happens when it is virtually costless to organize people into groups?
3. Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa, by Robert Paarlberg. The point is unassailable, the subtitle says it all.
4. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: A Saudi Family in the American Century. So far it’s great. I know you’re sick of reading about Bin Laden; just think of it as a (partial) history of the Saudis.
Addendum: The new "Nudge" blog is here.
Retribution, by Max Hastings
In the course of the war, Germany lost 781 submarines, Japan 128. By contrast, the Japanese navy sank only 41 American submarines, 18 percent of those which saw combat duty. Six more were lost accidentally on Pacific patrols. Even these relatively modest casualties meant that 22 percent of all American sailors who experienced submarine operations perished — 375 officers and 3,131 enlisted men — the highest loss of any branch of the wartime U.S. armed forces.
The subtitle of this book is The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. Have you ever wondered what kind of peace the Japanese expected (before losing), how the battle for the Philippines unfolded, why the Japanese treated their POWs so badly, or what it is like to be in a submarine surrounded by falling depth charges?
Every year there are five or six books that just wow me. This is one of them. It is as gripping as a first-rate novel and I learned something on almost every page. Here is one review. You can buy it here.
Bonk (What I’ve been Reading)
We have molecular gastronomy, so why not apply science to…other things, as does Mary Roach. The subtitle is "The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex." Here is the author’s home page; she also wrote Spook and Stiff, both of which are good. This isn’t a "how to" book, it is a real popular science book on its topic and I predict it will be successful.
2. The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, by Peter Lavezzoli. You need to care about the topic, but today this became one of my favorite non-fiction books, ever. I bought a copy just to express my loyalty to the author. I’ve said this before, but lack of knowledge of Indian classical music is the biggest gap in the education — and enjoyment — of many many smart people. This is one very good introduction but it offers much to the veteran as well.
3. How Judges Think, by Richard A. Posner. Every sentence in this book is substance, to a remarkable degree. It’s hard to find a central thread to the argument, but I blame that on the topic rather than on any failing of the author. After all, judges think in some pretty complicated ways and Posner goes out of his way to minimize the role of conscious theory in judicial behavior. Content aside (which reflects all of Posner’s usual erudition), anyone interested in non-fiction should take a look at this book. Just imagine, a text totally stripped of that which is content-less. Can the reader stand it?
Scream it from the Rooftops
Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, by Fuchsia Dunlop, due out in mid-April.
She is one of the writers I revere most. And yes, I know she is usually a cookbook writer, but I do mean her writing, not just her recipes. The more general point is you should expect to see many of the best writers, today, in new media and genres, not in the old. I saw notice of this, by the way, in the vastly superior to almost anything else London Review of Books.
The permanent tax revolt
…the fractional assessment of homes was easily the largest single government housing subsidy in the postwar era, and it was among the largest categories of social expenditure of any kind, direct or indirect. Fractional assessment of residential property provided a subsidy that was forty times greater than federal spending for public housing. It was ten times greater than the home mortgage interest deduction. It was five times as costly as more controversial "welfare" programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Although fractional assessment did not show up on official government budgets, on the eve of the tax revolt it was providing more benefits than any other social policy in America except for the twin blockbusters of the federal budget, Social Security and Medicare.
That is from the new book The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics, by Isaac Martin. The main thesis of this book is overstated, namely that the professionalization of property tax assessments is the root cause of American exceptionalism on tax politics; nonetheless I found this a very informative and stimulating read.
Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
That’s the new Jeff Sachs book. It promotes resource pessimism, Nordic-style social democracy, foreign aid, and a fundamental rethinking of U.S. foreign policy. Most of all it expresses a faith in global cooperation. Sachs is very smart and, though I do not agree with him, there is often more to his views than his critics admit. But my browsing of this book never gave me the feeling that I had access to the mind of Jeffrey Sachs. It doesn’t even read like a popularization. Imagine a smart and diligent but not insightful or self-reflective person doing a "color by numbers" version of what a Jeffrey Sachs book should read like.
Cop in the Hood
Motivated primarily by a desire for court overtime pay, police officers want arrests on their own terms, ideally without victims, complaints, or unnecessary paperwork. Young officers make more arrests than veteran officers. These officers believe that making arrests is police work. In my squad, the top three officers in arrest totals were three officers with the least experience. An arrest-based culture can exist in a low-drug environment, but without a limitless supply of arrestable criminal offenders, an arrest-based culture cannot make a lot of arrests. Neighborhoods, without public drug dealings will not produce a high number of arrests.
That is from Peter Moskos’s truly excellent Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. This is one of the two or three best conceptual analyses of "cops and robbers" I have read. It is mandatory reading for all fans of The Wire and recommended for everyone else.
How many books should be facing out?
To boost sales, retailer Borders Group is taking a simple but radical approach, our colleague Jeff Trachtenberg reports in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Borders is increasing the number of books that it displays with the
cover facing out (rather than the spine facing out), even though this
shelf-space-eating approach will require cutting inventory at each
store up to 10%. Says one analyst: “Breakfast cereals are not stocked
end-of-box out. […] It’s a little bizarre that it’s taken booksellers
this long to realize that the point of self-service is to make the
product as tempting as possible.”
The link is here. I understand the basic model as follows. Superstores first invest in high inventory and a tony reputation. You start thinking of them as "the place to go" for books, or in an earlier era, for music. They then devote more and more of their space to non-book items. The number of greeting cards and chocolates stocked by my Borders has risen steadily over time, as have the size of the coffee shops. Having more books "face out" — at least they are books — is one of the lesser aspects of this more general problem. It’s related to why most trendy restaurants peak in the first year and a half of their operation, followed by decline and then stagnation. Once they have a high enough (and sticky enough) reputation, it is time to cash in and lower the quality of the product to the informed and more sophisticated buyers.
Who’s Your City?
The always-interesting Richard Florida has a new book out, namely Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live The Most Important Decision of Your Life.
The book tells you how to find the city for you (for me it is Los Angeles, but somehow closer to everything else, and with better bookshops) and why the mood of a city matters.
Is the following true:? The class of city you live in matters less than before, because you can use Amazon or Starbucks in either Manhattan or Chattanooga. But within a class of city, personality now matters more precisely because people can sort themselves on the basis of personality rather than convenience.
What about me? I enjoy living in an area which is not totally flat and I also enjoy the feeling that I can drive from one mini-region to another and experience changes; Maryland and DC really do differ from Virginia. I felt hedged in living in Wellington, New Zealand and in general I don’t like having my back to the water.
Last week Robin Hanson and I discussed which would be the best city to live in if a) all your basic needs were taken care of, and b) you could not otherwise spend any money. Oxford, even with mediocre weather, seemed like a strong pick. There is a true intellectual community and everything there costs a lot anyway; not being able to spend any money isn’t so different from the reality.
What books should you read on Africa?
Chris Blattman offers up his list in two parts, here and here, the second relying on suggestions from Elliot Green. I’ll add a few suggestions to these lists, including P.T. Bauer’s West African Trade, Stanislav Andreski’s The African Predicament, The Da Capo Guide to African Music, Martin Lynn on the palm oil trade, and Robert Klitgaard’s Tropical Gangsters.
But I am forgetting lots so please help out in the comments…
What I’ve been reading
1. Predictocracy: Market Mechanisms for Public and Private Decision-Making, by Michael Abramowicz. A good compilation of current knowledge on prediction markets; he also argues for letting prediction markets determine many social decisions. Here is his debate with Robin Hanson on the same.
2. Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, by Robin Wright. An intelligent and experienced book on current trends in the Middle East and why we should be optimistic that pluralism will triumph. Here is one good review.
3. "What makes Finnish kids so smart?"
4. Superior, Nebraska: The Common Sense Values of America’s Heartland, by Denis Boyles. Contra "What’s the Matter with Kansas?", Boyle argues that the Midwestern values of individual responsibility are wise and sophisticated and that the Republican Party embodies much of this wisdom. The author lives…in France. By the way, here are maps for per capita Starbucks and Wal-Mart.
5. Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality. This seems to be less popular than Synthetic Worlds but in terms of social science I think it is better and deeper; recommended. Here is a Russ Roberts podcast with Castronova.