Category: Books

In his upcoming book, that is, bid here at $20,000 or more.  Here are other naming auctions in literature.  Thanks to Matt Fulvio for the pointer.  Here is my earlier post on this practice; read Alex also.

Addendum: While we are on the "markets in everything" topic, here is Steve Levitt on how to discourage protestors.

…of optimal resource extraction, are found in Octavia Butler’s new Fledgling.  ("Who could need that much blood?  Why kill a person who would willingly feed you again and again if you handled them carefully?")  Here is one review; a new novel by her is an event and the first few chapters are gripping.

…the most neglected side of law and economics is empirical.  In most areas of law and economics, there is a dearth of empirical studies…  Recently, I surveyed articles published in the Journal of Legal Studies (the leading ‘new’ law and economics journal) during the 1972-2002 period, and found that 39 percent of the 571 articles had some empirical content [TC: a Chicago code word for "econometrics"?]…In contrast, 71 percent of the 604 articles published in the Journal of Law and Economics, (a leading economics journal in industrial organization) during the 1972-2002 period were empirical.  Similarly, 70 percent of the articles recently published in the Journal of Political Economy contained substantial empirical analysis.

That is William Landes, writing in The Origins of Law and Economics: Essays by the Founding Fathers, edited by my colleagues Charles Rowley and Francesco Parisi.  Other contributors to this important volume include Coase, Tullock, Becker, Epstein, Posner, Buchanan, Demsetz Williamson, and others.  Read more here.

The title of Stephen Hawking’s forthcoming book:  A Briefer History of Time.

Are there secrets of seduction, drawn from (gasp) social science?  In his new book Neil Strauss says yes.  Here is an interview.  He recommends playing hard-to-get, perhaps he has read signaling theory:

I learned that the more unavailable you make yourself, the more people would want you. The more you say ‘stop touching me’ or ‘I’m taken’ or ‘you’re just not my type,’ the more people would actually chase you…A small example would be — this sounds awful to say, but it’s true — if, say I tried to kiss someone and got rejected. I found that if I just turned my head away and ignored them for about five seconds, then turn back and say the same thing, most of the time they’d then go ahead and kiss me. I could be a punishment-reward thing, or it could be that people’s first reaction is no, but once they’ve had a moment to think about it, they think, ‘Well maybe this guy’s alright.’

And yes there are workshops for pick-up artists.  Here is a website on how to act like an alpha male.

I can only wonder: What would Barbara Ehrenreich do with this material?

My second question, which perhaps an alpha male would never ask, is how the hard-to-get strategy is an equilibrium, equating returns on all margins for all players (no pun intended) in the repeated game.  Isn’t "hard-to-get" too easy to mimic? 

And don’t you have to be noticed in the first place?  I never came on to Salma Hayek (unlike Daniel Drezner, who courted her repeatedly on his blog), yet this reticence paid few dividends, not even a courtesy trackback or link.  So how do you know when to back off, isn’t this like forecasting when the real estate bubble will crash?

Of course this point about timing addresses whether the strategy is easy to mimic.  A proper application of hard-to-get is well…hard to get right.  Plus some women are shrewd, which means you actually have to be hard-to-get, which is no fun at all, just remember the movie about that forty-year-old guy with all the action figures.

Thanks to Michael at www.2blowhards.com for the pointer.

I talk about labor markets and public policy, here is one nibble from my final Slate.com piece:

…displaced white-collar workers do not lead my list of victims deserving compensation. It is unfair that a 56-year-old is now expected to compete in a world for which he was never prepared. But we ought to be realistic. These transitional costs are borne by a class that has been about the richest and freest human history has seen. Let us say that you, Alan, could design a public policy to ease their readjustment. I probably would zero out that budget line and spend those funds in Niger, or on boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit, or paying for future Medicare benefits, or, dare I say it, lowering the corporate income tax as a means of encouraging white-collar re-employment.

Here is my not-so-positive review of the new Barbara Ehrenreich book, courtesy of Slate.com.  Here is her basic premise:

Ehrenreich gives up her identity and sends around a vita for media/public relations work. After a year of looking–with comic adventures along the way–she has no serious offer. She concludes that the white-collar world is one of "economic cruelty."

There will be further installments, including a response from Alan Wolfe, stay tuned…

Here is the story, thanks to the ever-excellent www.politicaltheory.info.  Here is a related story about the books.  Also see this link from the textbook article; I was disappointed but not shocked.

Doing Economics, buy it here.  This book is based on the novel premise that undergraduate instruction should be based on teaching practical skills.  Imagine chapters like "Overview of the Research Process in Economics," "What is Research?", "Critical Reading or How to Make Sense of Published Research," and "Locating (and Collecting) Economic Data."  It is more mechanical and less incisive than I would like, but every serious undergraduate economics major should be familiar with this book.

By the way, here is what undergraduates actually do, courtesy of one anthropologist; thanks to the readers who sent in the link.

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body: The title says it all, this book is not for the squeamish.

Hunger’s Brides: A Novel of the Baroque, by Paul Anderson.  I’m a sucker for 1400-page Canadian novels about Mexican nun/poetesses who are learning to speak Nahuatl and are involved in murders.  The New York Times ran an article on how to deal with the book’s size and weight.

Chronicles, volume I, by Bob Dylan.  No, I don’t care about him anymore either, but  nonetheless this was one of the best books I read all summer.  A primer on what it means to be American and why low rents are good for artistic creativity.

Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It, by Michael Cannon and Michael Tanner, published by the Cato Institute.

Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkish World, by Hugh Pope.  A useful and entertaining book on modern Turkey and how it relates to Azerbaijan and the "stan" countries.  Short of actual travel, this is your best hope of gaining a knowledge foothold in these areas.

My favorite book this summer remains the accessible yet deeply philosophic The Time Traveler’s Wife.  More generally, Michael at www.2blowhards.com offers a comprehensive set of links on what is new in the world of books.

Here it is.  Here is their home page, where you can buy books (here too) at better prices than on Amazon.com.

Christopher Paolini (teen author of the fun Eragon and the just-published Eldest, now 21 years old) notes:

I tend [sic] to get up, grab breakfast, sit in front of my computer [and not] get up until about an hour before dinner.  I do this seven days a week, every week of the month, every month of the year.

That is from today’s Washington Post, Kids Section. 

I have a different idea, taking effort as a scarce variable.  Every day, stop writing just a short while before you really want to quit.  The next day you will be very keen to get going again.  For most mortals, your real enemy is the number of days when you get nothing written.  Getting "not enough" done each day is a lesser problem.

Addendum: Here are my previous writing tips.