Category: Books
New Ross Douthat book
Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, pre-order here. Self-recommending, some would say God recommends it too. Here is the chain of links to my earlier exchange with Ross on whether one should believe in God.
What should I ask Christopher Kirchhoff?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. In case you do not know, Christopher self-describes as:
Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office and has led teams for the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. He recently worked special projects at Anthropic. Previously, Dr. Kirchhoff helped design and scale $1 billion in philanthropic programs at Schmidt Futures. He also founded and led the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Office, Defense Innovation Unit X, which piloted flying cars and microsatellites in military missions and created a new acquisition pathway for start-ups now responsible for $70 billion dollars of technology acquisition. During the Obama Administration, he was Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council and the senior civilian advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I very much enjoyed his new book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, co-authored with Raj M. Shah. Here is his home page. The book just received a very strong review from the FT.
So what should I ask Christopher?
How Many Workers Did It Take to Build the Great Pyramid of Giza?
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built circa 2600 BC and was the world’s tallest structure for nearly 4000 years. It consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks with a weight on the order of 6-7 million tons. How many people did it take to construct the Great Pyramid? Vaclav Smil in Numbers Don’t Lie gives an interesting method of calculation:
The Great Pyramid’s potential energy (what is required to lift the mass above ground level) is about 2.4 trillion joules. Calculating this is fairly easy: it is simply the product of the acceleration due to gravity, the pyramid’s mass, and its center of mass (a quarter of its height)…I am assuming a mean of 2.6 tons per cubic meter and hence a total mass of about 6.75 million tons.
People are able to convert about 20 percent of food energy into useful work, and for hard-working men that amounts to about 440 kilojoules a day. Lifting the stones would thus require about 5.5 million labor days (2.4 trillion/44000), or about 275,000 days a year during [a] 20 year period, and about 900 people could deliver that by working 10 hours a day for 300 days a year. A similar number might be needed to emplace the stones in the rising structure and then smooth the cladding blocks…And in order to cut 2.6 million cubic meters of stone in 20 years, the project would have required about 1,500 quarrymen working 300 days per year and producing 0.25 cubic meters of stone per capita…the grand total would then be some 3,300 workers. Even if we were to double that in order to account for designers, organizers and overseers etc. etc….the total would be still fewer than 7,000 workers.
…During the time of the pyramid’s construction, the total population of Egypt was 1.5-1.6 million people, and hence the deployed force of less than 10,000 would not have amounted to any extraordinary imposition on the country’s economy.
I was surprised at the low number and pleased at the unusual method of calculation. Archeological evidence from the nearby worker’s village suggests 4,000-5,000 on site workers, not including the quarrymen, transporters and designers and support staff. Thus, Smil’s calculation looks very good.
What other unusual calculations do you know?
*Emergency Money*
The author is Tom Wilkinson, and the subtitle is Notgeld in the Image Economy of the German Inflation, 1914-1923. Notgeld, or emergency money, typically was privately issued to make up for the deficiencies of government money during that period.
It is hard to think of a book that is more “for me.” The book covers history, monetary economics, private currency issuance, and the artistic renderings put on the private notes. You can see plenty of desperation in those visuals, and clearly the 19th century seems like a long time ago. I read this one right away upon arrival.
You can buy it here. Here is a good short piece on the art.
What should I ask Nate Silver?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with Nate, based in part on his new and forthcoming book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (I have just started it, but so far it is very good, dealing with issues of poker and also risk-taking more generally).
Here is my previous Conversation with Nate Silver. And please note I am not looking to ask him about the election. So what should I ask?
What I’ve been reading
Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition. Lengthy and dense, but full of good material and written with extreme indeed almost unbelievable clarity. The historicists are these days the underdiscussed approach in the history of German thought. Have you ever wondered why Justus Möser was important, and why he focused on the history of Osnabrück? Or how Leopold Ranke saw his work as an answer to Hegel? How about the difference between Dilthey and Rickert? If nothing else, this book is also excellent background for grasping the development of Austrian School methodology in economics. After reading it, I did proceed to order further books by the same author.
Celine Dietziker and Lukas Gruntz, Aalto in Detail: A Catalogue of Components. I hadn’t realized just how much he was a “micro architect.” This book, for instance, has a fantastic collection of different photos of stairs he designed. There is a chapter “Handrails,” “Door Handles,” and also “Drainage.” This is a book for me.
Zeke Hernandez, The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers, delivers exactly what its title promises.
Neil Taylor, Estonia: A Modern History, is by far the best history I have found on that country. It also has a rave blurb from Robert Service.
Arthur Brown Ruhl, New Masters of the Baltic, a travel book from 1921. If you visit any place, you always should try to read a much earlier travel book on said place. Fantastic for perspective, indefensible but nonetheless insightful generalizations, and these books give you a sense for just how contingent history can be. Who was “the good guys” was often more up for grabs than you might have thought.
Then there are bits like this: “I asked if they thought that Latvia would be able to keep her independence when Russia was herself again. Yes, they said, they did; if the non-Russian border peoples got together in a defensive alliance, old Russia would have some trouble in coercing them. But they would like to ask me a question. Did the Allies, who had encouraged them to declare their independence, really believe in it? Or were they merely being used because the Allies thought their own soldiers too good to send against the Bolsheviks?”
The Gary Becker Papers
The Gary Becker Papers (117.42 linear feet, 223 boxes) are now open at the University of Chicago:
The collection documents much of Gary Becker’s intellectual history. One of his autobiographical essays, “A Personal Statement About My Intellectual Development” (see Box 120, Folder 10 and Box 189, Folder 1), traces his academic career from his youth to his origins as a student at Princeton University, to his graduate student years and professorship at the University of Chicago, and his extra collegial engagement on corporate advisory boards, political participation, and governmental councils. The essay could have been written based on some of the records collected here. The collection documents an intellectual trajectory primarily through intellectual productions, research files, and communications. His approach to the research and writing, his publishing history, his engagement with others in the field of economics and other individuals in public service and global politics are contained here. Though the collection primarily concerns his professional life, there is also mention of his relationship with Guity Nashat, his wife, as they traveled together to the many conferences and events in the United States and abroad, and other incidents of his life for a minor study or treatment of his biography.
The collection materials include Becker’s handwritten and printed copies of his scholarship, including notes (and bibliographic cards), papers (and drafts), diagrams and charts, data sheets, correspondence, periodical reprints, magazines, newspapers and clippings, grant documents, reports, referee files, course and instructional materials, photographs, VHS tapes, DVD’s, and related ephemera.
Hat tip: Peter Istzin.
*The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War*
That is the new book by Nick Lloyd, it will be making my best non-fiction of the year list. Reviews are very strong, and you can either pre-order and wait, or order it from the UK, or buy it in the excellent Hedengrens bookshop in Stockholm. Here is one short bit:
As always with the Russian army, squabbles between the generals quickly surfaced.
A bit later:
This lack of cooperation within the Russian high command would seriously undermine its operations throughout the war, preventing Russia from bringing all her strength to bear and forcing her commanders to spend precious time bickering amongst themselves.
About one-third of the way through the text of the book:
Tsar Nicholas II had come to a momentous decision: to take direct command of Russia’s armies.
How it started….how it’s going…
*Jan Morris: life from both sides*
That is the recent biography from Paul Clements, which I enjoyed very much. In part I liked it because I have never much loved her writing, or found it insightful. To me the book (to some degree unintentionally) raises the questions of why so much travel writing does not age well, and why so much travel writing is simply boring to read, even though a trip to the same place might be fascinating.
Here was one good passage:
…at a conservative estimate, Morris’s books alone contain more than five million words — and then there is her journalism and literary criticism, which run to several million more. From the days of the Arab News Agency in 1948 until its conclusion, her career spanned seventy-three years of publication. Every aspect of her life fuelled her writing; her entire published corpus, from 1956 to 2021, totalled fifty-eight books, while she edited a further five volumes.
Posterity will remember Jan Morris. What makes her work sui generis is the genre-less way that she combined topography, the social landscape, history, personal anecdote, and an acute imagination. Morris forged an unlikely style that was vigorous, precise, and entertaining. Hers was a language nourished by the music of childhood, conditioned by The Book of Common Prayer and Shakespeare, energised by journalism, and inspired by travelling the world as a student of human nature. Like all writers, Morris had her foibles: her voluptuous vocabulary included words such as ‘tatterdemalion,’ ‘swagger,’ ‘gallimaufry,’ ‘coruscate,’ ‘fizz,’ ‘parvenu,’ ‘rodomontade,’ ‘gasconade,’ ‘palimpset,’ ‘simulacrum,’ ‘fandango,’ and ‘chimerical.’ The three Morris m’s — magnificent, melancholy, and myriad — ripple through her work, not forgetting her love of the two Welsh h’s —hwyl and hiraeth. Her writing could be indulgent at times, but Morris did not take an exalted view of herself as a writer. She was the one who called her work, in A Writer’s World, ‘hedonistic,’ ‘boisterous,’ and ‘impertinent,’ In a newspaper questionnaire in 1998, Morris was asked how she would like to be remembered, and she replied: ‘As a merry and loving writer.’
As an aside, not all those words cited seem so weird to this writer. Swagger, fizz, and parvenu are in ordinary usage, chimerical too.
Among its other virtues, I feel this book captures British history and British intellectual history very well. In any case, you can buy the book here, and I have ordered some additional Morris works to read. If I really like any of them, I will let you all know.
Accelerating India’s Development
What will India look like in 2047? Combining projections of economic growth with estimates of the elasticity of outcomes with respect to growth, Karthik Muralidharan in Accelerating India’s Development reports:
Even with a strong GDP per capita growth rate of 6 per cent, projections for 2047 paint a sobering picture if we maintain our current course. While India’s infant mortality is projected to halve from 27 per 1000 births to 13 in 2047, it will still be well above China’s current rate of 8. Child stunting will only decrease from 35.5 to 25 per cent, which is only a 10.5 percentage point or 30 per cent reduction in nearly 25 years. In rural India, 16 per cent of children in Class 5 will still not be able to read at a Class 2 level, and 55 per cent of them will still not be able to do division at the Class 3 level.
Bear in mind that this is assuming an optimistic 6% growth rate in GDP per capita. Even more telling is that if growth increased to 8%, infant mortality would only fall to 10 per 1000 (instead of 13). Growth is great. It’s the single most important factor but it’s not everything. If India can double the elasticity of infant mortality with respect to growth, for example, then at the same 6% growth rate infant mortality would fall to just 6 per 1000 by 2047–that’s millions of lives saved. The big argument of Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development is that India can get more development from the same level of growth by increasing the total factor productivity of the state.
There are many “big think” books on growth–Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor, Koyama and Rubin’s How the World Became Rich–but these books are primarily historical and descriptive. The big think books don’t tell you how to develop. Create institutions to strike “a delicate and precarious balance between state and society” isn’t much of a guide to development. Accelerating India’s Development is different.
“Accelerating” opens with two excellent chapters on the political economy of politicians and bureaucrats, outlining the constraints any reforms must navigate. It concludes with two chapters on the future, including ideas like ranked choice voting, representing its aspirations. It’s in-between the constraints and the aspirations, however, that Accelerating India’s Development is unique. I know of no other book that offers such a detailed, analytical, and comprehensive examination and evaluation of a country’s institutions and processes.
Muralidharan’s recommendations are often based on his own twenty years of research, especially in education, health and welfare, and when not based on his own research Muralidharan has read everyone and everything. Yet, he offers not a laundry list but a well-thought out, analytic, set of recommendations that are grounded on political and economic realities.
To give just one example, India’s bureaucracy is far over-paid relative to India’s GDP per capita or wages in the private sector. With wages too high, the bureaucracy is too small–a reflection of the concentrated benefits (wages to government workers), diffuse costs (delivering services to citizens) problem. Lowering wages for government workers is a non-starter but Muralidharan argues persuasively that it is possible to hire new workers from local communities at prevailing wages on renewable contracts. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), for example, is India’s main program for delivering early childhood education. There are 1.35 million anganwadi centers (AWCs) across India and typically a single anganwadi worker is responsible for both nutrition and pre-school education but they spend most of their time on paperwork!
A simple, scalable way to improve early childhood education is to add a second worker to AWCs to focus on preschool education….In a recent study, my co-authors and I found that adding an extra, locally hired, early-childhood care and education facilitators to anganwadis in Tamil Nadu doubled daily preschool instructional time…we found large gains in students’ maths, language and executive function skills. We also found a significant reduction in child stunting and malnutrition…We estimate the social return on this investment was around thirteen times the cost….the ECCE facilitators typically had only a Class 10 or Class 12 qualification and received only one week of training, and were still highly effective.
The example illustrates Muralidharan’s methods. First, the recommendation is based on a large, credible, multi-year study run in India with the cooperation of the government of Tamil Nadu. Second, the study is chosen for the book because it fits Muralidharan’s larger analysis of India’s problems, India has too few government workers which leads to high potential returns, yet the workers are paid too much so these returns are fiscally unachievable. But hiring more workers on the margin, at India’s-prevailing wages, is feasible. India has lots of modestly-educated workers so the program can scale–this is not a study about adding AI-driven computers to Delhi schools under the management of IIT trained educators, a program which would be subject to the heroes aren’t replicable problem. The program is also politically feasible because it leaves rents in place and by hiring lots of workers, even at low wages, it generates its own political support. Finally, note that India’s ICDS is the largest early childhood development program in the world so improving it has the potential to make millions of lives better. Which is why I have called Muralidharan the most important economist in the world.
One of the reasons state capacity in India is so low is premature load bearing. Imagine if the 19th-century U.S. government had attempted to handle everything today’s U.S. government does—this is the situation in India. When State Capacity/Tasks < 1, what should be done? In premature imitation, Rajagopalan and I advocate for reducing Tasks–an idea best represented by Ed Glaeser’s quip that “A country that cannot provide clean water for its citizens should not be in the business of regulating film dialogue.” Accelerating India’s Development focuses on increasing State Capacity but without being anti-market. In fact, Muralidharan proposes making the state more effective by leveraging markets more extensively.
Indian policy should place a very high priority on expanding the supply of high-quality service providers, regardless of whether they are in the public or private sector.
Hence, Muraldiharan wants to build on India’s remarkably vibrant private schools and private health care with ideas like vouchers and independent ratings. Free to choose but free to choose in an information-rich environment. My own inclinations would be to push markets and also infrastructure more–we still need to get to that 6% growth! But I have few quibbles with what is in the book.
Accelerating India’s Development is an exceptionally rich and insightful book. Its comprehensive analysis and innovative recommendations make it an invaluable resource. I will undoubtedly reference it in future discussions and writings. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and improving life in the world’s largest democracy.
What I’ve been reading
Jill Ciment, Consent: a memoir. A good short book on how you can have a creepy life for decades, and not be so aware of it. In this case, a 17-year-old girl (Ciment) ends up marrying a man who first slept with her when he was 47 and married. They had an apparently normal marriage for decades, or did they? How much does “creepy” matter anyway? She doesn’t seem to be complaining about unhappiness. But is it just wrong anyway?
Hugh Warwick, Cull of the Wild: Killing in the Name of Conservation. A well-written and subtle account of the tensions and paradoxes involved in attempts to conserve nature. What if conserving one animal leads to the destruction of others? I am slowly learning how many British people are obsessed with hedgehogs. And I hadn’t known how much the importation of earthworms in the 18th century, from Britain to North America, shaped the environment.
Ebbe Dommissse, Anton Rupert: The Life of a Business Icon is a very favorable biography of who was probably South Africa’s richest man, with cigarettes being the central part of his business empire. For a contrasting perspective, read Pieter h de Toit, The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaire’s Club.
Charles King, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. This is what you would want from a book on Handel’s Messiah. I hadn’t known that Handel was briefly supported by the Medici in Florence. By the way, Suzuki will be conducting the Messiah in DC in late December, be there or be square!
Phumlani M. Majozi, Lessons from Past Heroes: How the rejection of victimhood dogmas will save South Africa. A libertarian Zulu approach to what the subtitle promises.
David Albright with Andrea Stricker, Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Its History, Dismantlement, and Lessons for Today. It is odd how little-mentioned this episode in world history has become, in any case this is the go-to book on it, interesting throughout.
Still in my pile is Nathaniel Popper’s The Trolls of Wall Street: How the Outcasts and Insurgents are Hacking the Markets, which covers the WallStreetBets phenomenon.
*The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned*
By John Strausbaugh, an excellent book. Here is one good passage of many:
Putting dogs on top of rockets was nothing new. Since so little was known about the effects that blasting off in a rocket might have on th ehuman body and brain — the g-force of acceleration, the disorientation of weightlessness, the impact of radiation, the g-force of deceleration — the Soviets and the Americans both had been using various species of animals to test conditions since the 1940s. The Americans started sending up fruit flies aboard their White Sands V-2s in 1947. An anesthetized rhesus monkey they named Albert II…went up eighty-three miles in a V-2 in 1949. Unfortunately, his parachute failed to oepn on reentry and he was smashed to death on impact with the ground. The Americans continued to send up primates in the 1940s and 1950s. Something like two-thirds of them died. They used many other species as well, maybe the oddest of which was black bears, who were strapped into a rocket-powered sled at a facility with the deceptively sweet name the Daisy Track to test the physical effects of ultra-rapid acceleration and deceleration.
Recommended.
South Africa and its history
Almost three years earlier, a sombre Paul Kruger had warned that Britain would find conquering the Boer states no easy matter. In the sense that they were certainly not gained on the cheap, this was an accurate judgment. By the end of the war, the British had been obliged to mobilise almost 450 000 imperial solders to defeat Boer forces, which had been able to field roughly 80 000 combatants at most. Their extended resistance turned London’s South African campaign into the largest and most costly war fought by the British between 1815 and 1914. This was a colonial war which Britain’s Treasury estimated in September 1899 would require the despatch of at most 75 000 troops and funding of about £10 million for a campaign of two to three months. By the time the conflict finally ended, that cost had risen to £217 million. What this balance sheet reflected was the enormous military investment that the British Empire required to defeat two of the world’s smallest agrarian states.
That is from New History of South Africa, by Hermann Giliomee, Bernard Mbenga, and Bill Nasson, a very excellent book. I found it to be one of the best single-volume histories of any country I have read. The other South Africa book I found especially helpful was Understanding South Africa, by Carien du Plessis and Martin Plaut. One of the best things about travel is you understand a country — through books — much better than before you went there. Everything is more vivid, and you retain much more of it.
The best business books aren’t in the management section
I expand on this theme in my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt from that:
I thus have a modest proposal for anyone interested in business books: Read books about specific businesses or industries that you already know a lot about. That way, you will have enough contextual knowledge for the book to be meaningful. Of course many people don’t work at a company or industry big or famous enough that there are books about it, so I have a corollary proposition: You will learn the most about management by reading books about sports and musical groups.
And this:
Many music and sports books are not only written for obsessed fans, but also written by obsessed fans. Traditional business books, in contrast, are frequently written to get consulting work or on to the speaker’s circuit. The incentive is not to offend anybody and to put forward some “least common denominator” insights, rather than say anything truly original that might be complicated to explain. The end result is a bookstore section that would be mind-numbing to have to read.
There is much more of interest at the link, recommended.
*Cosmic Connections*
The author is Charles Taylor (yes, the Charles Taylor) and the subtitle is Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. This book is a very good introduction to romanticism, and also to the poetry of romanticism, noting that its degree of originality may depend on how much you already know. I liked the chapters on Rilke and Mallarme best, here is one excerpt:
It follows that for Rilke, our full capacity to Praise can only be realized if we take account of the standpoint of the dead. The medium of Preisen is Gesang [song]. thus the voice which most fully carries this song would have to be that of the gold Orpheus, who moves in both realms, that of the living and that of the dead.
And the sonnet is the medium. As its name suggests, it is a poetic form which asks to be heard, and not only read on the page. These two modes of reception are essential to all poetry, but in the sonnet the musical dimension becomes the most important avenue to the message.
So a praise-song from both sides, that of the dead, as well as the living. They call on Orpheus, the singer-god who moves between the two realms. Hence the Sonnets to Orpheus.
I am very glad to see that Taylor is still at it, and 640 pp. at that. Furthermore, this book is (unintentionally?) a good means for thinking about just how much deculturation has taken place.