Category: Books

1. Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.  My consumer surplus from this book was huge.  The author calls it an "economic history" of the graphic novel; he hasn’t read Bob Fogel but it remains one of the best introductions to any topic.

2. Martin Krause, La Economia Explicada a Mis Hijos, and Por el ojo de una aguja.  Economics, explained through the medium of literature and fables, from an Argentinian classical liberal.

3. Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think is Right is Wrong.  The claim is that happiness follows from self-knowledge, self-control, self-realization, and awareness of death.  There is little consideration of what is the proper margin for each.

4. Alfredo Jose Estrada, Havana: Autobiography of a City.  One of the best city biographies, almost as good as the books on Cairo.

5. Ruth Rendell, The Water’s Lovely.  I used to think she was past her peak, but the first third of this is superb and the rest stays pretty good.

Seth Godin looks to the economic theory of complements:

Publish the first edition of the book without the last three chapters.
Take your time, save the $20 million [spent on security]. Every purchaser then gets access
(hey, everyone gets access) to the last three chapters on launch day.

Bad economics, says Megan McArdle.  Excerpt:

The low opportunity cost attached to magic spills over into the
thoroughly unbelievable wizard economy. Why are the Weasleys poor? Why
would any wizard be? Anything they need, except scarce magical objects,
can be obtained by ordering a house elf to do it, or casting a spell,
or, in a pinch, making objects like dinner, or a house, assemble
themselves. Yet the Weasleys are poor not just by wizard standards, but
by ours: they lack things like new clothes and textbooks that should be
easily obtainable with a few magic words. Why?

Addendum: Here is the nerdiest sentence Ezra Klein will ever write.

Highly capitalized and reputation-conscious mass media will give you warnings in advance.  Clicking on links — yes and that includes innocuous-looking links — is the most dangerous thing you can do.  Just don’t click on links or MP3 files for a while.

While we are on the topic of links, here is a great post on why doomsday analysis is wrong.  (There are no HP spoilers behind the link.  Seriously.  Really.  I mean it.  It’s statistics, Bayesian approaches vs. frequentism, and when the world will end.  It’s Andrew Gelman, who can’t even send a text message.  I can’t either.)  So please do save for your retirement.

Comments on this post are…um…open. 

OK people, we’re going to do an MR book forum on Greg Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.  Pre-order it, get it July 27.  (Guess whose book you can buy it with, for a two-fer discount?)  We’ll start the first chapter or so about a week after that and I’ll discuss the book sequentially.

The New York Times calls this book "the next blockbuster in economics"; here is my column on the book.  Here’s the book’s home page.  Arnold Kling has had some very good posts on the book as well.

And yes I will play the role of helpful critic.  Keep marginalism in mind.  Contrary to what many of you suggested, my view is not that all criticism is worthless.  I said "use Google" but that means you are indeed Googling to something by a critic and then reading it.  You are reading "critics" on Amazon as well.  It remains very likely, however, that the marginal act of criticism isn’t worth very much, relative to using Google.

But ah…which act of criticism is the marginal one?  Can we be infra-marginal?  Here’s hoping the world googles to our forthcoming symposium, and perhaps Greg will join in.

I may soon pick a work of fiction as well, though I am less sure that will work.  In the meantime, please don’t discuss Clark’s book in the comments, we’ll save that for the future.  And I would be curious to hear what kind of pace you could bear for the forum.

If the forum goes well, I’m thinking of doing Keynes’s General Theory, chapter by chapter (no, wise guy, that’s not the work of fiction!), but first I want to see if there is interest in the forum for an easier book of more general interest.

Addendum: Last I looked Greg’s book rose from about #10,000 on Amazon.com to #169 today, and was still rising, so I am glad some of you seem to be interested…

I’ve thought of running a week-long or five-day MR symposium of a book of general interest to MR readers.  Each day I would "review" one part of the book, in sequence.  You could read along and of course comment, but the posts also would be fully intelligible to people who weren’t reading the book at all.

If we did this, which book would you like to have covered, not counting some of the books we discussed yesterday…?

1. Taxi: A Social History of the New York Cabdriver, by Graham Hodges, 44 out of 240 pp.

2. Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas, 169 out of 522 pp., it is actually quite good.

3. Kiwis Might Fly, by Polly Evans, 1 out of 310 pp.

4. Gold: The Once and Future Money, by Nathan Lewis, 13 out of 447 pp., some of you will love it.

5. Cosmonaut Keep, by Ken MacLeod, 77 out of 352 pp., sorry guys.

To this day, nature hasn’t come up with a microbe that eats it [a tire], either.  Goodyear’s process, called vulcanization, ties long rubber polymer chains together with short strands of sulfur atoms, actually transforming them into a single giant molecule.  Once rubber is vulcanized — meaning it’s heated, spiled with sulfur, and poured into a mold, such as one shaped like a truck tire — the resulting huge molecule takes that form and never relinquishes it.

Being a single molecule, a tire can’t be melted down or turned into something else.  Unless physically shredded or worn down by 60,000 miles of friction, both entailing significant energy, it remains round.  Tires drive landfill operators crazy, because when buried, they encircle a doughnut-shaped air bubble that wants to rise.  Most garbage dumps no longer accept them, but for hundreds of years into the future, old tires will inexorably work their way to the surface of forgotten landfills, fill with rainwater, and begin breeding mosquitoes again.

In the United Sates, an average of one tire per citizen is discarded annually — that’s a third of a billion, just in one year.

That is from Alan Weisman’s truly excellent The World Without Us.  Here is my previous post on the book.

How many more times will someone suggest this book in the comments section of this blog?  I like this book and I think it offers a real contribution.  Nonetheless I feel no need to suggest it in the comments sections of other peoples’ blogs.

I do not treat this book as foundational because of personal experience.  I’ve spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan, and spent much time chatting with the people there.  They are extremely smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring.  And that’s in their second language, Spanish.

I’m also sure they if you gave them an IQ test, they would do miserably.  In fact I can’t think of any written test — no matter how simple — they could pass.  They simply don’t have experience with that kind of exercise.

When it comes to understanding the properties of different corn varieties, catching fish in the river, mending torn amate paper, sketching a landscape from memory, or gossiping about the neighbors, they are awesome.

Some of us like to think that intelligence is mostly one-dimensional, but at best this is true only within well-defined peer groups of broadly similar people.  If you gave Juan Camilo a test on predicting rainfall he would crush me like a bug.

OK, maybe I hang out with a select group within the village.  But still, there you have it.  Terrible IQ scores (if they could even take the test), real smarts.

So why should I think this book is the key to understanding economic underdevelopment?

Addendum: I am sorry there have been too many nasty comments, so I have taken the comments down.  They aren’t deleted forever, I like to think that I will have time to pick out the bad ones and put the thread back up.  I do understand that most of you (and not just on one side of the debate) are capable of discussing this topic with the appropriate tone.

By David Markson, fun, fun, fun.  Excerpt:

Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid everyone of his bills — electric, phone, whatever — on the same day that it arrived.

Or:

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.
Said Richard Serra.

Is this a novel or a book of aphorisms?  Could it be a set of blog posts spread out over 190 pp.?  Who cares, I finished it.  Or:

A woman’s body is not a mass of flesh in a state of decomposition, on which the green and purplish spots denote a complete of cadaveric putrefaction.
An early critics presumed to inform Renoir.

1. Vie Francaise, by Jean-Paul Dubois.  He is the French Philip Roth; the bottom line is that I finished it, and not just because of the occasional mentions of Adam Smith.

2. Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, by Gerd Gigerenzer.  The author is a smart guy and an accomplished scholar, but despite his best efforts this book is a few years too late.

3. Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok.  Inflation vs. cyclic theories, the latter help you stay an agnotheist by resolving the Goldilocks problem; only some of the universes through time have order as we know it.  I enjoyed it, even though I am sick of popular physics books.  It’s also the first time I’ve understood anything about the Higgs field debates.  Recommended.

4. The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society, by Mark A. Smith.  The main thesis is that right wingers have made America a more conservative society by framing issues in terms of economic reasoning.  Maybe I am too close to the topic, but I didn’t learn anything from the book.  At the very least it should interest progressives looking to mimic the successes (?) of the right wing.

5. Blankets, by Craig Thompson.  This I loved and read in one sitting; it is a very good introduction to graphic novels, especially if you are not thrilled by Alan Moore.

Editions of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy often have excessively small print.  Why?  The major works by those authors are long.  Larger print will make the volumes too long and thus too expensive.  Perhaps more importantly the volumes will appear too forbidding to the average buyer.

But isn’t miniscule type for Raskolnikov hard to read?  Ah…most of the people who buy the book don’t read it.  If miniscule type gets them to stop reading sooner rather than later, you might even call it a Pareto improvement.

Self-help books almost always have reasonably large print or even ridiculously large print.  The author doesn’t have much to say and the publisher wishes to pad the book so it looks real.  Furthermore most self-help books are read (at least in part), so to keep the reader happy the print should be large.

Can you think of other generalizations?

Which books are most likely to go into "Large Print" editions? 

John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of a Continent.  Most of all it offers historical and geographic reasons why African development has proven so problematic.  The author very frequently thinks in terms of mechanism, so it will be congenial to most economically-oriented readers.  Have you wondered why slavery is so common in African history, or why African societies are so frequently conservative and obsessed with the veneration of elders?  Why parasites can feast on humans so easily in Africa?  Why Africa has been underpopulated?

This book, which came out in 1997, is old news to many of you.  But I just discovered it, and it made for excellent airplane reading to the extremely livable, very beautiful, and tasty city of Denver.  If you are interested in African development, or economic geography more generally, this book is a must.

But not all is bright.  I now worry that, since I missed this book for ten years, there is something deeply deficient in my book-finding algorithms.  I thank Karol Boudreaux, who pointed the book out to me while we were in Tanzania.

I began by exposing the myth that imprecision, slowness, and noisiness are liabilities of brain function, "bugs" in computers.

That is from Read Montague’s new and notable Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, an in-depth look at neuroscience and the brain.

Why not read among your books?