Category: Books

Asian culture does not emphasize the importance of personal happiness as much as European culture does, and thus Asian Americans believe that they are generally less happy than their European American counterparts.  In one study, volunteers carried handheld computers everywhere they went for a week and recorded how they were feeling when the computer beeped at random intervals throughout the day.  These reports showed that the Asian American volunteers were slightly happier than the European American volunteers.  But when the volunteers were asked to remember how they had felt that week, the Asian American volunteers reported that they had felt less happy and not more.

The above passage is from Daniel Gilbert’s excellent Stumbling on Happiness.  Here is my earlier post on the book.  Hispanics, by the way, remembered feeling happier than they had been in the moment.  One implication is that you cannot completely trust happiness studies based on self-reported data.

By the way: Have you figured out what is the secret but unpalatable way of making better life decisions?

Finally, in Part VI, "Corrigibility," I will tell you why illusions of foresight are not easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers.  I will conclude by telling you about a simple remedy for these illusions that you will almost certainly not accept.

That is from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, so far the best book this year. 

He takes Proust and turns it into social science.  Your brain distorts both your anticipations and your memories; we do not know how happy we were or how happy we will be.  Here is a short article on Gilbert.  Here is a long article on Gilbert.  Here is a short piece on why dreading pain can be as bad as pain itself.  Or is it…?  Was it…?

1. The People’s Act of Love, by James Meek.  You wouldn’t think a Brit could imitate a 19th century Russian novel, but he pulls it off.  Excellent mid-brow fiction, give it a few chapters to grab you.

2. The Singing Neanderthals, by Stephen Mithen.  The author starts with sexual selection theories of the arts, and then asks why we sing in large groups rather than exclusively one-to-one.  The Neanderthals are portrayed as a static culture, dependent on music for their communication, and thus unable to come up with new ideas.   Recommended for those who like just-so stories and yes that includes me.

3. Capital and Collusion: The Political Logic of Global Economic Development, by Hilton Root.  Here is the book’s web page.  Hilton will be moving full time to George Mason, School of Public Policy.

4. Polio: An American Story, by David Oskhinski.  There are few Pulitzer Prize-winning works you can gulp down and enjoy in a single brief sitting, but this is one of them.

5. You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir, by Wole Soyinka.  Wonderfully written, sadly he doesn’t seem to see why capitalist enterprise is important for Africa.

6. The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Never Will Read, by Stuart Kelly.  Aeschylus, Dante, Kafka, and many others wrote works that were lost, destroyed, or never finished.  (Hey, what about the missing second volume of Hayek’s Pure Theory of Capital?  You know, the one where he integrates the theory of money and capital?)  Here is the history of those works, in bit-sized, ready-to-consume form.  Here is one good review.  If you are tired of popular literary treatments which simply recycle material you already know, this book is for you.  A gem.

7. "The only irreducible reward"…

Here is his brief review; he calls my main argument "the most counterintuitive thesis ever."  Bryan Caplan does not like such talk, but I take it as praise.  Here Matt picks San Antonio over Detroit in the playoffs, which I consider the second most counterintuitive thesis ever.

In an economy of stuff, the laws of property govern who owns stuff.  In an attention economy, it is the laws of intellectual property that govern who gets attention.

The center of gravity for formal inquiry changes places too.  In an economy of stuff, the disciplines that govern extracting material from the earth’s crust and making stuff out of it naturally stand at the center: the physical sciences, engineering, and economics as usuallly written.  The arts and letters, however, vital we all agree them to be, are peripheral.  But in an attention economy, the two change places.  The arts and letters now stand at the center.  They are the disciplines that study how attention is allocated, how cultural capital is created and traded.  When your children come home and tell us that they have decided to major in English or art history, no longer need we tremble for their economic future.

That is all from Richard Lanham’s excellent The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information.  The truly discerning will in particular appreciate the merits of pp.39-40 in this book, but I am not going to give them away…

Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, now chapter one is here on-line.

Thanks to the ever-indispensable www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer (hey, isn’t it my book?).  And here is the first chapter from economist Jay Hamilton’s All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News.

No, it has nothing to do with debt-collecting strategies of the Sopranos.  Rather it refers to the kind of book I dream of.  The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760, by John Robertson, compares the Neapolitan and Scottish Enlightenments.

There is Ferdinando Galiani, the brilliant midget who understood supply and demand, outlined subjective value theory, formulated an early version of the price-specie flow mechanism, and yet opposed freedom of the grain trade.

Antonio Genovesi held the first European chair of political economy.  He believed economic growth was the path to happiness.  No clergy were allowed in the post.

Giambattista Vico — well, where does one start?  History is cyclic, rhetoric is all-important, poetry is a primary source of knowledge, and the Cartesian method does not apply to the public sphere.  He believed, correctly, that the true wisdom of mankind could be received through a sufficiently deep reading of Homer.  The history of ideas is never quite the same after reading Vico. 

If you want to know how these people relate to Hume and Bayle, this is your book.  It does not go far enough or deep enough — why so little talk of Plato and the Gnostics? — but it is about time we can hold something like this in our hands.  In the meantime we should get this guy to publish his stuff.

Books that move men: Camus’s The Outsider, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.

Books that move women: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, The Women’s Room by Marilyn French and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The poll data are from the UK and the articles are interesting in their own right.  Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointers.

It is a fun game to write out only the last paragraphs of good books:

Where vessel size had once been limited by the locks in the Panama Canal, containerships had grown so large that twenty-first-century naval architects were constrained by the Straits of Malacca, the busy shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia.  If a containership ever reaches Malacca-Max, the maximum size for a vessel able to pass through the straits, it will be a quarter mile long and 190 feet wide, with its bottom some 65 feet below the waterline.  If it should sink, it will take nearly $1 billion of cargo with it.  Its capacity will be 18,000 TEUs, or 9,000 standard 40-foot containers, enough to fill a 68-mile line of trucks each time it arrives in port.  Where it will call is a serious question, because few ports anywhere are deep enough to accommodate it.  The answer may well be brand-new ports built in deep water offshore, with Malacca-Max ships linking offshore platforms and smaller vessels shuttling containers to land.  If they ever come about, these enormously costly ships and ports will create yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe.

That is from Marc Levinson’s The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.  Here is a link to Virginia Postrel’s post on the book.  Here is a photo of a Malacca-Max ship; sadly there is no elephant nearby.

The whole thing is on-line.

From Michael, at www.2blowhards.com.

Here is an excerpt from chapter one of my new book: Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, due out in a week:

Moving to yet larger questions, we cannot have a coherent political philosophy without bridging the gap between economic and aesthetic perspectives.  For instance critics charge that liberalism cannot satisfy the higher aspirations of the human race.  They compare liberal government to an innkeeper who looks after his guests but otherwise has little to offer in the way of vision or a common loyalty.  On the international scene, the U.S. is often seen as a military and economic behemoth, but as lacking in concern for cultural values or beauty.  I wish to put this picture to rest, and to reclaim America’s rightful role in offering a liberal vision for beauty and creative human achievement. 

I will use arts policy to begin a new sketch of a liberal state.  The public sector can encourage a proliferation of diverse cultural outputs and in that regard offer a rich menu of life-enhancing options.  At the same time, we do not have to abandon the values of free speech and neutrality across (non-coercive) competing lifestyles.  All of this can be done in a manner consistent with prosperity and other economic objectives.  A state – in particular the American state — can be involved with matters aesthetic without losing its liberal character.  We also will see that, counterintuitively, a rich diversity of artistic achievement is compatible with the ideas of cultural centrality and the use of culture to bind a polity together.

Summary paragraph:

I write with one foot in the art lover camp and with another foot in the libertarian economist camp.  I try to make each position intelligible, and perhaps even sympathetic (if not convincing) to the other side.  I try to show how the other side might believe what it does, and how close the two views might be brought together.  Furthermore, I use the fact of persistent disagreement as a kind of datum, as a clue for discovering what the issues are really about. 

You will get some more specific passages soon.