Category: Books

Just out, buy it here, and here is Tim’s schedule of talks on his U.S. tour.  Here is Tim on whether women should propose marriage to men.  Here are Tim’s early columns that never got published.

Addendum: Here is Tim on Diane Coyle.

It is easy to hate his self-important puffery, but Norman Mailer remains one of America’s best writers.  His books include:

1. The Naked and the Dead – Outdated, but still full of powerful writing, and lacking many of the later objectionable mannerisms.

2. Advertisements for Myself – A collection of journalism, a mixed bag, but the peaks are high.

3. Armies of the Night – About the 1968 Chicago Convention, I’ve never read it but it gets consistent raves.

4. Of a Fire on the Moon – The story of America’s space program, and one of the best non-fiction books period.  As a writer, one of the books I most envy.

5. The Executioner’s Song – The story of Gary Gilmore, the first half is incredible — a candidate for "The Great American Novel" — although the second half meanders.

5. Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery – I usually hate historical fiction but this is gripping.

6. Harlot’s Ghost – His best book, 1168 pages of panache and joy.  One of the most underrated and underread of the important American novels. 

The thing is, he has many other books too.  His new The Castle in the Forest, a psychological autobiography of the young Hitler, is better than his bad books but it does not compare to the books on this list.

1. I don’t agree with the most notorious claim of the book, namely that income inequality hasn’t gone up over the last few decades.  Gary Burtless has a good, non-polemical look at the data.  See also Bruce Bartlett.  Personally I am struck by what I know about philanthropy, art markets (booming prices, driven by wealth) and academic salaries.  At the micro-level each of these areas appears to reflect a trend of rising income inequality.  Even before I had heard of Piketty and Saez, I felt I was seeing their result right before my eyes.  In terms of more formal data, I also was much influenced by the Thomas Lemieux piece I cited earlier today (Reynolds cites it too, I might add, approvingly, though without considering this angle), which shows that composition effects virtually require income inequality to be rising.  Reynolds would have had a better book if he simply stated that income inequality isn’t going up as much as some people have claimed.

2. The book is of course polemical in style, so it is no surprise it would occasion polemical responses.  Nonetheless I have been disappointed by much of the critical reaction to the book, most typically Jonathan Chait at NR.  With any book, whether you like its attitude or not, the first questions are what the book gets right and what we can learn from it.  (I am someone who had GMU economics Ph.d. students read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed.)  Many of the critics aren’t asking these questions but rather they are using debating points, or attacks against Reynolds, to dismiss the book altogether.  On many issues Reynolds is correct or at least he makes arguments worth considering.  Often he is simply a massive tonic of common sense when countering the fuzzier-minded of egalitarian arguments.

Neither Reynolds nor the critics try hard enough to get at the real issues, namely which kinds of inequality are present, which are problems, and which are worth worrying about.  The Reynolds book would have done better to try to give us a deeper understanding of the actual problems, whatever they may be, and less to respond to the critics number-by-number; the latter approach rarely convinces many people. 

On specific points, the critics are too dismissive of consumption data, and Reynolds defends them too passionately.  And what about happiness?  Are there special problems concerning unequal health care?  Just how bad is emergency room care relative to gold-plated insurance plans?  Is the biggest problem of the poor, as one MR commentator points out, simply having to hang around other poor people?

Overall both philosophy (a rigorous treatment of which complaints are exactly complaints about inequality) and sociology are badly needed in this debate.  On both sides of the fence I yearn for just a bit more Amartya Sen.  The numbers, one way or the other, taken alone, aren’t going to convince very many people.

Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World, by John Taylor.

Here is the scoop, I just ordered my copy.  Here is my earlier post on Nobel Laureate (and my former advisor) Thomas Schelling.

1. Lynn Freed, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home – Her message is that to be a great writer you must be brutal in exposing the truth and somewhat brutal period; a short memoir of female South African ambition, recommended.

2. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents – Western study of Orientalism was not always racist or biased, a useful corrective to Edward Said.

3. Roy Richard Grinker, Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism – One of the better books on the topic, by an anthropologist with an autistic daughter, most interesting for its cross-cultural perspectives.

4. Charles Clover, The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat.  Yes the topic is "overfished," but this book stands above the others.  Among other virtues, it has a good treatment of which regulations and property rights management systems are actually working.

5. ESPN-NBA; there is more logic on this site than almost any blog, worth the price.

Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra.

I am fairly confident in that pronouncement, even though a) it is only January 11, and b) I have read only the first hundred pages.

Here is a New York Times story, here is a New York Times review.  It helps to have visited Bombay.

Any new visitor to [Nigeria] is bound to notice the odd phenomenon that literally thousands of houses and buildings in cities and towns bear the message "THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE," painted prominently near the front door.  Ask any Nigerian the purpose of the message and they will quickly tell you that it is to prevent 419 [scamming].  Apparently, one popular method of 419 is to assume the identity of a real estate agent or simply a property owner trying to sell one’s house.  In Nigeria’s cities and towns, where the real estate market is tight, buyers can be induced to make down payments to secure a later purchase, and in some cases entire transactions have been completed before the buyer discovered that the deal was a scam.

That is from Daniel Jordan Smith’s informative and entertaining A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria.  Here is the book’s home page.

Top 10 collections of translated poetry, from a single Chinese store:

1. Paul Celan, Selected Poetry and Prose
2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems
3. Dylan Thomas, Selected Poems
4. Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems
5. Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
6. Allen Ginsberg, Selected Poems
7. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems
8. Constantine P. Cavafy, Collected Poems
9. Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Poetry
10. The Eddas

Not a bad list, I would like to know more about their clientele.  The top four "General Titles in Poetry" are:

1. Friedrich Hölderlin, Collected Prose
2. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry
3. Wang Zuoliang, History of English Poetry
4. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

Thanks to Yan Li for the pointer.

Keith Ellison made history Thursday, becoming the first Muslim member
of Congress and punctuating the occasion by taking a ceremonial oath
with a Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

(From the NYTimes). I wonder if Jefferson every took scissors to the Quran to cut out all the ridiculous bits, the way he did to the Bible?   

You can’t find "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" at the
Fairfax City Regional Library anymore.  Or "The Education of Henry
Adams" at Sherwood Regional.  Want Emily Dickinson’s "Final Harvest"? 
Don’t look to the Kingstowne branch.

It’s not that the books are
checked out.  They’re just gone.  No one was reading them, so librarians
took them off the shelves and dumped them.

Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works
have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new
computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at
least 24 months.

First Tower, now this.  In any case I do not think they are using the correct algorithm; here is more.  Circulation figures, by the way, have become a bargaining chip for more government funding.  That, plus growing demands on space, explain the ruthless culling underway.

A loyal MR reader writes:

Why are there so many well-padded books out there that really ought to be nice, long articles?

David Sucher has raised similar questions in the MR comments.  The answer is simple: most people don’t read the books they buy.  But they like the self-image generated by the book purchase decision, and they like to feel they are getting something for their money.  Driven by market demand, book publishers demand a certain amount of heft and sometimes this means padding.

Yes there is a tendency toward shorter "books," some of which are called blogs.  The price is lower.  Another loyal MR reader once wrote in praise of MR: "if I wanted to read something longer I would read a book or something".  Or not read, as the case may be.

Addendum: Note also that marketing expenditures are more or less constant, relative to the size of the book.  Higher marketing expenditures (definitely the trend) thus spur higher-margin and typically larger books, as suggested by the Alchian and Allen theorem (why buy a big ad campaign for book which sells for a penny?).  For those of us who actually read the books, as book choice goes up, the importance of marketing goes up, and the padding goes up as well.