Category: Books

Write the next page:

A first-time author has bypassed the traditional route of getting an agent, and is publishing a collaborative thriller on eBay. The novel is being written one page at a time, one writer to a page. As each installment is finished, the chance to create the next is offered for auction on eBay. So far, 17 pages have been completed, with 234 to go, and while the quality of the writing might charitably be described as variable, there is no shortage of plot.

By the way: "Money generated from page auctions goes to Macmillan Cancer Support."

Here is my new Slate piece.  Excerpt:

If you don’t like the superstores, it is easy enough to expand your
viewing horizons through other means. Just go to new sections of your
superstore (the best popular book on geology, gardening, or basketball
is very good, whether or not you like the topic). Stoop or
stretch to slightly uncomfortable levels. Use the stool. Peruse books
randomly. Look at other peoples’ discard piles. Spend more time in
public libraries, which offer many of the best features of indie
bookshops, including informed staff, diversity, and offbeat titles. Of
course, public libraries aren’t exactly atmospherically "cool." The
clientele is often young children, women over 40, and retired men. I
visit five public libraries on a regular basis, and each one makes me
feel old. But they deliver the goods.

For his students, that is:

• Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
• Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
• Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
• Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist
• P.J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich
• Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
• Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
• Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
• John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar
• William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

Very good picks, and here is the link.  How about a book on globalization (Martin Wolf) or economic development (John Kay)?  How about a book on China (????) or economic history (Robert Fogel)?

Addendum: Here is Arnold Kling’s addendum.

On the arts, and on my latest book, here is the link.  The text version should be up at www.TechCentralStation.com sometime tomorrow.

"But I digress."

[Bill] Gates…took Mike Spence’s famously difficult advanced microeconomics course — at the very dawn of the excitement about "bandwagon effects," monopolistic competition, and network economics.  Enrolled in the course as well was Steve Ballmer, a fellow cardplayer with whom Gate had grown friendly.  The two finished first and second in the course, but Gates didn’t wait for his grade.

That is from David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.  Maybe this is the book of the year so far (I can no longer remember how much I liked Stumbling on Happiness).

While it pretends to focus on a single article — Paul Romer’s 1990 piece on endogenous growth — the book is a tour de force through growth theory, the economics profession, the world of public intellectuals, and how science works.  Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Bob Solow, and Bob Lucas play prominent roles, in addition of course to Romer.  If you want to read one book on how the economics profession works, this is it.

Paul Krugman wrote:

I’ve never seen anyone write as well as Warsh about the social world of economic research, a world of brilliant, often eccentric people who bear no resemblance to the dreary suits you see discussing the economy of CNBC.  It’s a world of informal manners yet intense status competition…

The book will please both specialists and neophytes.  Warsh’s coverage is so thorough that even yours truly makes a few cameo appearances.  I thank David for the coverage, and I recommend his book highly.

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.