Category: Books

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.

1. New Freakonomics study guide, explained and downloadable here.  Elsewhere on the Steve Levitt front, he argues with Roland Fryer that black and white kids have roughly the same mental abilities when measured at age one.

2. Google map of Mars, hat tip to Yana.

3. Here is a new cost-benefit study of the war in Iraq, from a hawk-friendly point of view.  The authors are Steve Davis, Kevin Murphy, and Bob Topel; I’ll let you know more once I’ve read it.

If you think my theory is unnecessarily complex, just wait till you see what the theories will be like fifty years from now.

An excellent line but also a sign of trouble.  The final sentence is:

Making a virtue of necessity, I will leave it to other people to test my theory [TC: in fairness to Harris, she may be referring to her medical problems].

Nonetheless I like virtually everything she says.  The key point is that when it comes to environmental influences on our behavior, we are highly malleable avatars.  Tests which don’t recognize this will be misleading.  For instance if you are testing "birth rank" theories, submission within the family does not imply submissive behavior toward the outside world.  Of course the theory immediately gains an additional degree of freedom, both its blessing and curse.

The book is full of fascinating facts and interludes:

…people who are married to one of a pair of twins feel, on average, only so-so about the other twin; only 13 percent of the men and 7 percent of the women feel they could have fallen for their spouse’s twin.

Dead Ringers anyone?  Here is my previous post on the book.

The bottom line: All those young, anti-theocratic, and sometimes pro-democratic Iranian hotheads, for all their rebellious behavior against their parents, when push comes to shove will embrace nuclear weapons and a maximal sphere of regional influence.

Strategies of Commitment, by Thomas Schelling, essays and speeches.  Here is my previous post on Thomas Schelling, 2005 Nobel Laureate.  Here is the home page for the book.

Seriously.   Originally published in Look magazine.  Thanks to Alina Stefanescu for the pointer.

If you are a completist, as am I, buying this new book — yes it really is called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die — is a dangerous move.  It has already induced me to purchase George Bataille’s Story of the Eye (not what I thought!), Robert Musil’s Young Törless, Thomas Pynchon’s supposedly underrated Vineland, and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, which I expect contains the key to the mysteries of Lost.  The volume is excellent for browsing and seeing what came out in a particular year.  Elsewhere on the book front, David Maruszek’s long-awaited Counting Heads has idea futures, frozen heads, and a compelling literary style.  I can’t imagine how it could have a good ending, but I am not yet at the point where I care.

Krugman writes:

A reasonable man might well have concluded that capitalism had failed,
and that only…the nationalization of the means of production – could
restore economic sanity….Keynes argued that these failures had
surprisingly narrow, technical causes…

It is well-known that Keynes called for the socialization of investment and euthanasia of the rentier.  Although I do not think he meant it by the 1940s (for background read this paper, or Keynes’s preface to the German-language edition of GT, which is Department of Uh-Oh material), it is odd for Krugman to ignore these passages and present Keynes as an outright enemy of government control or ownership of investment.  Next, Krugman writes:

1. Economies can and often do suffer from an overall lack of demand, which leads to involuntary unemployment
2. The economy’s automatic tendency to correct shortfalls in demand, if it exists at all, operates slowly and painfully
3. Government policies to increase demand, by contrast, can reduce unemployment quickly
4. Sometimes increasing the money supply won’t be enough to persuade
   the private sector to spend more, and government spending must step
   into the breach

To a modern practitioner of economic policy, none of this – except,
possibly, the last point – sounds startling or even especially
controversial. But these ideas weren’t just radical when Keynes
proposed them; they were very nearly unthinkable. And the great
achievement of The General Theory was precisely to make them
thinkable….

Arthur Marget and other historians of thought have shown that such ideas were commonplace in pre-1936 macroeconomics, albeit not in Hayek and Robbins.  The American tradition in particular pushed for activist fiscal policy, read for instance Jacob Viner.  Several books document the popularity of this approach, again before the General Theory.

This is from William Saletan’s New York Times review of Judith Harris’s No Two Alike:

Ultimately, however, long-term behavior modification is at odds with
itself. As our minds become subtler and our occupations less stable,
short-term modifications suited to the situation at hand become more
advantageous than permanent modifications. This is already happening,
according to her theory. The reason parental influence doesn’t control
children’s behavior outside the home is that they adjust to context.
"Children are capable of generalizing – of learning something in one
context and applying it in another – but they do not do it blindly,"
Harris observes. At home, where you’re the younger sibling, you yield.
At school, where you’re one of the bigger kids, you don’t. And unlike
other animals, you can shuffle your self-classifications. In seconds,
you can go from acting like a girl to acting like a child to acting
like a New Yorker.

In short, the evolutionary logic that makes
us different from one another will gradually make us different from
ourselves, context by context. Personality – behavior that is
"consistent across time and place," as one textbook puts it – will
fade. We’ll miss characters like Harris, the little woman from New
Jersey who boasted of giving psychologists a "wedgie" and tried to
solve the puzzle of human nature.

But is it true?  Cannot evolutionary pressures favor extreme constancy, for purposes of precommitting to transparency and attracting a better mate?

By the way, I’ll give "best sentence of the day" honor to Daniel Akst: "Any benefit from shining the cleansing light of day on executive greed
will probably be outweighed by the inflationary effect of additional
disclosure, which will provide more ammunition for executives and
consultants seeking to justify additional increases."

Forty-one per cent [of respondents] are overwhelmingly in favour of books with a happy ending, as against 2.2% who like it sad. Women were 13% more likely than men to say they want it all to end happily. Almost one fifth of men expressed a preference for books with ambiguous endings…

Young people were most likely to prefer books with a sad ending – 8.6% of under 16s. Those aged 41-65, however, a group with more personal experience of sadness, dislike sad endings, with only 1.1% preferring books that end this way.

Here is more information.  You must know by now, of course, that I prefer most of my endings tragic, or ambiguous, with a few happy tales thrown in to make the tragedies a surprise when they come.  (Is it the dirty little secret of elite culture that we would be bored if in fact we had everything our way?)  In fact all of you unwashed-masses-happy-endings-loving viewers subsidize me.  You support so much feel-good slop that when something meaty does come along, I am genuinely shocked and delighted.  If it is bad, I just put down the book or leave the theater.  Thank you all, once again.

Addendum: Right now Typepad is "holding" all your comments.  They should appear sooner or later, our apologies…Further update: The problem appears to be corrected.

Here is my Slate.com piece from today.  Excerpt:

…her work went far beyond simply mourning the victim. She showed us why repulsion cannot be avoided, why we often resemble what we hate, and why it is sometimes our best qualities that prevent us from accepting the differences of others. Her ability to both understand the outsider perspective better than others and then to invert it, places Butler above her science-fiction-writing peers. She is a disturbing and important writer who transcends the usual genre categories.

Here is a home page.  Here is Wikipedia.  The Xenogenesis series was a masterpiece.  Here are obituaries.

Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing.

That Auden bit is cited in the new and fun The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, by James Geary.  While we are on the topic, here are Auden’s aphorisms on reading.  Here are his aphorisms on writing.  Here are the aphorisms Auden selected and edited into book form.

Geary also offers three aphorisms by Chateaubriand:

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

As long as the heart preserves desire, the mind preserves illusion.

Love decreases when it ceases to increase.