Category: Books
Kiss of Fire
First, full disclosure: Barbara Nitke is my friend.
Barbara is an exquisitely sensitive photographer whose self-imposed mission is to record lovers at the precise moments when they exchange power, trust and intimacy. Her work (best exempified in her book Kiss of Fire) is not porn; her photos are tinged with sexuality but they’re rarely overtly sexual. On the other hand, they won’t be easy for everyone to look at. Often they depict dominance, submission and pain. Always they depict love. It’s not the naked bodies that jump out at you; it’s the naked souls.
Barbara’s new show, Illuminata: Are You Curious?, opens on Thursday, November 11 at the Art At Large gallery in New York. If the photos aren’t to your taste, you can still go to support Barbara’s courageous lawsuit against John Aschcroft and the Communications Decency Act.
Too Many Books?
This year’s Man Booker Prize, Nobel Prize for Literature, and Pulitzer Prize for fiction have now all been awarded for works I will never read, and next month’s National Book Award is certain to follow suit. Which causes me to wonder whether the world’s got enough books already. I own hundreds of novels that I will never have the time to read. If these were the only copies on earth and a fire destroyed half of them, my life would not be signifcantly impoverished.
Of course there are great novels that have brought me a lot of pleasure—most recently, Ian Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpostand Donna Tartt’s The Secret History come to mind—(warning! Do not read the Amazon reviews of Fingerpost; they give away the ending!). But the opportunity cost of reading a great novel is reading some other great novel, so if either of these had gone unwritten, I’d probably have some other wonderful book to recommend.
There’s an important economic point here: The vast rewards that go to successful novelists can grossly overstate the social value of their work. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has sold over 6 million copies and almost surely earned its author over $20 million. But if The Da Vinci Code hadn’t been written, some other now-unnoticed book might have taken its place as the blockbuster of the year, and readers would have been almost as happy.
Writing a book is not like growing an orange. If you grow the best orange in the world, the second best orange still gets eaten. But if you write the best book in the world, the second best book loses a lot of readers. So the market price of an orange is an excellent reflection of its true social value, whereas the bulk of Dan Brown’s $20 million is only an excellent reflection of what he was able to divert from some
other author to himself.
Harold Bloom at work
A conversation between [Samuel] Johnson and Goethe is all but inconceivable. Perhaps a gathering of Shakespeare, Plato, and Oscar Wilde, put together in Eternity, could create it. Shakespeare would convey the inability of the English critic and the German poet to listen to each other, while Plato would mold the irony of the encounter, and Wilde suggest the wasted wit.
That’s from Harold Bloom’s new Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?. It doesn’t matter how flawed Bloom’s recent books may be, he is still a smarter reader than just about anyone else. I buy his stuff on sight and gobble it up within twenty-four hours.
Another good Christmas gift is Richard Dawkin’s The Ancestor’s Tale, his most systematic treatment of evolution to date.
Addendum: Alan Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty just won the Mann Booker Prize; here is more info.
Who benefits from R&D?
…the main finding — that R&D capital stocks of trade partners have a noticeable impact on a country’s total factor productivity — appears to be robust… [consider] a coordinated permanent expansion of R&D investment by 1/2 of GDP in each of twenty-one industrial countries. The U.S. output grows by 15 percent, while Canada’s and Italy’s output expands by more than 25 percent. On average the output of all the industrial countries rises by 17.5 percent. And importantly, the output of all the less-developed countries rises by 10.6 percent on average. That is, the less-developed countries experience substantial gains from R&D expansion in the industrial countries [emphasis added].
That is from Elhanan Helpman’s just-published The Mystery of Economic Growth. I’ll add that, more generally, Europe is a massive free-rider on American investments in pharmaceutical R&D; see Alex immediately below.
Are you looking for a good and readable summary of what economists know about economic growth? Helpman’s book is the place to start. And here is my earlier post on external returns from innovation.
The growing cost of textbooks
As many textbooks now break the $100 barrier, complaints are rising
Some college and public-interest groups charge that the publishing industry is forcing textbook prices higher by introducing unnecessary new editions and packaging books with expensive study materials that not all students want or need. The National Association of College Bookstores says wholesale prices of college textbooks have risen nearly 40 percent in the past five years.
And students are finding that many of the same books are sold overseas at much lower prices.
Note, by the way, that textbook prices have not risen as rapidly as tuition and fees (admittedly the latter is difficult to calculate in real terms, given different way of valuing financial aid). This makes it harder for universities to make a stink.
The economic problem is simple: professors assign a book without worrying much about the cost that students will pay. In fact a pricey book might be a nice way to drive down your enrollment and lower your workload.
But do we really need Congressional hearings on the matter?
How about this for a simple solution? If a professor can lower the price of classroom materials, the university adds one-tenth of the class’s gain to that professor’s salary or research account. Yes in the short run there might be inefficient skimping but in the longer run prices should come down. Some professors, of course, might resort to teaching their classes through blogs. As the subtitle of this blog notes, “Small Ideas for a Much Better World.”
Arnold Kling, a master expositor of economics, has another excellent solution.
Why reading Homer’s Iliad is good for you
Reciting the Iliad could have epic effects on your health. German physiologists have recently shown that such poetry can get your heart beating in time with your breaths. This synchronization may improve gas exchange in the lungs as well as the body’s sensitivity and responsiveness to blood pressure changes.
The poem’s use of hexameter — six rhythmic units per line — is seen as especially important to this result.
Here is one brief account, see also the October issue of Scientific American, p.29.
How the Internet saved bookstores
Most of all used bookstores; read more here.
And here are the most requested out-of-print books.
The Sledgehammer of Wow
By this point in life I’ve stuffed so much material down my gullet I feel I am hard to impress. When it comes to new books and music in particular, I can go many moons without feeling The Sledgehammer of Wow. But yesterday I felt it twice:
Blueberry Boat by The Fiery Furnaces dispays a level on ongoing invention that one expected from Brian Wilson circa 1968.
Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: A Novel has been called a “Harry Potter for grown-ups”; it starts by asking whether magic has disappeared in England. Only rarely have I been captivated so quickly and so deeply by a novel of our time. Read the ever-insightful Henry Farrell (CrookedTimber.org) on this wonderful book. Here is another good review, also courtesy of Henry; here is a Slate.com review.
On a sadder note, Johnny Ramone has passed away. “Twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go, I wanna be sedated…!”
The politics of Nobel Prizes
Jorge Luis Borges was one of the greatest writers never to win a Nobel Prize (try the early short fiction if you don’t already know his work). Now I know why:
The visit to [Pinochet’s] Chile finished off Borges’s chances of ever winning the Nobel Prize. That year, and for the remaining years of his life, his candidacy was opposed by a veteran member of the Nobel Prize committee, the socialist writer Arthur Lundkvist, a long-standing friend of the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, who had received the Nobel Prize in 1971. Lundkvist would subsequently explain to Volodia Teitelboim, one of Borges’s biographers and a onetime chairman of the Chilean Communist Party, that he would never forgive Borges his public endorsement of General Pinochet’s regime.
Borges, it should be noted, did believe in democracy but thought Pinochet the best of the available options at the time. For purposes of contrast, consider the following (slightly overstated) description of Laureate Pablo Neruda:
On the eve of his [Neruda’s] death, in 1973, he could still describe Stalin as “that wise, tranquil Georgian”. His feelings were similarly soft for Mao’s China, where he loved to see everyone in those vast landscapes and streetscapes dressed in regulation blue.
The former quotation is from p.426 of Edwin Williamson’s excellent Borges: A Life.
The Dead Zone
I’ve now entered the vacation part of my trip, which of course means that I am slightly bored. On the bright side, I’ve just discovered Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I admire his ability to think in epic terms and grab the reader at the same time; I’ve long thought that his best material will still be read one hundred years from now. My previous favorites have been Stand and The Dead Zone, among others. And the food in Acapulco is of course amazing. I’m back at the beginning of the week to come, and my apologies for being slow in email responses.
Cyclopaedia of Political Economy
Have you ever wondered what nineteenth century, classical liberal political economy looked like? No, not the classic writers but rather ordinary political economy?
A new web resource answers your question. John J. Lalor’s Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy collected classical liberal writings on the economic issues of the day, circa 1881. You can now access and read the work in its entirety. Here is information about the book and author.
For one sample, here is the brief article on the political economy of debt. Or try this entry on the balance of trade, still relevant today. The item on the division of labor remains eloquent and insightful. Gustav de Molinari writes passionately on the link between freedom, prosperity, and the arts, a favorite topic of mine. I’ve spent a good bit of time browsing through the book (both recently and much earlier), and it offers surprisingly few clunkers. On social issues it is consistently liberal and progressive.
Kudos to the ever-excellent Liberty Fund for putting the work on-line. Until their efforts, you could buy the book for a mere $675.
Addendum: The links to the previous version of this post have now been fixed.
Literary role models for bloggers
All writers have their role models. To whom should bloggers look?
One obvious choice is Samuel Pepys, who kept regular diaries for about ten years. But Adam Sisman’s excellent book, written before the advent of blogging, nonetheless directs our attention to the Scot James Boswell:
Boswell’s plain, direct prose was easy to read, and appealed to twentieth-century readers as [Samuel] Johnson’s mannered, classical style never could. Moreover, Boswell’s interest in himself, which seemed so peculiar to his contemporaries, was very much more acceptable two centuries later. Indeed, Boswell seemed to offer a unique combination: a writer who poured the contents of his mind freely into his journal, without either embarrassment or knowingness…Here was a miracle: a pre-Freudian autobiographer who revealed everything in his mind, without restraint, concealment, or distortion. Or so it seemed.
Boswell [borrowed] techniques from the novel, the theatre, and the confessional memoir. With meticulous care, with long-practised skill, and with a generous imagination, he crafted a character who lived and breathed [TC: I have long felt that Boswell, not Samuel Johnson, is the real biographical subject of Boswell’s Life of Johnson]. He also set new scholarly standards; his verification of every possible detail, which seemed so eccentric to his contemporaries, would become the norm. In doing what he did, he relied mainly on instinct, his sense of what would serve his purpose best.
Hmm…and like many bloggers, Boswell often got in trouble for writing up his private conversations with others.
Should we ban the peanut?
I have to point out that many common foods — the peanut is a good example — couldn’t pass the screening of GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in the United States.
That is from James Trefil’s illuminating generalist tract Human Nature: A Blueprint for Managing the Earth — By People, For People. Trefil argues that better science will prove the most effective way to save our planet from environmental disaster. He is an unabashed fan of ecological management and is skeptical about the idea of pristine wilderness. How about this?:
The real advance in genetic modification…[will come] from a second wave of plants already being developed. One example of this new wave is what are called neutraceuticals [nutraceuticals]. These are food plans that have been engineered to produce molecules that are specifically beneficial to humans. You can imagine, for example, a banana whose DNA has been modified so that it produces the recommended daily allowance of vitamins. Once such trees are planted, they would continue to produce the vitamins without any further intervention…
We can even imagine a banana that would provide protection from cholera or other diseases. Golden Rice already has the potential to alleviate vitamin A deficiencies; read an update here.
Psychoanalysis and Consumer Society
Freudian introspection aimed to foster the individual’s capacity to live an authentically personal life, yet it wound up helping to consolidate consumer society…Psychoanalysis remained marginal to European psychiatry until after Wrofl War II, when Americans brought it back to Europe, but it became central to American culture almost immediately. The reason was the weakness of traditional authority in the United States and the widespread belief in the power of the individual mind to overcome “external” difficulties. In that context, American psychoanalysis became intensely popular. As a result, it was caught up in a process that emphasized personal empowerment, self-regulation, and individual charisma. As we shal see, the actual practice of analysis was less important than its cultural impact. Ultimately American analysis came to mean almost the opposite of the self-reflective exploration of internal limitations that characterized its European counterpart.
From the intermittently fascinating Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, by Eli Zaretsky.
Gordon Tullock triumphant
My colleague Gordon Tullock, along with Thomas Schelling, is one of the most deserving scholars never to have received a Nobel Prize [Ed Prescott and Eugene Fama are also obviously deserving, though they are much younger].
A new Liberty Fund series may help rectify this injustice. In ten cheap volumes ($12.00 for the first, 450 pp.) we will receive the greatest hits of Tullock. The first book, just published, presents Tullock’s best essays, including his classic article on rent-seeking behavior; read this summary as well.
Gordon’s degree is in law, many of his formative experiences were in post-WWII China (some say he was a spy), and he took only a single economics class, from Henry Simons at Chicago. Nonetheless Gordon is an economist to the core and full of intellectual surprises.
Gordon is best-known for his co-authorship of Calculus of Consent, which set the foundation for how economists think about voting rules and “politics as exchange.” But I think as much about his lesser-known contributions. He wrote early works on the economics of scientific organization, the economics of trials, and the economics of animal societies, including insects. These works have yet to be mined for their full insights. His Politics of Bureaucracy remains a classic.
Gordon is very much a systematic thinker, although he is oddly reluctant to admit this fact. I take his central insight to be the importance of law, but also that real laws are given by economic incentives, rather than by what is on the books. Here is Gordon’s 46-page vita, with a brief written introduction.
Kudos to Charles Rowley for having edited the volumes, and here is a more general link to the Liberty Fund publishing program.