Category: Books
My excellent Conversation with Seth Godin
Here is the audio, video, and transcript from a very good session. Here is part of the episode summary:
Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive?
GODIN: [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant.
What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division.
Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways.
Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now.
And another:
COWEN: What is the detail you have become most increasingly pessimistic about?
GODIN: I think that our ability to rationalize our lazy, convenient, selfish, immoral, bad behavior is unbounded, and people will find a reason to justify the thing that they used to do because that’s how we evolved. One would hope that in the face of a real challenge or actual useful data, people would say, “Oh, I was wrong. I just changed my mind.” It’s really hard to do that.
There was a piece in The Times just the other day about the bibs that long-distance runners wear at races. There is no reason left for them to wear bibs. It’s not a big issue. Everyone should say, “Oh, yeah, great, done.” But the bib defenders coming out of the woodwork, explaining, each in their own way, why we need bibs for people who are running in races — that’s just a microcosm of the human problem, which is, culture sticks around because it’s good at sticking around. But sometimes we need to change the culture, and we should wake up and say, “This is a good day to change the culture.”
COWEN: So, we’re all bib defenders in our own special ways.
GODIN: Correct! Well said. Bib Defenders. That’s the name of the next book. Love that.
COWEN: What is, for you, the bib?
GODIN: I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And here is Seth’s new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
Orwell Against Progress
Orwell was deeply suspicious of technology and not simply because of the dangers of totalitarianism as expounded in 1984. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell argues that technology saps vigor and will. He quotes disparagingly, World Without Faith, a pro-progress book written by John Beever, a proto Steven Pinker in this respect.
It is so damn silly to cry out about the civilizing effects of work in the fields and farmyards as against that done in a big locomotive works or an automobile factory. Work is a nuisance. We work because we have to and all work is done to provide us with leisure and the means of spending that leisure as enjoyably as possible.
Orwell’s response?
…an exhibition of machine-worship in its most completely vulgar, ignorant, and half-baked form….How often have we not heard it, that glutinously uplifting stuff about ’the machines, our new race of slaves, which will set humanity free’, etc., etc., etc. To these people, apparently, the only danger of the machine is its possible use for destructive purposes; as, for instance, aero-planes are used in war. Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress; machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more machines–until finally you land up in the by now familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men.
What’s Orwell’s problem with progress? He is a traditionalist. Orwell thinks that men need struggle, pain and opposition to be truly great.
…in a world from which physical danger had been banished–and obviously mechanical progress tends to eliminate danger–would physical courage be likely to survive? Could it survive? And why should physical strength survive in a world where there was never the need for physical labour? As for such qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went wrong, they would be not only irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain, and difficulty.
..The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard.
I will give Orwell his due, he got this right:
Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles which they would never be obliged to use.
Orwell’s distaste for technology and love of the manly virtues of sacrifice and endurance to pain naturally push him towards zero-sum thinking. Wealth from machines is for softies but wealth from conquest, at least that makes you brave and hard! (See my earlier post, Orwell’s Falsified Prediction on Empire). Orwell didn’t favor conquest but it’s part of his pessimism that he sees the attraction.
Another of Orwell’s tragic dilemmas is that he doesn’t like progress but he does favor socialism and thus finds it unfortunate that socialism is perceived as being favorable to progress:
…the unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress…The kind of person who most readily accepts Socialism is also the kind of person who views mechanical progress, as such, with enthusiasm.
Orwell admired the tough and masculine miners he spent time with in the first part of Wigan Pier. In the second part he mostly decries the namby-pamby feminized socialists with their hippy-bourgeoise values, love of progress, and vegetarianism. I find it very amusing how much Orwell hated a lot of socialists for cultural reasons.
Socialism is too often coupled with a fat-bellied, godless conception of ’progress’ which revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of
an aesthetic sense.…One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
…If only the sandals and the pistachio coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!
What Orwell wanted was to strip socialism from liberalism and to pair it instead with conservatism and traditionalism. (I am speaking here of the Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier).
It’s still easy today to identify the sandal wearing, socialist hippies at the yoga studio but socialism no longer brings to mind visions of progress. Today, fans of progress are more likely to be capitalists than socialists. Indeed, socialism is more often allied with critiques of progress–progress destroys the environment, ruins indigenous ways of life and so forth. A traditionalist socialism along Orwell’s lines would add to this critique that progress destroys jobs, feminizes men, and saps vitality and courage. Thus, Orwell’s goal of pairing socialism with conservatism seems logically closer at hand than in his own time.
The changing classic book culture that is German
I visited the best and largest bookstore in Konstanz, a university town and a town with above-average wealth. The bookstore had three floors.
In times past, you might have expected to find hundreds of classic German-language novels in such a store. This visit I found only a single shelf devoted to such novels, and most of them were not German-language heritage at all. (In contrast, the section for English-language books was about three times larger.) I saw Italienische Reise by Goethe and Wilde Phantasien by Tieck, and…? Maybe two or three others? There was plenty of Sherlock Holmes, a fair amount of Dickens and Austen and Melville, and so on. No Kafka, Musil, Mann…you can keep on going and no it wasn’t there. Nowhere to be found in the store. You might do better looking for those works (in English) in an American Barnes and Noble.
Do the classic German book buyers simply use Amazon? Or is the shift in reading habits so dramatic? Is this another international conformity effect, and can I somehow blame the Woke? Maybe immigrants are a modest factor too, or you might not wish to post your reading of such books on social media.
*The Corporation and the Twentieth Century*
The author is Richard N. Langlois, and the subtitle is The History of American Business Enterprise. 551 pp. of text. I’ve taught Ph.D Industrial Organization for a good while now, and have always wanted a text that provides an overview and introduction to U.S. business history, with sophistication and good economics, and without being out of date. This is that book, so I am happy indeed.
Two Podcasts
Two podcasts I have enjoyed recently, First, The Social Radars, headed by Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy, co-founder and managing director of Y Combinator respectively. Jessica and Carolynn bring a lot of experience and trust with them so the entrepreneurs they interview open up about the realities of startups. Here is a great interview with David Lieb, creator of Google Photos and before that the highly successful failure, Bump.
I’ve also enjoyed the physician brothers Daniel and Mitch Belkin at The External Medicine Podcast. Here’s a superb primer on drug development from the great Derek Lowe.
The rise of Louise Perry
I am pleased to see Bryan Caplan reviewing the new Louis Perry book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. He opens with this:
I read Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century in a single day. If you want a page-turner, look no further. The sentences are gripping, the anecdotes are shocking, and the thesis is eyebrow-furrowing. For pure entertainment, I honestly don’t think I can compete with this book, which strives to convert today’s young feminists to a heretical syncretic creed of sex-negative feminism and social conservatism.
On Amazon the book has a five-star average with 716 ratings, and I strongly suspect it still will be read and referenced in ten or twenty years. I disagree with much of what Bryan says on this topic, but am glad to see he recognizes the importance of the book. In my view, Bryan is insufficiently Freudian, unwilling to see both “sexual freedom” and “sexual repression” as embodying a complex bundle of options, with no unproblematic way out and with no truly stable solution. I read Perry (who is an Emergent Ventures winner, by the way) as embodying the Freudian perspective, and not denying it, but not willing to emphasize it either. She has chosen her side, and would rather tell the woman not to let the guy choke you for his own fun.
On that I can agree. I am pleased to see this book doing so well.
*Why Congress*
By Philip A. Wallach, of the American Enterprise Institute. Here is the book’s home page. Here is a review of the book. A very good book. As I read Phil, he is suggesting that Congress is even a wee bit underrated. You can buy it here.
*The Lost Album of the Beatles*
The author is Daniel Rachel, and the subtitle is What if The Beatles Hadn’t Split Up? This is perfectly fine as a music book (for Beatle fans, it won’t convince the unconverted), but I couldn’t stop thinking of the Lucas critique.
For the author, the Beatles “final last album” is a double album of the best cuts from Beatle early solo careers, and that is an impressive assemblage indeed. McCartney’s “Back Seat of My Car,” for instance, was written in 1968, or at least started in that year, so surely it would have ended up on the last album. Or would it have? It didn’t end up on Let It Be or Abbey Road, so who knows? As long as the end of The Beatles was in sight, perhaps each Beatle would have hoarded his best potential solo material. Or maybe the other Beatles would have vetoed some of those songs, just as Paul in 1968 had decided that George’s “Isn’t a Pity?” wasn’t suitable as a Beatles song. Or maybe John and Paul would have had to give more songs to George and Ringo, to keep the group together, but arguably to the detriment of the final album. Most of the songs on All Things Must Pass are very good, but best suited to their own little walled garden.
In contrast, this economist believes that an additional album would have fallen somewhere between Let It Be and The White Album, with an overall sound somewhat akin to “Free as a Bird,” or perhaps also Ringo’s “I’m the Greatest,” penned by John and cut with George as well. Good stuff, but I’m still glad they split. Get that Q up, especially given that market power was present!
And don’t assume that Beatle behavior remains invariant across different policy regimes. Lucas truly was a universal economist.
*The Soul of Civility*
The subtitle is Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, and the author is the still-on-the-rise Alexandra Hudson. Most of all this is a sane and healthy book! And it indicates a direction for the future evolution of classical liberalism. Here is one short excerpt:
In Rituals of Dinner, Margaret Visser notes the dark side to hospitality. she argues that hosting others can be a power play. The host has the opportunity to be the guest of honor, the center of all praise and attention in the comfort of their own home. Guests must fawn and thank them whether or not the hospitality or food is any good, and often feel obligated to reciprocate whether they want to or not. While cynical, I’ve come to see some wisdom in her insight.
I am very glad this book now exists, you can pre-order it here.
Jonathan Swift/Gulliver/Laputa optimal taxation
I heard a very warm debate between two professors, about the most commodious and effectual ways and means of raising money, without grieving the subject. The first affirmed, “the justest method would be, to lay a certain tax upon vices and folly; and the sum fixed upon every man to be rated, after the fairest manner, by a jury of his neighbours.” The second was of an opinion directly contrary; “to tax those qualities of body and mind, for which men chiefly value themselves; the rate to be more or less, according to the degrees of excelling; the decision whereof should be left entirely to their own breast.” The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the other sex, and the assessments, according to the number and nature of the favours they have received; for which, they are allowed to be their own vouchers. Wit, valour, and politeness, were likewise proposed to be largely taxed, and collected in the same manner, by every person’s giving his own word for the quantum of what he possessed. But as to honour, justice, wisdom, and learning, they should not be taxed at all; because they are qualifications of so singular a kind, that no man will either allow them in his neighbour or value them in himself.
The women were proposed to be taxed according to their beauty and skill in dressing, wherein they had the same privilege with the men, to be determined by their own judgment. But constancy, chastity, good sense, and good nature, were not rated, because they would not bear the charge of collecting.
First Pigou taxes on vice, then taxes on inherited rents, and finally no tax on ideas, knowledge, or wisdom. That is from part III, chapter six.
*The Fall of the Turkish Model*
The author is Cihan Tuğal, and the subtitle is How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism, though the book is more concretely a comparison across Egypt and Tunisia as well, with frequent remarks on Iran. Here is one excerpt:
This led to what Kevan Harris has called the ‘subcontractor state’: an economy which is neither centralized under a governmental authority not privatized and liberalized. The subcontractor state has decentralized its social and economic roles without liberalizing the economy or even straightforwardly privatizing the state-owned enterprises. As a result, the peculiar third sector of the Iranian economy has expanded in rather complicated and unpredictable ways. Rather than leading to liberalization privatization under revolutionary corporatism intensified and twisted the significance of organization such as the bonyads…Privatization under the populist-conservative Ahmedinejad exploited the ambiguities of the tripartite division of the economy…’Privatization’ entailed the sale of public assets not to private companies but to nongovernmental public enterprises (such as pension funds, the bonyads and military contractors).
This book is one useful background source for the current electoral process in Turkey.
My Conversation with Simon Johnson
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode description:
What’s more intense than leading the IMF during a financial crisis? For Simon Johnson, it was co-authoring a book with fellow economist (and past guest) Daron Acemoglu. Written in six months, their book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, argues that widespread prosperity is not the natural consequence of technological progress, but instead only happens when there is a conscious effort to bend the direction and gains from technological advances away from the elite.
Tyler and Simon discuss the ideas in the book and on Simon’s earlier work on finance and banking, including at what size a US bank is small enough to fail, the future of deposit insurance, when we’ll see a central bank digital currency, his top proposal for reforming the IMF, how quickly the Industrial Revolution led to widespread prosperity, whether AI will boost wages, how he changed his mind on the Middle Ages, the key difference in outlook between him and Daron, how he thinks institutions affect growth, how to fix northern England’s economic climate, whether the UK should join NAFTA, improving science policy, the Simon Johnson production function, whether MBAs are overrated, the importance of communication, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If institutions are the key to economic growth, as many people have argued — Daron and yourself to varying degrees — why, then, is prospective economic growth so hard to predict?
In 1960, few people thought South Korea would be the big winner. It looked like their institutions were not that good. It was a common view: oh, Philippines, Sri Lanka — then Ceylon — would do quite well. They had English language to some extent. They seemed to have okay education. And those two nations have more or less flopped. South Korea took off. It’s now, per capita income roughly equal to France or Japan. Doesn’t that mean it’s not about institutions? Because institutions are pretty sticky.
JOHNSON: Yes, I think of institutions as being part of the hysteresis effect, if you can get it in a positive way, that if you grow and you strengthen institutions, which South Korea has done, it makes it much harder to relapse. There are plenty of countries that had spurts of growth without strong institutions and found it hard to sustain that.
You make a very good point about the early 1960s, Tyler. There wasn’t that much discussion that I’ve seen about institutions per se, but education — yes, absolutely. Culture — people made the same comparisons. They said, “Confucian culture is no good or won’t lead to growth. That’s a problem, for example, for South Korea.” That turned out to be wrong.
I think institutions are sticky. I think history matters a lot for them. They’re not predestination, though. You could absolutely carve your own way, but the carve-your-own way is harder when you start with institutions that are more problematic, less democratic, more autocratic control, less protection of property rights.
All of these things can go massively wrong, but building better institutions and making them sustainable, like Eastern Europe — the parts of the former Soviet Empire that managed to escape the Soviet influence after 1989, 1991 — I think those countries have worked long and hard, with very mixed results in some places, to build better institutions. And the EU has helped them in that regard, unquestionably.
I enjoyed this session with Simon.
*Russia and China*
Authored by Philip Snow, the subtitle is Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord. This book is excellent and definitive and serves up plenty of economic history, here is one bit from the opening section:
The trade nonetheless went ahead with surprising placidity. Now and again there ere small incidents in the form of cattle-rustling or border raids. In 1742 some Russians were reported to have crossed the frontier in search of fuel, and in 1744 two drunken Russians killed two Chinese traders in a squabble over vodka.
I am looking forward to reading the rest, you can buy it here.
*Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death*
By Nick Lane, here is one excerpt:
Should NASA and other space agencies back missions to Mars, or to the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter, Enceladus and Europa? If light is essential for the origin of life, then Enceladus is the last place to look, as those who favour warm ponds are quick to assert. But if life emerges from deep-sea hydrothermal vents, then Enceladus is an ideal place to look, as beneath its icy crust is a liquid ocean bubbling with hydrogen gas and small organic molecules, to judge from the plumes that jet hundreds of miles into space through cracks in the ice. It’s the first place I’d look.
Arguably even more important are the practical connotations for metabolism and our own health today. Is the Krebs cycle at the heart of metabolism because life was forced into existence that way, by thermodynamics — fate! — or was this chemistry invented later by genes, just a trivial outcome of information systems that could be rewired, if we are smart enough? Is the difference between ageing and disease an tractable outcome of metabolism, written into cells from the very origin of life, or a question for gene editing and synthetic biology to come? That in turn boils down to genes first or metabolism first? The thrust of this book is that energy is primal — energy flow shapes genetic information. I will argue that the structure of metabolism was set in stone (perhaps literally in deep-sea rocky vents) from the beginning.
Among the other things I learned from this book are the importance of Otto Warburg, why men get mitochondrial diseases more than women do (there is some speculative component here), why respiration is suppressed with age, why the brain prefers to burn glucose, what it might mean to think of cancer as “growth-based” rather than genes-based, and most of all the importance of the Krebs cycle and reverse Krebs cycle for a broader array of biological questions. The final section considers why chloroform seems to rob fruit flies of their “consciousness.”
I can’t pretend to evaluate the more controversial claims of the author, but at the very least I learned a great deal reading this book and it has stimulated my interest in the topic areas more generally. You can buy it here.
*The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe*
An excellent book by Martyn Rady, here is the passage most relevant to the history of economic thought:
A Norwegian economist and his wife have published a line of bestsellers in the field of economics written before 1750. Top is Aristotle’s Economics. Composed in the fourth century BCE, it is still available in paperback. Martin Luther’s denunciation of usury (1524) is number three. But there, in the top ten, is an unfamiliar name — Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (1626-1692), who was a government official in the duchy of Saxe-Gotha in Thuringia. Seckendorff’s German Princely State (Teutscher Fürsten-Staat, 1656) is a thousand-page blockbuster that went through thirteen editions and was in continuous print for a century. Although only ever published in German, it was influential throughout Central Europe, shaping policy from the Banat to the Baltic.
I enjoyed this sentence:
Besides his distinctive false nose (the result of a duelling accident), Tycho Brahe kept an elk in his lodgings as a drinking companion.
And yes the book does have an insightful discussion of Laibach, the Slovenian hard-to-describe musical band. You can buy it here.