Category: Books
First book written with GPT-4?
I wrote a new book with @OpenAI’s latest, most powerful large language model.
It’s called Impromptu: Amplifying our Humanity through AI.
This, as far as I know, is the first book written with GPT-4.
Here’s how it all began… https://t.co/M19e1ISGpb
— Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) March 15, 2023
That was then, this is now
From Taylor C. Sherman’s useful Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths:
Although Hindu nationalists had gained prominence in the run-up to partition, the new Congress leaders of the Government of India tried to sideline them. After Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948, members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were arrested, and the Hindu Mahasabha declared it would not take part in politics. In short, though raging before partition, the flames of Hindu chauvinism were quickly doused after independence, at least according to the old nationalist narrative. Secondly, the reform of Hinduism was seen as an essential element of secularism. To this end, a prominent Dalit, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, was put in charge of both writing the Constitution and overseeing reform of Hindu personal law. Within a short time after independence, so the myth goes, India had a secular state, and was on course to establish a sense of security and belonging for the two groups who had raised the loudest objections to Congress’s nationalism: Muslims and Dalits.
As with so many of the myths that have arisen about this period after independence, the myth of India secularism owes a great deal to Jawaharlal Nehru.
The book is both a good focused view of the Nehru era, but excellent background for current disputes.
readtrellis.com
Diamond Age is here, you can visit readtrellis.com.
Your tireless, endlessly creative AI Tutor…With every Trellis, you get a Socratic Guide to teach you the material. It can even quiz you for your understanding!
Here is readtrellis on Product Hunt.
*Scotland: The Global History, 1603 to the Present*
By Murray Pittock, this is perhaps the best book on Scotland I ever have read? But do note it is relatively light on the Scottish Enlightenment. In any case, here is the passage I will pull out, on the roots of that Enlightenment:
Charles II’s brother James’s rule in Edinburgh as Duke of Albany 1679-82 has been characterized as ‘a brief period of enlightened government’ made possible by the Catholic heir’s exile from the irrational hysteria of the aftermath of the ‘Popish Plot’ in England. Both Charles and James carried out extensive building in the Scottish capital and supported civic redevelopment; indeed what was eventually to become the New Town development was first envisioned under James. James created or supported many of the institutions which underpinned the Enlightenment: the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (1681), the Edinburgh Merchant Company (1681), the Advocates’ Library (1682) and the Order of the Thistle (1687), as well as the offices of Historiography and Geographer Royal (1681-82). In the aftermath of Union, new institutions were developed to defend and preserve Edinburgh’s capital status, such as Allan Ramsey’s theatre (1736) and the Academy of St. Luke, Scotland’s first art school, in 1729. A large number of clubs and associations for improvements were formed, such as the Society for Endeavouring Reformation of Manners (1699), the Rankenian and Associated Critics Clubs (1716-17), the Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland (1723), the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge (1731) and the Philosophical Society (1737). The University Medical School (where over three-quarters of students in the eighteenth century were not Scots) was founded by the support of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1726. Like the other Scottish universities, Edinburgh went on to benefit substantially from the addition to the student body of English and Irish dissenters, who were unable to attend Oxford and Cambridge because of their religious affiliations.
Pittock stresses the importance of good education for the Scottish story, here is one good Guardian review noting that point. Here is a good Scotsman review. You can buy the book here, definitely recommended and interesting on virtually every page.
*Solenoid*
That is the recently published and translated Romanian novel by Mircea Cartarescu. I have just finished reading it, and am pleased to announce that a new major European novel of ideas is upon us. I don’t put it up with Ferrante or Knausgaard, but it is on the next level below. Think of it as a blend of Knausgaard (autofiction), Joyce (Bucharest filling in for Dublin), and the surrealism of Kafka. From the NYT:
It is the journal-cum-antinovel of a schoolteacher reflecting on his youth, his mother, his job, his disturbing dreams and his overwhelming intuition that the anomalies of his life constitute an inscrutable pattern.
GPT has I think read the Romanian reviews, and has a good take:
Cartarescu‘s Solenoid is a sprawling, labyrinthine, and visionary novel that explores the main themes of identity, memory, creativity, and transcendence. The narrator, a frustrated writer and disillusioned teacher in Bucharest, recounts his life story, his dreams, his hallucinations, and his encounters with various eccentric characters and phenomena, such as a giant solenoid, a metal coil that escaping the oppressive and absurd conditions of his existence. He also reflects on his own personal and cultural history, his childhood traumas, his family secrets, his sexual and spiritual experiences, and his artistic aspirations. The novel is rich in intertextual and metaphysical references, ranging from Kafka, Borges, and Proust to Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Eastern mysticism. The novel challenges the conventional boundaries of genre, time, and space, creating a complex and original literary cosmos that blends realism, fantasy, horror, and science fiction.
I have been predicting this will be an amazing year for fiction, most of all fiction in translation, and so far it is off to a wonderful start. You can buy the book here.
What should I ask David Bentley Hart?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. David Gordon claims the guy has read more than David Gordon! Here is Wikipedia:
David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and Orthodox theologian noted for his distinctive, humorous, pyrotechnic and often combative prose style. With academic works published on Christian metaphysics, philosophy of mind, classics, Asian languages, and literature, Hart received the Templeton Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study in 2015 and organized a conference focused on the philosophy of mind. His translation of the New Testament was published by Yale in 2017 with a 2nd edition in 2023.
A prolific essayist, Hart has written on topics as diverse as art, baseball, literature, religion, philosophy, consciousness, problem of evil, apocatastasis, theosis, fairies, film, and politics. His fiction includes The Devil and Pierre Gernet: Stories (2012) as well as two books from 2021: Roland in Moonlight and Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale). Hart also maintains a subscription newsletter called Leaves in the Wind that features original essays and conversations with other writers such as Rainn Wilson, China Miéville, Tariq Goddard, and Salley Vickers. Hart’s friendship and substantial intellectual common ground with John Milbank has been noted several times by both thinkers.
So what should I ask him?
*The Soviet Century*
The author is Karl Schlögel, and the subtitle is Archaeology of a Lost World. Who else could have a whole chapter on Soviet-era doorknobs? This is a fascinating book about the material loose ends, the pamphlets, the clothes, the non-existent phone books, the shop signs, the chest medals, and the bric-a-brac — among many other items — of the Soviet Union. Excerpt:
…the centre of this city consisted of the largest steelworks in the world, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Plant.
Who would be able to describe the sight of it? There is no vantage point and no camera lens that would encompass the panorama that we know otherwise only from the sight of the forces of nature at work…
The conglomerate has an area of around twenty by ten kilometres. The Magnitogorsk combine is roughly the size of a region from Manchester to Sheffield, compressed into a single point, a Pittsburgh beyond the Urals. As Stephen Kotkin observed at the end of the 1980s, the Magnitogorsk engineering complex was far more than just a ‘steel factory’. It consisted of dozens of plants, ten mighty blast furnaces, thirty-four open hearth furnaces, rolling mills and finishing mills that produced more steel annually than Canada or Czechoslovakia and almost as much as the whole of Great Britain.
Over 800 pp. of text, this is in my view one of the better books for understanding the Soviet Union.
*The Individualists*
The authors are Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, and the subtitle is Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Due out April 4, pre-order now, here is my blurb:
“Zwolinski and Tomasi have written the definitive book about libertarian ideas reaching up to the present day. They show that libertarianism remains a vital and fascinating source of ideological energy and influence.”
Recommended.
What should I ask Simon Johnson?
Other than “why don’t you have a better Wikipedia page?” Here is one excerpt:
Simon H. Johnson…is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management… From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund. He is the author of the 2010 book 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown along with James Kwak, with whom he has also co-founded and regularly contributes to the economics blog The Baseline Scenario.
He has an extensive publication record, including in political economy, economic history, and economic growth, he studied earlier Russian reforms, and he has books on science policy (with Jonathan Gruber) and the national debt (with Kwak). Most notably his forthcoming book is with Daron Acemoglu and is titled Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, due out in May. He is a Brit of course.
So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Brad DeLong
Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the summary:
Tyler and Brad discuss what can really be gleaned from the fragmentary economics statistics of the late 19th century, the remarkable changes that occurred from 1870–1920, the astonishing flourishing of German universities in the 19th century, why investment banking allowed America and Germany to pull ahead of Britain economically, what enabled the Royal Society to become a force for progress, what Keynes got wrong, what Hayek got right, whether the middle-income trap persists, his favorite movie and novel, blogging vs. Substack, the Slouching Towards Utopia director’s cut, and much more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What do you take to be the best understanding of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, if indeed you view it as a 17th-century revolution?
DELONG: I always think Joel Mokyr is absolutely magnificent on this. I think he understates the role that having printing by movable type played in creating the community of scientific practice and knowledge seeking.
There’s one thing that happens that is extremely unusual. Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can have enough. Which means that, principally, politics and governance are going to be some elite constituting itself and elbowing other elites out of the way, and then finding a way to run a force-and-fraud domination and exploitation scheme on society so that they at least can have enough. When Proudhon wrote in 1840s that property is theft, it was not metaphor. It was really fact.
What does this elite consist of? Well, it’s a bunch of thugs with spears, the people who have convinced the thugs with spears that they’re their bosses, and their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. Which means, most of the time, when you have a powerfully-moving-forward set of people thinking about ideas, whether the idea is true is likely to be secondary to whether the idea is useful to helping me keep my place as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.
This is a point I’ve stolen from Ernest Gellner, and I think it is very true. Yet, somehow, the Royal Society decides, no. The Royal Society decides nothing except through experiment — what we are going to demand that nature tell us, or tell one of us, or at least someone writes us a letter saying they’ve done the experiment about what is true. That is a miraculous and completely unexpected transformation, and one to which I think we owe a huge amount.
Many interesting points are discussed.
UK fact of the day
As of 2017 we [Brits] spent about 5.6 per cent of national income on benefits for those in old age against 7.1 per cent in the US, 7.7 per cent across the OECD as a whole, 10 per cent in Germany and more than 13 per cent in France.
And yet the country is still in economic troubles. In any case, that is from the new and excellent Paul Johnson book Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost? This book talks you through both the tax expenditure side of the British government budget. It is not quite thrilling, but given the topic area it is remarkably interesting and well-executed. And while the authors is not without his own ideas, the book is more to inform you than to propagandize you.
You can buy it here. There should be many more books just like this one, but for different topics — take note!
“Frank Herbert’s Dune”
This chapter examines Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic Dune from the perspectives of economic history and institutional economics.
Predictions from *Average is Over*
My book is from 2013, here are some of the key predictions:
1. Increases in the power and generality of artificial intelligence will prove a major breakthrough within a foreseeable time period.
2. Labor market returns will accrue to individuals capable and willing to work with such services.
3. Resources and land are going to significantly increase in economic value, as they will remain relatively scarce.
4. Marketing will continue to rise in relative importance.
5. Managerial and “soft skills” will continue to increase in importance for earnings.
6. What we now call “quiet quitting” will be a thing.
7. At many corporations it will be possible to dismiss large numbers of workers without any decline in output.
8. Cheating with AI will arise as an issue of major importance, starting with cheating in chess, and the work of Kenneth Regan will turn out to be significant.
9. AI assessments of everything will rise in importance.
10. AI will produce more and more outputs that are so smart we will not be able to evaluate them as humans.
11. Free or near-free effective on-line education soon would become available, though it will remain an open question how many individuals will be interested in learning from it.
12. Good teaching would evolve more toward coaching and mentorship, as information provision will be handled by AI.
13. Intelligent machines soon will become effective producers of science, yet how they arrive at their results will not be legible to us.
14. With the aid of AI, there will be a resurgence of amateur science.
15. Machine learning and its successors will take over economic research.
Of course not all of those predictions have come true, but many have or others are on the verge of realization. The subtitle of the book is Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.
*The Guest Lecture*
The author is Martin Riker, and this is a story about a jobless economics professor about to give a lecture. She is nervous, and her thoughts rapidly turn to Keynes, including his “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” essay. She ponders the problems of the world, her husband and daughter, and Keynes, Keynes, Keynes, chatting with him throughout. On pp.54-55 Deirdre McCloskey surfaces and plays a role in the story, which shifts to the scene of a trial.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but suffice to say there are some non-literal meanings of what is happening in these pages. Overall, this is one of the more significant modern examples of a very direct overlap of economics and fiction.
You can buy it here. Here are various reviews.
*The Time Travelling Economist*
The author is Charlie Robertson, and the subtitle is Why Education, Electricity and Fertility are Key to Escaping Poverty.
How come no one told me about this book before? Published in 2022 (in Switzerland), it is one of the best popular economics books of the last decade, and one of the best books on economic development period. People should talk about it more! And to be sure, that description “popular” is misleading. Like other good books in this genre, it is deeper and better than merely being “popular,” even if it does not itself present original research of the kind you might find in a journal.
Anyway, the core argument is reflected well in the subtitle, and here is one excerpt:
Electricity is an integral part of the investment story that all countries require to escape poverty and eventually progress to become rich. The commonly cited metric is that investment needs to be 25% of GDP and those that beat this, grow fast. In this chapter, we use electricity as a proxy for that investment target.
There are good insights throughout, for instance:
Many have high hopes for solar power in Nigeria, but one problem is keeping them secure. Solar panels might be at risk of theft to replace the expensive diesel generator that so many households have to rely on.
The author has considerable real world experience through his Global Chief Economist position at Renaissance Capital. Here is another good bit:
When fertility rates fall, country’s banking systems will get larger.
And:
A debt crisis is probably unavoidable in a bid to create jobs.
The author is bullish on Pakistan, North Africa, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda. For better or worse, some of those picks reflect the fact that “politics” does not feature directly in his key jumping-off points for growth. We will see.
There are various objections you can levy at this book, ranging from “lack of a fully specified model” (who has that anyway?) to “those factors are themselves endogenous to [fill in the blank].” I’ll just say that I have seen many a worse economic development book, and this one is not ideologically charged either.
You can order it here.