Category: Books

My Conversation with the excellent Jonny Steinberg

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg’s particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee’s journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist’s emotional insight.

Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons,  why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren’t foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: My favorite book of yours again is Winnie and Nelson, which has won a number of awards. A few questions about that. So, they’re this very charismatic couple. Obviously, they become world-historical famous. For how long were they even together as a pair?

STEINBERG: Very, very briefly. They met in early 1957. They married in ’58. By 1960, Mandela was no longer living at home. He was underground. He was on the run. By 1962, he was in prison. So, they were really only living together under the same roof for two years.

COWEN: And how well do you feel they knew each other?

STEINBERG: Well, that’s an interesting question because Nelson Mandela was very, very in love with his wife, very besotted with his wife. He was 38, she was 20 when they met. She was beautiful. He was a notorious philanderer. He was married with three children when they met. He really was besotted with her. I don’t think that he ever truly came to know her. And when he was in prison, you can see it in his letters. It’s quite remarkable to watch. She more and more becomes the center of meaning in his life, his sense of foundation, his sense of self as everything else is falling away.

And he begins to love her more and more, and even to coronate her more and more so that she doesn’t forget him. His letters grow more romantic, more intense, more emotional. But the person he’s so deeply in love with is really a fiction. She’s living a life on the outside. And you see this very troubling line between fantasy and reality. A man becoming deeply, deeply involved with a woman who is more and more a figment of his imagination.

COWEN: Do you think you learned anything about marriage more generally from writing this book?

STEINBERG: [laughs] One of the sets of documents that I came across in writing the book were the transcripts of their meetings in the last 10 years of his imprisonment. The authorities bugged all of his meetings. They knew they were being bugged, but nonetheless, they were very, very candid with each other. And you very unusually see a marriage in real time and what people are saying to each other. And when I read those lines, 10 different marriages that I know passed through my head: the bickering, the lying, the nasty things that people do to one another, the cruelties. It all seemed very familiar.

COWEN: How is it you think she managed his career from a distance, so to speak?

STEINBERG: Well, she was a really interesting woman. She arrived in Johannesburg, 20 years old in the 1950s, where there was no reason to expect a woman to want a place in public life, particularly not in the prime of public life. And she was absolutely convinced that there was no position she should not occupy because she was a woman. She wanted a place in politics; she wanted to exercise power. But she understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to do that was through a man. And she went after the most powerful rising political activists available.

I don’t think it was quite as cynical as that. She loved him, but she absolutely wanted to exercise power, and that was a way to do it. Once she became Mrs. Mandela, I think she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy. She understood herself to be South Africa’s leader by virtue of being married to him, and understood his and her reputations as her projects to endeavor to keep going. And she did so brilliantly. She was unbelievably savvy. She understood the power of image like nobody else did, and at times saved them both from oblivion.

COWEN: This is maybe a delicate question, but from a number of things I read, including your book, I get the impression that Winnie’s just flat out a bad person…

Interesting throughout, this is one of my favorite CWT episodes, noting it does have a South Africa focus.

What should I ask Dan Wang?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, I will be doing a podcast with him.  Dan first became famous on the internet with his excellent Christmas letters.  More recently, Dan is the author of the NYT bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.

Here is Dan Wang on Wikipedia, here is Dan on Twitter.  I have known him for some while.  So what should I ask him?

*The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny*, now finished

by  Tyler Cowen in

This novel took me a long time to read, mostly because it was so good (and pretty long at about 660 pp.).  It keeps on getting better and more closely knit together, requiring additional levels of attention.  Apart from being an entrancing story and beautifully written, it is the best fiction I know on:

The near-metaphysical difficulties of immigrant assimilation

The strength and pull of Indian culture

The difficulties of escaping one’s own romantic past, most of all for women

The growing attitude gap between men and women in matters of romance

What Indians bring to America from “the old country,” whether they wish to or not

Loneliness in cosmopolitan modern life, and why it is so difficult to escape

The novel has multiple layers, and by the time you finish you realize the earlier story has a somewhat different meaning than you were thinking all along.  Desai pulls this off very well.  So this one is still recommended.  Here is a very good Adam Mars-Jones LRB review, really a masterful piece, noting it is full of spoilers.

What should I ask Andrew Ross Sorkin?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  From Wikipedia:

Andrew Ross Sorkin (born February 19, 1977) is an American journalist and author. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service published by The New York Times. He wrote the bestselling book Too Big to Fail and co-produced a movie adaptation of the book for HBO Films. He is also a co-creator of the Showtime series Billions.

In October 2025, Sorkin published 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation, a new history of the Crash based on hundreds of documents, many unpublished.

Most of all I am interested in his new book, but not only.  So what should I ask him?

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

Terry Eagleton, Modernism: A Literature in Crisis.  The book is short, its quality unevenly distributed, and the subtitle misleading (plenty of it is not about literature).  It remains the case that Eagleton is one of the people who knows enough that he is almost always worth reading.

Jonathan Healey, The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642.  What I found so compelling about this book was the step-by-step narrative of how the whole thing collapsed into very direct conflict and then an execution.  Recommended.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.  I’m not the sort of person to recommend these sorts of anti-tech books (they are a dime a dozen), but if you have to read one of them…this is maybe the most coherent, non-ridiculous, and philosophically oriented, in the good sense of course?

David Nasaw, The Wounded Generaton: Coming Home After World War II.  A good book showing just how much post-traumatic stress disorder there was during and after WWII.

Marc S. Ryan, The Healthcare Labyrinth: A Guide to Navigating Health Plans and Fixing American Health Insurance is a very good and balanced book on the economics of health care.

Benjamin Schneider, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution.  How do we make urban transformation succeed in America’s largest and most important cities?  What are the main obstacles to such success?  Schneider calls for resurrecting the “lost art of city-building” to achieve abundant housing, good public transit, and streets for people instead of cars.

Helen Vendler, Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays.  She wrote these for Leon Wieseltier’s magazine, and they are now collected after her passing.  Self-recommending.

And there is Cynthia Paces, Prague: The Heart of Europe.

*Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new Helen C. Epstein book, which I found very instructive and useful.  My main wish is that it would be longer, in any case here is one very interesting excerpt of many:

If Nunavut, the semi-autonomous Canadian territory that is home to roughly 28,000 indigenous Inuit people, were an independent country, it would have the highest suicide rate in the world.  The suicide rate in Greenland, whose population is mostly Inuit, is 85 per 100,000; next highest is Lithuania, at 33 per 100,000.  Nunavut’s rate is 100 per 100,000, ten times higher than the rest of Canada and seven times higher than the US.  When I visited Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit, in July, virtually every Inuit I met had lost at least some relative to suicide, and some recounted as many as five or six family suicides, plus those of friends, co workers ,and other acquaintances.  Three people in my small circle of contacts lost someone close to them to suicide during my nine-day visit.  Acquaintances would direct my attention to passersby on the street: “his older brother too,” “his son.”  Almost one-third of Nunavut Inuit have attmpted suicide, and most Inuit I met confided, without my asking that had done so at least once.

This book also is important for understanding the key phenomenon of negative emotional contagion.

*Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Kim Bowes, this is an excellent book, the best I know of on ordinary economic life in the Roman empire.  It also shows a very good understanding of economics, unlike some forays by archeologists.  Here is one excerpt:

On the income side, we’ve seen that unskilled wages, which were very low indeed, were also a very bad proxy for income.  Wages were usually part of a portfolio of income, a portfolio that all family members contributed to, but one still centered on own production — either farming or textile/artisanal work.  Unskilled wages supplemented own-production; they mostly weren’t equivalent to it.  Roman wagges, unlike modern wages, can’t be used as a proxy for income.

Gross income from own-production, particularly farming, appears to have been much higher than previously supposed.  Rotation strategies practiced by Italian and Egyptian farmers meant that per-hectare outputs were many times greater than alternate fallow models predicted, since outputs included not only wheat but also significant quantities of fodder and animals.  In the northwest provinces, where rotation was less common, outputs per hectare were lower but still included some hay and larger animal herds.  And every, high settlement densities and shrinking amounts of land would have urged farmers to achieve higher yields — in some places three or more times greater than previously supposed.  We can’t be sure they managed this, only that low yields would have been mostly unteanble and that farmers had the tools — rotation, manuring, weeding — to achieve higher ones.

Most working class Romans, by the way, bought their clothing rather than having to make it themselves.

Recommended, you can pre-order it here.

*The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny*, by Kiran Desai

by  Tyler Cowen in

I read all the glowing reviews, and concluded it was the kind of book I probably would regard as overrated and to me dull.  Then I started reading it, as indeed I will experiment and sample such things.  The reviews are in fact warranted, and this is a fictional masterpiece.  It is also further evidence for our current literary golden age.

You can order it here.

My excellent Conversation with George Selgin

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and George discuss the surprising lack of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the New Deal, whether revaluing gold was really the best path to economic reflation, how much Glass-Steagall and other individual parts of the New Deal mattered, Keynes’ “very sound” advice to Roosevelt, why Hayek’s analysis fell short, whether America would’ve done better with a more concentrated banking sector, how well the quantity theory of money holds up, his vision for a “night watchman” Fed, how many countries should dollarize, whether stablecoins should be allowed to pay interest, his stake in a fractional-reserve Andalusian donkey ownership scheme, why his Spanish vocabulary is particularly strong on plumbing, his ambivalence about the eurozone, what really got America out of the Great Depression, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: But once we revalue gold, as you know, starting in 1933, you have manufacturing-output growth rates of 7 percent to 8 percent until we screw it up later on with some disinflationary pressures. How much better could we have done? Wasn’t that a pretty good performance?

SELGIN: It was pretty good, but it didn’t last very long. In fact, the New Dealers knew that it wouldn’t last very long. There are a couple of reasons why.

First of all, there was a big burst of output that was connected to the expectation that the NRA, the National Recovery Administration, was going to be coming into effect, because it was one of the early New Deal measures. It was going to artificially raise prices through controls. There was a boom that was based only on manufacturers’ desires to jump the gun and buy inputs and produce inventory before their own costs went up. That was part of the story.

Of course, when you’re coming out from the deepest depths of a depression with a banking crisis and all that, you would expect rather rapid growth to follow from the stabilization of the banking situation itself. I don’t want to deny that there was genuine progress during those early months of the New Deal, and I don’t want to deny that the New Dealers deserve credit for much of it, but it didn’t last. Of course, we all know it didn’t last.

Beyond that first period, once the NRA and associated programs for price controls kicked in, things started to slow down very rapidly. What kept the progress going after that — though at a slower rate — was mostly gold starting to rush in from Europe. It was rushing in only initially because of devaluation. After that, it was mostly rushing in because of fears of the consequences of Hitler coming to power and the possibility of war breaking out.

That’s the story of the early phase of the New Deal: a good start that didn’t last that long, except as a result of help from abroad that was quite unintentional help.

COWEN: Was revaluing the gold price the best way of reflating the economy? Because there were many proposals at the time. You shut down the domestic gold market as well. Could it have been done better?

SELGIN: Yes, it could have been done better. I think that what should have happened was immediate devaluation of the dollar. It was clear by the time Roosevelt took office, the gold standard, as it had been, had to be at least suspended because the New York banks had run out of gold essentially. That was not something there was much choice about.

Then the question was, “Okay, what are we going to do going forward?” As I said, what I think they should have done was to just plan on a devaluation of the dollar, get it over with as quickly as possible. You don’t announce that plan before you’ve suspended gold payments because that’s just going to make the run on gold worse. Once you’ve suspended, then you can go ahead and proceed with the devaluation.

What Roosevelt did was to engage in this crazy gold purchase program for quite a few months, based on a harebrained theory by a fellow named George Warren, who was very influential. They toyed with the price of gold. The theory was that if you raise the price of gold, other prices will start going up. Didn’t happen. Eventually, after many months, general prices had hardly risen at all.

Finally, Roosevelt picked a value for the dollar, a proper devaluation. Confirmed it, put it into effect, and at that point, things started to improve. That’s what should have happened.

By the way, this is as good a time as any to mention, this is what Keynes would have recommended and did recommend. He scolded or criticized Roosevelt for following Warren’s theories instead. I think that on this and many other scores, Keynes’s advice about dealing with the Depression was actually very sound. The myth is that Roosevelt was following it when, in fact, most of the time, he wasn’t.

Recommended, informative throughout.  I am happy to recommend George’s new and excellent book False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947.  Plus George now owns a rather large number of donkeys…

The Economics Nobel goes to Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Nobel prize goes to Joel Mokyr, the economic historian of the industrial revolution and the growth theorists Phillippe Aghion and Peter Howitt best known for their Schumpeterian model of economic growth.

Here’s a good quote from Nobelist Joel Mokyr’s the Lever of Riches.

Yet the central message of this book is not unequivocally optimistic . History provides us with relatively few examples of societies that were technologically progressive. Our own world is exceptional, though not unique, in this regard. By and large, the forces opposing technological progress have been stronger than those striving for changes. The study of technological progress is therefore a study of exceptionalism, of cases in which as a result of rare circumstances, the normal tendency of societies to slide toward stasis and equilibrium was broken. The unprecedented prosperity enjoyed today by a substantial proportion of humanity stems from accidental factors to a degree greater than is commonly supposed. Moreover, technological progress is like a fragile and vulnerable plant, whose nourishing is not only dependent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short. It is highly sensitive to the social and economic environment and can easily be arrested by relatively small external changes. If there is a lesson to be learned from the history of technology it is that Schumpeterian growth, like the other forms of economic growth, cannot and should not be taken for granted.

Aghion and Howitt’s Schumpeterian model of economic growth shares with Romer the idea that the key factors of economic growth must be modelled, growth is thus endogenous to the model (unlike Solow where growth is primarily driven by technology, an unexplained exogenous factor). In Romer’s model, however, growth is primarily horizontally driven by new varieties whereas in Aghion and Howitt growth comes from creative destruction, from new ideas, technologies and firms replacing old ideas, technologies and firms.

Thus, Aghion and Howitt’s model lends itself to micro-data on firm entry and exit of the kind pioneered by Haltiwanger and others (who Tyler and I have argued for a future Nobel). Economic growth is not just about new ideas but about how well an economy can reallocate production to the firms using the new ideas. Consider the picture below, based on data from Bartelsman, Haltiwanger, and Scarpetta. It shows the covariance of labor productivity and firm size.  In the United States highly productive firms tend to be big but this is much less true in other economies. In the UK during this period (1993-2001) the covariance of productive and big is considerably less than half the rate in the United States. In Romania at this time the covariance was even negative–indicating that the big firms were among the least productive. Why? Well in Romania this as the end of the communist era when big, unproductive government run behemoths dominated the economy. As Romania moved towards markets the covariance between labor productivity and firm size increased. That is the economy became more productive as it reallocated labor from low productivity firms to high productivity firms.

Aghion and Howitt’s work centers on how new ideas emerge and how creative destruction turns those ideas into real economic change through the birth and death of firms. But creative destruction is never painless—growth requires that some firms fail and that labor be displaced so resources can flow to new, more productive uses. Aghion and Howitt will likely point to the United States as dealing with his process better than Europe. Business dynamism has declined in Europe relative to the United States, a worrying fact given that business dynamism has also declined in the United States. Nevertheless, the US has a more flexible labor market and appears more open to both the birth of new firms (venture capital) and the deaths of older firms. Yet, in both the United States and around the the world the differences between high productivity and low productivity firms appears to be growing, that is the dispersion in productivity is growing which means that the good ideas are not spreading as quickly as they once did. Aghion and Howitt’s work gives us a model for thinking about these kinds of issues–see, for example, Ten Facts on Business Dynamism and Lessons from Endogenous Growth Theory.

Ian Smith’s memoir *Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes he used to run Rhodesia, and yes it is costly to buy this book because no one wants to reprint it, for obvious reasons.  Nonetheless it is a fascinating look into an era and its dissolution.

Smith is a wonderful writer, and remarkably erudite, more so than virtually any politician today.  He also is delusional almost beyond belief.  As the title of the memoir indicates, the story is all about the different parties who betrayed him.  The British, the South Africans, and also some of his fellow Rhodesians.  He blames almost everybody else, without considering the possibility that the Rhodesian system of “one white for every seventeen blacks, and without equal rights” (as was the ratio circa 1960) simply was never going to work.

He calls the Rhodesian human rights record “impeccable,” but you will find another perspective from GPT-5.

He loves to inveigh against South African apartheid, which he considered very bad publicity for the broader project of civilizing the southern cone of the African continent.  He insisted that Rhodesia had nothing similar.

Unlike many contemporary writers, he often is willing to tell you what he really thinks, for instance:

Hilgar Muller certainly put on a good performance, full of drama and emotion, the kind of thing these foreign-affairs types have got to perfect if they are going to do their job.  He need not have bothered as far as I was concerned, for I am far too experienced and down to earth to be influenced by such tactics.

The closest he ever comes to blaming himself, his party, or his decisions is when he writes:

Our crime was that we had resisted revolutionary political change.

Or he writes:

I myself certainly prefer having dealings with some of these honest-to-goodness black people, than with the two-faced liberals of the Labour Party or the Fabian Society.

“Recommended” is not exactly the word I wish to use here, but I can report that I read the whole thing.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking.  A very good book, perhaps the best introduction to Kant?  Though for me it is mostly interior to my current knowledge set.

Matthew Bell, Goethe: A Life in Ideas.  A beautiful book, now in English we have Nicholas Boyle’s work and also this.  Bell is wise enough to understand and value Iphigenia auf Tauris, a good test for Goethe appeciation.  Although I had a library copy out to read, I went ahead and bought a copy of this one to own.

Benjamin Wilson, Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex is both interesting and has plenty of information on early Thomas Schelling and his precursors.

Very well researched is The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China, by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, with Claire Cousineau.

Peter Baxter, Rhodesia: A Complete History 1890-1980.  The most complete history of the country I have been able to find.  Many of the other books contain a few dominant, non-false narratives, but one gets tired of that?  I say LLMs come especially in handy for learning this history.

Luka Ivan Jukic, Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea.  I took this sentence to encapsulate the main lesson of the book, namely that this does not usually work: “Central Europeans were, as ever, masterfully adept at rearranging polities into new configurations.”

I enjoyed Maxim Samson, Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, From the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way.

My excellent Conversation with John Amaechi

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  As I said on Twitter, John has the best “podcast voice” of any CWT guest to date.  Here is the episode summary:

John Amaechi is a former NBA forward/center who became a chartered scientist, professor of leadership at Exeter Business School, and New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders, argues that leadership isn’t bestowed or innate, it’s earned through deliberate skill development.

Tyler and John discuss whether business culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated, what rituals leadership requires, the quality of leadership in universities and consulting, why Doc Rivers started some practices at midnight, his childhood identification with the Hunchback of Notre Dame and retreat into science fiction, whether Yoda was actually a terrible leader, why he turned down $17 million from the Lakers, how mental blocks destroyed his shooting and how he overcame them, what he learned from Jerry Sloan’s cruelty versus Karl Malone’s commitment, what percentage of NBA players truly love the game, the experience of being gay in the NBA and why so few male athletes come out, when London peaked, why he loved Scottsdale but had to leave, the physical toll of professional play, the career prospects for 2nd tier players, what distinguishes him from other psychologists, why personality testing is “absolute bollocks,” what he plans to do next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Of NBA players as a whole, what percentage do you think truly love the game?

AMAECHI: It’s a hard question to answer. Well, let me give a number first, otherwise, it’s just frustrating. 40%. And a further 30% like the game, and 20% of them are really good at the game and they have other things they want to do with the opportunities that playing well in the NBA grants them.

But make no mistake, even that 30% that likes the game and the 40% that love the game, they also know that they like what the game can give them and the opportunities that can grow for them, their families and generation, they can make a generational change in their family’s life and opportunities. It’s not just about love. Love doesn’t make you good at something. And this is a mistake that people make all the time. Loving something doesn’t make you better, it just makes the hard stuff easier.

COWEN: Are there any of the true greats who did not love playing?

AMAECHI: Yeah. So I know all former players are called legends, whether you are crap like me or brilliant like Hakeem Olajuwon, right? And so I’m part of this group of legends and I’m an NBA Ambassador as well. So I go around all the time with real proper legends. And a number of them I know, and so I’m not going to throw them under the bus, but it’s the way we talk candidly in the van going between events. It’s like, “Yeah, this is a job now and it was a job then, and it was a job that wrecked our knees, destroyed our backs, made it so it’s hard for us to pick up our children.”

And so it’s a job. And we were commodities for teams who often, at least back in those days, treated you like commodities. So yeah, there’s a lot of superstars, really, really excellent players. But that’s the problem, don’t conflate not loving the game. And also, don’t be fooled. In Britain there’s this habit of athletes kissing the badge. In football, they’ve got the badge on their shirt and they go, “Mwah, yeah.” If that fools you into thinking that this person loves the game, if them jumping into the stands and hugging you fools you into thinking that they love the game, more fool you.

COWEN: Michael Cage, he loved the game. Right?

But do note that most of the Conversation is not about the NBA.