Category: Books
*Steven Weinberg: A Life in Physics*
A fun book, I enjoyed the read. Here is one bit:
There is another contribution to my productivity. While sitting at my desk at home doing physics or preparing classes, or doing some science writing, I picked up the habit of watching classic movies or the History Channel on television. My TV is always turned on in its corner of my desk. Doing the two things at once doubles the value of my time. And the movie keeps ne gnawing at a problem in physics when I might otherwise have knocked back my chair and decamped in frustration.
And:
At this time, Louise [his wife] literally saved my life. Through my friendship with Bernie Feld, I found myself welcome at, and attending, international meetings of various experts on the problems of the international order. Louise understood the situation better than I did. She advised me to have nothing further to do with Bernie’s world, if I wanted to get anything done in physics. She made me see that this was a world of disheartened older men giving themselves something important-looking to do, but that I was an optimistic young man with real work to do. I do not exaggerate when I confess that she saved my life.
You can order it here.
An Economic Approach to Homer’s Odyssey: Part II
My three-part essay for Liberty Fund continues, here is the opener:
In the previous article, I outlined what an economic approach to reading Homer’s epic, The Odyssey,1 might look like. I also noted that what most strikes me about The Odyssey is Homer’s treatment of comparative political regimes. Looking at the wide variety of regimes Odysseus encounters is the focus of this article.
Given that human behavior, at least in The Odyssey, can be understood in terms of the non-standard assumptions described in my previous essay, what are then the possible states of affairs? Which polities might we look to for arranging human interactions and maintaining political order? Utopia is not readily achieved, not only because of material constraints, but also because human behavior is too restless and too desirous of alternative states of affairs. A straightforward order based on political virtue is also beyond human grasp, again because it clashes with the nature of human beings as we understand them. What then might fit with a vision of humans as restless, intoxicating, deceiving, and self-deceiving creatures? The travel explorations of The Odyssey can be understood as, in part, an attempt to address this question.
I will now consider the major and some of the minor polities described by The Odyssey, roughly in the order they appear in the story.
The discussion starts with Pylos and Sparta…
How the System Works
Charles Mann is worried that so few of us have any notion of the giant, interconnected systems that keep us alive and thriving. His new series, How the System Works at the The New Atlantis, is a primer to civilization. As you might expect from Mann, it’s beautifully written with arresting facts and images:
The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.
…Water, food, energy, public health — these embody a gloriously egalitarian and democratic vision of our society. Americans may fight over red and blue, but everyone benefits in the same way from the electric grid. Water troubles and food contamination are afflictions for rich and poor alike. These systems are powerful reminders of our common purpose as a society — a source of inspiration when one seems badly needed.
Every American stands at the end of a continuing, decades-long effort to build and maintain the systems that support our lives. Schools should be, but are not, teaching students why it is imperative to join this effort. Imagine a course devoted to how our country functions at its most basic level. I am a journalist who has been lucky enough to have learned something about the extraordinary mechanisms we have built since Jefferson’s day. In this series of four articles, I want to share some of the highlights of that imaginary course, which I have taken to calling “How the System Works.”
We begin with our species’ greatest need and biggest system — food.
and here’s one telling fact from the first essay:
Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”
Addendum: Tom Meadowcroft from the comments: I teach chemical engineers, who are expert at understanding, designing and managing processes, and will be running many of these civilizational processes after they graduate. Even amongst that group of very bright thinkers, there is remarkably little knowledge as to how we achieve clean water, reliable electricity, fuel for transport and industry, dispose of sewage, and grow and distribute food. These same young adults can all tell you about colonial mindsets, how the world is going to burn, and how various groups are victimized. Our K-12 education system has very warped priorities and remarkably ignorant people at the front of the classroom.
Dwarkesh’s Question
One question I had for you while we were talking about the intelligence stuff was, as a scientist yourself, what do you make of the fact that these things have basically the entire corpus of human knowledge memorized and they haven’t been able to make a single new connection that has led to a discovery? Whereas if even a moderately intelligent person had this much stuff memorized, they would notice — Oh, this thing causes this symptom. This other thing also causes this symptom. There’s a medical cure right here.
Shouldn’t we be expecting that kind of stuff?
It’s a very good question. In 2023, I quipped, “I think they have, we just haven’t asked them.” Maybe, but less clear today. Dwarkesh reports that there have been no good answers.
New York City fact and poetic passage of the day
If the coastline of the New York Harbor region were stretched out, it would be longer than the state of California. New York City’s waterfront is bigger than those of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston combined. As vast as it is, the area that is officially known as the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary is even more staggering in its complexity, encompassing such a concatenation of inlets, margins, banks, strands, runnels, rivers, reefs, rivulets, coves, creeks, and kills; of brooks, basins, bays, shoals, shores, islands, islets, and peninsulas, of jetties, bluffs, heights, scallops, spits, crags, beaches, reaches, bends, bights, channels, sandbars, sounds, and points, as to be virtually unmatched in the United States.
That is from the new and fun book by Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America.
The Licensing Racket
I review a very good new book on occupational licensing, The Licensing Racket by Rebecca Haw Allensworth in the WSJ.
Most people will concede that licensing for hair braiders and interior decorators is excessive while licensing for doctors, nurses and lawyers is essential. Hair braiders pose little to no threat to public safety, but subpar doctors, nurses and lawyers can ruin lives. To Ms. Allensworth’s credit, she asks for evidence. Does occupational licensing protect consumers? The author focuses on the professional board, the forgotten institution of occupational licensing.
Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.
Ms. Allensworth conducted exhaustive research for “The Licensing Racket,” spending hundreds of hours attending board meetings—often as the only nonboard member present. At the Tennessee board of alarm-system contractors, most of the complaints come from consumers who report the sort of issues that licensing is meant to prevent: poor installation, code violations, high-pressure sales tactics and exploitation of the elderly. But the board dismisses most of these complaints against its own members, and is far more aggressive in disciplining unlicensed handymen who occasionally install alarm systems. As Ms. Allensworth notes, “the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”
She finds similar patterns among boards that regulate auctioneers, cosmetologists and barbers. Enforcement efforts tend to protect turf more than consumers. Consumers care about bad service, not about who is licensed, so take a guess who complains about unlicensed practitioners? Licensed practitioners. According to Ms. Allensworth, it was these competitor-initiated cases, “not consumer complaints alleging fraud, predatory sales tactics, and graft,” where boards gave the stiffest penalties.
You might hope that boards that oversee nurses and doctors would prioritize patient safety, but Ms. Allensworth’s findings show otherwise. She documents a disturbing pattern of boards that have ignored or forgiven egregious misconduct, including nurses and physicians extorting sex for prescriptions, running pill mills, assaulting patients under anesthesia and operating while intoxicated.
Read the whole thing.
*Atlantic Cataclysm*
The author is David Eltis and the subtitle is Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades. Here is one summary passage:
While Europe’s role in the slave trade may have been secondary it can scarcely be described as minor. The traffic was broadly based, with ninety-six European ports dispatching at least one voyage to Africa. Almost every port large enough to initiate transoceanic trade participated in the business. Owners, their employees and, most important, the public had unquestioning support for the business until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The Portuguese and Spanish created the Atlantic slave-trading system, and they were the last to abandon it. They dispatched more voyages and carried off far more enslaved women and men than did the British throughout the era.
Eltis also writes:
Generally, the new data reveals a sense of equality between buyer and seller on the African littoral, at least until late in the slave trade era…Africanists have yet to take on board new population estimates for African regions in 1850 and match these with new estimates of the exodus of people that are now available. It now seems unlikely that outside influences transformed the nature of slavery in Africa.
And note:
…only four other jurisdictions in the Americas received more African captives than Barbados.
A very useful and important book on what is (yes) still a topic underrated in import.
My excellent Conversation with Ross Douthat on God and religion
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. I am very glad Ross flew down from Connecticut to do it, we ended up cutting about 2x the normal length. Here is part of the episode summary:
Ross joined Tyler to discuss what getting routed by Christopher Hitchens taught him about religious debate, why the simulation hypothesis resembles ancient Gnostic religion, what Mexican folk Catholicism reveals about spiritual intermediaries, his evolving views on papal authority in the Francis era, what UFO sightings might tell us about supernatural reality, why he’s less apocalyptic than Peter Thiel about the Antichrist, and why he’s publishing a fantasy novel on Substack before AI potentially transforms creative writing.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: In general, you weigh personal testimony higher than I do. Let me see if you can talk me into it a bit. Something is recorded in data sensors and confirmed across multiple sensors. Maybe I don’t know what it is, but I’ll believe there’s something there. But if people say X, Y, and Z — there’re all sorts of religions neither you nor I would sign onto, and plenty of humans who will assert, insist that there’s direct evidence for that particular religion.
The story of Joseph Smith, the plates from LDS would be one example, but there’re plenty of religions that don’t even exist anymore, where there’re very particular stories that people have attested to. We really do dismiss them in the numbers of the tens of millions or maybe even billions. So, if we’re willing to dismiss all those stories, isn’t David Hume right? We should not dismiss the stories, but they’re not going to budge us out of a more commonsensical worldview.
DOUTHAT: Yes. I don’t dismiss all of those stories. I guess that’s part of my strong departure from Humean assumptions. I think that certainly there are fakes and frauds and charlatans in religion, and there are people who are just sincerely mistaken, who think that they had a religious experience when really, they have a diagnosis or they should get a diagnosis of some form of mental illness or insanity.
At the same time, I think that the wide range of attested spiritual, just frankly bizarre experiences that human beings have — of which, UFO encounters are a subset — that, again, has familiar antecedents going back millennia — I think we should take those seriously and have a theory of what they are that is more complex than fraud meets insanity meets delusion.
Part of this is just knowing people who’ve had those kinds of experiences, reading a lot about those kinds of experiences — not just in my own tradition, but in other religious traditions. I think that they correspond to something real, even if the interpretation that people give to them is wrong or deluded or misguided. I don’t think that Joseph Smith was in fact chosen by God to restore the lost truths about Jesus Christ, polygamy, and the ancient civilizations of the New World. I don’t think that’s true.
Do I think that Joseph Smith didn’t have some weird supernatural encounter? I’m less confident about saying that. The same would go . . . I don’t think that Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets. Do I think that Muhammad either hallucinated or made it all up? Again, I’m certainly much less confident than you would be in saying that. I do not —
COWEN: It’s almost an Islamic doctrine you’re holding. There are these various tiers of prophets, and they’re imperfectly right, but they’re getting at the divine.
DOUTHAT: Yes. I think any coherent theory of supernatural experience — given what you can encounter just by reading William James — has to say either there’re infinite realms of deception out there . . . This is something that some religious believers would say. There’s one subset of totally authentic, trustworthy religious experiences, and then there’s a vast realm where it’s all demonic deception.
Or you have to say that there’s just a range of ways in which people encounter God and the supernatural that do get filtered through cultural assumptions and through — I don’t want to say imperfect prophets — let’s just say imperfect human beings. And that helps yield the diversity of religions in the world today.
But you can also see patterns in those things like near-death experiences. The range — there is cross-cultural variation in near-death experiences. If you have a near-death experience as a Tibetan Buddhist, you are more likely to see the Buddha. If you have a near-death experience as a Catholic, you’re more likely to maybe see an archangel or a Catholic saint or something. But at the same time, there are some pretty clear commonalities to suggest that people in Tibet and people in Indiana are having the same kind of experience when they die and are resuscitated and report the lights, the tunnel, all the strange things associated with those experiences.
Yes, there’s a challenge here, obviously, for any kind of dogmatic religion. You do have to figure out, “Okay, why is there this consistency but also this variation?” But there’s also a challenge for the Humeans to say, “Well, we’re just writing off this fairly consistent cross-cultural realm of human experience because it’s all supposed to be myth and hallucination?” The people who have these experiences are not generally the kinds of people who you would describe as prone to hallucination and insanity. There are of course cases, but that’s not the norm.
On the Humean point — if you go back and read Hume, he doesn’t exactly say this, but you really have the strong impression that Hume thinks that once you get rid of established religious authorities and the universal teachings of antique stories from the Bible, that a big swath of supernatural stuff will just go away. Now, he says humans still —
Interesting throughout, definitely recommended. And again, I am happy to recommend Ross’s new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious.
What should I ask Sheilagh Ogilvie?
She is a Canadian economic historian at Oxford, here is from her home page:
I am an economic historian. I explore the lives of ordinary people in the past and try to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. I’m interested in how social institutions – the formal and informal constraints on economic activity – shaped economic development between the Middle Ages and the present day.
And:
My current research focusses on serfdom, human capital, state capacity, and epidemic disease. Past projects analysed guilds, merchants, communities, the family, gender, consumption, finance, proto-industry, historical demography, childhood, and social capital. I have a particular interest in the economic and social history of Central and Eastern Europe.
Here is her Wikipedia page. Her book on guilds is well known, and her latest is Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid. Here are her main research papers.
So what should I ask her?
What I’ve been reading
Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism. A very good short book, defending “left wing modernism,” a much maligned target on the right these days. Hatherley himself is a much underrated figure, a commie who came along at the wrong time but a very good writer and thinker about aesthetics.
Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination. For whatever reason, there are more good books about the Congo than most other parts of Africa. This is one of them. From 2023, but good enough to make a “best of non-fiction” list for a typical year. Very cleanly written as well.
Charles Callan Tansill, The Purchase of the Danish West Indies. Who would have thought that this 1966 volume, and Tansill, would be making a comeback? The biggest lesson for me here was how much the purchase was a live issue as early as 1867. And as the final purchase approached in 1917, the other European powers were by no means happy.
Richard Overy, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan is a short but very good and substantive look at the non-nuclear and also nuclear bombing campaigns.
Michael Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin. A surprisingly fresh and substantive book, which also does a good job integrating the first-person perspective of the author. I’ve read the standard biographies of Shostokovich, Prokofiev, and the like, and still learned a lot from this one.
There is Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis.
Molly Worthen, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump is a very good book on an underexplored topic. In some ways tech has mattered less than you might think.
Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip. A fun and well-informed look at its subject matter. There should be more books on one of the world’s most valuable companies, and yes here supply is elastic.
Marc Hijink, Focus: The ASML Way, Inside the Power Struggle Over the Most Complex Machine on Earth. You have to already want to read a book about ASML, but this is in fact the relevant book about ASML. To call it boring is to miss the point, because the company itself is somewhat boring.
Jeanette zu Furstenberg, Wie gut wir sind, zeigt sich in Krisenzeiten: Ein Weckruf. Exactly the wake-up call Germany needs.
Rainer Zitelmann, The Origins of Poverty and Wealth: My World Tour and Insights from the Global Libertarian Movement is a kind of travel memoir from a man who has become one of our most prolific writers on behalf of liberty.
And I was reading my own short commentary on Atlas Shrugged, from a few years ago.
*The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power*
By Amy Sall. I love this picture book, or should I say photo book? Most of it is reproductions of photographs from the “golden age” of African photography, with profiles of each major photographer, plus a section on cinema as well.
One very good way to find “a picture book for you” is to visit a good museum bookshop, in this case for me it was the Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. Look around at the books with images. Find one that intrigues you, and then buy it, take it home and read and look through it. Do note this might cost 2x a normal book, but on average it is more than 2x better. It will open up whole new worlds. And it is not something your GPT is able to do (yet), though of course you can follow up with queries.
You can order the book here.
Keynes on the Soviet Union
I had not known of this passage, which I am packaging with its introduction from Gavan Tredoux:
John Maynard Keynes has the undeserved reputation of a critic of the USSR. Few know that he reviewed Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s mendacious tome The Soviet Union: a New Civilization (1935/1937/1943) fawningly. Perhaps the most embarrassing thing Keynes ever wrote. From his Complete Works 28:
“One book there is … which every serious citizen will do well to look into—the extensive description of Soviet Communism by Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb. It is on much too large a scale to be called a popular book, but the reader should have no difficulty in comprehending the picture it conveys. Until recently events in Russia were moving too fast and the gap between paper professions and actual achievements was too wide for a proper account to be possible . But the new system is now sufficiently crystallised to be reviewed. The result is impressive. The Russian innovators have passed, not only from the revolutionary stage, but also from the doctrinaire stage. There is little or nothing left which bears any special relation to Marx and Marxism as distinguished from other systems of socialism. They are engaged in the vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully over a territory so extensive that it covers one sixth of the land surface of the world. Methods are still changing rapidly in response to experience. The largest scale empiricism and experimentalism which has ever been attempted by disinterested administrators is in operation. Meanwhile the Webbs have enabled us to see the direction in which things appear to be moving and how far they have got. It is an enthralling work, because it contains a mass of extraordinarily important and interesting information concerning the evolution of the contemporary world. It leaves me with a strong desire and hope that we in this country may discover how to combine an unlimited readiness to experiment with changes in political and economic methods and institutions, whilst preserving traditionalism and a sort of careful conservatism, thrifty of everything which has human experience behind it, in every branch of feeling and of action.”
So no, sorry, Keynes cannot be GOAT.
The forward march of computer use, AI edition
I must admit, though, that the thing that scared me most about HudZah was that he seemed to be living in a different technological universe than I was. If the previous generation were digital natives, HudZah was an AI native.
HudZah enjoys reading the old-fashioned way, but he now finds that he gets more out of the experience by reading alongside an AI. He puts PDFs of books into Claude or ChatGPT and then queries the books as he moves through the text. He uses Granola to listen in on meetings so that he can query an AI after the chats as well. His friend built Globe Explorer, which can instantly break down, say, the history of rockets, as if you had a professional researcher at your disposal. And, of course, HudZah has all manner of AI tools for coding and interacting with his computer via voice.
It’s not that I don’t use these things. I do. It’s more that I was watching HudZah navigate his laptop with an AI fluency that felt alarming to me. He was using his computer in a much, much different way than I’d seen someone use their computer before, and it made me feel old and alarmed by the number of new tools at our disposal and how HudZah intuitively knew how to tame them.
It also excited me. Just spending a couple of hours with HudZah left me convinced that we’re on the verge of someone, somewhere creating a new type of computer with AI built into its core. I believe that laptops and PCs will give way to a more novel device rather soon.
That is from Ashlee Vance, the entire story is very interesting.
*On the Calculation of Volume, I and II*
Thoee two novels by Solvej Balle, a Danish author, are now available in English. Conceptually, they are close to time travel novels (I should not tell you the actual nature of the twist), but with more literary value than you might be expecting.
Every now and then a new book comes along that is conceptual, fascinating, fun to read, good on human psychology, and in literary terms very well done. The Balle books qualify there. Each is also quite short, though the second half of each volume is better than the first, so there is a return to patience (to be clear, the first halves, or maybe thirds, are fine, but the true points are revealed only with some time).
There are some implicit economic and even crypto themes in the work, though I doubt if the author is aware of them.
So I recommend these, and will not go near potential spoilers.
*In Praise of Floods*, James C. Scott does Uncle Boonmee?
That is the new James C. Scott book, from Yale University Press. It focuses on Burma [sic], and I found this to be the most typical and illustrative sentence:
Several of the commentators evaluating this book in manuscript noticed that the section of river spirits (nats) and the much larger section describing the eco zones, hydrology of the Ayeyarwady, and the mapping of major human interventions represent something of a rupture from the preceding narrative on rivers.
Also:
One central purpose of this book is not only to recognize the animated liveliness of the river and its tributaries, but also to give voice to all the flora and fauna whose lifeworld centers around the river.
One section of the book is narrated from the first-person perspective of a river dolphin.
This is an essential book for understanding Scott. And from the preface we read:
The book before you contains more disjunctions than I would have preferred.
Scott was a great man and scholar, and this book reminds you that many such people are really quite weird, in the good sense of course. You can pre-order it here.