Category: Books
Why Housing is Unaffordable: The Elasticity of Supply
We have a great new MRU video on housing and why it’s so expensive in many dynamic cities. The video is a good introduction to the economics and also to the politics of housing supply. A highlight is a wonderful animation illustrating how increasing demand coupled with inelastic supply leads to competitive bidding among buyers, driving up prices. Anyone teaching economics should take a look.
Of course, the video pairs perfectly with our textbook, Modern Principles. Indeed, this is the initial video in a two-part series exploring the elasticity of supply, transforming a traditionally mundane topic into a relevant and fun discussion. Check it out!
Charlie Munger, RIP
Age 99, the reissue of his Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger is due out December 5 from Stripe Press. And my planned CWT with him will have to be rescheduled…
EconGoat for Claude 2.1
Claude 2’s large context window and easy file upload feature have made this one of the best LLMs.
As of November 21, 2023, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1 has the largest context window of any of the leading LLMs. Paid users can upload and query up to around 150,000 words of text, more than enough to fit this 95,000 word book. But even the free plan allows you to analyze about 75,000 words, which in this book equates to about six chapters.
Here are more details on how to use Claude 2.1 to interrogate GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time, and Why Does It Matter?
*Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics*
The author of this excellent book is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and the subtitle is Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. One of the most interesting themes of this book is how life in rural Ireland became so “de-eroticized,” to use her word. Here is one bit:
Marriage in rural Ireland is, I suggest, inhibited by anomie, expressed in a lack of sexual vitality; familistic loyalties that exaggerate latent brother-sister incestuous inclinations; an emotional climate fearful of intimacy and mistrustful of love; and an excessive preoccupation with sexual purity and pollution, fostered by an ascetic Catholic tradition. That these impediments to marriage and to an uninhibited expression of sexuality also contribute to the high rates of mental illness among middle-aged bachelor farmers is implicit in the following interpretations and verified in the life history materials and psychological tests of these men.
And:
In the preceding pages I have drawn a rather grim portrait of Irish country life, one that differs markedly from previous ethnographic studies. Village social life and institutions are, I contend, in a state of disintegration, and villagers are suffering from anomie, of which the most visible sign is the spiraling schizophrenia. Traditional culture has become unadaptive, and the newly emerging cultural forms as yet lack integration. The sexes are locked into isolation and mutual hostility. Deaths and emigrations surpass marriages and births.
Recommended. This seminal book, republished and revised in 2001, but originally from the 1970s, would be much harder to write and publish today.
Best non-fiction books of 2023
In the order I read them, more or less, rather than in the order of preference. And behind the link usually you will find my earlier review, or occasionally an Amazon link:
Erika Fatland, High: A Journey Across the Himalaya Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China.
Adam Kuper, The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions.
Paul Johnson, Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost?
Murray Pittock, Scotland: A Global History.
Reviel Netz, A New History of Greek Mathematics.
Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege.
David Edmonds, Derek Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.
Peter Lee, Carey Goldberg, and Isaac Kohane, The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond.
Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi,
Sebastian Edwards, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism.
Martyn Rady, The Central Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe.
Norman Lebrecht, Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces.
Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter.
Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex.
Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849.
Fearghal Cochrane, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People.
Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.
Mikhail Zygar, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.
Jeremy Jennings, Travels with Tocqueville: Beyond America.
Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.
David Brooks, How to Know Others: The Art of Seeing Others and Being Deeply Seen.
Jonny Steinberg, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage.
Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World.
Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
Larry Rohter, Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist.
Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022.
Tyler Cowen, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?
It is hard to pick out 2 or 3 favorites this year, as they are all excellent. I am partial to David Edmonds on Parfit, but a lot of you already know you should be reading that. Perhaps my nudge is most valuable for Jonny Steinberg, Winny and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage? So that is my pick for the year!
As usual, I will issue an addendum at the end of the year, because I will be reading a lot between now and then. I haven’t even received my 1344-pp. Jonathan Israel biography of Spinoza yet. Here is my earlier list on the year’s fiction. And apologies for any of your books I have forgotten to list, there are always some such cases.
*Lineages of the Feminine*
That is the new book by Emmanuel Todd, subtitled An Outline of the History of Women and mostly on the feminization of society. It does not cohere, and spends too much time wallowing in pseudo-anthropology, but it has a number of interesting bits. Here is from the preface:
The feminist revolution is a great thing (I’m an ordinary Westerner on the point) but we are not yet able to see how much the emancipation of women has radically altered the whole of our social life. Because we always see women as minors, as victims, we do not place them, for better or for worse (i.e., like men) at the centre of our history: they are the protagonists, for example, in the rejection of racism and homophobia, but they are also the unconscious protagonists of our neoliberalism, or deindustrialization and our inability to act collectively….we must accept that the inequalities between human beings in general, in the West, have increased at the same rate as the decrease in inequalities between men and women
The original pointer was from Arnold Kling’s review.
What is your favorite book that no one else you know likes?
I do mean no one. You have to really like this book, have no other friends or colleagues who like it, and still think the book is very good, not just the product of your own contrarian snottiness.
I have my pick: Nancy Scheper Hughes’s 1992 study Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil.
Part of the GPT-4 summary runs as follows:
The central premise is the apparent paradox that mothers in this region seem to accept the death of their infants without the expected level of grief or weeping. Scheper-Hughes explores the sociocultural and economic factors that have led to a situation where such high infant mortality is normative and somewhat “accepted” as a part of life. This acceptance is a survival mechanism in a context where the death of children is so common due to factors such as malnutrition, dehydration, and lack of adequate healthcare.
It’s not that I know people who reject this book, rather I don’t currently know anyone who would read a 556-page work on medical anthropology/conflict studies in northern Brazil.
A long time ago, I would have nominated Rene Girard here, perhaps Theatre of Envy. But he has since grown in popularity.
What are your picks, and why?
*Look Again*
The authors are Tali Sharot and Cass Sunstein, and the subtitle is The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. Excerpt:
The day is known as Högertrafikomläggningen, which translates to “the right-hand traffic diversion,” or H-day for short. It was the day Sweden changed from driving on the left side of the road to the right. The move was initiated to align Sweden with the other Scandinavian countries. The fear was that drivers would get confused, turning the wrong way or getting too close to other cars when attempting to overtake them. That would seem to be a perfectly reasonable fear. Surprisingly, however, the switch did not result in a rise in motor accidents, On the contrary, the number of accidents and fatalities plunged! The number of motor insurance claims went down by 40 percent.
A very interesting book, recommended, due out in February.
Bill Conerly at Forbes reviews GOAT
GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? is an intriguing book by the well-known economist Tyler Cowen in which he tries to determine who is the greatest economist of all time. This book will be enjoyed not only by economists but also those interested in understanding the world of people and their interactions. Importantly, the book emphasizes the non-financial implications of economic analysis in areas such as friendship, community and aesthetics…
In a startling advance for book publishing, GOAT comes with a chatbot in which a user can ask the AI to answer questions related to the book. In writing this review, I used the chatbot to refresh my memory about Tyler’s criteria for greatness and for examples of non-financial concerns. The chatbot uses the same technology that enables AI to answer specialized questions for customer service by accessing a company’s owners’ manuals, returns policy and troubleshooting guides.
Here is the full review.
My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Burns
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode description:
Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, provides a nuanced look into the influential economist and public intellectual.
Tyler and Jennifer start by discussing how her new portrait of Friedman caused her to reassess him, his lasting impact in statistics, whether he was too dogmatic, his shift from academic to public intellectual, the problem with Two Lucky People, what Friedman’s courtship of Rose Friedman was like, how Milton’s family influenced him, why Friedman opposed Hayek’s courtesy appointment at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s attitudes toward friendship, his relationship to fiction and the arts, and the prospects for his intellectual legacy. Next, they discuss Jennifer’s previous work on Ayn Rand, including whether Rand was a good screenwriter, which is the best of her novels, what to make of the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, how Rand and Mises got along, and why there’s so few successful businesswomen depicted in American fiction. They also delve into why fiction seems so much more important for the American left than it is for the right, what’s driving the decline of the American conservative intellectual condition, what she will do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s the future of Milton Friedman, say, 30, 40 years from now? Where will the reputation be? University of Chicago is no longer Friedmanite, right? We know that. There are fewer outposts of Friedmanite-thinking than there had been. Will he be underrated or somehow reinvented or what?
BURNS: Let me look into my crystal ball. I don’t think the name will have faded. I think there are still names that people read. People still read Keynes and Mill and figures like that to see what did they say in their day that was so influential. I think that Friedman has got into the water and into the air a bit. I do some work on tracing out his influence.
Within economics, no one’s going to say, “Oh, I’m a Friedmanite,” or fewer people are, but this is someone whose major work was done half a century or more ago, so I don’t think that’s surprising. It would be surprising if economics had been at a standstill as Friedman still called the tune. When you think about the way we accord importance to the modern Federal Reserve, of course, there were things that happened in the world, but Friedman’s ideas did so much to shape that understanding.
He’s still in policymakers’ minds. He’s still in the monetary policy establishment’s minds, even if they’re not fully following him. I think we’re in the middle of a big reckoning now. You saw all the debate about M2 and the pandemic and monetary spending. I don’t know where it’s all going to settle out. It’s a more complicated world than the one that Friedman looked at. I tend to think he is an essential thinker, that the basics of what he talked about are going to be known 50 years from now, for sure.
COWEN: Did Milton Friedman have friends?
Definitely recommended, and Jennifer’s new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is one of my favorite books of the year. It will likely stand as the definitive biography of Friedman.
Malthus was smarter than you think, vice and prostitution edition
That is a passage from my new book GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?
So one way to read Malthus is this: if a society is going to have any prosperity at all, the people in that society either will be morally quite bad, or they have to be morally very, very good, good enough to exercise that moral restraint. Alternatively, you can read Malthus as seeing two primary goals for people: food and sex. His accomplishment was to show that, taken collectively, those two goals could not easily be obtainable simultaneously in a satisfactory fashion. In late Freudian terms, you could say that eros/sex amounts to the death drive, but again painted on a collective canvas and driven by economic mechanisms.
Malthus also hinted at birth control as an important social and economic force, especially later in 1817, putting him ahead of many other thinkers of his time. Birth control was widely practiced for centuries through a variety of means, and Malthus unfortunately was not very specific. He did call it “unnatural,” and the mainstream theology of his Anglican church condemned it, as did many other churches. But what did he really think? Was this unnatural practice so much worse than the other alternatives of misery and vice that his model was putting forward? Or did Malthus simply fail to see that birth control could be so effective and widespread as it is today? It doesn’t seem we are ever going to know.
From Malthus’s tripartite grouping of vice, moral restraint, and misery, two things should be clear immediately. The first is why Keynes found Malthus so interesting, namely that homosexual passions are one (partial) way out of the Malthusian trap. The second is that there is a Straussian reading of Malthus, namely that he thought moral restraint, while wonderful, was limited in its applicability. So maybe then vice wasn’t so bad after all? Is it not better than war and starvation?
I don’t buy the Straussian reading as a description of what Malthus really meant. But he knew it was there, and he knew he was forcing you to think about just how bad you thought vice really was. Malthus for instance is quite willing to reference prostitution as one possible means to keep down population. He talks about “men,” and “a numerous class of females,” but he worries that those practices “lower in the most marked manner the dignity of human nature.” It degrades the female character and amongst “those unfortunate females with which all great towns abound, more real distress and aggravated misery are perhaps to be found, than in any other department of human life.”
How bad are those vices relative to starvation and population triage? Well, the modern world has debated that question and mostly we have opted for vice. You thus can see that the prosperity of the modern world does not refute Malthus. We faced the Malthusian dilemma and opted for one of his options, namely vice. It’s just that a lot of us don’t find those vices as morally abhorrent as Malthus did. You could say we invented another technology that (maybe) does not suffer from diminishing returns, namely improving the dignity and the living conditions those who practice vice. Contemporary college dorms seem pretty comfortable, and they have plenty of birth control, and of course lots of vice in the Malthusian sense. While those undergraduates might experience high rates of depression and also sexual violation, that life of vice still seems far better than life near the subsistence point. I am not sure what Malthus would think of college dorm sexual norms (and living standards!), but his broader failing was that he did not foresee the sanitization and partial moral neutering of what he considered to be vice.
Written by me, recommended, and open source at the above link.
A GPT for GOAT?
I took a few minutes to create a GPT configured as similarly as possible to the original EconGOAT GPT-4 assistant. Try it out, contrast and compare, and see if you can build a better one! https://t.co/gt8kvmoG1T
— Jeff Holmes (@Jeff_Holmes) November 13, 2023
Also linked here.
That was then, this is now
…the first German pogroms of the modern age, the so-called Hep-Hep riots, took place in 1819. Jews were attacked on the streets and Jewish stores were ransacked. It was a new and as yet unknown phenomenon in the German-speaking lands. The riots were led by students, ostensibly the anti-absolutist and progressive force in German society.
That is from Shlomo Avineri’s Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State. Here is a new bulletin from MIT.
What I’ve been reading
1. Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. An excellent history of U.S. trade publishing, and not the sort of anti-capitalist mentality snark you might be expecting from the title. Recommended, for those who care.
2. Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World. It’s not the same kind of deep explanation as Toulmin or Schorske, nonetheless an excellent survey and introduction to the miracles of Viennese science, philosophy, and culture, earlier in the 20th century. I enjoyed this very much.
3. Peter Kemp, Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction. Is this an actual book, or just some smart guy running off at the mouth and writing what he really thinks? Would I prefer the former? No!
4. Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. It is getting harder and harder to find good popular science books, due to exhaustion of the major topics, but this is one of them. I kept on seeing reviews of this book, and not buying it due to fears of pandering. But most of this book is genuinely illuminating and on a wide range of biological topics, most of all how the female body is different. Ovaries, menopause, differences in brains — you’ll find it all here. Furthermore, the book does not drown in political correctness. Recommended.
5. Larry Rohter,
Note also that Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence is coming out in April, likely to be very good. I haven’t seen it yet.
You heard, saw, and read it here first
“Try my chat app” becomes the new “check out my podcast” https://t.co/fHHJhwuAJI
— Jeff Holmes (@Jeff_Holmes) November 7, 2023