Category: Books

My Conversation with the excellent Sheilagh Ogilvie

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

Tyler and Sheilagh discuss the economic impacts of historical pandemics, the “happy story” of the Black Death and why it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, the history of variolation and how entrepreneurs created vaccination franchises in 18th-century England, why local communities typically managed epidemics better than central authorities, the dastardly nature of medieval guilds, the European marriage pattern and its disputed contribution to economic growth, when sustained economic growth truly began in England, why the Dutch Republic stagnated despite its early success, whether she agrees with Greg Clark’s social mobility hypothesis, her experience and conducting “anthropological fieldwork” on English social customs, the communitarian norms she encountered while living in Germany, her upcoming research project on European serfdom, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

OGILVIE: …If you were a teenager in an English village in the 18th century and you were deciding, “I’m going to move to London and get a job,” you and your friendship group from the village would all go into the nearest town and pay a commercial variolator. You’d all get smallpox together. You’d go back to your village. You’d suffer through this mild case of smallpox, and then you would be immunized for life, assuming that you hadn’t died. You would go off to London and seek your fortune. It was very much a normal teenage thing to do.

There was this incredible franchising set up in England. It was like a McDonald’s, but to get variolated. There were these entrepreneurs who advertised themselves as having lower-risk ways of getting immunized and cheaper ways of getting immunized. There was this famous family of the Suttons that started a franchise in 18th-century England in the 1750s. Then they spread into the continent of Europe and actually into North America.

COWEN: You would have done it back then?

OGILVIE: Oh, definitely.

COWEN: With enthusiasm.

And this:

COWEN: You’ve now lived in England for well over 30 years. What’s been your biggest surprise about the place, if anything has stuck?

OGILVIE: It keeps on surprising me. I’ve actually lived here for more than 46 years. I moved here as an undergraduate. I came here when I was 16, and I feel as if I’m still doing anthropological fieldwork on the behavioral patterns of these strange local tribes. There are these systematic things — they’re charming, but they’re very strange.

For instance, just to give one example, English people are very reserved. I get on with that because Canadians are fairly reserved as well. It’s okay to talk to people in your neighborhood if they have a dog with them. That’s a conversation mediator. Or if you are gardening in your front garden, but if you’re in your back garden, you’re not supposed to talk to people. It’s taken me a few decades to observe this as an empirical regularity.

Nobody ever tells you that this is how you’re supposed to behave, but if you keep your field notebooks going as an anthropologist, you begin to notice the tribal patterns of the English. I must like them, since here I still am after more than four decades.

Recommended.

Rebecca Yarros and the vibe shift

by  Tyler Cowen in

The New York Times has described her recent Onyx Storm as the bestselling adult book of the last twenty years, as the work sold 2.7 million copies in the first week of publication.  Out of curiosity I started the book, but it is not for me.  It feels like reading a computer game?  Grok 3 suggested it attempts to be “adrenaline-fueled,” with “vivid sensory details.”  The sex scenes are remarkably explicit for regular popular fiction.  The plot is centered around dragons (I did enjoy the first Paolini book).

According to the book jacket, Yarros “loves military heroes” and has six children.  One of them was first fostered, and then adopted.  She cofounded with her husband a non-profit to help kids in foster care.

And so the vibe shift continues.

That was then, this is now — Liverpool heliport edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

For a brief moment in the mid-1950s, it seemed as if Liverpool’s transportation system was about to be revolutionised, not by cars, trams, buses or ferries, but instead by helicopters.  As strange as it may seem, Liverpool was at the forefront of a flurry of interest from planners and politicians who imagined that an age of mass helicopter transit was just around the corner.  With their vertical life, small size and ability to land on the roofs of buildings, helicopters seemed ideal for short trips between and even within cities.  From 1953, Liverpool’s City Engineer, Henry Hough, began to draw up plans for a network of heliports that would connect seamlessly with buses and form the basis of an integrated ground and sky transit system…After flirting with the idea of using floating pontoons in the Mersey to land helicopters, he settled on plans for a new integrated bus and helicopter station on a patch of bombed ground between Paradise Street and Canning Place.

That is from the new Sam Wetherell book Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain.  All those plans ended, however, as the popularity of the car spread amongst Liverpool residents.

More broadly, the book has quite a bit of useful and interesting content, though reading it you would never realize that Liverpool today is a far wealthier place than in times past.  It seems always to be in decline.  There is also too much “fashionable left-wing jargon,” plus an unwillingness to stress that capital accumulation is what boosts wages.  Will books like this one ever be willing to shed those features?

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

David Sheff, Yoko: A Biography.  An excellent work, I view Yoko as a quite good visual and conceptual artist, a sometimes quite interesting but hard to listen to in any volume musical creator, and overall a pretty stunning woman.  Sheff has known Yoko well for decades, so you get a real sense of her from this book, even if you wonder that perhaps not all details are being reported.  I learned also that the same guy at Sarah Lawrence dated by Yoko and Sylvia Plath.

Diane Coyle has a new book coming out, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters.

Reviel Netz, Why the Ancient Greeks Matter: The Problematic Miracle that Was Greece. Uneven but periodically fascinating: “But science was but a small part of the Greek cultural sphere and it would be surprising if the overall contours of Greek cultural life could be explained through science alone. It seems much more promising to consider…what mattered the most to the Greeks themselves. This was their literary legacy: their canon.”

There is Michael M. Rosen, Like Silicon from Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.

And Jill Eicher, Mellon vs. Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War.

Edward Tenner, Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences, collects many earlier essays by the master.  From The American Philosophical Society Press, a new venture.

And there is James Grant, Friends Until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution.

I’ve also been reading “in the cluster,” trying to better understand what is sometimes called The Hundred Years War, between England and France.

The vanishing male writer

by  Tyler Cowen in

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

Here is more from Jacob Savage at Compact.

What should I ask Helen Castor?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her.  Here is Wikipedia:

Helen Ruth Castor FRSL (born 4 August 1968) is a British historian of the medieval and Tudor period and a BBC broadcaster. She taught history at the University of Cambridge and is the author of books including Blood and Roses (2004) and She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (2010). Programmes she has presented include BBC Radio 4‘s Making History and She-Wolves on BBC Four. Her most recent book is The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (2024).

I very much liked her last book in particular.  And here is a good interview with her.  So what should I ask her?

My excellent Conversation with Ezra Klein

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ezra is getting plenty of coverage for his very good and very on the mark new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance.  So far it is a huge hit after only a few days.  I figured this conversation would be most interesting, and add the most value, if I tried to push him further from a libertarian point of view (a sign of respect of course).  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

In this conversation, Ezra and Tyler discuss how the abundance agenda interacts with political polarization, whether it’s is an elite-driven movement, where Ezra favors NIMBYism, the geographic distribution of US cities, an abundance-driven approach to health care, what to do about fertility decline, how the U.S. federal government might prepare for AGI, whether mass layoffs in government are justified, Ezra’s recommended travel destinations, and more.

Lots of good back and forth, here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Here’s a question from a reader, and I’m paraphrasing. “I can see why you would favor Obamacare and an abundance agenda because Obamacare throws a lot more resources at the healthcare sector in some ways. It did have Medicare cuts, but nonetheless, it’s not choking the sector. But if you favor an abundance agenda, can you then possibly favor single-payer health insurance through the government, which does tend to choke resources and stifle innovation?”

KLEIN: I think it would depend on how you did the single-payer healthcare. Here, we should talk about — because it’s referenced glancingly in the book in a place where you and I differ — but the supervillain view that I hold and your view, which is that you should negotiate drug prices. I’ve always thought on that because I think in some ways, it’s a better toy example than single payer versus Obamacare.

I think you want to take the amount of innovation you’re getting very, very, very seriously. I’ve written pieces about this, that I think if you’re going to do Medicare drug pricing at any kind of significant level, you want to be pairing that with a pretty significant agenda to make drug discovery much easier, to make testing much easier.

And:

COWEN: What should the US federal government do to prepare for AGI? We should just lay off people, right?

KLEIN: [laughs] I would not say it that way. I wouldn’t say just lay off people. I think that’s some of what we’re doing.

COWEN: No, not just, but step one.

KLEIN: Do you think that’s step one? Do you buy this DOGE’s preparation-for-AGI argument that you hear?

COWEN: I think maybe a fifth of them think that. Maybe it’s step two or step three, but it’s a pretty early step, right?

KLEIN: I think that the question of AI or AGI in the federal government, in anywhere — and this is one reason I’ve not bought this argument about DOGE — is you have to ask, “Well what is this AI or AGI doing? What is its value function? What prompt have you given it? What have you asked it to execute across the government and how?”

Alignment, which we have primarily talked about in terms of whether or not the AI, the superintelligence makes us all into paperclips, is a constant question of just near-term systems as well. I think the question of how should we prepare for AGI or for AI in the federal government first has to do with deciding what we would like the AI or the AGI to do. That could be different things to different areas.

My sense — talking to a bunch of people in the companies has helped me conceptualize this better — is that the first thing I would do is begin to ask, what do I think the opportunities of AI are, scientifically and in terms of different kinds of discoveries…

And this:

COWEN: Let me give you another right-wing view, and tell me what you think. The notion that the most important feature of state capacity is whether a state has enough of its citizens willing to fight and die for it. In that case, the United States, Israel, but a pretty small number of nations have high state capacity, and most of Western Europe really does not because they don’t have militaries that mean anything. Is that just the number one feature of abundance in state capacity?

Recommended, obviously.

An Economic Approach to Homer’s Odyssey: Part III

by  Tyler Cowen in

Published by Liberty Fund, by me, here is the third and final installment.  Excerpt:

“Below is a brief and simplified catalog of the major polities described in The Odyssey:

  • • Pylos and Sparta: Visited by Telemachus, superficially seem normal but they seem sadder on reflection and Sparta relies on intoxication to support public order.
  • • Ogygia, or Calypso: An unbearable paradise, there is no utopia.
  • • Phaeacia: Relatively well-run, inward-looking, passive-aggressive, “control freak” syndrome.
  • • The Lotus Eaters: Another unbearable “utopia.”
  • • The Cyclopes: Anarchistic, brutish, and the community is ineffective and unable to defend itself.
  • • Aeolus: A closed society, based on incest, hostile to outsiders, a more extreme and dysfunctional version of Phaeacia.
  • • Laestrygonia: Giants, they throw boulders and murder, and in some ways resemble the Cyclopes. Tendencies toward anarchy are widespread, and not confined to the Cyclopes.
  • • Aeaea (Circe): There is the bed of tyrannical but beautiful Circe, or life as a well-fed pig. Again, utopias are impossible and immortality would bore us.
  • • Cimmeria: Dark, bleak, and unloved by God. Possibly the default setting.
  • • The Underworld: Everyone is sad (and dead), yet they talk like actual humans and also tell the truth. Lesson: the living cannot escape artifice and deception.
  • • Ithaca: Usually wrapped up in war and revenge-taking, chaotic and lacking in trust and lacking in clarity about sovereignty. This is another one of the default options.
  • • Syria: Initially prosperous but wrecked by the arrival of avaricious merchants. Unstable.
  • • Crete: A diverse society of perfect trust, within a narrative of Odysseus-in-disguise, but it has no chance of existing.”

My overall goal has been to pull out the implicit “public choice” strands in Homer’s Odyssey.  It is very much a poem about politics, and the book is among other things a study in comparative politics.

Do read the whole essay, and here are parts one and two.

Boettke on the Socialist Calculation Debate

by  Alex Tabarrok in

An excellent EconTalk episode with Pete Boettke on the socialist calculation debate.

I like Boettke on the three Ps.

The three Ps–property, prices, and profits and loss. Property incentivizes us. Prices guide us. Profits lure us to new changes and losses discipline us.

Today, “incentives matter” is often considered the first lesson of economics. But not so in the 1930-1940s.

Yeah, it’s so weird to read 1930s economics. Hayek’s colleague, H.D Dickinson, at LSE–when he teaches his course on economics of planning, his first statement is, ‘We will truck with no incentive talk here.’ Okay. Lange, in his famous paper on socialism, says that incentives are psychological problems and therefore not economic theory.

Pete’s new book on the socialist calculation debate with Candella and Truit is very good and available here.

My Conversation with Carl Zimmer

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

He joins Tyler to discuss why it took scientists so long to accept airborne disease transmission and more, including why 19th-century doctors thought hay fever was a neurosis, why it took so long for the WHO and CDC to acknowledge COVID-19 was airborne, whether ultraviolet lamps can save us from the next pandemic, how effective masking is, the best theory on the anthrax mailings, how the U.S. military stunted aerobiology, the chance of extraterrestrial life in our solar system, what Lee Cronin’s “assembly theory” could mean for defining life itself, the use of genetic information to inform decision-making, the strangeness of the Flynn effect, what Carl learned about politics from growing up as the son of a New Jersey congressman, and much more.

Here is an excerpt:

COWEN: Over time, how much will DNA information enter our daily lives? To give a strange example, imagine that, for a college application, you have to upload some of your DNA. Now to unimaginative people, that will sound impossible, but if you think about the equilibrium rolling itself out slowly — well, at first, students disclose their DNA, and over time, the DNA becomes used for job hiring, for marriage, in many other ways. Is this our future equilibrium, that genetic information will play this very large role, given how many qualities seem to be at least 40 percent to 60 percent inheritable, maybe more?

ZIMMER: The term that a scientist in this field would use would be heritable, not inheritable. Inheritability is a slippery thing to think about. I write a lot about that in my book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, which is about heredity in general. Heritability really is just saying, “Okay, in a certain situation, if I look at different people or different animals or different plants, how much of their variation can I connect with variation in their genome?” That’s it. Can you then use that variability to make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future? That is a totally different question in many —

COWEN: But it’s not totally different. Your whole family’s super smart. If I knew nothing about you, and I knew about the rest of your family, I’d be more inclined to let you into Yale, and that would’ve been a good decision. Again, only on average, but just basic statistics implies that.

ZIMMER: You’re very kind, but what do you mean by intelligent? I’d like to think I’m pretty good with words and that I can understand scientific concepts. I remember in college getting to a certain point with calculus and being like, “I’m done,” and then watching other people sail on.

COWEN: Look, you’re clearly very smart. The New York Times recognizes this. We all know statistics is valid. There aren’t any certainties. It sounds like you’re running away from the science. Just endorse the fact you came from a very smart family, and that means it’s quite a bit more likely that you’ll be very smart too. Eventually, the world will start using that information, would be the auxiliary hypothesis. I’m asking you, how much will it?

ZIMMER: The question that we started with was about actually uploading DNA. Then the question becomes, how much of that information about the future can you get out of DNA? I think that you just have to be incredibly cautious about jumping to conclusions about it because the genome is a wild and woolly place in there, and the genome exists in environments. Even if you see broad correlations on a population level, as a college admission person, I would certainly not feel confident just scanning someone’s DNA for information in that regard.

COWEN: Oh, that wouldn’t be all you would do, right? They do plenty of other things now. Over time, say for job hiring, we’ll have the AI evaluate your interview, the AI evaluate your DNA. It’ll be highly imperfect, but at some point, institutions will start doing it, if not in this country, somewhere else — China, Singapore, UAE, wherever. They’re not going to be so shy, right?

ZIMMER: I can certainly imagine people wanting to do that stuff regardless of the strength of the approach. Certainly, even in the early 1900s, we saw people more than willing to use ideas about inherited levels of intelligence to, for example, decide which people should be institutionalized, who should be allowed into the United States or not.

For example, Jews were considered largely to be developmentally disabled at one point, especially the Jews from Eastern Europe. We have seen that people are certainly more than eager to jump from the basic findings of DNA to all sorts of conclusions which often serve their own interests. I think we should be on guard that we not do that again.

And:

COWEN: If we take the entirety of science, you’ve written on many topics in a very useful way, science policy. Where do you think your views are furthest from the mainstream or the orthodoxy? Where do you have the weirdest take relative to other people you know and respect? I think we should just do plenty of human challenge trials. That would be an example of something you might say, but what would the answer be for you?

I very much enjoyed Carl’s latest book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Air We Breathe.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Eric Topol, Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity.  Longevity research goes mainstream!  Very clearly written, well argued, and focused on the science.  I cannot pretend to evaluate the details of the material, but this seems a step ahead of the other, typically less serious books on the same topic.

2. Daniel Dain, A History of Boston, 772 pp., clearly written and consistently interesting.  Most of all one receives the sense of Boston as a place with a long history of radical ideas.  Has it moved away from that tradition or cemented it in?  I find that more and more of America has little acquaintance with New England and its history, and this book is one good way to remedy that.  Remember Rt.128?  Paul Revere?

3. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.  A reasonable, evidence-based, non-crazy account of governance failures and excesses during the Covid crisis.  For me there was not so much new here, but I am glad to see saner voices moving into the discourse.

4. Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych, National Gallery of London.  If you want to learn about a historical figure (in this case Richard II), read a book about an art work associated with them.

5. Zaha Hadid, Complete Works 1979-Today.  Architecture, plus excellent preliminary sketches of the works.  The Weil am Rhein works are my favorite of what I have seen by her.  Exactly the kind of picture book that will become more valuable in an age of strong AI.  Here are seventeen buildings by her.

John McWhorter, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.  Mostly about actual pronouns, not the PC debates.

There is Paul Bluestein, King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World’s Dominant Currency.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

Alain Mabanckou, Dealing with the Dead.  Most African fiction does not connect with me, and there is a tendency for the reviews to be untrustworthy.  This “cemetery memoir,” from the Congo (via UCLA), connected with me and held my interest throughout.

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams.  I was in the mood of thinking I don’t need to read another book about these people.  Yet this one was so good it won me over nonetheless.

Eddie Huffman, Doc Watson: A Life in Music.  A fun book about one of America’s greatest guitarists.  Watson was blind from an early age, and he was collecting state disability benefits until he was 40 — a classic late bloomer.

Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor.  Call me crazy, but I think Sun Ra and Taylor are better and more important musically than say Duke Ellington.  Freeman’s book is the first full-length biography of Taylor, and it is well-informed and properly appreciative.  It induced me to buy another book by him.  The evening I saw Taylor was one of the greatest of my life, I thank my mother for coming with me.

Carlos M.N. Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible.  Ross Douthat recommended this one to me.  It is well done, and worth reading, but I don’t find it shifted my priors on whether “impossible” events might have really happened.

I agree with the central arguments of Samir Varma’s The Science of Free Will: How Determinism Affects Everything from the Future of AI to Traffic to God to Bees.  I was happy to write a foreword for the book.

Kathleen deLaski, Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Don’t Matter.  One of a growing chorus of books suggesting higher education is on the verge of some radical changes.

There is Daniel Brook, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld Visionary of Weimar Berlin.  It is good to see him getting more attention.

There is also Brandy Schillace, The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story.

Paul Millerd on AI and writing

by  Tyler Cowen in

I have been thinking a lot about this. Have been experimenting like a madman for two months

A few unhinged thoughts: – It’s a huge advantage to have a past body of work and style in terms of fine-tuning and training. It can help you understand your own style and keep evolving that over time independent of LLMs

– Vibe Writing will be a thing in 6-12 months if not the next couple of months. LLM suggest edits => accept. The biggest thing stopping this is reliable output based on an input/preferred vibe. It is getting CLOSE

– Much of the friction of writing, like getting stuck on sections/sentences/phrasing is basically gone. You can just prompt your LLM coach for alternatives to unstuck yourself

– LLMs will empower existing authors with audiences. LLMs will enable you to build your own team of people. An LLM developmental editor (slower reasoning models), a parter co-writer LLM for remixing and rewriting sentences, an LLM copyeditor and proofreader and LLM translator – its still so early but these are coming

– This leads to the fact that LLMs will increase the speed of writing. The time to first draft can be dramatically shortened. You can now generate really good writing that is similar to yours as a first draft

– Right now we have less books because its hard to write a damn book. As this gets easier, we’ll see more books, shorter books, and more creative collaborations

– just like music has such a fast production and relase cycle (singles dropping randomly) I think authors go this wway too.

– The reading experience obviously will change. Kindle will likely ship AI features in the next 2-3 years that will help you understand characters, refactor books to your preferences, and instantly translate to different languages / audio. Of couse the traditional publishing dinosaurs will lose their minds of this.

– Theres a huge opportunity for more reading devices clear AND a big opportunity for new direct to reader distribution (long self-publishing lol) – Text to voice will be instant and cheap too meaning the divide between reading/listening gets fuzzier

Here is the link, responding to the thoughts of David Perell immediately below.