Category: Books
Good sentences
This leads us to the next of Freud’s major contributions to neuroscience: his realization that cognition is, at bottom, wishful.
That is from the new and notable Mark Solms, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. This is a good book for people who underrated Freud, or think he is a mere charlatan.
What I’ve been reading
1. Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid. This history book actually tries to explain to the reader how things were. Oh such books are so rare! (Why is that?) Definitely recommended, written at the very end of the apartheid era which gives it yet another angle of interest.
2. Nic von Wielligh and Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn, The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Programme. I had been looking for a book on this topic for a long time, and finally I found the right one in a South African bookshop. They did build six atomic bombs, almost seven, and this is the story of how that started and was later reversed. Hundreds of pages of substantive detail, and I had not realized how much the conflict in Angola, and Cuban/Soviet involvement, was a major factor in the whole episode.
3. David Stuart, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya. We keep on learning lots about the Maya, and this is the best book to follow what has been going on. Well-written and clear, and it does not numb your mind with details you may not care about.
4. Mark B. Smith, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991. I am seeing an increasing number of excellent books on what the Soviet Union really was. This one is well written, broad in scope, and yet rich in detail, treating the covered era as a living, breathing time in human history. It makes the time and place imaginable. The book also goes a long way toward disaggregating different Soviet eras, rather than just the end of Stalinism.
5. Kevin Hartnett, The Proof is in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI. A very useful book about the history of proving math theorems by computer.
My very interesting Conversation with Arthur C. Brooks
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you’ll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that’s not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI’s effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he’s reading Josef Pieper, how he’ll face death, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What do you think of the view that books on happiness or the meaning of life, they’re a kind of placebo? They don’t help directly, but you feel you’ve done something to become happier, and the placebo is somewhat effective.
BROOKS: I think that there’s probably something to that, although there’s some pretty interesting new research that shows that the placebo effect is actually not real. Have you seen some of that new research?
COWEN: Yes, but I don’t believe it. Nocebos also seem to work in many situations.
BROOKS: I know. I take your broader point. I take your broader point. I think that the reason for that is that when people read most of the self-improvement literature, not just happiness literature, what happens is that they get a flush of epiphany, a new way of thinking. That feels really good. That feels really inspirational. The problem is it doesn’t take root.
It’s like the seeds that are thrown on a path in the biblical parable. They don’t go through the algorithm that I just talked about, and so not all of these things can be compared. I would not have gotten into this line of research and this line of teaching if I thought that it was just going to add another book to a long line of self-improvement books that make people feel good but don’t ultimately change their lives.
COWEN: Say a person reads a new and different book on happiness once a year at the beginning of the year. Now, under the placebo view, that’s a fine thing to do. It’ll get you a bit happier each year. Under your view, it seems there’s something wrong. Isn’t the placebo view doing a bit better there? You should read a book on happiness every year, a different one. It’ll revitalize you a bit. Whether or not it’s new only matters a little.
BROOKS: Yes. It might remind you of some things that you knew to be the truth that you had fallen away from. One of the things that I like to do is I like to read a good book by one of the church fathers, for example. They’re more or less saying the same thing. It reminds me of something that I learned as a boy and that I’ve forgotten as an adult. It might actually remind me to come back to many of these practices and many of these views.
I think that there are real insights. There’s real value that can come from science-based knowledge about how to live a better life. I think that you and I are both dedicated to science in the public interest and also science in the private interest as well. I think there is some good to be gotten through many of these ideas. Not all. Once again, not all happiness literature is created equal.
And:
COWEN: Why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months rather than your last 18 months? Do intertemporal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sasse probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he’s done a remarkable job, even publicly, of coming to terms with what’s happening. Isn’t that better than two years of the same?
And:
COWEN: I think it’s fair to say what we call the right wing in America, it’s become much, much more Trumpy. Does this shift you to the left or make you question what the right wing was to begin with, or do you just feel lost and confused, or do you say, that’s great, I’m more Trumpy, too? How have you dealt with that emotionally and intellectually?
BROOKS: Yes. I’ll answer, but you’re going to have to answer after me, will you?
COWEN: Sure.
Interesting throughout.
Sentences to ponder
This matters for the AI question, and the book leaves it unfinished. If the breakthroughs of the past required social conditions, not just cognitive capacity, then what does it mean when the next breakthroughs are produced by systems that have no social conditions at all? A neural net does not need a university chair or financial independence from the church. It does not need to reorganize its commitments. It does not, in any recognizable sense, have commitments. The machine that replaces the marginalist is not a better marginalist. It is a different kind of thing entirely.
That is from Jônadas Techio, presumably with LLMs, this review of The Marginal Revolution is interesting throughout. And this:
Maybe the book demonstrates only that Cowen personally remains good at something the field no longer needs.
What should I ask Andrew Graham-Dixon?
He is one of the world’s leading art critics, all of his books are excellent, and he has a new and very good work coming out titled Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found. He also has a well-known book on Caravaggio, on Michelangelo, and I am especially fond of his book on British art.
Here is his Wikipedia page. Here is his home page. So what should I ask him?
Henry Oliver calls it a Swiftian ending
To The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, here is the very close of the book:
There is however a slightly scarier version of this story yet. Maybe our intuitions about the world, including the economic world, were never so strong in the first place. Maybe we put so much value on “intuitive” results, in 20th century microeconomics, as a kind of cope and also security blanket, to make up for this deficiency. But our intuitions, even assuming them to be largely correct, always were just a small corner of understanding, swimming in a larger froth of epistemic chaos. And now the illusion has been stripped bare, and the true complexities of economic reasoning are being revealed.
As Arnold Kling would say, “Have a nice day.”
Can I say again “Have a nice day”?
My excellent Conversation with Paul Gillingham
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler calls Paul Gillingham’s new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single best introduction to the country’s past—and one of the best nonfiction books of 2026. Paul brings both an outsider’s eye and ground-level knowledge to Mexican history, having grown up in Cork — a place he’d argue gave him an instinctive feel for fierce local autonomy and land hunger —earning his doctorate on the Mexican Revolution under Alan Knight at Oxford, and doing his fieldwork in the pueblos of Guerrero.
He and Tyler range across five centuries of Mexican history, from why Mexico held together after independence when every other post-colonial superstate collapsed, to why Yucatán is now one of the safest places on earth, what two leaders from Oaxaca tell us about Mexican politics, how Mexico avoided the military coups that plagued the rest of Latin America, what Cárdenas’s land reform actually achieved versus what it promised, whether the ejido system held Mexico back, why Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital, how Mexico’s fertility rate fell below America’s, why Guerrero has been violent for two centuries, why the new judicial reforms are a disaster, where to find the best food in Mexico and Manhattan, what a cache of illicit Mexican silver sitting on a ship in the English Channel has to do with his next book, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, after independence in 1821, why did not the rest of Mexico fragment the way Central America did a few years later, where it splits off from the Mexican empire? What determines the line? What sticks together with Mexico, and what does not?
GILLINGHAM: That’s a very good question because it’s one of the things that really makes Mexico stand out in that period, those histories, is that after independence, the rest of the Americas, you get a series of super-states. You get Gran Colombia, which is most of the Andes, and going across what’s now Venezuela. You get the United Provinces of the Rio Plate. These are huge, very difficult to conceive of super-states, and they fail within a decade. Elsewhere, you look at other post-colonial states, thinking particularly of India, within a couple of years, you’re fragmented and failed. Mexico doesn’t. Mexico actually stands up with the exceptions you put of Central America, which is formally part of it, in fact, but leaves within short order.
It’s one of these questions of what Álvaro Enrigue calls the miracle that Mexico exists. To explain it is a paradox. To make a try at it, I think that there is a common theme in Mexican history, which runs across most of those five centuries, which is a remarkable degree of hands-off government. It’s imposed. Mexico has a lot of mountains. It’s very difficult to rule from any central pole. Savvy governments, or governments with no choice, which are quite often the same thing, are very hands-off. Federalism is built into Mexico’s soul. I think that’s one of the reasons, from early on, Mexico actually out-punches the rest of the Americas in terms of sticking together as a territorial unit.
COWEN: As you know, in the early 19th century, there are rebellions in Yucatán, the Caste Wars, but Yucatán does not split off from Mexico. What keeps that together?
GILLINGHAM: Yucatán has always felt itself to be a different country, effectively, and that runs through to the present. You can see the cultural reasons, obviously, and the Maya and the other great, sophisticated urban culture of the 16th century and before. It makes sense that they should feel themselves very different from the rest of what becomes Mexico. In fact, it comes through in small but revealing ways. Back in the 20th century, people find themselves being asked whether they want a Yucatán beer or a foreign beer, and a foreign beer being anything in Mexico outside Yucatán.
Why doesn’t Yucatán leave? I think that it came extremely close. In fact, there’s a moment in the 1840s when Mexico and Texas form an alliance, and Texas is chartering warships out to Yucatán to try and prevent any naval incursions. Why on earth does Yucatán stay? I think it’s because of the absence of an alternative capital, because Yucatán is profoundly racially divided. It’s one of the few places in Mexico where you could say that really is a fairly stark racial divide. You have a plantocracy, in some ways, like the US South before the Civil War.
You’ve got a relatively small white plantocracy centered in Mérida. They have no interest whatsoever in leading an independent struggle. While the Maya achieve an underestimated level of sophistication as a state, it’s still not at the point where you would get, for more than a couple of years, a really joined-up independence movement spanning all races, all areas, and the entire peninsula.
Recommended, interesting and substantive throughout. In the United States at least, Mexico remains a greatly underdiscussed nation.
*The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution*
I am offering a new piece of work — I do not quite call it a book — online and free. It has four chapters, is about 40,000 words, is fully written by me (not a word from the AIs), and it is attached to an AI with a dual page display, in this case Claude. Think of it as a non-fiction novella of sorts, you can access it here. You can read it on the screen, turn it into a pdf (and upload into your own AI), send it to your Kindle, or discuss it with Claude.
Here is the Table of Contents:
1. What Is Marginalism?
2. William Stanley Jevons, Builder and Destroyer of Marginalism
3. Why Did It Take So Long for the Science of Economics to Develop?
4. Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?
Here are the first few paragraphs of the work:
How is it that ideas, and human capabilities, become lost? And how is that new insights come to pass? If eventually the insight seems obvious, why didn’t we see it before? Or maybe we did see it before, but didn’t really know we were on to something important? Why do new insights arrive suddenly, in a kind of flood? How do new worldviews replace older ones?
And what does all of that have to do with the future of science, the future of research, and the future of economics in particular? Especially when we try to understand how the ongoing artificial intelligence revolution is going to reshape human knowledge, and the all-important question of what economists should do.
Those are the motivating questions behind this work, but I will address them in what is initially an indirect fashion. I will start by considering a case study, namely the most important revolution in economics, the Marginal Revolution (to be defined shortly). The Marginal Revolution made modern economics possible. What was the Marginal Revolution? How did it start? Why did it take so very long to come to fruition? From those investigations we will get a sense of how economic ideas, and sometimes ideas more generally, develop. And that in turn will help us see where the science, art, and practice of economics is headed today.
Recommended! I will be covering it more soon.
What should I ask Katja Hoyer?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Hoyer was born in Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben, Bezirk Cottbus, German Democratic Republic (GDR), where her mother was a teacher and her father an officer of the National People’s Army. She received a Master’s degree from the University of Jena and moved to the United Kingdom in about 2010.
Hoyer is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and has published two books about the history of Germany. She is also a journalist for The Spectator, The Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, UnHerd, and Die Welt.
Her first book, Blood and Iron, about the German Empire from 1871 to 1918, was well reviewed, even though some reviewers suggested that she had played down the negative aspects of the period and of Otto von Bismarck‘s legacy. Her second book, Beyond the Wall, about the history of the GDR from 1949 to 1990, was well reviewed in the United Kingdom, but less well received in Germany.
She also has a new, forthcoming book on the history of the city of Weimar, namely Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. So what should I ask her?
My excellent Conversation with Harvey Mansfield
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Harvey discuss how Machiavelli’s concept of fact was brand new, why his longest chapter is a how-to guide for conspiracy, whether America’s 20th-century wars refute the conspiratorial worldview, Trump as a Shakespearean vulgarian who is in some ways more democratic than the rest of us, why Bronze Age Pervert should not be taken as a model for Straussianism, the time he tried to introduce Nietzsche to Quine, why Rawls needed more Locke, what it was like to hear Churchill speak at Margate in 1953, whether great books are still being written, how his students have and haven’t changed over 61 years of teaching, the eclipse rather than decline of manliness, and what Aristotle got right about old age and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: From a Straussian perspective, where’s the role for the skills of a good analytic philosopher? How does that fit into Straussianism? I’ve never quite understood that. They seem to be very separate approaches, at least sociologically.
MANSFIELD: Analytic philosophers look for arguments and isolate them. Strauss looks for arguments and puts them in the context of a dialogue or the implicit dialogue. Instead of counting up one, two, three, four meanings of a word, as analytic philosophers do, he says, why is this argument appropriate for this audience and in this text? Why is it put where it was and not earlier or later?
Strauss treats an argument as if it were in a play, which has a plot and a background and a context, whereas analytic philosophy tries to withdraw the argument from where it was in Plato to see what would we think of it today and what other arguments can be said against it without really wanting to choose which is the truth.
COWEN: Are they complements or substitutes, the analytic approach and the Straussian approach?
MANSFIELD: I wouldn’t say complements, no. Strauss’s approach is to look at the context of an argument rather than to take it out of its context. To take it out of its context means to deprive it of the story that it represents. Analytic philosophy takes arguments out of their context and arranges them in an array. It then tries to compare those abstracted arguments.
Strauss doesn’t try to abstract, but he looks to the context. The context is always something doubtful. Every Platonic dialogue leaves something out. The Republic, for example, doesn’t tell you about what people love instead of how people defend things. Since that’s the case, every argument in such a dialogue is intentionally a bad argument. It’s meant for a particular person, and it’s set to him.
The analytic philosopher doesn’t understand that arguments, especially in a Platonic dialogue, can deliberately be inferior. It easily or too easily refutes the argument which you are supposed to take out of a Platonic dialogue and understand for yourself. Socrates always speaks down to people. He is better than his interlocutors. What you, as an observer or reader, are supposed to do is to take the argument that’s going down, that’s intended for somebody who doesn’t understand very well, and raise it to the level of the argument that Socrates would want to accept.
So to the extent that all great books have the character of this downward shift, all great books have the character of speaking down to someone and presenting truth in an inferior but still attractive way. The reader has to take that shift in view and raise it to the level that the author had. What I’m describing is irony. What distinguishes analytic philosophy from Strauss is the lack of irony in analytic philosophy. Philosophy must always take account of nonphilosophy or budding philosophers and not simply speak straight out and give a flat statement of what you think is true.
To go back to Rawls, Rawls based his philosophy on what he called public reason, which meant that the reason that convinces Rawls is no different from the reason that he gives out to the public. Whereas Strauss said reason is never public or universal in this way because it has to take account of the character of the audience, which is usually less reasonable than the author.
And yes he does tell us what Straussianism means and how to learn to be a Straussian. From his discussion you will see rather obviously that I am not one. Overall, I found this dialogue to be the most useful source I have found for figuring out how Straussianism fits into other things, such as analytics philosophy, historical reading of texts, and empirical social science.
Perhaps the exchange is a little slow to start, but otherwise fascinating throughout. I am also happy to recommend Harvey’s recent book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy.
*Recession*, by Tyler Goodspeed
The subtitle is The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What To Do About It. Here is from the book’s summary:
Contrary to popular perception, recessions are not the inevitable bust that follows an unsustainable boom, and they do not operate like wildfires that clear out economic deadwood. Recessions are caused by adverse shocks like war and energy price spikes; and far from unleashing gales of creative destruction, post-recession economic growth typically resumes the same trend as before—all pain, no gain.
The book covers American history and focuses on verbal exposition of the theory, not mathematics. Overall, Goodspeed provides an underrated perspective in an era where 2008-2009 led people to become overly obsessed with issues of aggregate demand. Our current presidency may be curing this however!
The hyper-NIMBY of earlier Cape Town and South Africa
The most controversial of the forced removals occurred in the second half of the 1960s, with the expulsion of 65,000 coloureds from District Six, a vibrant inner-city ward of Cape Town, where whites, many of the slumlords, owned 56% of the property. Against their will, District Six residents were moved out to the sandy townships of the Cape Flats. In Johannesburg, the inner-city suburb of Sophiatown, where blacks could own freehold property, was another notorious site of forced removals. Often long-established community institutions such as churches and schools had to be abandoned.
That is from the very good book by Hermann Giliomee The Afrikaners: A Concise History.
What should I ask Toby Wilkinson?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is one of the leading historians of ancient Egypt, and he has a recent book out on Ptolemaic Egypt, namely The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra.
Here is his Wikipedia page, he also has served as Vice Chancellor of Fiji National University, and worked extensively as a development director for Cambridge. Here is his personal home page.
So what should I ask him?
The alternate book universe that is South Africa
One of the things I like best about South Africa is how quickly one enters another and very different intellectual world. Walk into a good used book shop, such as Clarke’s in Cape Town, and you find a slew of quality history books and biographies you otherwise would not have heard of. Buy them and read them and be transported. So many of them exist apart from the usual dialogues. For instance, I recently bought
Nowhere else is a used book store more interesting, at least from an English-language perspective.
The forthcoming Fuchsia Dunlop book
The Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavor, due out this fall. Via Joe Powers in the MR comments section. Hers are the very best Chinese cookbooks and they are also wonderful books more generally. She has been a CWT guest three times now. Let us hope a fourth episode is in order…