Category: Books
*Bubbles and the End of Stagnation*
By Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, a new Stripe Press book.
My Conversation with the excellent Neal Stephenson
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
In Neal’s second appearance, Tyler asks him why he sometimes shifts from envisioning the future to illustrating the past, the rise of history autodidacts, the implications of leaked secrets from the atomic age to today’s AI, the logistics of faking one’s death, why he still drafts novels in longhand, Soviet idealism among Western intellectuals, which Soviet achievements he admires, the lag in AR development, how LLMs might boost AR, whether social media is increasingly giving way to private group chats, his continuing influence on technologists, why AI-generated art might struggle to connect with readers, the primer from The Diamond Age in light of today’s LLMs, the prospect of AGI becoming an unnoticed background tool, what Neal believes the world really needs more of, what lies ahead in Polostan and the broader “Bomb Light” series, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: How effectively could you stage your own death? You. Say you really want to do it, and you’re willing to do it.
STEPHENSON: To fake it or to actually —
COWEN: Fake it, but everyone thinks it’s real. I read about it in the papers. “Neal is gone.” I nod my head, I weep, and then I forget about it. I don’t mean I forget about you, but you understand what I’m saying.
STEPHENSON: Wait, there’s not that many circumstances under which all physical traces of someone can be obliterated. That’s a fairly hard thing to do. It would have been easier a hundred years ago, but now we’ve got cameras everywhere, and we’ve got DNA testing and other ways to prove or to disprove that somebody’s actually dead. I guess it would have to be something like a plane crash into the ocean.
COWEN: But then how do you survive it?
STEPHENSON: Oh, yes. Okay.
COWEN: To kill yourself is one thing, but to pretend you’ve killed yourself and stay alive seems harder.
STEPHENSON: You could parachute out if it was a small plane, not a jet airline full of people, but a single-seater. I guess that might work.
COWEN: So, hire a private plane, have it crash, parachute out into somewhere where you —
STEPHENSON: You’re witnessed getting into the plane and taking off, but then there’s no way to recover the evidence for some reason. It’s pretty hard to do. If someone really wanted to, if they were just determined to go and find the . . . You see the efforts that people have gone to to go down to the Titanic. Well, if you can go find that thing and check it out with a submarine, then it’s pretty hard to really find a place that can’t be accessed in that way.
I very much enjoyed Neal’s new book Polostan. And here is my first Conversation with Neal Stephenson.
What I’ve been reading
1. Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel. Very good short portraits of various classic novels, including Machado de Assis, Mann’s Magic Mountain, Dr. Moreau, Carpentier, Perec, and others. At this point I am usually sick of such books but this one I stuck with as it is rewarding throughout.
2. Peter Doggers, The Chess Revolution: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age, is a good book, though it is mostly interior to my current knowledge set.
3. Rebecca Charbonneau, Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain. This book fit well into my recent “Soviet science” reading program. This is more of a “Cold War” book than a “UFO book.” And I learned the full saga behind the Byrds song “C.T.A. – 102” for the first time.
4. Geoffrey Wawro, The Vietnam War: A Military History, is the single best book on its topic and is both intelligent and highly readable.
Coming in 2025 is David Spiegelhalter, The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck.
The Legacy of Robert Higgs, edited by Christopher J. Coyne, is a very good collection for those interested in the topics Bob worked on.
Louis Kaplow, law and economics professor at Harvard, rethinks merger analysis in Rethinking Merger Analyses.
I have not yet had a chance to start Agustina S. Paglayan, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education.
John Cassidy has a forthcoming collection of readings, Capitalism and its Critics, A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI.
My Conversation with the excellent Christopher Kirchhoff
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the intro:
Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office. He’s led teams for President Obama, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. He’s worked in worlds as far apart as weapons development and philanthropy. His pioneering efforts to link Silicon Valley technology and startups to Washington has made him responsible for $70 billion in technology acquisition by the Department of Defense. He’s penned many landmark reports, and he is the author of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War.
Tyler and Christopher cover the ascendancy of drone warfare and how it will affect tactics both off and on the battlefield, the sobering prospect of hypersonic weapons and how they will shift the balance of power, EMP attacks, AI as the new arms race (and who’s winning), the completely different technology ecosystem of an iPhone vs. an F-35, why we shouldn’t nationalize AI labs, the problem with security clearances, why the major defense contractors lost their dynamism, how to overcome the “Valley of Death” in defense acquisition, the lack of executive authority in government, how Unit X began, the most effective type of government commission, what he’ll learn next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, I never understand what I read about hypersonic missiles. I see in the media, “China has launched the world’s first nuclear-capable hypersonic, and it goes 10x the speed of sound.” And people are worried. If mutual assured destruction is already in place, what exactly is the nature of the worry? Is it just we don’t have enough response time?
KIRCHHOFF: It’s a number of things, and when you add them up, they really are quite frightening. Hypersonic weapons, because of the way they maneuver, don’t necessarily have to follow a ballistic trajectory. We have very sophisticated space-based systems that can detect the launch of a missile, particularly a nuclear missile, but right then you’re immediately calculating where it’s going to go based on its ballistic trajectory. Well, a hypersonic weapon can steer. It can turn left, it can turn right, it can dive up, it can dive down.
COWEN: But that’s distinct from hypersonic, right?
KIRCHHOFF: Well, ICBMs don’t have the same maneuverability. That’s one factor that makes hypersonic weapons different. Second is just speed. With an ICBM launch, you have 20 to 25 minutes or so. This is why the rule for a presidential nuclear decision conference is, you have to be able to get the president online with his national security advisers in, I think, five or seven minutes. The whole system is timed to defeat adversary threats. The whole continuity-of-government system is upended by the timeline of hypersonic weapons.
Oh, by the way, there’s no way to defend against them, so forget the fact that they’re nuclear capable — if you want to take out an aircraft carrier or a service combatant, or assassinate a world leader, a hypersonic weapon is a fantastic way to do it. Watch them very carefully because more than anything else, they will shift the balance of military power in the next five years.
COWEN: Do you think they shift the power to China in particular, or to larger nations, or nations willing to take big chances? At the conceptual level, what’s the nature of the shift, above and beyond whoever has them?
KIRCHHOFF: Well, right now, they’re incredibly hard to produce. Right now, they’re essentially in a research and development phase. The first nation that figures out how to make titanium just a little bit more heat resistant, to make the guidance systems just a little bit better, and enables manufacturing at scale — not just five or seven weapons that are test-fired every year, but 25 or 50 or 75 or 100 — that really would change the balance of power in a remarkable number of military scenarios.
COWEN: How much China has them now? Are you at liberty to address that? They just have one or two that are not really that useful, or they’re on the verge of having 300?
KIRCHHOFF: What’s in the media and what’s been discussed quite a bit publicly is that China has more successful R&D tests of hypersonic weapons. Hypersonic weapons are very difficult to make fly for long periods. They tend to self-destruct at some point during flight. China has demonstrated a much fuller flight cycle of what looks to be an almost operational weapon.
COWEN: Where is Russia in this space?
KIRCHHOFF: Russia is also trying. Russia is developing a panoply of Dr. Evil weapons. The latest one to emerge in public is this idea of putting a nuclear payload on a satellite that would effectively stop modern life as we know it by ending GPS and satellite communications. That’s really somebody sitting in a Dr. Evil lair, stroking their cat, coming up with ideas that are game-changing. They’ve come up with a number of other weapons that are quite striking — supercavitating torpedoes that could take out an entire aircraft carrier group. Advanced states are now coming up with incredibly potent weapons.
Intelligent and interesting throughout. Again, I am happy to recommend Christopher’s recent book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, co-authored with Raj M. Shah.
Principles of Economics Textbooks and the Market for Ice Cream
Rey Hernández-Julián and Frank Limehouse writing in the Journal of Economics Teaching write that very few principles of economics textbooks deal with modern information and digital tech industries:
The main takeaways of our review are highlighted by two stand-alone textboxes found in Mankiw’s (2023) textbook. This textbook has been regarded as one of the most dominant players in the principles of economics textbook market for over 20 years. In the introductory chapter of the 10th Edition (2023), “Ten Principles of Economics” there is a stand-alone textbox with the Netflix logo with the following caption: “Many movie streaming services set the marginal cost of a movie equal to zero”. However, there is no further explanation of this statement in the chapter and no presentation of the concept of zero marginal cost pricing in the remainder of the entire textbook. In Chapter 2 (“Thinking Like an Economist”), there is an In the News article from the New York Times, “Why Tech Companies Hire Economists”, but very little coverage in the text on how to apply microeconomic concepts to the tech industry. These two discussions of the tech industry in Mankiw’s text exemplify many of our findings from other texts….updated examples from the modern economy seem to be afterthoughts and detached from the central discussion of the text.
…There are some notable exceptions. The most significant coverage of these questions is in Chapter 16 of Cowen and Tabarrok’s Modern Principles of Microeconomics, 5th edition (2021). In this chapter, the authors discuss platform service providers, such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, Visa, and Uber, and the role they play in competing “for the market,” instead of “in the market.” They also discuss why the prevailing product is not necessarily the best one, how music is a network good, and why these platform services may give away goods for ‘free’.
I would also point out that our example of a constant-cost industry (flat long-run supply curve) is domain name registration! As we write in Modern Principles:
Now consider what happens when the demand for domain names increases. In 2005, there were more than 60 million domain names. Just one year later, as the Internet exploded in popularity, there were more than 100 million domain names. If the demand for oil nearly doubled, the price of oil would rise dramatically, but despite nearly doubling in size, the price of registering a domain name did not increase…the expansion of old firms and the entry of new firms quickly pushed the price back down to average cost.
In short, it’s called Modern Principles for a reason! Tyler and I are committed to keeping up with the times and not just adding the occasional box and resting on our laurels.
See Hernández-Julián and Limehouse for some further examples of how to introduce modern industries into principles of economics.
What should I ask Paula Byrne?
Paula Jayne Byrne, Lady Bate…is a British biographer, novelist, and literary critic.
Byrne has a PhD in English literature from the University of Liverpool, where she also studied for her MA, having completed a BA in English and Theology at West Sussex Institute of Higher Education (now Chichester University).
Byrne is the founder and chief executive of a small charitable foundation, ReLit: The Bibliotherapy Foundation, dedicated to the promotion of literature as a complementary therapy in the toolkit of medical practitioners dealing with stress, anxiety and other mental health conditions. She is also a practicing psychotherapist, specializing in couples and family counseling.
Byrne, who is from a large working-class Roman Catholic family in Birkenhead, is married to Sir Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare scholar and former Provost of Worcester College, Oxford
Her books cover Jane Austen, Mary Robinson, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Pym, JFK’s sister, two novels, and her latest is a study of Thomas Hardy’s women, both in his life and in his fiction, namely Hardy’s Women: Mother, Sister, Wives, Muses. Here is her home page. Here is Paula on Twitter.
*A Voyage Around the Queen*
I loved this Craig Brown book, although many of you won’t. A good biography typically brings a subject to life. This biography sets out to convince you that Queen Elizabeth II could never be understood whatsoever, that she was a literal cipher and always was going to stand outside our typical categories. She did love jigsaw puzzles.
Can you stand a book that has sentences like?:
The Queen Mother’s corgis were every bit as edgy.
The Queen was born in 1926, and the book lists some words that were first chronicled in that same year:
Bible belt, business lunch, car park, kitsch, market research, pop song, publicity stunt, recycle, sugar daddy, and totalitarian.
Recommended, for some of you at least. You need to have a touch of mischief in you perhaps?
My Conversation with Musa al-Gharbi
I am a big fan of Musa’s work, most of all his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. As for the podcast, here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Musa explore the rise and fall of the “Great Awokening” and more, including how elite overproduction fuels social movements, why wokeness tends to fizzle out, whether future waves of wokeness will ratchet up in intensity, why neuroticism seems to be higher on the political Left, how a great awokening would manifest in a Muslim society, Black Muslims and the Nation of Islam, why Musa left Catholicism, who the greatest sociologist of Islam is, Muslim immigration and assimilation in Europe, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Let me give you an alternate theory of the Great Awokening, and tell me what’s wrong with it. It’s not really my view, but I hear it a lot.
So on the Left, there’s some long-term investment in teaching in America’s top universities. You produce a lot of troops who could become journalists, and they’re mostly left-leaning. Then 2011, 2012 — there’s something about the interaction of social media and, say, The New York Times and other major outlets, where all of a sudden they have a much bigger incentive to have a lot of articles about race, gender, Black Lives Matter, whatever. When those two things come together, wokeness takes off based on a background in Christianity and growing feminization of society.
By the time you get to something like 2021, enough of mainstream media has broken down that it’s simply social media out there going crazy. That just gives us a lot of diversity of bizarre views rather than just sheer wokeness — and besides, Elon is owning Twitter, so wokeness ends.
What’s wrong with that account?
AL-GHARBI: For one, I do think that some of the factors that you identified are important for contextualizing the current moment. For instance, a lot of the symbolic professions, like law and consulting, academia, journalism — they are being feminized. I do talk a bit in the book about how this matters for understanding the dynamics in a lot of these institutions. Not just over the last 10 years, but over the last several decades, in part because women and men tend to engage in very different forms of status-seeking and competition and things like that. So that does matter.
Things like social media obviously do change the way interactions play out. But you can see, actually, that things like social media or changes in the media landscape after 2010 — one limitation for using those kinds of explanations to explain the current moment is that it becomes hard, then, to understand how or why it was the case that . . .
There were three previous episodes like this, one in the 1920s through the early ’30s, one in the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, and then one in the late ’80s through early ’90s. In all cases where we didn’t have social media, where the structure of media enterprises was importantly different than it is today, and before you had Gen Z “kids these days” with their idiosyncratic attitudes, or before a lot of these professions were as feminized as they were today.
I think all of those factors you said actually do matter, and they matter in the sense — because each of these episodes, there’s so much in common, an insane amount. When you read the book and I walk through some of these — I think a lot of readers will be troubled, maybe, by how similar these episodes are. But they’re also importantly different. They don’t play out identically. They are importantly different: The role that symbolic capitalists occupy in society changed immensely over the last century. The constitution of these fields has changed immensely. There are a lot more women; there are a lot more nonwhite people in these professions than there were in the past, and so on and so forth.
All of those factors you described: I think they actually do matter, especially for understanding the ways in which this period of awokening might differ from previous episodes, but I don’t think they explain why awokenings happen at all.
COWEN: If “woke” recurs, do you think there’s a ratchet effect where it comes back bigger and stronger each time, a bit like the destructiveness of war? Or is it more of a random walk? Like, the next wave of woke in 37 years might be half as strong as the one we just had. What’s your model?
AL-GHARBI: I think it’s random; that depends a little bit on . . .
What I argue in the book is that the — for instance, when we look at the last period of awokening in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was much less — that was the last time we had these struggles over what they call political correctness, or the PC culture, which we call wokeness today. As I argue in the book, it didn’t last as long, that awokening. It was shorter than most of the others, actually. Shorter than the one in the ’60s, shorter than the one after 2010. It was a little shorter, and it also wasn’t quite as dramatic.
I think there are these kind of contextual factors that significantly inform how severe it is or how long it lasts, how long it’s able to sustain itself or how long it is until the frustrated elites get — enough of them get satisfied that they disengage. My guess is that it’s more of a random walk, but I’m open to persuasion.
Definitely interesting.
Northern Ireland fact of the day
The NHS in Northern Ireland is the worst in the UK. During the quarter April/June 2021, over 349,000 people were waiting for a first appointment, 53 percent for over a year, an increase of 39,000 for the same period in 2020. Adjusted for population size, waiting lists in Northern Ireland are 100 times greater than those in England, a country 50 times its size.
That is from the truly excellent Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, by Padraig O’Malley. Imagine a detailed, thoughtful 500 pp. book on political issues you probably don’t care all that much about — is there any better way to study politics and political reasoning? Every page of this book offers substance.
Elsewhere, of course, we are told that reluctance to give up their health care system is a major reason why Irish reunification is not more popular in the North, and that holds for Catholics too.
This one will make the best non-fiction of the year list.
What I’ve been reading
Fiona Maddocks, Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile. Captures the spirit of the man and his music, and a good addition to the growing literature on European cultural exiles in America. Readable and to the point.
Kurt Weyland, Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat. This book has useful data, and perhaps it is a useful corrective to the most extreme fears out there. But overall it does more to persuade me of the opposite conclusion, namely that populism is a real threat. the author himself writes: “In fact, wide-ranging statistical studies find that only in about one-third of cases have populist chief executives done substantial damage to democracy. and they have truly suffocated liberal pluralism only in approximately one-quarter of all instances…”
Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich. This very well-reviewed book does not seem to have either new data or new theory, as yes it does show a lot of the Nazis were “pretty ordinary people.” Yet it is so well-written and well-presented that it deserves a high recommendation nonetheless.
Tim Lankester, Inside Thatcher’s Monetarism Experiment: The Promise, The Failure, The Legacy, the author was on the scene in the Thatcher government.
Michael Huemer, Progressive Myths. Michael is a very smart philosopher, but this book seemed like a waste of time to me. Will it persuade anyone? Do we need Michael writing seven-page essays rebutting various claims of the BLM movement and the like?
Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History is too chatty/friendly a book for me, but for many readers it is probably worthwhile.
Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English is great fun, either to read or to browse. I do for instance use some of these words: one-off, go missing, curate, early days, kerfuffle, easy peasy, and cheeky.
Dana Gioia: Poet & Critic, edited by John Zheng and Jon Parrish, is a series of essays in honor of Dana and a very good introduction to his life and work. Here is my earlier CWT with Dana, information billionaire and aspiring information trillionaire.
Weep, Shudder, and Die: On Opera and Poetry, is Dana’s forthcoming book on opera. He claims that Sweeney Todd is one of the two greatest American operas.
The value of books on tractors
In addition, there were no textbooks to be found, except in libraries, where the numbers who tried to get in were so immense that readers could only access the building for one hour, according to surname. An enterprising Shanghai publisher began reprinting textbooks from the early 1960s, which soon were worth their weight in gold. Young people in faraway places were pleading to relatives to send the books to them. Soon there was a black market. Printers sold imperfect copies outside the printworks. Textbooks were resold at phenomenal prices. In one part of the country, manuals on tractor repairs, normally in high demand, were exchanged twenty to one for physics textbooks. When the doors to the examination halls were finally opened, few prospective students were surprised that one topic set for Chinese composition was “An unforgettable day.” In the end, 278,000 students were admitted for college starting in the fall of 1978. One student, enrolled at Yan’an University in Shaanxi, wrote home to his family about how surprised he was that people in the city were nearly as poor as those in his village. But his admission to college opened a new world for him, with new kinds of people.
That is from the new and interesting Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, The Great Transformation: China’s Road to Reform.
What should I ask Stephen Kotkin?
Kotkin’s most prominent book project is his three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin: The first two volumes have been published as Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014) and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017), and the third volume remains to be published.
Here is more from Wikipedia, of course he is an expert on the Soviet Union and also Russia more generally:
Among scholars of Russia, he is best known for Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization which exposes the realities of everyday life in the Soviet city of Magnitogorsk during the 1930s. In 2001, he published Armageddon Averted, a short history of the fall of the Soviet Union…
He is currently writing a multi-century history of Siberia, focusing on the Ob River Valley.
He is currently at the Hoover Institution. So what should I ask him?
*Emancipation*
The author is Peter Kolchin, and the subtitle is The Abolition and Aftermath of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Here is one interesting excerpt of many:
Despite the surge in schools and teachers after 1880, Russian peasant children were considerably less likely to receive schooling than were African American children, especially if they were girls. As the statement about not needing literacy in order to make cabbage soup indicated, the subordination of females that characterized Russian society in general was as evident in peasant education as in any other sphere of life. Statistics on school attendance by sex indicates that, in contrast to former slaves in the Southern United States, for whom serfs in Russia rarely sent their daughters to school during the 1860s and 1870s, regarding it as a waste of time that would fill their heads with needless knowledge and make them less fit for their feminine duties. The evidence is consistent and overwhelming. Among African Americans in the Southern United States, girls were at least as likely as boys to attend school: the Freedmen’s Bureau Consolidated Monthly School Report for June 1867, for example, listed 45,855 male and 52,981 female pupils in the schools that it monitored throughout the South; in almost every state, female pupils outnumbered male pupils and there were slightly more males than females. The decennial census returns showed a similar pattern between 1870 and 1910: school enrollment rates in the United States for Black children aged five to nineteen (the great majority of whom lived in the South) were fairly evenly balanced between the sexes, with female rates slightly higher than male in four of the five census years. (The male rate was slightly higher than the female in 1880.)
You can buy the book here.
What should I ask Neal Stephenson?
Yes I will be doing another Conversation with him, in honor of his forthcoming book Polostan, which initiates a new series. It is set in the 1930s, has some spies in it, and parts are set in the town of Magnetogorsk in the Ural mountains, as well as Montana and WDC in the U.S. So far I like the first thirty pages very much.
Here is my 2019 Conversation with Neal Stephenson. So what should I ask him?
Sometimes people are just wrong
The puzzle was that, despite M1 growth in excess of 5 percent during 1970 and 10 percent during the first half of 1971, the engine still continued to sputter. At the June 1971 meeting of the FOMC, the Fed’s chief economist admitted bafflement. “Why is it that the very high recent growth rates of money…fail to produce a satisfactory real performance?” asked Charles Partee.
At the same time, Milton Friedman was writing Arthur Burns and telling him he was “appalled” by the high rates of money growth.
That is from the quite interesting 1998 book Allen J. Matusow, Nixon’s Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes.
I had not known that in 1971, for a while, President Nixon was pushing for a uniform ten percent tax on imports into the United States, and indeed he imposed it temporarily. That was then, this is now…