Category: Books
What should I ask Bruno Maçães?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. Bruno is the author of Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order, published earlier in the United Kingdom but just now in the United States. It is one of the essential reads of the last few years and was last year a tied favorite for my “Book of the Year.”
On the book:
Well, it turns out there is a book explaining all the recent, strange events in China, Russia, Turkey and the European Union
Here is his excellent recent piece on what the West is becoming, and why. I also have read he is currently writing a book on China’s “One Belt, One Road.”
On Bruno, here is one bit from Wikipedia:
Bruno Maçães is a Portuguese politician, political scientist, business strategist, and author. He studied at the University of Lisbon and Harvard University, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under Harvey Mansfield. He is currently a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington.
My Conversation with Bruno is in fact one reason why I took my August trip to Kiev and Baku — what better and indeed necessary way to prepare for a discussion of Eurasia?
So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Michael Pollan
I was very happy with how this turned out, here is the audio and transcript. Here is how the CWTeam summarized it:
Michael Pollan has long been fascinated by nature and the ways we connect and clash with it, with decades of writing covering food, farming, cooking, and architecture. Pollan’s latest fascination? Our widespread and ancient desire to use nature to change our consciousness.
He joins Tyler to discuss his research and experience with psychedelics, including what kinds of people most benefit from them, what it can teach us about profundity, how it can change your personality and political views, the importance of culture in shaping the experience, the proper way to integrate it into mainstream practice, and — most importantly of all — whether it’s any fun.
He argues that LSD is underrated, I think it may be good for depression but for casual use it is rapidly becoming overrated. Here is one exchange of relevance:
COWEN: Let me try a very philosophical question. Let’s say I could take a pill or a substance, and it would make everything seem profound. My receptivity to finding things profound would go up greatly. I could do very small events, and it would seem profound to me.
Is that, in fact, real profundity that I’m experiencing? Doesn’t real profundity somehow require excavating or experiencing things from actual society? Are psychedelics like taking this pill? They don’t give you real profundity. You just feel that many things are profound, but at the end of the experience, you don’t really have . . .
POLLAN: It depends. If you define profundity or the profound as exceptional, you have a point.
One of the things that’s very interesting about psychedelics is that our brains are tuned for novelty, and for good reason. It’s very adaptive to respond to new things in the environment, changes in your environment, threats in your environment. We’re tuned to disregard the familiar or take it for granted, which is indeed what most of us do.
One of the things that happens on psychedelics, and on cannabis interestingly enough — and there’s some science on it in the case of cannabis; I don’t think we’ve done the science yet with psychedelics — is that the familiar suddenly takes on greater weight, and there’s an appreciation of the familiar. I think a lot of familiar things are profound if looked at in the proper way.
The feelings of love I have for people in my family are profound, but I don’t always feel that profundity. Psychedelics change that balance. I talk in the book about having emotions that could be on Hallmark cards. We don’t think of Hallmark cards as being profound, but in fact, a lot of those sentiments are, properly regarded.
Yes, there are those moments you’ve smoked cannabis, and you’re looking at your hand, and you go, “Man, hands, they’re f — ing incredible.” You’re just taken with this. Is that profound or not? It sounds really goofy, but I think the line between profundity and banality is a lot finer than we think.
And:
COWEN: I’ve never myself tried psychedelics. But I’ve asked the question, if I were to try, how would I think about what is the stopping point?
For my own life, I like, actually, to do the same things over and over again. Read books. Eat food. Spend time with friends. You can just keep on doing them, basically, till you die. I feel I’m in a very good groove on all of those.
If you take it once, and say you find it entrancing or interesting or attractive, what’s the thought process? How do you model what happens next?
POLLAN: That’s one of the really interesting things about them. You have this big experience, often positive, not always though. I had, on balance . . . all the experiences I described in the book, with one notable exception, were very positive experiences.
But I did not have a powerful desire to do it again. It doesn’t have that self-reinforcing quality, the dopamine release, I don’t know what it is, that comes with things that we like doing: eating and sex and sleep, all this kind of stuff. Your first thought after a big psychedelic experience is not “When can I do it again?” It’s like, “Do I ever have to do it again?”
COWEN: It doesn’t sound fun, though. What am I missing?
POLLAN: It’s not fun. For me, it’s not fun. I think there are doses where that might apply — low dose, so-called recreational dose, when people take some mushrooms and go to a concert, and they’re high essentially.
But the kind of experience I’m describing is a lot more — I won’t use the word profound because we’ve charged that one — that is a very internal and difficult journey that has moments of incredible beauty and lucidity, but also has dark moments, moments of contemplating death. Nothing you would describe as recreational except in the actual meaning of the word, which is never used. It’s not addictive, and I think that’s one of the reasons.
I did just talk to someone, though, who came up to me at a book signing, a guy probably in his 70s. He said, “I’ve got to tell you about the time I took LSD 16 days in a row.” That was striking. You can meet plenty of people who have marijuana or a drink 16 days in a row. But that was extraordinary. I don’t know why he did it. I’m curious to find out exactly what he got out of it.
In general, there’s a lot of space that passes. For the Grateful Dead, I don’t know. Maybe it was a nightly thing for them. But for most people, it doesn’t seem to be.
COWEN: Say I tried it, and I found it fascinating but not fun. Shouldn’t I then think there’s something wrong with me that the fascinating is not fun? Shouldn’t I downgrade my curiosity?
POLLAN: [laughs] Aren’t there many fascinating things that aren’t fun?
COWEN: All the ones I know, I find fun. This is what’s striking to me about your answer. It’s very surprising.
W even talk about LSD and sex, and why a writer’s second book is the key book for understanding that writer. Toward the end we cover the economics of food, and, of course, the Michael Pollan production function:
COWEN: What skill do you tell them to invest in?
POLLAN: I tell them to read a lot. I’m amazed how many writing students don’t read. It’s criminal. Also, read better writers than you are. In other words, read great fiction. Cultivate your ear. Writing is a form of music, and we don’t pay enough attention to that.
When I’m drafting, there’s a period where I’m reading lots of research, and scientific articles, and history, and undistinguished prose, but as soon as I’m done with that and I’ve started drafting a chapter or an article, I stop reading that kind of stuff.
Before I go to bed, I read a novel every night. I read several pages of really good fiction. That’s because you do a lot of work in your sleep, and I want my brain to be in a rhythm of good prose.
Defininitely recommended, as is Michael’s latest book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
*La Classe Compiaciuta*
My preface to *Stubborn Attachments*, and why this book is especially important
Here it is:
One theme of Stubborn Attachments is that economic growth in the wealthier countries has positive spillover effects for poorer individuals around the world. If you think of the publication of this book as a form of economic growth/gdp enhancement, I want to boost its positive global effects. I also argue in Stubborn Attachments that we should be more charitable and altruistic at the margin. That includes me!
So having written Stubborn Attachments, I now wish to live the book, so to speak. I am donating the royalties from the book to a man I met in Ethiopia on a factfinding trip earlier this year, I shall call him Yonas [not his real name].
He is a man of modest means, but he aspires to open his own travel business. He has a young and growing family, and also a mother to support. He is also hoping to buy a larger house to accommodate his growing family. In his life, he faces stresses – financial and otherwise — that I have never had to confront. When I visited his home, his wife had just had a new baby girl, but Yonas’s income depends on the vicissitudes of tourist demand, and by American standards it is in any case low.
I met Yonas when he served as my travel guide around Lalibela. I spent a full day with him, touring the underground, rock-hewn stone churches of that city. He struck me as reliable, conscientious, well-informed, and I was impressed by the quality of his English, which he had acquired on his own. He also took me by his village to meet his family, and they performed a coffee ceremony for me, cooking freshly ground coffee beans (it was delicious, something I had never imagined). Based on my impressions from that day, I believe an investment in Yonas will help his entire family and perhaps his broader community as well. Since then, he and I have kept in touch by email.
As another way of “living the content” of my book, I will be sending the funds via Stripe, Stripe Press being the publisher of this book. Stripe, a payments company, really has made it easy to send money across borders, thereby helping to knit the whole world together. I hope someday Yonas is able to apply for incorporation through Atlas, a Stripe service that helps entrepreneurs incorporate in Delaware, with his travel business, or with whatever else he may do.
I suppose this means I will remain stubbornly attached to Yonas. And with the publication of this book, Stripe Press is now stubbornly attached to me.
Think of this book — due out in October — as my attempt to defend and explain why a free society is objectively better in terms of ethics, political philosophy, and economics. No punches are pulled, this is my account of what I strongly believe you should believe too. My bottom lines, so to speak.
But today I’d like to focus upon Yonas, in Ethiopia, rather than the content of the book. All of my share of the income from the book goes to him and his family, I get nothing. So if you order Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, you are very directly contributing to economic development and human betterment and the multiplication of possibilities. And perhaps you are also expressing some faith in the quality of my judgment as to who would put the money to good use.
I would like to see that you pre-order the book to make a difference for Yonas and his family. And the earlier you order, the more attention the book will receive, the greater the chance of reviews and a further print run and further sales, and so on.
You can pre-order here. By the way, what is your stubborn attachment?
*Prohibition: A Concise History*
That is a new and truly excellent book by W.J. Rorabaugh. It is a perfect 116 pp. of text and a model for what many other books should be.
From 1825 to 1850, the per capita consumption of alcohol in the United States dropped by half, due largely to religious influence.
As late as 1914, alcohol taxes accounted for 35 percent of the revenue of the federal government.
The Russian government moved to prohibition during WWI, and the resulting loss of revenue was a significant factor contributing to the downfall of the regime.
Note that “per capita consumption of alcohol was reduced for a very long time.” If you were born in 1900, for instance, you could not legally drink until 1933, at the age of thirty-three, a relatively late age for this habit to form.
Today “more than half of Mexican American women are teetotalers.” And: “African Americans continue to be light drinkers, and more than half of black women do not drink.”
Strongly recommended. If all books were like this, it would be hard for me to tear myself away from them.
That was then, this is now, a continuing series
This is part of a letter from Miss Howe to Miss Clarissa Harlowe, from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa [1748].
You and I have often retrospected the faces and minds of grown people; that is to say, have formed images for their present appearances, outside and in, (as far as the manners of the persons would justify us in the latter) what sort of figures they made when boys and girls. And I’ll tell you the lights in which HICKMAN, SOLMES, and LOVELACE, our three heroes, have appeared to me, supposing them boys at school.
Solmes I have imagined to be a little sordid, pilfering rogue, who would purloin from every body, and beg every body’s bread and butter from him; while, as I have heard a reptile brag, he would in a winter-morning spit upon his thumbs, and spread his own with it, that he might keep it all to himself.
Hickman, a great overgrown, lank-haired, chubby boy, who would be hunched and punched by every body; and go home with his finger in his eye, and tell his mother.
While Lovelace I have supposed a curl-pated villain, full of fire, fancy, and mischief; an orchard-robber, a wall-climber, a horse-rider without saddle or bridle, neck or nothing: a sturdy rogue, in short, who would kick and cuff, and do no right, and take no wrong of any body; would get his head broke, then a plaster for it, or let it heal of itself; while he went on to do more mischief, and if not to get, to deserve, broken bones. And the same dispositions have grown up with them, and distinguish them as me, with no very material alteration.
Only that all men are monkeys more or less, or else that you and I should have such baboons as these to choose out of, is a mortifying thing, my dear.
I am enjoying this splendid book for the first time, and yes it is OK to read an abridged edition.
*Stubborn Attachments* is being published by Stripe Press
The full title is Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals. I have been working on this book for about twenty years, and I recommend it to you all.
Here is the Amazon link, you can pre-order for October 16. Here is the Kindle link. I will get you the Barnes and Noble link as soon as it is available. The Stripe Press people have done a fantastic job with the cover and also with the production more generally, my commendations to them!
Milton Friedman in *Death Wish*
Dan Klein writes to me:
Yes, a movie character (young woman student) was reading it aloud to her friend in a coma, Bruce Willis’s daughter, who had been attacked and shot. Willis comes in and asks what she’s been reading. The young woman replies that she had to read it anyway, for summer reading in anticipation of NYU, and figured good for coma victim to hear voice. Willis makes a joke about “I don’t think that will wake her up” or “Do you think that will wake her?”
When Willis asks her what she’s reading she says “Essays in Positive Economics, by Milton Friedman”. And then explains that it is on the NYU summer reading list.
The text quoted was: “Normative economics and the art of economics, on the other hand, cannot be independent of positive economics. Any policy conclusion necessarily rests on a prediction about the consequences of doing one thing rather than another…”
Has anyone else seen this movie?
That was then, this is now
Politicians were not shy about discussing sexual pleasure, even as a matter of state business. During Jefferson’s second term, when the ambassador from Tunis arrived in Washington, he requested that the secretary of state make his stay complete by providing him and his entourage with concubines. Madison (generally portrayed as prim and proper) charged the ambassador’s pleasure to the government, listing “Georgia a Greek,” as one of the expenses among “appropriations for foreign intercourse” He made light of the incident in a letter to Jefferson, noting the double meaning of “foreign intercourse.”
That is from Nancy Isenberg’s excellent Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr. I also learned that Burr was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, and that late in his life Burr spent time with Bentham, was intrigued by the Panopticon idea, and he may have influenced Bentham on suffrage
My favorite things Ukraine
I am just arriving, and for the first time Here are my favorites:
1. Pianist: Emil Gilels, most of all for Beethoven and Chopin. Vladimir Horowitz was born in Kiev, he was often best in unusual pieces, such as Scriabin, Prokofiev, and John Philip Sousa. But there is also Cherkassy, Pachmann, Moiseiwitsch, Lhevinne, and others. Simon Barere was one of the greatest Liszt pianists. So we are into A++ territory here. But wait…Richter was born in Ukraine! My head is exploding now.
1b. Violinists: You’ve got Nathan Milstein, Mischa Elman, Isaac Stern, Leonid Kogan, the Oistrakhs, among others, with Milstein’s Bach recordings as my favorite.
2. Composer: Prokofiev was born in eastern Ukraine (or is it now Russia again?), but somehow I don’t feel he counts. Valentin Sylvestrov would be an alternative.
3. Novelist: One choice would be Nikolai Gogol, then Mikhail Bulgakov, born in Kiev but ethnically Russian. But I can’t say I love Master and Margarita; it is probably much better and funnier in the original Russian. His The White Guard is a more directly Ukrainian novel, and it should be better known. A Country Doctor’s Notebook is perhaps my favorite by him. For short stories there is Isaac Babel. Joseph Conrad was born in modern-day Ukraine, though I don’t feel he counts as Ukrainian, same with Stanislaw Lem. Vassily Grossman is a toss-up in terms of origin. The Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, now very much in fashion, was born in Ukraine.
4. Movie: Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth, a 1930 take on agricultural collectivization. With Dovshenko as my favorite director.
5. Movie, set in: Man With a Movie Camera. It is remarkable how fresh and innovative this 1929 silent film still is.
6. Painter: David Burliuk, leader of the Ukrainian avant-garde and later member of the Blue Rider group. Ilya Repin was born in modern-day Ukraine, though he feels “Russian” to me in the historical sense.
7. Sculptor: Alexander Archipenko was born in Ukraine, though he ended up in America.
8. Economist: Ludwig von Mises. He was born on territory near current-day Lviv, part of Ukraine.
9. Actress: Milla Jovovich is pretty good in The Fifth Element and Resident Evil.
10. Tech entrepreneur: Max Levchin.
11. Israeli: There is Golda Meir, Natan Sharansky, and Simon Wiesenthal, among others.
12. Legal scholar, blogger, and First Amendment advocate: Eugene Volokh. And don’t forget Sasha!
Other: Wilhelm Reich deserves mention, though I’m not really a fan. The region produced a few good chess players too.
Overall, this is a stunningly impressive list, though there are legitimate questions as to who and what exactly counts as Ukrainian. They’re still trying to sort that one out, which is part of the problem.
What I’ve been reading
1. Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World. A very good book, one of the hot books of the year, and much deeper and broader and balanced than the subtitle might imply.
2. George Magnus, Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is In Jeopardy. The case for pessimism, based on all possible reasons. Worth reading, but who knows?
3. Devin Fergus, Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class. Not a balanced treatment, but a fact-rich and handy starting point for reading about this topic. You won’t learn how many of those fees are efficiency-based, but you will go around asking the question more.
4. François Cusset, How the World Swung to the Right:Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions. Full of generalizations and unsupported claims, but still a better guide to reality than most of what you will find from the other big think books. An attempt at fresh thought, in pocket-sized form.
5. Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation. Yet another good social and intellectual history of the early, formative period of Christianity.
Charles Silver and David A. Hyman, Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care. I find most books on this topic too painful to read, including this one, but it does appear to be comprehensive and the new go-to coverage on this topic.
How phony was the “phony war”?
It is misleading to think of 1939-1940 as the phoney war or twilight war, or the Sitz-krieg, or bore-war, with all the sense of lack of authenticity and reality these terms now convey. This was war as Britain and France wanted to wage it and win it. The dominant propaganda line in Britain in the early months of the war was ‘assurance of victory’, the policy was economic offence and military defence. Britain was fighting a war ‘for King, for Empire, and for Freedom’, as British propaganda put it. One reason we still think of the early war as phoney is that the air force was not used for bombing and that Germany was not attacked on land either. But the navy went on the offensive. German shipping and trade were swept from the seas. Imports into Germany were blocked, and from November 1939 its exports too, both extraordinary changes to a world economic system in which Germany was a more significant trader than France.
That is from the quite good Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War, by David Edgerton.
Bob Luddy and the Thales Academy
Scott Alexander reports:
Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem: children given private tutoring will do two sigmas better than average (ie the average tutored student will be in the 98th percentile of nontutored students). But see here for some argument that the real value is lower, maybe more like 0.4 sigma. Some further discussion on the subreddit asks the right question – can we simulate this with some kind of clever computer-guided learning? – and gives the right answer – apparently no. TracingWoodgrains has a great comment. Especially interested in their discussion of Direct Instruction: “One of the few schools to use it as the basis of their program for math and English, a libertarian private school in North Carolina called Thales Academy, is reporting results exactly in line with the two-sigma bar: 98-99th percentile average accomplishment on the IOWA test. Their admissions process requires an interview at the elementary level, but no sorting other than that, so it’s not a case of only selecting the highest-level students.” (though note that IOWA is nationally normed, and Thales is in the well-off Research Triangle area). On the other hand, it costs half of what public schools do, so file this under “cost disease” too.
By the way, I have been enjoying my read of Robert L. Luddy’s Entrepreneurial Life: The Path from Startup to Market Leader. Luddy is founder of Thales Academy, and the final chapter of his memoir covers his thoughts and praxis on education.
Facts about abortion history
1. In 1800, there were no formal laws against abortion in the United States, although common law suggested that the fetus had rights after a process of “quickening.”
2. Ten states passed anti-abortion laws in the 1821-1841 period. De facto there were many exceptions and enforcement was loose.
3. Abortion became a fully commercialized business in the 1840s, and this led to more public discussion of the practice. Abortion in fact became one of the first medical specialties in American history. It is believed that abortion rates jumped over the 1840-1870 period, and mostly due to married women.
4. Drug companies started to supply their own abortion “remedies” in the 1840s on a much larger scale.
5. At this time there were few moral dilemmas, at least not publicly expressed, about the termination of pregnancies in the earlier stages. That came later in the 20th century.
6. In 1878, a group of physicians in Illinois estimated the general abortion rate at 25%. In any case during this time period abortion was affordable to many more Americans than just the wealthy.
7. Several states started to criminalize abortion during the 1850s.
8. 1857-1880 saw the beginning of a physicians’ crusade against abortion. By 1880, abortion was illegal in most of the United States, and this occurred part and parcel with a rise in the professionalization of the medical profession. These policies were later sustained and extended throughout the 1880s and also the early twentieth century.
9. Over the 1860-1880 period, doctors succeeded in turning American public opinion significantly against abortion. The homeopaths supported them in this.
This is all from the very useful and readable book Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, by James C. Mohr.
Margaret Thatcher and the size of government
There are those who still believe that the Thatcher government (1979-1990) rolled back the state and cut taxes. In fact Thatcherism involved an increase in the proportion of national income passing through the state and an increase in the tax burden. Only income taxes went down, with great publicity — the more hidden taxes increased. Value Added Tax, a form of purchase tax, was increased and was by comparison with income taxes regressive, though not quite as regressive as the additional taxes which were levied on alcohol and tobacco…the Thatcher government, and indeed subsequent ones, ended up spending more in absolute and even in relative terms on welfare taken overall.
That is from David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century. Here are my previous posts on the book and on other work by Edgerton.