Category: Books
*Napoleon: Passion, Death and Resurrection, 1815-1849*
The bottom line here is that I ordered all of Philip Dwyer’s other books on Napoleon. This one covers Napoleon’s time on St. Helena and how the memory of Napoleon was processed after his death, running up through the return of Napoleon’s body to France. Here is one excerpt:
In 1840, the year of the return of Napoleon’s remains to France, thirteen or fourteen “Napoleons” were admitted to the insane asylum at Bicêtre in the south of Paris. One can imagine that each of them considered the others to be made. Of course, there had been people suffering from this kind of delusion even while he was still alive. In 1818, at least five people were admitted to Charenton hospital believing they were Napoleon. Now, however, Napoleon was being caricatured, right down to his temperament — ‘imperial’, proud, haughty, abrupt, tyrannical, capricious, choleric. The men (and one woman that we know of) who believed they were Napoleon always fit the same profile: they took themselves seriously, they gave orders and they demanded loyalty; in return they treated people with disdain.
Definitely recommended, surprisingly gripping throughout, you can buy it here.
What the Randomistas Taught TOMS
You probably know the story of Tom’s shoes (here told by Andrew Leigh):
After a visit to Argentina businessman Blake Mycoskie decided he wanted to do something about the lack of decent footwear in developing nations. A talented entrepreneur, Mycoskie had founded and sold four companies by his thirtieth birthday. Now he was affected by the poverty he saw in villages outside Buenos Aires”… “I saw the real effects of being shoeless: the blisters, the sores, the infections.”
To provide shoes to those children, Mycoskie founded ‘Shoes for Better Tomorrows’, which was soon shortened to TOMS. The company made its customers a one-for-one promise: buy a pair of shoes and TOMS will donate a pair to a need child. Since 2006, TOMS has given away 60 million pairs of shoes.
Perhaps you see where this is going (but don’t be too sure!):
Six years in, Mycoskie and his team wanted to know what impact TOMS was having, so they made the brave decision to let economists randomize shoe distribution across eighteen communities in El Salvador…
The results from the World Bank study were not great:
Results indicate high levels of usage and approval of the shoes by children in the treatment group, and time diaries show modest evidence that the donated shoes allocated children’s time toward outdoor activities. Difference-in-difference and ANCOVA estimates find generally insignificant impacts on overall health, foot health, and self-esteem but small positive impacts on school attendance for boys. Children receiving the shoes were significantly more likely to state that outsiders should provide for the needs of their family. Thus, in a context where most children already own at least one pair of shoes, the overall impact of the shoe donation program appears to be negligible, illustrating the importance of more careful targeting of in-kind donation programs.
In other words, the shoes didn’t add much to health but did increase feelings of dependency. Another bubble punctured by economists. End of story, right? No. To their great credit TOMS took the results to heart. TOMS reevaluated how they give, they made adjustments, they changed. The lead researcher Bruce Wydick wrote:
By our agreement, [TOMS] could have chosen to remain anonymous on the study; they didn’t…For every TOMS, there are many more, both secular and faith-based, who are reticent to have the impacts of the program scrutinized carefully by outside researchers…many organizations today continue to avoid rigorous evaluation, relying on marketing cliches and feel-good giving to bring in donor cash. TOMS is different…
Will TOMS’ new methods work better? Only randomization will tell. Fortunately, TOMS is committed to doing just that.
This is from Andrew Leigh’s excellent new book Randomistas. Leigh tells the story of how randomized controlled trials are being used to improve teaching, crime fighting, charitable giving and more. It’s a good read and even in areas that I know well, such as crime research, I learned new information. Leigh is also careful to point to the studies that didn’t replicate as well as those that did.
By the way, Leigh is a person to keep to an eye on. In 2011, he was awarded the Economic Society of Australia’s Young Economist Award, given to “honour that Australian economist under the age of forty who is deemed to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” As you can see from Google Scholar this was a well-deserved award. Yet even as he received this award, Leigh had already left his position at Australian National University to embark on a second career as a Member of Parliament. Since starting his second career, however, he has published three well received books about politics, economics, and inequality and now the world of randomized controlled trials! Look for Andrew as a future Australian Treasurer and who knows what more.
What I’ve been reading
Economic Science Fictions, edited by William Davies. I didn’t quite come away with a takeaway from this book, but still I feel obliged to pass knowledge of it along to you. It is a bunch of essays about economic themes in science fiction, and/or how the two “genres” might be more closely integrated, with a lead essay by Ha-Joon Chang.
Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History. Could this new book be the single best brief introduction to Reconstruction available? Recommended.
Emily Dufton, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. I loved this book, which I also consider a paradigmatic example of how to write a wonderful non-fiction work. Throughout it is clear, substantive, balanced, passes various ideological Turing tests, and it focuses on essentials, as well as framing everything in terms of broader theories of social change. It is sure to make my best books of the year list, and if she had ten other books I would buy them all sight unseen. Here is Dufton’s home page.
Bekelech Tola, Injera Variety from Crop Diversity. She explains where all the different types of injera come from. I hadn’t realized for instance that teff is sometimes mixed with maize, or sorghum flour, or cassava powder, all in the service of variety.
Ethiopia reads: donkey mobile libraries
Via Malcolm Clark.
*The Trade*
This book is about what I call the Trade, the growing international business of political kidnappings, according to the US Treasury the most lucrative source of income, outside of state sponsorship, for illegal groups. But it’s more than about money. It is about my attempt, yes, to find the answer to two questions which have haunted me for nine years: Who kidnapped me, and why?
That is from Jere Van Dyk, The Trade: My Journey into the Labyrinth of Political Kidnapping.
Solve for the equilibrium, as they say. The puzzle, of course, is why there are not more kidnappings for revenue.
Gonder, Ethiopia
Gonder was at the height of its prosperity at the turn of the eighteenth century, when it may have had a population of seventy thousand. Emperor Fasilidades, who founded the new capital around 1635, obviously hoped to create a strong center around which the remnants of the Christian north could rally. He picked a beautiful site, a flat volcanic ridge at seven thousand feet surrounded by mountains on three sides, but with easy access to Lake Tana in the south. Gonder’s climate is warm during the day, cool at night, its two streams afforded plentiful water supplies and its hinterland abundant wood and produce.
Enough of an urban economy arose to sustain architecture, music, poetry, literature, painting, calligraphy, and educational, religious, and social institutions. The emperors appeared in considerable state, surrounded by courtiers, clergy, and soldiers…
The aristocracy and the monarchy supported the artists and artisans who put up buildings, illuminated manuscripts, decorates the interior of churches and palaces, and worked stone, wood, or pottery. The town’s castles and other monuments were built of hewn brown basalt blocks and contained features that derived from Axumite and Zagwe times as well as Portuguese models. They were concentrated in the center of the town, and provided a sharp contrast with the traditional round, thatched, mud wattled homes of the people.
That is all from the excellent Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia.
My Conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Interesting throughout, so interesting I don’t feel the need to give you an excerpt, here is the audio and transcript. There is no other conversation with Taleb which places his ideas in the proper context, as far as I am aware. At the end of the conversation, just keep on scrolling, Taleb starts up with Bryan Caplan for an hour, mostly on education. Here is the link for the Caplan segment only.
*Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made*
That is the title of a new and excellent book by Michael Zakim. Here is one bit:
A single block fronting Wall Street in 1850 was thus home to seventeen separate banking firms, as well as fifty-seven law offices, twenty-one brokerage houses, eleven insurance companies, and an assortment of notaries, agents, importers, commission merchants, and, of course, stationers. A rental market for office “suites” developed apace “fitted up with gas and every other convenience,” which also included newly invented “acoustic tubes” that allowed managing partners to communicate with porters in the basement and clerks in the salesroom without ever having to leave their desks…
All this office activity spurred a flurry of technological spillovers that included single standing desks and double-counter desks, sitting desks featuring nine or, alternately, fifteen pigeonholes, and drawers that could or could not be locked. “Office chairs capable of swiveling and tilting became available as well, together with less costly “counting house stools” that lacked any upholstery. Paperweights, check cutters, pen wipers (the woolen variety being preferable to silk or cotton, which tended to leave fibers on the nib), pencil sharpeners, rulers, copying brushes, dampening bowls, blotting paper (less important for absorbing excess ink than for protecting the page from soiled hands), wastepaper baskets, sealing wax (including small sticks coated with a combustible material ignited by friction and designed to be discarded after a single use), seal presses, paper fasteners, letter clips (for holding checks while entering them into the daybook), writing pads, billhead and envelope cases, business cards, receiving boxes for papers and letters, various trays (for storing pins, wafers, pencils, and pens), and “counting room calendars” spanning twelve- or sixteen-month cycles — all became standard business tools. So did the expanding inventory of “square inkstands,” “library inkstands,” and “banker inkstands” designed with narrow necks which prevented evaporation and shallow bodies that kept the upper part of the pen from becoming covered in ink, thus avoiding blackened fingers and smudged documents.
There is then a whole other paragraph about the different kinds of paper that developed and their importance for clerical work. This is perhaps the most thorough book I know on the importance of “small” innovations, and it is also a useful book on the history of accounting.
Kenneth Arrow, weather officer
Following the U.S. declaration of war on December 8, 1941, Arrow, who was certain to be drafted, enlisted in the hope of securing an officer’s commission in the U.S. Army Corps where he believed he would have a chance to use his mathematical and statistical training. He was quickly approved to attend an aviation training program at New York University in October 1942, taking “active duty” breaks from classes for rifle drill, which he and his colleagues thought rather silly. Nonetheless, he came out of that program in September 1943 commissioned as a weather officer with the rank of second lieutenant and was assigned to a weather research facility in Asheville, North Carolina; in July 1945 he was transferred to the weather division headquarters of the Army Air Force. It was during that time in Asheville that he wrote a memorandum that later, in 1949, became his first professional paper (“On the Use of Winds in Flight Planning” in the Journal of Meteorology). That paper presented an algorithm for taking advantage of winds aloft to save fuel on North Atlantic air crossings, an idea that was not acted upon by the military at that time but became the canonical practice for North Atlantic flight paths in the postwar period.
That is from the new, excellent, and consistently interesting Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Problem of Scientific Credit, by Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintraub. Unlike many history of economic thought books, this one tells you “what actually happened,” such as how an Econometrica editor (Robert Strotz) decided to publish the McKenzie paper before the Arrow-Debreu paper, when he had both in hand.
*Unfabling the East*
That is the new and noteworthy book by Jürgen Osterhammel, and the subtitle is The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia. Here is one good bit of many:
For Alexander Hamilton, there was nothing more acoustically disturbing on his extensive travels in Asia than the bells that tolled through the night in Portuguese Goa. Asian cities are quieter than European ones because they have hardly any paved roads and there are few, if any, carriages with iron fittings. Festive banquets are marked by an absence of polite conversation because the hosts are too busy tucking into their food to bother with such niceties. Court ceremonies generally unfold in an atmosphere that strikes Europeans as eerily hushed. Few words are exchanged during Siamese and Tibetan audiences. All is calm around the Chinese emperor too, as courtiers and mandarins glide to and fro in felt-lined slippers.
Definitely recommended. Here is the book’s home page.
*A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx*
The author is Sven-Eric Liedman and it came out on May 1.
This book is very well done. It is not revelatory to me, but it serve very well as the standard, up to date major biography of Marx. You can order it here.
Ethiopia: books on horseback
Via Malcolm Clark.
*The Radical Fool of Capitalism*
Bentham…appraised the trophies — dismissively dubbed “baked heads” — as technical innovations and recognized their potential for his own plans. He enthusiastically praised the “savage ingenuity.” An 1824 draft of his will was the first to contain the score of his wishes: first, to see the corpse as an inheritance…
According to legend, Behtam carried around the glass eyes intended for the Auto-Icon in his pocket in his final years. (Supposed) attempts to dehydrating body parts in his home oven are said to have yielded satisfactory results. Bentham believed the [Maori] mokomokai process would discolor facial traits and produce a parchment- or mummy-like appearance (which could be corrected with paint), while maintaining the physiognomy.
But Southwood Smith botched the job. He sprinkled sulfuric acid onto the head, and in doing so docked Bentham’s nose. He used an air pump to aid dehydration, which caused the skin to shrivel. Bentham’s face appeared melted, the physiognomy destroyed. In spring 1833, Smith commissioned a replacement head of wax…
That is from the new, excellent, and short The Radical Fool of Capitalism: On Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon, and the Auto-Icon, by Christian Welzbacher.
Erik Brynjolfsson interviews Daniel Kahneman
Mostly about AI, here is one bit:
My guess is that AI is very, very good at decoding human interactions and human expressions. If you imagine a robot that sees you at home, and sees your interaction with your spouse, and sees things over time; that robot will be learning. But what robots learn is learned by all, like self-driving cars. It’s not the experience of the single, individual self-driving car. So, the accumulation of emotional intelligence will be very rapid once we start to have that kind of robot .
It’s really interesting to think about whether people are happier now than they were. This is not at all obvious because people adapt and habituate to most of what they have. So, the question to consider about well-being and about providing various goods to people, is whether they’re going to get used to having those goods, and whether they continue to enjoy those goods. It’s not apparent how valuable these things are, and it will be interesting to see how this changes in the future.
Kahneman tells us that his forthcoming book is called Noise, though I don’t yet find it on Amazon. Here is an HBR essay of his on that topic.
*My Morning Routine*
The editors and co-creators are Benjamin Spall and Michael Xander, and the subtitle is How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired.
They were generous enough to include a contribution from me, on my theory of how to get ready in the morning for the day to come:
I make sure I’ve already showered. Too many people waste some of their most productive morning time showering. Showering relaxes you and calms you down — why should that happen in the morning? I prefer to enjoy my shower during the evening, when I know I’m winding down in any case.
And here is Scott Adams on related topics, from the same book:
I’m a trained hypnotist, and when I learned to do hypnosis I learned that self-hypnosis, if you’re trained to do it, is more effective and faster than meditation.
You can order the book here.