Category: Books
*Enlightenment Now*, the new Steven Pinker book
1. He is more likely right than wrong on the major points of optimism and progress and science.
2. The book is very clearly written, and it would do most of the world good to read it.
3. Contrary to Pinker, inframarginally I see the Enlightenment as a strong complement to Christianity/faith, even though the two at the margin often will clash. The same is true for nationalism.
4. The Counterenlightenment, as Pinker calls it, is intellectually much stronger than he gives it credit for. It’s time for yet another reread of Gulliver’s Travels.
5. I am uncomfortable with statements such as “Intellectuals hate progress.” That sentence opens chapter four. I know that he explains and qualifies it, but it is not how I like to organize concepts.
6. It is not a good book for understanding the Enlightenment.
7. Overall my main difference with Pinker might be this: I believe there is a certain amount of irreducible “irrationality” (not my preferred term, but borrowing his schema for a moment) in people, and it has to be “put somewhere,” into some doctrine or belief system. That is what makes the whole bundle sustainable. It also means that a move toward greater “Enlightenment” is never without its problematic side, and that a “Counterenlightenment” can be more progressive than it might at first appear. In contrast, I read Pinker as believing that Enlightenment simply can beat ignorance more and more over time.
The book’s subtitle is The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. And here is my earlier discussion with Pinker, video, podcast, and transcript.
*Can it Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America*
It will be out soon, you should buy it. I’ve only read my own essay in the book, but that one is very good and also original, I haven’t made the argument elsewhere. Presumably the other essays are better yet, as they feature Jon Elster, Timur Kuran, Samantha Power, Duncan Watts, Noah Feldman, and other luminaries.
My Conversation with Matt Levine
Here is the transcript and audio, Matt was in great form. We covered Uber, derivatives, crypto, Horace, Latin and the ancient world, neighborhoods of New York City, whether markets are volatile enough, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whether IPOs are mispriced, Nabokov and modernist literature, Achilles and Homer, and of course the Matt Levine production function (“panic”).
Here is one excerpt:
LEVINE:
…What I’d like the story to be is that financial markets have gotten smarter and they reacted less to news. So even though the news is noisier, they react less to that noisy news because it turns out not to affect asset prices in as noisy a way as you’d think by watching TV.
I think that there is something compelling to that because we actually have seen smart people build smart things that do a good job of making investing decisions. So you’d expect over time, as people build more rational investing tools, investing would become more rational.
The good counterargument to that is that investing is not a technological problem in the world that can be solved. It’s an interpersonal fight. Trading, in particular, is an attempt to be better than someone else. You can never make trading more rational because as you get better, someone else gets better. The residue will ultimately still be your human biases.
I’m biased towards the view that we have gotten smarter at decoupling our emotional reactions to the news from financial asset prices. Part of that is — whether or not that’s true globally — there’s a local sense in which the first day of Trump’s election everyone panicked. Then he said another crazy thing, and then he said another. Eventually you tune it out. That’s a form of this thing of financial assets reacting less to human reactions to the news.
Here is another:
COWEN: Do you have a single biggest worry [about asset markets], however tiny, tiny, tiny it may be?
LEVINE: I don’t think I do. I don’t think I do. The thing that I find weirdest is the lack of volatility in the face of a very strange and volatile world, but I’ve reconciled myself to that. This is my efficient markets optimism, where I assume that if something bad is happening, it would happen.
COWEN: But efficient markets is also a pessimism, right? It’s harder to make the world better than it already is because you can’t see past what others are seeing very easily.
LEVINE: Sure, it’s an efficient markets conservatism or something.
And finally:
LEVINE: I have an idiosyncratic take on Book 9 of the Iliad. The Iliad is the story of Achilles is the great warrior on the Greek side in the Trojan War. He gets mad at some slight, and he goes back to his tent to sulk, and the Greeks start losing.
So then they send emissaries to his tent to say, “Please come back.” And he says, “No.” Then, the Greeks start losing some more.
Eventually, he comes back, and he gets killed. That’s basically the story of the Iliad. Book 9 is where they send the emissaries to say, “Please come back,” and he says, “No.”
He gives this speech, this response that is weird, where he says, effectively, “The prophecy is that if I go back to fight here, I will die here. My name will be immortal. If I don’t go back to fight, I’ll go home and live a long life and will be forgotten.” He chooses to go back and be forgotten. Then, later, he changes his mind because his friend gets killed.
I think the existential examination of this Greek warrior and this heroic culture that clearly valorizes heroism and deathless fame and everything, and who is, canonically, the most famous heroic warrior and the one with the most deathless fame, he’s the one who says, “Nah, I’d rather go back and live a long life on my farm.”
The forcing of that choice is the central point of the highest work of Greek art, sort of prefigures a lot of existentialist thought in the future, I think.
Do read and listen to the whole thing…
What should I ask Martina Navratilova?
I will be having a Conversation with her on March 19, in Arlington at George Mason University. So what should I ask?
I thank you all in advance for your usual enthusiasm and sagacity.
What I’ve been reading
1. Kathryn Lomas, The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars. A very thorough, reasonable, and well-researched account and synthesis of what we know about the origins of the Roman empire. By my standards it is insufficiently concerned with generalizations, but I do understand how many might consider that an advantage.
2. Michael E. Hobart, The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide. I wanted to love this book, and I still think it is quite important and worthy, but I don’t love reading this book. Yet here is the first and marvelous sentence of the preface: “This book uses the history of information technology — in particular, the shift from alphabetic literacy to modern numeracy — to narrate and explain the origins of the contemporary rift between science and religion.” After that it is dense.
3. Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography. The most interesting material concerns Khaldun’s history as a Sufi. Which brings me to Alexander Knysh’s Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism, which I enjoyed. Overall I find this a fruitful area to study, and I benefited from some parts of Alexander Bevilacqua’s The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment.
4. David Hockney and Martin Gayford, A History of Pictures. How artists have thought about space and light over the centuries, consistently interesting and insightful, wonderful color plates too. I am not persuaded by all of Hockney’s claims about art history, but overall he is much underrated as a writer and thinker, including on the nature and import of photography.
5. Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World, covers the economics of the Kibbutz.
6. Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. I don’t have the time to make my way through the details of this 900+pp. book, but upon browsing it appears to be a work of incredible quality, scope, and original research.
7. Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History. A radical revision of the usual story, based on a careful reexamination of Spanish and Nahuatl stories. Restall seems to be mostly correct, but I will add two points: a) I never took the older account very seriously anyway, and b) I am more interested in the new macro-story than the micro-revisions of the march and the encounter and surrender and so on. One big difference seems to be there was more early resistance to Cortés than the common accounts would have you believe. And outright slaughter and starvation were more important for the war in the short run than we used to think, relative to smallpox and other maladies. In any case, this is an important book for anyone who follows this area.
When fiscal policy might make matters worse
From the new 4th edition of Cowen and Tabarrok, Modern Principles of Economics:
Increased spending and tax cuts have to be paid for. Thus, increased spending and tax cuts today will tend to be followed by decreased spending or tax increases tomorrow. When tomorrow comes and spending is reduced and taxes rise, aggregate demand will fall—this is one reason why long-run or net multipliers are smaller than short-run multipliers. Ideal fiscal policy will increase AD in bad times and pay off the bill in good times, as we show in Figure 37.5. Overall, if we can spend more in bad times when the multiplier is big and tax more in good times when the multiplier is small, the net effect will lead to higher GDP overall. Economists say that the ideal fiscal policy is counter-cyclical because when the economy is down the government should spend more, and when the economy is up the government should spend less.
Although counter-cyclical fiscal policy makes sense to economists, it often
doesn’t make sense to politicians or to voters. The views of economists violate a kind of “common sense” or folk wisdom, which says that in bad times the government should spend less and only in good times should the government spend more. After all, you and I spend less when times are bad and more when times are good, so shouldn’t the government behave similarly? If the government follows the “common sense” view, however, it will tend to make recessions deeper and booms larger, thereby making the economy more volatile, again as shown in Figure 37.5.
…Even when governments do spend more in recessions, as economists suggest, they often don’t follow through on the second half of the prescription, which is to spend less during booms…This usually means that there is less room for expansionary fiscal policy when it is needed.
The 4th edition is just out, here is more information.
Bias in Advertising vs Subscription Driven Media
The excellent Andrew Potter at In Due Course writes:
When I was a student journalist, it was axiomatic that advertising was the biggest threat to independent media. Putting your livelihood in the hands of capitalists meant, ipso facto, doing their bidding.
Experience is a great teacher though, and when I started working as an editor at a newspaper, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that you didn’t wake up every day to a swarm of calls from outraged advertisers threatening to pull their campaigns if we didn’t smarten up….presumably because they didn’t really care. What they wanted was our audience, not the content.
But you know who does complain a lot? Subscribers do, endlessly.
Today, the great hope for mainstream news organizations is that subscribers will start doing something they’ve never done, which is pay for news. The New York Times seems well on its way to bending that revenue curve and replacing ad dollars with subscribers at a 1:1 ratio, and there’s similar hopes for the Washington Post, the FT, and maybe the Wall Street Journal….
…My suspicion is that [this] will lead to an increasingly polarized media environment, through more or less the same mechanism that leads to group polarization in social psychology. When a news organization relies almost entirely on its readership for its revenue, it will inevitably start to cater to what the owners perceive to be the political centre of gravity of that readership. And the readership will in turn make demands on the editors to shape the coverage in certain ways, which will tend to gradually shift that centre of gravity away from the middle, and towards the political extremes.
I’d add one more factor to Potter’s analysis. Since the advertisers care about eyeballs, advertisement-funded media are incentivized to produce more eyeballs. Such incentives tends to encourage lowest-common-denominator entertainment but also more political balance. Subscription-funded media, in contrast, face a tradeoff: subscribers want content that supports their world view so moderating the content to appeal to a larger audience will likely reduce the price that any one reader is willing to pay. Revenues are therefore larger with a smaller but more political extreme audience.
Addendum: Potter and philosopher Joseph Heath write at In Due Course infrequently but are always interesting. Here, for example, is a superb long-read by Heath, nominally about Iain Bank’s culture series but actually about more and well worth reading even if you don’t know the novels.
My favorite things Poland
No, I am not there now, but Adam D. emails me and requests this, so here goes:
1. Novel: Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, all about identity and erotic guilt. Next in line would be any number of Isaac Singer novels, I don’t have a favorite offhand. Soon I will try The Family Moskat. Gombrowicz is probably wonderful, but I don’t find that it works for me in translation. Quo Vadis left me cold.
2. Chopin works: The Preludes, there are many fine versions, and then the Ballades. The Etudes excite me the most, the Mazurkas and piano sonatas #2 and #3 are most likely to surprise me at current margins of listening. I find it remarkable how I never tire of Chopin, in spite of his relatively slight output.
3. Painter: This one isn’t as easy as it ought to be.
4. Architect: Daniel Libeskind was born in Poland. But more generally one can cite Krakow, and I suspect the older versions of Gdansk.
The wooden churches and folk art of southern Poland also deserve mention.
5. Political thinker: Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, about the capitulations of artists to communism, though subtler than just an anti-state polemic. He once stated: ” I have never been a political writer and I worked hard to destroy this image of myself.” I do not feel I can judge his poetry, though last year’s biography of him was a good book.
6. Astronomer and originator of the quantity theory of money: Copernicus.
7. Television show: The Decalogue, perhaps #4 is my favorite. Here is good NPR coverage.
8. Movie: Any of the Andrzej Wajda classics would do, maybe start with Kanal or Ashes and Diamonds. More recently I would opt for Ida. I like Kieślowski’s TV more than his films, and prefer Hollywood Polanski to Polish Polanski.
9. Classical pianist: There are many, but I will cite Kristian Zimerman over Artur Rubinstein. The former plays the piano better. Josef Hofmann deserves mention, but there are dozens of picks here.
10. Jazz musician: Trumpeter Tomasz Stańko.
11. Economists: There is Kalecki, Hurwicz, the now-underrated Oskar Lange (doesn’t Singaporean health care work fine?), and Victor Zarnowitz. I had thought Mises was born in Poland, but upon checking it turned out to be Ukraine.
Overall the big puzzle is why there isn’t more prominence in painting, given Poland’s centrality in European history.
That was then, this is now, rent control vs. building deregulation edition
By early 1919 many New Yorkers — even many who held that the long-term solution to the housing problem was “to build more homes and build them now” — had come to believe that neither private enterprise nor public authority could do much to alleviate the housing shortage in the near future. From this belief it was only a short step to the conclusion that the state legislature had to take action to stop the city’s rapacious landlords from raising the rent…
Here you will find a recent WSJ article (or read this ungated) about municipalities once again turning to rent control…
The above passage is from the highly useful and deeply comprehensive The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917-1929, by Robert M. Fogelson. Note that back then both rent control and “building more” won. As for today, Megan has a relevant column.
*Self-Regulation and Human Progress*
Note that General Motors, with both a direct incentive to closely monitor water quality and the capacity to do something about it, ceased using Flint River water at its engine plant in that city in October 2014.
The author of the book is Evan Osborne and the subtitle is How Society Gains When We Govern Less.
What I’ve been reading and what has arrived in my pile
Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do. Usually I am allergic to “general summary about some new topic in tech” books, but this one is quite good.
Michela Wrong, I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation, is in fact, as a number of you had suggested, probably the best book on Eritrea.
Matthew Engelke, How to Think Like an Anthropologist, is a very good introduction to exactly what the title promises.
Robert Wuthnow tries his hand at The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America.
Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War.
Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.
How should you take and write notes in books?
Hey Tyler!
Do you have a process for note taking while you read? Like clipping important parts in books, etc? Or do you just read and that’s all?
Matthew E.
And in the same week William D. writes to me:
…How do annotate, or mark up books that you read? This question is prompted by a lively discussion between a professor of mine (who argued that the text should be kept clean to ensure the integrity of re-readings) and myself (I find that my comprehension and ability to navigate the text is increased by annotations). Do you think that re-readings are harmed or benefitted by the presence of past annotations on the text? Personally I am not sure. Does it depend on the text?
My approach is simple, though not sophisticated. If I own the book, and there is something interesting on the page, I fold over the page corner. (If it is a library book I simply write down the page numbers.) The mere act of folding makes the fact or point easier to remember, and in fact that is my main purpose, namely to turn the piece of information into a claim about visual space. That said, the folds also make the source easier to find again if needed. I agree that marking up the page “ruins” your next read of the source. I find that by having to search again on the page I find other significant ideas as well.
That said, if I teach a book I have to mark it up to find particular passages more easily on the spur of the moment before the students in class. Then I stop learning from my rereads of the book, but instead learn from the teaching of it.
I pretend no universality for those procedures, but they work for me. Do you do something different?
What are stochastically the best books to read about Latin America?
This list is aggregating from my reader recommendations:
Jorge Castaneda “Manana Forever” on 21st Century Mexico isn’t as polished but it’s pretty informative.
“To count, the book must have some aspirations to be a general survey of what the country is…” Mexico: Riding, Distant Neighbors, — definitely. Being up to date is not that relevant for attempting to show “what the country is…”. As good or better: Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) (1950) and Charles Macomb Flandrau, Viva Mexico! (1908)
El Laberinto also came to my mind as a better candidate on Mexico. And then there is Understanding Mexicans and Americans: Cultural Perspectives in Conflict (Rogelio Diaz-Guerrero and Lorand B. Szalay) originally published in 1991.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-4899-0733-2
If you are going to go with a dated option for Mexico, Paz’ “Labyrinth of Solitude” is considerably better than “Distant Neighbors”.
El Nicaragüense by Pablo Antonio Cuadra (for Nicaragua)
On Mexico: Enrique Krauze’s book “Mexico: Biography of Power” has the reputation of “best book about [modern] Mexico,” but I’ve struggled to read it.
For Peru:
The textbook answer should be “The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered” ed. Cynthia McClintock & Abraham F. Lowenthal.
My personal favorite is another book by McClintock (the aforementioned editor and GWU Professor of Political Science and International Affairs) titled “Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change in Peru.” Unlike the broad surveys of political and economic history given in the McClintock and Lownthal edited book, “Peasant Cooperatives” gives a great case study of agrarian co-ops and the socio-economic horrors of military rule.
On Nicaragua: Stephen Kinzer’s “Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua”
On Guyana: “Wild Coast” by John Gimlette
And Michael Reid’s “Forgotten Continent” is a useful book about South America.
For Brazil: “Brazil – The Troubled Rise of a Global Power” by Michael Reid – http://amzn.to/2CFGYax
Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina, extended essay on Argentina books here.
Argentina (classic) Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism
My Conversation with Charles C. Mann
Here is the audio and transcript, Charles was in superb form. We talked about air pollution (carbon and otherwise), environmental pessimism, whether millions will ever starve and are there ultimate limits to growth, how the Spaniards took over the Aztecs, where is the best food in Mexico, whether hunter-gatherer society is overrated, Jackie Chan, topsoil, Emily Dickinson, James C. Scott, the most underrated trip in the Americas, Zardoz, and much much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: But if you had to pick a leading candidate to be the fixed factor, I’m not saying you have to endorse it, but what’s the most likely fixed factor if there is one?
MANN: Well, water is certainly a big candidate. There just really isn’t that much fresh water.
COWEN: But we can price it more, and since we have growing wealth — global economy grows at 4 percent a year — we can subsidize those who need subsidies…
MANN: You’re right. But water’s obviously one of them. But hovering over it is these questions about whether these natural cycles . . . is kind of a fundamental question about life itself. Is an ecosystem an actual system with an integrity of its own, with rules of its own that you violate at your peril? Which is the fundamental premise of the environmental movement. Or is an ecosystem more like an apartment building in which it is just a bunch of people who happen to live in the same space and share a few common necessities?
I don’t think ecology really has settled on this. There’s a guy in Florida, Dan Simberloff, who is a wonderful ecologist who has kind of made a career out of destroying all these models, these elegant models, one after another. So that’s the fundamental guess.
If it turns out that it’s just a collection of factors that we can shift around, that nature’s purely instrumental and we can do with it what we want, then we have a lot more breathing room. If it turns out that there really are these overarching cycles, which seems to be the intuition of the ecologists who study this, then we have less room than we think.
And:
COWEN: Jared Diamond.
MANN: I think an interesting guy who really should learn more about social sciences.
COWEN: Economics in particular.
MANN: Yes.
COWEN: Theory of common property resources.
MANN: Yeah.
And finally:
MANN: …What I think is the underrated factor is that Cortez was much less a military genius than he was a political genius. He was quite a remarkable politician, really deft. And what he did is . . . The Aztecs were an empire, the Triple Alliance, and they were not nice people. They were rough customers. And there was a lot of people whom they had subjugated, and people whom they were warring on who really detested them. And Cortez was able to knit them together into an enormous army, lead that army in there, have all these people do all that, and then hijack the result. This is an act of political genius worthy of Napoleon.
Self-recommending, and I am delighted to again express my enthusiasm for Charles’s new The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World. Here is Bill Easterly’s enthusiastic WSJ review of the book.
What is stochastically the best book to read about Japan?
Here were reader recommendations: remember the ground rules, namely that the book must aspire to some degree of comprehensiveness:
Japan and the Shackles of the Past by R. Taggart Murphy.Japan and the Shackles of the Past is very good. David Pilling’s Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of SurvivalAlso, Japan through the looking glass, by Alan Macfarlane.While Richie is *the* famous foreign voice on Japan, Alan Booth’s “The Roads to Sata” is, to use Tyler’s favorite word, underrated and worth a read.
Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West Paperback – March 28, 2000 by T.R. Reid
Good book about Japan by the WaPo correspondent. Funny.
Alex Kerr is another great writer on Japan, but this one is a bit dated although definitely still worth a read. His Lost Japan is my favorite.
The best book I’ve read about Japan, or at least modern Japan, is “Dogs and Demons” by Alex Kerr. It’s a fairly pessimistic book about how various postwar obsessions — material comfort, social harmony, and clear class identities — have created a surprisingly unambitious, overly conservative, deeply sclerotic country that has seen its brief glimpse as one of the world’s major powers unambiguously pass.
For Japan:
Modern: Bending Adversity by David Pilling is an excellent view on modern (deflation era) Japan.
Recent: Covering the Showa Period (1923-1989), the graphic novel “Showa” by Shigeru Mizuki is excellent. (I’m not usually a graphic novel reader, but this was amazing)-4 volumes.
Through 1867: A history of Japan by George Sansom (published 1958) is a three volume set covering -1334, 1334-1615 and 1615-1867.
There are a number of other enjoyable books as well (e.g., Road to Sata) but I would not say that they are representative or “must-reads”, regardless of how pleasant reading it may be.
I am not endorsing (or rejecting) those selections, merely aggregating them. That said, you should read them.