Category: Books
Charlotta Stern and Fabio Rojas
Sociology and Classical Liberalism in Dialogue: Freedom is Something We Do Together
Direct link to pdf:
Michael Cook on Iran
Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia. We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian history across the whole period. It has four major features. The first is the survival of something called Iran, as both a cultural and a political entity; Iran is there in the eleventh century, and it is still there in the eighteenth. the second is an alternation between periods when Iran is ruled by a single imperial state and periods in which it break up intoa number of smaller states. The third feature is steppe nomad power: all imperial states based in Iran in this period are the work of Turkic or Mongol nomads. The fourth is the role of the settled Iranian population, whose lot is to pay taxes and — more rewardingly — to serve as bureaucrats and bearers of a literate culture. With this first-order approximation in mind, we can now move on to a second-order approximation in the form of an outline of the history of Iran over eight centuries that will occupy most of this chapter.
That is from his new book A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity. I had not known that in the early 16th century Iran was still predominantly Sunni. And:
There were also Persian-speaking populations to the east of Iran that remained Sunni, and within Iran there were non-Persian ethnic groups, such as the Kurds in the west and the Baluchis in the southeast, that likewise retained their Sunnism. But the core Persian-speaking population of the country was by now [1722] almost entirely Shiite. Iran thus became the first and largest country in which Shiites were both politically and demographically dominant. One effect of this was to set it apart from the Muslim world at large, a development that gave Iran a certain coherence at the cost of poisoning its relations with its neighbors.
This was also a good bit:
Yet the geography of Iran in this period was no friendlier to maritime trade than it had been in Sasanian times. To a much greater extent than appears from a glance at the map, Iran is landlocked: the core population and prime resources of the country are located deep in the interior, far from the arid coastlands of the Persian Gulf.
In my earlier short review I wrote “At the very least a good book, possibly a great book.” I have now concluded it is a great book.
*The Carnation Revolution*
The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell. A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt:
The First Republic is sixteen years of unrelenting chaos, one that sets the scene for the fascist state that follows it. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal goes through eight presidents and forty-five governments, all the while experiencing an economic crisis, crushing debt and the Europe-spanning threats of the First World War. Mirroring similar movements in France and Mexico, early Portuguese republicanism’s defining feature is its fierce anti-clericalism, imposing a crackdown on churches, convents and monasteries and persecuting religious leaders. The turbulent political landscape is marked by escalating acts of violence, militant strike action, periodic military uprisings and borderline civil war, the government fluctuating wildly between different republican factions.
Unfortunately, this book does not read as if it is about a niche topic. And don’t forget Salazar was an economist.
Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT*
An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular:
Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral of prices and wages, monetary and exchange rate policies were out of whack, multipliers operate, the quest for savings could lower incomes overall, and the influence of liquidity factors on money demand and interest rates was especially high. All at once” (p. 72, emphasis in the original). In other words, Cowen drives home the point that this “general theory” isn’t actually general, it’s about very special, very unusual circumstances.
He considers Lord Keynes the GOAT contender whom he would most “want to hang around with” (p. 54). I had exactly the opposite reaction. The Keynes he portrays is virtually an egotistical monster. One who, for example, “kept an extended spreadsheet of his lovers and sexual encounters … each one rated by number” (p. 58). Anyone who treats other human beings this way—let alone writing it down—isn’t the kind of person I want to hang around with.
Recommended.
What to Watch
3 Body Problem (Netflix): Great! A captivating mix of big ideas, a compelling mystery, and spectacular set-pieces like the Cultural Revolution, strange worlds, the ship cutting and more. Of course, there are some weaknesses. 3 Body Problem falters in its portrayal of genius, rendering the British scientists as too normal, overlooking the obsessiveness, ambition, and unconventionality often found in real-world geniuses. Ironically, in its effort to diversify gender and race, the series inadvertently narrows the spectrum of personality and neurodiversity. Only Ye Wenjie, traumatized by the cultural revolution, obsessed by physics and revenge, and with a messianic personality hits the right notes. Regardless, I am eager for Season 2.
Shogun (Hulu): Great meeting of cultures. Compelling plot, based on the excellent Clavell novel. I didn’t know that some of the warlords of the time (1600) had converted to Christianity. (Later banned and repressed as in Silence). Shogun avoids two traps, the Japanese have agency and so does the European. Much of it is in Japanese with subtitles.
Monsieur Spade: It starts with a great premise, twenty years after the events of “The Maltese Falcon,” Sam Spade has retired in a small town in southern France still riven by World War II and Algeria. Clive Owen is excellent as Spade and there are some good noir lines:
Henri Thibaut: You were in the army, Mr. Spade?
Sam Spade: No, I was a conscientious objector.
Henri Thibaut: You don’t believe in killing your fellow man?
Sam Spade: Oh, I think there’s plenty of men worth killing, as well as plenty of wars worth fighting, I’d just rather choose myself.
Yet for all the promise, I didn’t finish the series. In addition to being set in France, Monsieur Spade has a French cinema atmosphere, boring, long, vaguely pretentious. There is also a weird fascination with smoking, does it pay off with anything? I don’t know. Didn’t finish it.
What I’ve been reading
1. Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. An amazing book, full of life and energy on every page, and yes there are 605 of them. Imagine if Camille Paglia had stuck with it and produced case studies. The main problem is simply that most people don’t know or care about Burton and Taylor any more?
2. David Caron, Michael Healy, 1873-1941, An Túr Gloine’s Stained Glass Pioneer. An excellent book, can it be said that Michael Healy is Ireland’s fourth greatest stained glass artist? Clarke, Geddes, and Hone would be the top three? It is good to see him getting this attention, but what will happen when so many Irish churches are decommissioned or abandoned or simply never seen? What does that equilibrium look like? All the more reason to invest in this book. What an underrated European tradition.
3. Paul Seabright, the subtitle says it all, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People. I’ve just started to crack this one open, Paul’s books are always very smart.
4. Sahar Akhtar, Immigration & Discrimination: (un)welcoming others. Can the idea of wrongful discrimination be applied to immigration decisions? Maybe you believe this is a pure and simple matter of national autonomy, but what if the potential immigrants are from a former and wronged colony? From an island nation perishing due to climate change? Or they were previously pushed off territory that is now part of the host nation? And yet open borders as an idea also does not work — how should one fit all these pieces together?
5. Austin Bush, The Food of Southern Thailand. The best book I know of on southern Thailand flat out. This one has recipes of course, but also photos, maps, anecdotes, and plenty of history. The food is explained in conceptual terms. Recommended, for all those with an interest.
6. Michael Cook, A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity. Mostly ends at 1800, this will become one of the standard, must-read histories of Islam and its multiple homes. The section on India, which is what I have been reading, is strongly conceptual and novel compared to other survey books such as Hourani. At the very least a good book, possibly a great book.
What should I ask Slavoj Žižek?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with him. Here is the first one, in Norway with a live audience. I am very much enjoying his new book
So what should I ask him?
My contentious Conversation with Jonathan Haidt
Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is the episode summary:
But might technological advances and good old human resilience allow kids to adapt more easily than he thinks?
Jonathan joined Tyler to discuss this question and more, including whether left-wingers or right-wingers make for better parents, the wisest person Jonathan has interacted with, psychological traits as a source of identitarianism, whether AI will solve the screen time problem, why school closures didn’t seem to affect the well-being of young people, whether the mood shift since 2012 is not just about social media use, the benefits of the broader internet vs. social media, the four norms to solve the biggest collective action problems with smartphone use, the feasibility of age-gating social media, and more.
It is a very different tone than most CWTs, most of all when we get to social media. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: There are two pieces of evidence — when I look at them, they don’t seem to support your story out of sample.
HAIDT: Okay, great. Let’s have it.
COWEN: First, across countries, it’s mostly the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries, which are more or less part of the Anglosphere. Most of the world is immune to this, and smartphones for them seem fine. Why isn’t it just that a negative mood came upon the Anglosphere for reasons we mostly don’t understand, and it didn’t come upon most of the rest of the world? If we’re differentiating my hypothesis from yours, doesn’t that favor my view?
HAIDT: Well, once you look into the connections and the timing, I would say no. I think I see what you’re saying now, but I think your view would say, “Just for some reason we don’t know, things changed around 2012.” Whereas I’m going to say, “Okay, things changed around 2012 in all these countries. We see it in the mental illness rates, especially of the girls.” I’m going to say it’s not just some mood thing. It’s like (a), why is it especially the girls? (b) —
COWEN: They’re more mimetic, right?
HAIDT: Yes, that’s true.
COWEN: Girls are more mimetic in general.
HAIDT: That’s right. That’s part of it. You’re right, that’s part of it. They’re just much more open to connection. They’re more influenced. They’re more subject to contagion. That is a big part of it, you’re right. What Zach Rausch and I have found — he’s my lead researcher at the After Babel Substack. I hope people will sign up. It’s free. We’ve been putting out tons of research. Zach has really tracked down what happened internationally, and I can lay it out.
Now I know the answer. I didn’t know it two months ago. The answer is, within countries, as I said, it’s the people who are conservative and religious who are protected, and the others, the kids get washed out to sea. Psychologically, they feel their life has no meaning. They get more depressed. Zach has looked across countries, and what you find in Europe is that, overall, the kids are getting a little worse off psychologically.
But that hides the fact that in Eastern Europe, which is getting more religious, the kids are actually healthier now than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Whereas in Catholic Europe, they’re a little worse, and in Protestant Europe, they’re much worse.
It doesn’t seem to me like, oh, New Zealand and Iceland were talking to each other, and the kids were sharing memes. It’s rather, everyone in the developed world, even in Eastern Europe, everyone — their kids are on phones, but the penetration, the intensity, was faster in the richest countries, the Anglos and the Scandinavians. That’s where people had the most independence and individualism, which was pretty conducive to happiness before the smartphone. But it now meant that these are the kids who get washed away when you get that rapid conversion to the phone-based childhood around 2012. What’s wrong with that explanation?
COWEN: Old Americans also seem grumpier to me. Maybe that’s cable TV, but it’s not that they’re on their phones all the time. And you know all these studies. If you try to assess what percentage of the variation in happiness of young people is caused by smartphone usage — Sabine Hossenfelder had a recent video on this — those numbers are very, very, very small. That’s another measurement that seems to discriminate in favor of my theory, exogenous mood shifts, rather than your theory. Why not?
Very interesting throughout, recommended. And do not forget that Jon’s argument is outlined in detail in his new book, titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
*Accelerating India’s Development*
The author is Karthik Muralidharan, and the subtitle is A State-Led Roapmap for Effective Governance. If you imagine a 600 pp. “state capacity libertarian” take on Indian development this is what you get, admittedly with the libertarian side of the equation downplayed a bit. Excerpt:
A common misconception is that the inefficiencies of the Indian state stem from its large size — that there are too many workers doing too few things. In practice, the opposite is true, and the Indian state is highly understaffed. As Figure 3.1 shows, India has only 16 public employees per 1000 people. For comparison, China has over three times as many (57) and Norway has nearly ten times as many (159). Even the US, often viewed as a leading example of a market-driven economy with limited government, has 77 public employees per 1000 people — nearly five times as many as India!
Recommended, here is the link on Amazon India. An American edition is needed. Here is a review of the book from The Economist.
What should I ask Brian Winter?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his bio:
Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a seasoned analyst of Latin American politics, with more than 20 years following the region’s ups and downs. He lived in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico as a correspondent for Reuters before taking on his current role in New York, where he is also the vice president of policy for the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. He has been called “the best foreign expert on Brazil of this moment” by GloboNews. Brian is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé; The Accidental President of Brazil, co-authored with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and Long After Midnight, a memoir about trying (and failing) to learn to tango in Argentina. He is a regular contributor to television and radio, the host of the Americas Quarterly Podcast and a prolific barbecuer and chef. Proficient in Spanish and Portuguese, Brian speaks frequently about Latin America’s past, present and future to investors and general-interest audiences. Follow him on Twitter @BrazilBrian
So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Fareed Zakaria
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. You can tell he knows what an interview is! At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying colors. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what’s stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what’s so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he’s become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he’s maintained a rich personal life, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why couldn’t you talk Singh out of his Nehruvian socialism? He was a great liberal. He loved free speech, very broad-minded, as you know much better than I do. But he, on economics, was weak. Or no?
ZAKARIA: Oh, no, you’re entirely right. By the way, I would say the same is true of my father, with whom I had many, many such conversations. You’d find this interesting, Tyler. My father was a young Indian nationalist who — as he once put it to me — made the most important decision in his life, politically, when he was 13 or 14 years old, which was, as a young Indian Muslim, he chose Nehru’s vision of secular democracy as the foundation of a nation rather than Jinnah’s view of religious nationalism. He chose India rather than Pakistan as an Indian Muslim.
He was politically so interesting and forward-leaning, but he was a hopeless social — a sort of social democrat, but veering towards socialism. Both these guys were. Here’s why, I think. For that whole generation of people — by the way, my father got a scholarship to London University and went to study with Harold Laski, the great British socialist economist. Laski told him, “You are actually not an economist; you are a historian.” So, my father went on and got a PhD at London University in Indian history.
That whole generation of Indians who wanted independence were imbued with . . . There were two things going on. One, the only people in Britain who supported Indian independence were the Labour Party and the Fabian Socialists. All their allies were all socialists. There was a common cause and there was a symbiosis because these were your friends, these were your allies, these were the only people supporting you, the cause that mattered the most to you in your life.
The second part was, a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.
My own view was, that was a big mistake, though I do think there are elements of what the state was able to do that perhaps were better done in a place like South Korea than in India, but that really explains it.
My father was in Britain in ’45 as a student. As a British subject then, you got to vote in the election if you were in London, if you were in Britain. I said to him, “Who did you vote for in the 1945 election?” Remember, this is the famous election right after World War II, in which Churchill gets defeated, and he gets up the next morning and looks at the papers, and his wife says to him, “Darling, it’s a blessing in disguise.” He says, “Well, at the moment it seems very effectively disguised.”
My father voted in that election. I said to him, “You’re a huge fan of Churchill,” because I’d grown up around all the Churchill books, and my father could quote the speeches. I said, “Did you vote for Churchill?” He said, “Oh good lord, no.” I said, “Why? I thought you were a great admirer of his.” He said, “Look, on the issue that mattered most to me in life, he was an unreconstructed imperialist. A vote for Labour was a vote for Indian independence. A vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of the empire.” That, again, is why their friends were all socialists.
Excellent throughout. And don’t forget Fareed’s new book — discussed in the podcast — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.
*Nuclear War: A Scenario*
By Annie Jacobsen, a very good book. What would happen if a nuclear weapon actually were launched at the United States? On the ground? In the chain of command? Organizationally and otherwise? A good book, sadly still of relevance. Full of drama throughout, and tactically astute. Excerpt:
Ted Postol is blunt. “Russian early-warning satellites don’t work accurately,” he says. “As a country, Russia doesn’t have the technological know-how to build a system as good as we have in the United States.” This means “their satellites can’t look straight down at the earth,” a technology known as look-down capability. And as a result, Russia’s Tundra satellites “look sideways,” Postol warns, “which handicaps their ability to distinguish sunlight from, say, fire”
Notably troublesome is how Tundra sees clouds.
It was North Korea who started the whole thing, you can buy the book here.
*Who’s Afraid of Gender?*
That is the title of the new Judith Butler book, focusing mostly on trans issues. To be clear, on most practical issues concerning trans, I side with the social conservatives. For instance, I don’t think trans women have a right to compete in women’s weightlifting contests. And I have not been happy with how many schools have been teaching about trans issues, due to social contagion effects that are larger than I would have expected. And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong. This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things). But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories? Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches? Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner? Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?
So I am happy to recommend this book, noting that not everyone will like it, to say the least. My main criticism is that Butler spends too much time with what I consider to be weaker views (e.g., the Pope), and not enough time with the more difficult problems concerning real and potential harms to children. Her neglect of the latter verges on the intellectually criminally negligent. And yet the key is to see that it is still a good and interesting book.
*Star Maker*, by Olaf Stapledon
Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago. To most men, if course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age. In their view civilization and mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been such a triumph of mechanization. The benefits of a scientific civilization were obvious. For the fortunate class there was more comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man coul dknow more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail. Moreoever, increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact. Local idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone. In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily overlooked that the human constitution, through strengthened by improved conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly. Certain disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing. In particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and more pernicious. Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon outnumber even the churches.
Here is a recent short essay on Starmaker, first published in 1937.
*Revolusi*
The subtitle is Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, and the author is David van Reybrouck. An excellent book, and I found two points of particular interest in it. First, just how weak and incomplete was the Dutch colonization of Indonesia for centuries. Second, just how complicated and rapidly changing was the postwar transition from Japanese rule to independence. Excerpt:
In total no fewer than 120,000 Dutch conscripts would depart between 1946 and 1949, an enormous number that approached the general mobilization before World War II (150,000). Six thousand recruits who were examined and judged ‘fit for the tropics’ refused to embark. Many of these were tracked down and hauled out of beds to the military police. This hunt for deserters went on until 1958! Strict sentences were passed on 2,565 war resisters. Almost three-quarters received custodial sentences of up to two years, the rest remain in jail even longer. Altogether a total of fifteen centuries of prison sentences were pronounced, a remarkably large amount compared to the complete immunity granted to later war criminals. The conclusion was clear: those who refused to kill were locked up, those who murdered without reason went free.
Recommended, there should of course be more such books on Indonesia.