Category: History
How and why did the Victorians succeed?
From Samuel Hughes, in Works in Progress:
The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun.
Here is some further detail:
Most socially elite Victorian boys began formal education at the age of seven or eight, spending about five years in a ‘preparatory school’ before passing on to a ‘public school’ (which, to the enduring confusion of international observers, is a kind of elite private school). There was a hierarchy of public schools, with the nine ‘Clarendon schools’ at the top, and just one, Eton College, clearly at the apex. About 30 percent of nineteenth-century cabinet ministers and 40 percent of prime ministers were Old Etonians.
Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire.
Nor did the Victorians wake up early in the morning. Recommended, there is much more at the link, though the answer to the question remains somewhat of a mystery to me.
The Great Accretion and the Great Depression
A very old idea, returning with a vengeance:
The Second Industrial Revolution sparked a wave of new products and industrial processes, fueling an optimistic Roaring Twenties. But did excitement about technological progress contribute to an over accumulation of investment, despite a slowdown in new product development and satiated demand during the 1920s? And, was this over investment worsened by continuous process innovation? Could these factors have played a role in triggering the Great Depression? To explore these questions, a macroeconomic model that incorporates both process and product innovation is proposed. Proof-of-concept simulations are performed to assess whether these factors can help explain the Great Depression. The answer is yes.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by
The Greg Clark Symposium
Earlier I wrote “Greg Clark may well be the most important social scientist of the 21st century.” Thus, the symposium in Econ Journal Watch on Clark’s new but perhaps not forthcoming book is very welcome. The symposium includes serious critics, most notably Stuhler and Benning, but I suspect even the critics would agree with Arden and Plomin who write:
We agree wholeheartedly with Clark’s overall message that genetics accounts for outcomes long assumed to be due to nurture. Like other books in his trilogy, Clark marshals evidence from diverse sources to support his argument.
The data reach in this book—1600–2026—is jaw-dropping. Clark (and his colleague Neil Cummins) turned to wedding-register marks, probate courts, Huguenot wills, Oxbridge matriculation rolls, Sandhurst cadet lists, Wedgwood servants, and the Guild of One-Name Studies, to name a few. These data are imaginative, arresting, and inspiring. The analyses conducted, given the manifest complexities of harmonising across data types, time, and place, are impressive.
…This audacious scholarly book properly lights a fire under important questions. We look forward to following the work, its critics, and its rebuttals. It’s a terrific scientific contribution; because it is so thoroughly interdisciplinary, it will enrich and enliven the conversation about social status, its causes, and malleability.
One thing I am struck with from the critics (not just those in the symposium) is that most acknowledge that twin and adoption studies have badly undermined the claim that parental investments are big determinants of adult ability and earnings. The critics are correct that more elaborate environmental models can reproduce genetic-looking correlations but keeping an environmental explanation alive is not the same as vindicating the explanation people originally believed. Clark and many others have pushed the debate far into new territory.
There is also a basic asymmetry between the competing explanations. Genetics supplies independently established inheritance rules. When an environmental model reproduces the same patterns by choosing transmission rules precisely because they mimic genetic inheritance, it is accommodating the evidence, not independently predicting it. True, Clark also requires some free parameter choices, but he is clear that these can and need to be independently estimated.
The kinds of parental effects being demonstrated also matter. The nurture effects the environmentalists point to often seem to be for optional, steerable, or transferable choices than for more fundamental abilities, that is, changing what a child chooses to do with a given set of abilities, versus changing those abilities. Parents, for example, have more influence over religious identification than over religiosity, more influence over wealth than income, more influence over educational attainment than IQ.
The genetic arguments in the book draw the most criticism and yet the book has much else offer as Clark notes. For example:
Social status is inherited as strongly as height. Even relatives as distant as nine generations apart, 270 years, still show significant correlation in social status.
That is a very striking finding–especially given the intervening industrial revolution, multiple wars, huge changes in social mores etc.–but if it stands, it does so independent of the genetic explanation.
The fact that this monumental and challenging book–right or wrong–cannot find a major academic publisher is an intellectual scandal. The editors at Princeton University Press and the University of Chicago Press should be ashamed.
Addendum: See previous MR posts on Clark including Tyler’s Conversation.
What should I ask Tom Griffiths?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Looking at Wikipedia:
Thomas L. Griffiths (born c. 1978) is an Australian academic who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He studies human decision-making and its connection to problem-solving methods in computation. His book with Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, was named one of the “Best Books of 2016” by MIT Technology Review…
Griffiths released The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind in 2026. Siobhan Roberts describes it as “a rigorous and captivating account of how cognition can be modeled via three mathematical frameworks: logic, artificial neural networks (“mathematical systems that emulate the operation of the brain”) and probability theory.”
Here is his research page, here is his new book on Amazon, I thought the book was excellent.
So what should I ask him?
*Shade*
The author is Sam Bloch, and the subtitle is The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. An interesting book on a neglected topic, here is one excerpt:
Shade is not part of L.A.’s modern identity. In the 1930s, the city was rezoned to Federal Housing Administration design standards and banned high-density developments like row houses. Although apartments were once common, city leaders bowed to a prevailing wisdom that L.A. should not resemble a dark and cramped East Coast city. Freestanding single family-homes that were touched by sun on every side became mandatory. In came the cars. L.A.’s curbside trees were removed to accommodate shrinking sidewalks and expanding roads, and new rules that require parking minimums dealt another below to the urban forest. Mediterranean-style courtyards became endangered species as the shaded commons were converted to outdoor car storage. For decades, no building could be taller than the twenty-seven-story city hall…
Since the 1970s, an individual right to sunshine has been practically enshrined in state law.
The book also serves as an alternative history of Los Angeles (though it covers much more than that) through this alternative lens.
Bundesrepublik Deutschland
At times we forget what an amazing wonder the Bundesrepublik Deutschland was. At the end of the World War II, Germany was one of the sickest and cruelest human societies in history, ever. Not too many years later, it was one of the best and most successful societies ever.
By the 1980s, living standards had caught up to the United States, with the provision of public goods sometimes superior. The country was fully democratic, pro-Western, and largely pro-American.
Their rail system and postal service were amongst the best ever created.
For thinkers of note there were Hans Blumenberg, Habermas, Peter Weiss, Gadamer, late Heidegger and late Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck, the underrated Klaus Theweleit, Niklas Luhmann, and perhaps you value some of the other members of the Frankfurt School.
The visual arts were very strong, with Richter, Polke, Baselitz, Beuys, Penck, Palermo, and much more.
Music produced Stockhausen, Henze, Lachenmann, Rihm, Zimmerman, Kraftwerk, Can, and all of Krautrock, later techno, though right at the time of unification rather than during the BRD per se. The list of vocalists, instrumentalists, and conductors is strong. Was there anywhere better for hearing opera?
Perhaps I prefer the fiction from Austria and Switzerland, but at the very least Germany provided a major market for those authors and it was an extraordinarily literate country with amazing bookstores. For domestic authors there were Böll, Patrick Süskind, Siegfried Lenz, Wolfgang Koeppen, can I count Uwe Johnson?, and Arno Schmidt maybe? I do not like Grass, but it seems wrong not to list him.
The food could be very good, especially in the southwest. There were Michelin star restaurants all over the country (still are, to be clear on this point). So many well-functioning cities, with many of the world’s best transit systems. Lots of nuclear power and a strong industrial base. West Berlin was an exciting city with an air of mystery. Some might say no speed limit on the Autobahn, though I am less sure that was a virtue. Plenty of beautiful women and reasonable attitudes toward sex.
If you had to choose, what was the worst thing about the country? No shopping on Sundays? Workplace and shopping hours discrimination against women? Too much smoking? Obsession with Waldsterben?
Are there features of post-unification Germany that can compare to this earlier era? So much seems not to work well. So many policy mistakes have been made. So much leadership lost in the areas mentioned above. So much pessimism, sadly a lot of it seems to be justified.
Where did all the good performance go? And why did it leave? Lack of a communist enemy? Absorption of East Germany? The simple accretion of distance from pre-WWII German creativity?
The wonder that was the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Johannes, we hardly knew ye.
The Federal Lands: An Economic Property Rights Perspective
The US federal government owns and administers 472,892,659 acres or 21% of the land area of the lower 48 states, the country’s largest landowner. The resource is held and managed as a collective resource, the Federal Lands, through political and bureaucratic interpretation of the Multiple Use principle and generally, the biological aim of maximum sustained-yield. By contrast, access, exchange, and investment for most other US natural resources are through private property rights and markets. Despite the magnitude of the resource, economists have devoted relatively limited attention to the economic and welfare impact. The objective is to suggest economic implications and to encourage additional economic analyses. The discussion summarizes federal lands privatization through 1891, when withholding of federal lands began. The literature reveals no demonstratable market failure or increased resource scarcity from private exploitation between 1870 and 1957 when most lands were withheld. Because land was nonmobile and observable private property rights could have been assigned and any externalities addressed via Pigouvian restrictions or Coasean exchange. Federal ownership was not obviously required. Progressive Era reformers, driven by concerns of impending resource depletion, called for scientific, sustained-yield management by government officials. The institutional change is economically important. As outlined by Dixit and others, private rights holders have high powered incentives for efficient resource use that are lacking in decision making by agency officials who do not hold exchangeable property rights and do not directly bear the economic costs and benefits of their actions. Consequential public goods delivery could be an offset, but these are not measured for tradeoff calculations. Following Krueger, a rent-seeking framework is presented for comparing outcomes with economic property rights and political management. The analysis suggests that a.) federal lands will have lower production value than comparable private, all else equal; (b). federal lands management will be less responsive to shifts in economic costs and benefits. Public goods may be provided for high amenity, recreation, and ecological areas, but the dominant Multiple Use management principle provides no objective criteria for allocation or for periodic outcome assessment and adjustment. A literature review and data for contemporary federal forests, range, and oil and gas lands are provided.
That is from a new paper by Gary D. Libecap.
Why Papua New Guinea is so interesting
And this leads to the most interesting part of this story: how the highlanders were so isolated for so long.
I want to acknowledge that the highlanders were not completely, hermetically sealed off from the outside world – it’s just that knowledge of outside world never actually made it to them or vice versa.
Over time, a few goods did make their way up to the highlands: pigs, about 3,000 years ago; the sweet potato, which is South American and arrived about 300 to 400 years ago; and tobacco, also American, which came the same way.
The journey the sweet potato and tobacco took to get there is a good example of how this all worked without transmitting further information. The Spanish and Portuguese brought both plants to the spice islands (in what is now Indonesia), just off the western tip of New Guinea, in the 1500s. The sultanates had been trading with the western tip of the coastal region of New Guinea for centuries. So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her. Each new family then planted the same, saw that it worked, and passed it on. At that pace the sweet potato crossed the highlands in a century or two, with nobody knowing where it came from beyond the tribe beside them.
And what fascinates me is that even with the highlands as sealed off as they were, such significant goods still got in. Sweet potatoes allowed a population explosion in the highlands: they give far more calories per acre, and pigs can live off them. So in a 10,000 year sealed off universe, after the invention of agriculture, the biggest change to highland life happened in the last 500 years, which I guess isn’t a coincidence, as the sweet potato got there through the same structural forces that later brought the Australians.
Here is much more from Daniel Frank, fascinating throughout.
AI, Redistribution, and the Size of the Pie
Anthropic’s economic team, including Anton Korinek and Chad Jones, have a valuable new paper, Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI. They make their assumptions explicit and provide a scenario explorer that lets you change them. How capable will AI become? How quickly will firms adopt it? Will it augment workers or automate their tasks? You can see what different answers imply for growth, wages, and unemployment.
In their extreme scenario AI takes on a lot of tasks, GDP is 32.4% higher by 2030 than without AI and labor share declines from 60% to 45.2% but they make this striking point:
“Total labor income in 2030 in the extreme scenario is almost exactly what it would have been without AI: the labor share falls by a quarter while GDP rises by a third, and 0.45×1.32 ≈ 0.60.”
Exactly. That is the central point of my paper, How Much Redistribution Will AI Require. A falling labor share does not necessarily mean falling labor income. Workers can receive a smaller share of a much larger economy and still earn as much as they would have without AI.
Using the code behind their scenario explorer I updated their results to a 10 year horizon and plotted them on my redistribution graph. Only under the modest scenario is some net labor transfer required to make AI Pareto improving at the aggregate level.
Aggregate labor income, of course, conceals differences among workers. Korinek et al. find that cognitive occupations lose income while other occupations gain. In their extreme scenario, restoring the cognitive occupations’ wage bill to its no-AI level would require about 9% of GDP. They argue that compensation on this scale in response to technological change has no precedent.
I think this makes the adjustment problem look too pessimistic.
First, adjustment happens through retirement and entry. A retiring accountant need not retrain as a nurse. A young person enters nursing rather than accounting. Neither becomes unemployed even as labor reallocates. Korinek et al. understand these channels but give them limited scope in their model. Admittedly, those margins don’t do much work by 2030 but they matter over ten years.
Second, compensation can take the form of shifting taxes from labor to consumption. In the long run labor’s share of consumption tends to equal its share of GDP, so the lower labor’s share becomes, the more relief a given tax shift provides. At a 45% labor share, each dollar shifted from labor taxation to consumption taxation reduces labor’s net burden by 55 cents. Shifting taxes worth 5% of GDP would thus provide net relief to labor of 2.75% of GDP, without increasing total tax revenue. Unemployed workers would still need payments, but compensation need not come entirely through additional government spending.
Third, we do have experience expanding income support rapidly. U.S. unemployment benefits reached approximately 2.5% of GDP in 2020, and that during a contraction. Britain’s compensation to slaveowners following abolition amounted to roughly 5% of GDP in a one-time settlement. These episodes show that governments can mobilize substantial resources for compensation. Moreover, the extreme AI scenario brings an enormous increase in output from which to finance compensation.
Preserving aggregate labor income does not protect every worker. But even the extreme Korinek scenario reinforces the point that a dramatic decline in labor’s share can coexist with stable or increasing aggregate labor income. To the extent labor income does decline, growth makes compensation affordable and attrition, entry, and tax shifting can make the intra-labor task smaller than it first appears.
Diversity Is Our Strength?
Diversity is our strength is a common motto. Indeed it is one of GMU’s core values but what is the scientific evidence for this thesis? A new scoping review:
Recent years have witnessed many strong claims that ‘diversity’ leads to more original and impactful science, which is a science-focused form of what we call “The Diversity Hypothesis.” However, what evidence supports the claim that diversity enhances scientific output or impact? This pre-registered rapid scoping review seeks to collate and evaluate the scientific evidence for the Diversity Hypothesis…
…Based on over 100 scientific articles, we find that only between 15% and 28% of results reported in the literature are consistent with the hypothesis, with the balance of the results not being consistent with it.
…Overall, the results of the analysis section indicate that there is little empirical evidence that diversity improves scientific output and/or impact. In fact, with the possible exception of disciplinary diversity—a type of informational or viewpoint diversity operationalized at the team level—the majority of the evidence seems to point in the other direction. These findings are robust regardless of how the data is parsed and analyzed. The same conclusions can be drawn looking at the full data set, only the population-adjusted results, or only the results of high quality based on the MMAT analysis.
Hat tip: Colin Wright.
Labor reallocation during the Industrial Revolution
New technologies swept through Britain during the Second Industrial Revolution, destroying old jobs and creating new ones. We know little about how workers reallocated. Using 170 million full-count British census observations (1851-1911), I construct new task-level data on occupation and investigate English bootmaking as it mechanized. 153,000 artisanal jobs disappeared as skills became obsolete; 140,000 specialized jobs emerged. Incumbent artisans did not take the new jobs, nor were they displaced. Instead, entry collapsed-young men stopped entering the old trade. New jobs went primarily to young workers, though not in the same locations. Young cohorts absorbed the adjustment.
Here is the full article by Hillary Vipond, via someone (now forgotten) on Twitter.
The excess pessimism of early nuclear bomb designers
From GPT Pro:
The Manhattan Project scientists were remarkably good technological and arms-race forecasters. They correctly rejected the idea that America’s nuclear monopoly could be maintained; the Soviet bomb arrived in 1949. They anticipated thermonuclear weapons, huge arsenals and the extreme vulnerability of cities.
Where many of them went wrong was in moving from “a nuclear war would be catastrophic” to “therefore a catastrophic nuclear war is fairly likely.” They tended to underweight the endogenous response of political and military institutions to the catastrophe—the emergence of second-strike forces, elaborate command systems, crisis management, and above all mutually assured retaliation.
There is even some contemporary evidence for an insider/ordinary-public gap. In August 1945, 69% of Americans told Gallup that development of the atomic bomb was a “good thing,” versus only 17% saying it was bad. The scientists campaigning for international control plainly regarded the public as far too complacent.
So I would summarize the historical evidence this way:
The bomb’s developers were, on average, unusually pessimistic about the political consequences of their invention, and noticeably more pessimistic than the general public.
Here is the full answer.
My very interesting Conversation with Jared Diamond
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
So which leaders do make a difference?
Tyler and Jared debate that question, including conditions what a religious founder needs to succeed, whether destructive leaders matter more than constructive ones, why individual leaders have mattered so little in Papua New Guinea, whether we undervalue preventers, how much Rachel Carson and the Resnicks really mattered, whether Botswana’s success will endure, Jared’s own place in intellectual history, and what he’d tell an ambitious 25-year-old about how to become consequential. They go on to cover whether New Guineans are smarter, his reasons for why the Industrial Revolution started in England, what he learned from Jim Robinson about natural experiments, why he’s more optimistic about the environment than when he wrote Collapse, what he’d do about nuclear risk, the 189 bird species on his street in Los Angeles, why the MacArthur “genius grant” left him depressed for a week, why he’s listening to one Bach cantata a week, what he hopes to work on as he enters his nineties, and more.
Excerpt, we start with this:
COWEN: Who do you think is the least replaceable leader in human history?
DIAMOND: Wow. Wow. The least replaceable leader in human history. Frankly, my answer is none. There has been no unreplaceable leader in human history because over a long time, things wash out. A candidate, of course, would be Jesus Christ, but there were half a dozen other prophets in the Roman Empire at that time discussed in the New Testament. If Christ had died in childbirth, one of those other prophets might have taken over. I would say that in the long run, there is no leader that has made a difference.
COWEN: Well, you say “might have taken over,” but that’s probabilistic, right? Say with a 40 percent chance, someone else would have taken over. It still seems in expected value terms, Christ made an enormous difference.
DIAMOND: Certainly, his religion made an enormous difference. Christ himself was the charismatic founder, but a religion needs three things: It needs a charismatic founder, it needs an organizer, and often it needs a general because new religions often face opposition. The organizer for Christianity was St. Paul. In the case of the Mahdi’s religion of the Sudan in the late 1800s, the Mahdi was the charismatic founder, and he was the organizer, and he was the general. In the case of Islam, Muhammad was the founder and the organizer and the general. Religions may have three roles, some of which are sometimes played by the same person.
COWEN: Without the figure of Muhammad at exactly the time he came along, is it not quite easy to imagine a Middle East not unified under Islam, not unified with the common language of Arabic? In some ways, maybe a bit more like the Caucasus, which remains a crazy quilt of different patterns. Thus, Muhammad is one of the three or four most consequential leaders ever.
DIAMOND: That’s possible. That’s a big question. It’s harder to become clear about Muhammad than it is about Christ, because we don’t know what the weather was like in Arabia at that time. Weather makes a big difference. If it was rainy, that would mean lots of plant growth for lots of babies and for feeding an army. We just don’t have information on the weather in Arabia at that time.
A counter-example is Genghis Khan, who developed the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. Recently, why did Genghis Khan do it when there were other steppe leaders like Adolf Hühnlein and Timur the Turk? We’ve learned recently that the wettest time on the steppes in the last 2,000 years was around the time of Genghis’s birth. He was born at exactly the right time at the right place. If he had been born 200 miles further away and 20 years earlier, we wouldn’t know anything about him. In the case of Muhammad, we just don’t know whether the time of his birth was a particularly propitious time to found a religion in that area or not.
COWEN: The very notion that the two first names we’re talking about, they’re both religious leaders, right? They’re not kings. They’re not inventors. Do you think that suggests a vision of the world where it’s ideas that really matter and somewhat at variance with your own geography-based theories?
Interesting throughout, and we debated pomegranate juice as well. I enjoyed reading Jared’s new book Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?
What should I ask Kevin Roose?
Yes I will be doing a podcast with him. From Wikipedia:
Kevin Roose…is an American author and journalist. He is the author of three books, and is a technology columnist and podcast host for The New York Times. He wrote a book about Liberty University, an evangelical Christian university known for strict rules imposed on students…
Kevin of course has a new book coming out, namely The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence. I have yet to read it, but I expect it to be gripping.
So what should I ask him?
My excellent Conversation with Michael Moritz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Michael Moritz has written books through every phase of his life: the first history of Apple and an account of Chrysler’s near-death while he was a journalist at Time, a study of Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United in the middle of his 38 years at Sequoia, and now Ausländer, a family memoir, after leaving the firm. Moritz calls himself a dilettante with too many interests, but listen to him on learning to paint in his 40s, or the questions he would ask a ten-year-old boy in a German village in 1890, and you may decide that unsatisfied curiosity is not a small thing to build a life on.
Tyler and Michael discuss his childhood in Wales, where his love for visual arts came from, why he disappointed his Latin teacher, having Thanksgiving dinner with Philip Roth, why children don’t interrogate their parents about their history, what he feels visiting Germany and why he now holds German citizenship, how a history major with no technical background talked his way into Sequoia, his unpublished Don Valentine profile, what people underrate about Steve Jobs, obsessives versus dilettantes, why capitalism was more ablaze in China than America, what funding the Booker Prize taught him about his own ignorance, how to improve San nonprofits, how an incurable cancer diagnosis changed his calendar, why Britain’s stuck, what he’ll learn next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Is it easy to live with an Otto Dix painting or sketch? It hangs on the wall. Many people think it’s ugly. It reminds one of unpleasant things in history, right?
MORITZ: Yes, for Harriet and me it is. I think the tougher, more strenuous, grueling works of art that other people would have difficulty living with have many layers to them. You explore them, and they’re difficult pictures, and they’re not easy at first sight. Unlike easier pictures that may be a bit more decorative, they leave room for plenty of exploration, as the years go by. Then they’re redolent, they tell stories. They’re redolent of history. They’re images of a different epoch. I think most of the paintings that we’ve been lucky enough to find over the years, they are tough paintings.
COWEN: I feel that way about Haitian art, which has many brutal scenes. For you, is Chagall too sentimental?
MORITZ: Yes.
COWEN: You don’t want to put it on your wall?
MORITZ: The earlier Chagalls I’ve been drawn to, but neither of us have felt the urge or the need to go out in pursuit of Chagall.
COWEN: What is your own painting like?
MORITZ: Oh, exasperating.
COWEN: Neue Sachlichkeit or something else, it’s like Kossoff?
MORITZ: No, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried painting or drawing. I didn’t take it up until I was in my mid 40s. I’d never picked up a crayon or outside of the obligatory, abbreviated art lessons that always seem to be held later on Thursday afternoon, with everybody waiting for the bell to ring to end school. I’d never taken up a crayon or drew, or let alone painted.
If I look back today at what I did early on, it’s a lot better. Then if I look at the paintings that I try to make, my goodness, it is an extremely humbling experience, but I enjoy it. I really enjoy it. There’s nothing like getting lost in making a painting, and before you know it, two hours have gone, and you have no idea where the time went.
And:
COWEN: If we think of your interest in Steve Jobs, your book on Alex Ferguson, the art you buy, that you’ve now written a book on the Holocaust, is there some general pattern where trying to come to terms with really difficult things, is this a recurring theme in your life? Learning how to paint, that’s very hard, right?
MORITZ: I haven’t really thought about it that way, but I think life is made richer by having a challenge that you’re not sure whether you’re up to conquering. I’ve always been up for that. Each of these books has really just sprung out of being curious about something. I’m not sure that there’s any greater pattern than unsatisfied curiosity.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And I am very happy to recommend Michael’s new book Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile.