Category: Uncategorized

Ten favorite science fiction novels

That is from a reader request, please note I am not saying these are the best (that would be a separate query).  Here goes, noting I am engaging in some bundling of volumes and sequels:

1. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, Star Maker.  Who needs characters and plot when such a compelling mega-Hegelian take is on the table?  His other novels are underrated as well.

2. Isaac Asimov, original Foundation Trilogy.  But no, the books didn’t want to make me become an economist and in fact when I read them at age fourteen (?) I recoiled at their historicist, anti-Hayekian, and anti-Popperian nature.  I, Robot is actually a more important book, and one of the most influential of its century, but it is less fun to read.

3. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, doubles and erotic guilt, with a touch of Girard, check out the Tarkovsky film as well.

4. Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, her masterpiece, sadly I find The Dispossessed pretentious and unreadable.

5. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End.  In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.  And once again, why haven’t they turned this into a movie?

6. Dan Simmons, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion.  I’m not sure these are important science fiction, but they sure hold your interest.

7. Larry Niven, Ringworld.  Read this one through the lens of Dante.

8. China Mieville, Embassytown.  It demands serious attention, but worth a try even if you don’t enjoy his other books.

9. Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem trilogy.  Again note the first volume is tough sledding for quite a while.

10. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game trilogy, it only gets great at the end of the first volume, nonetheless deeply worth it.

Assorted notes: I would have said Dune, except that last year I tried to reread it.  John Wyndham deserves a lifetime achievement award.  Philip K. Dick is “idea rich,” but basically a bad and overrated writer.  And don’t kid yourself, Neuromancer, while important, isn’t that much fun either.  A big chunk of Verne and H.G. Wells is worth reading, more than just the famous ones.  I’m a fan of Neal Stephenson, but not sure my favorite works of his count toward this category.  Huxley’s Brave New World would make the list if it counts.  Gene Wolfe is OK, but no need to lecture me about him in the comments, same for Ray Bradbury.  Some Heinlein holds up fine, but most does not.  Vonnegut no, but I like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series if it counts as science fiction.  There is also Iain Banks.

Honorable mentions: Joe Haldeman, The Forever War; Greg Bear, Eon; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, if that one counts as belonging to the genre.  High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand, again if they count.  Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.

Thursday assorted links

1. The best can openers.  You can just assume them, or if you want buy them too.

2. Scenarios for Ukraine?

3. Jeff Lonsdale thinks about food.

4. Ross Douthat on the decline of the Oscars.

5. “But Joe Cordell, the founder of Cordell & Cordell, which specializes in divorce law, said that about a third of the 270 lawyers at his firm, which is spread across 40 states, said that they have seen an increase in custody battles over whether a child should be allowed to play football.” (NYT)

6. My NPR bit on John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography.

People expect happiness improvements that don’t quite arrive

Among the young, expectations for future well-being run far ahead of reported well-being today. The gap diminishes with age, and in the rich countries, the lines cross around age 65 after which the future is expected to be worse than the present. Except for this, people appear to be perpetually optimistic about their futures even though this optimism is perpetually frustrated by actual outcomes.

…This (unjustified) optimism seems to happen everywhere in the world…

That is from a new paper by Angus Deaton.

Massive share buybacks are just fine, and other mistakes in economic reasoning

I am intrigued by the idea that opinion articles, blog posts and tweets can have “give away” phrases that reveal more bias than the author intends, or perhaps are correlated with errors in economic reasoning. I have a candidate for such a phrase: “massive share buybacks,” or the variation, “massive share repurchases.” The words sound innocuous enough, but such talk ought to raise red flags in your mind.

That is from my latest Bloomberg column, the defense of massive share buybacks then follows.  Of course the share buybacks just push around money, they don’t have to draw real resources away from investment or for that matter a wage boost.  As this piece was coming out I also saw this excellent complementary treatment by John Cochrane.

What are other such “red flag” phrases?  “The big tech companies are selling your data” is a recent one.  I’ve already outlined my “law of gut“: beware anyone who tells you that a particular government program is being “gutted.”  Another bad one is when a review or critique is described as a “takedown.”  That’s a sign that either the reviewer, or the reviewer of the review, is trying to lower the status of somebody rather than to learn from them.

Which are the most dangerous animals in America?

Beware the snake, the spider and the scorpion. But know this: You are much more likely to be killed by a bee or a dog.

Of the 1,610 people killed in encounters with animals between 2008 and 2015, 478 were killed by hornets, wasps and bees, and 272 by dogs, according to a study published in Wilderness & Environmental Medicine. Snakes, spiders and scorpions were responsible for 99 deaths over the eight years.

Using a database published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers found that 72 people annually were killed by “other mammals,” which includes horses, cattle and pigs.

Only six people a year died from snakebite, and six after being bitten by a venomous spider. Two people were killed by marine animals over the eight-year period, and no one was killed by a rat.

That is from Nicholas Bakalar at the NYT, via Michelle Dawson.

How can families afford children?

Collin asks:

Answer me the riddle: The richer the society becomes the less families can afford children? (Note look at India being at replacement level fertility and it is the rich areas bringing the average down.)

I have three boys and wonder how they are ever going to be able to afford a family of more than 1 children in 2030.

“Afford” is a tricky word here.  If the goal is simply to avoid bankruptcy, at the expense of the life satisfaction of the main child rearer (usually the wife), that isn’t so difficult for most Americans and Europeans.  But of course people wish to maximize utility.  And so here are some trends operating against having large numbers of children:

1. Jobs for women are higher-paying and more satisfying than ever before, and that raises the opportunity cost of having large families.

2. Divorce is these days socially imaginable, and for many people desirable if feasible.  The larger the number of children, the harder it is to take advantage of the divorce option, and so that too encourages smaller families.

3. Living space has become especially costly in so many of the major Western cities and suburbs.

4. Given the connection between where you live and your public school system, the very best neighborhoods have become very costly positional goods, in part because of their school systems and the embedded social peers for your kids (even if they bus away to private schools.)

5. Child care is subject to some version of the cost disease, as is higher education.  Those services have risen in relative prices and some would say they also have decreased in reliability.

6. These days, there is much more you can do for your single kid (or two), including fancy SAT tutors and unending extracurricular activities.  You thus are less likely to arrive at the “I can’t do any more for this kid, let’s summon up another to keep me busy” point than formerly was the case.  In Beckerian language, you always have the option of a greater investment in quality, in lieu of boosting quantity.

7. Daughters are no longer less popular than sons and arguably they have become somewhat more popular (NYT).  So the notion that you must keep on having kids until a son arrives is weaker than it used to be.  The first child is already a “quality child,” no matter what the gender.

8. Most Westerners are on the whole less religious, and this too diminishes the motives for having a larger number of children, for whatever reasons.

9. The decline of the extended family, with babysitting grandparents, is hardly new news.  Still, I suspect both work and leisure opportunities for the elderly have improved, which lowers their desire to babysit.  Some prefer watching those same babies on Facebook.

That’s a lot of weight operating against multiple children — praise to those who manage nonetheless!

The hidden taxes that challenge women

That is the new and excellent Sendhil Mullainathan NYT column, here is one excerpt from many good points:

Corporate success has similar consequences: Women who become chief executives divorce at higher rates than others.

Another study found that the same is true in Hollywood: Winning the best actress Oscar portends a divorce, while winning the best actor award does not.

Of course, the divorce itself may be a preferred outcome, one that is better than enduring a poisonous relationship. Even then, I’d argue that the tax was exacted in the emotional toll and the time lost in a failed marriage.

Men react particularly negatively to their spouses’ relative success. Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, economists at the University of Chicago, and Jessica Pan, an economist at the National University of Singapore, examined the wages of spouses. Because women generally earn less in the work force, they generally earn less than their husbands, too.

What is more surprising in the data is that it is far more common for the husband to earn just a tiny bit more than the wife than the other way around. The fact that women on average earn less does not account for such a sharp asymmetry.

The piece is interesting throughout.

The contributions of Rene Girard

Carl L asks: Address the scapegoating theory of René Girard in general, and its possible application to economics. Peter Thiel has repeatedly cited Girard as an important influence and has even said his theory was partly the reason he invested in Facebook.

From my idiosyncratic point of view, here are a few of Girard’s major contributions, noting that I am putting them into “stupid simple” language, rather than trying to communicate his nuances:

1. His understanding of Christianity as fundamentally and radically different from earlier religions, as it exalts the individual victim rather than the conqueror.  Here is one point from a summarizer: “Christianity is the revelation (the unveiling) of what the myths want to veil; it is the deconstruction of the mono-myth, not a reiteration of it—which is exactly why so many within academe want to domesticate and de-fang it.”

2. Seeing violence as a chronic problem of human societies, rather than as the result of a bug in rational choice or the collapse into a bad game-theoretic solution.

3. Understanding the import of “mimetic desire,” namely the desire to copy others, and also why this is not always an entirely peaceful process, due to scarcity.  The tech world, by the way, at least pretends to have found a solution to this in its extreme scalability of product; we’ll see how that pans out.

4. A theory of mediated and triangulated desire, not yet absorbed by behavioral economics, and partly summarized here: “Whereas external mediation does not lead to rivalries, internal mediation does lead to rivalries. But, metaphysical desire leads a person not just to rivalry with her mediator; actually, it leads to total obsession with and resentment of the mediator. For, the mediator becomes the main obstacle in the satisfaction of the person’s metaphysical desire. Inasmuch as the person desires to be his mediator, such desire will never be satisfied. For nobody can be someone else. Eventually, the person developing a metaphysical desire comes to appreciate that the main obstacle to be the mediator is the mediator himself.”

5. First and foremost approaching societies from an anthropological point of view, prior to the economic method.

6. Understanding various social situations in terms of the need of finding a scapegoat to sacrifice, if not violently with some kind of resolution and catharsis.  These days one of those victims would be the big tech companies, as it is remarkable how many weakly-argued critiques of them make the paper every day.  You’ll understand these writings through the eyes of Girard, not economic theory.  Girard is also one of the best lenses for understanding the writings of bad and manipulative pundits.

7. Girard is of great use for understanding literature.  Try any Shakespearean play with “doubles,” Merchant of Venice, Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (an all-time favorite), or Coetzee’s Disgrace, all Girardian to the core and very much illuminated by familiarity with his key ideas.  These are perhaps his most underrated contributions.  Shakespeare, by the way, is Girard’s most important precursor, also throw in the New Testament, Hobbes, Tocqueville, and maybe Montaigne.

What should you read by him?: Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Theatre of Envy.

Where is Girard weakest: His theory of language, his overemphasis on the destructive nature of mimesis, excess claims to have discovered universal mechanisms, just making lots of stuff up, and not knowing enough economics or empirical anthropology.

How important is he?: If you had to pick twenty thinkers from the latter half of the 20th century, he is definitely one of them.  By the way, Foucault and Baudrillard might be the other French writers on that list.

That was then, this is now

From the (early) MR archives

Bush to drop most steel tariffs, Tyler Cowen, on December 1, 2003 at 7:45 am

Bush decided in March 2002 to impose tariffs of 8 to 30 percent on most steel imports from Europe, Asia and South America for three years. Officials acknowledged at the time that the decision was heavily influenced by the desire to help the Rust Belt states, but the departure from Bush’s free-trade principles drew fierce criticism from his conservative supporters. After a blast of international opposition, the administration began approving exemptions.

The WTO’s ruling against the tariffs was finalized three weeks ago, clearing the way for the retaliatory levies, and Bush’s economic team concluded unanimously that the tariffs should be scrapped. The source involved in the negotiations said the consensus in the White House was that “keeping the tariffs in place would cause more economic disruption and pain for the broader economy than repealing them would for the steel industry.”

Here is the full story. The formal decision is expected to be announced later this week. This is the first piece of economic policy good news in some time, but it is sad that it required a WTO ruling and threats of European retaliation to come about.”

I recall visiting the White House with Vernon Smith around this time.  Smith told Bush that he had done the wrong thing with the steel tariffs, and Bush simply snapped back: “You’re the economist…leave the politics to me!”  I wonder how Trump put it to his advisors…

Addendum: Here is Bob Crandall criticizing Reagan steel protectionism from the 1980s.  Here is a 2003 retrospective analysis of the Bush steel tariffs.