Results for “best book” 1835 found
*A Happy Marriage*
That is the title of the new novel by Rafael Yglesias. Here is a tiny excerpt:
I devoured this book eagerly on a plane flight and I recommend it highly to those who are married, have been married, will be married, should be married, and should not be married.
The blogger son Matt, in the form of a fictional persona, makes numerous cameo appearances. The economist Paul Joskow, in the form of a fictional persona, makes a cameo appearance. In real life he is Matt's uncle.
How many other novels explain to you — tongue in cheek — the exact difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics?
In my view Rafael Yglesias is one of the best American novelists of the last twenty years and probably the most underappreciated. Here is my earlier post on his earlier novel Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil.
John Calvin as behavioral economist
Tomorrow marks the 500th birthday of John Calvin. If you read John Calvin you will find a great deal of what we now call behavioral economics.
For there is no medium between the two things: the earth must either be worthless in our estimation, or keep us enslaved by an intemperate love of it.
Here is one reason why there is "evil" in the world:
Whatever be the kind of tribulation with which we are afflicted, we should always consider the end of it to be, that we may be trained to despise the present, and thereby stimulated to aspire to the future life. For since God well knows how strongly we are inclined by nature to a slavish love of this world, in order to prevent us from clinging too strongly to it, he employs the fittest reason for calling us back, and shaking off our lethargy.
Adam Smith and David Hume were influenced by Calvin:
If we see a funeral, or walk among graves, as the image of death is then present to the eye, I admit we philosophise admirably on the vanity of life. We do not indeed always do so, for those things often have no effect upon us at all. But, at the best, our philosophy is momentary. It vanishes as soon as we turn our back, and leaves not the vestige of remembrance behind; in short, it passes away, just like the applause of a theatre at some pleasant spectacle. Forgetful not only of death, but also of mortality itself, as if no rumour of it had ever reached us, we indulge in supine security as expecting a terrestrial immortality.
It is odd to call someone so famous an "underrated thinker" but indeed Calvin is. You'll find the whole text of the Institutes of Christian Religion here; it makes for good browsing.
This chapter is John Calvin imitating Robin Hanson.
Buy the book here on Kindle for 99 cents.
*Create Your Own Economy*, special offer
As an economist I believe in the power of incentives.
If you order or buy my book before midnight tomorrow (it comes out tomorrow in stores), I will send you a free, special bonus chapter. If you've already bought or ordered the book, don't worry, you still qualify.
Just email me and tell me you bought the book, I will take your word for it. You can send me a copy of your on-line order if you wish.
No, it's not a bonus chapter from Create Your Own Economy.
Did you know that for years I have been, on and off, drafting a book on the philosophic foundations of a free society? The book is still years from completion. It won't even be my next book to come. But I do finally have an introductory chapter for that book which I will send you. This book is my no-holds-barred attempt to answer all of the tough questions about the philosophic foundations of our belief in freedom. It also gives a shorthand version of why I have significant reservations about the standard neoclassical approach to economic policy. No, it is not the book's full treatment of these issues but the chapter outlines the scope of the argument and the six major problems that any philosophy of freedom must solve.
In return I ask only that you give me your word you will not post the chapter on-line. (Comments, however, are welcome.)
This offer will not be repeated and I do not expect other people to see this chapter (much less the manuscript-in-progress) for some time to come. So now is the best, highest return time to order or buy Create Your Own Economy.
If you're having trouble clicking through to other book outlets, the link for Barnes&Noble.com is here, the link for Borders.com is here.
Administrative Costs
In the latest debate: Paul Krugman attacks Greg Mankiw for linking to a study by Robert Book arguing that administrative costs under Medicare are not as low as many people think. Book defends against Krugman's attack here. I find the debate peculiar for a number of reasons:
1) Picking out one measure of health care "costs" to compare systems is sadly reminiscent of the arguments for socialism. Do you remember those arguments? Under socialism:
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"Think of how much money we will save on advertising!"
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"Socialism will lower costs by maximizing economies of scale!"
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"Money will be used for production not profits!"
Exactly these arguments are regularly trotted out in the debate over administrative costs in health care so color me unimpressed. To be clear, the point is not that these statements are false – the point is that these premises to the argument are all in some sense true it's just the conclusion, socialism is more efficient than capitalism, which turned out to be false. We tried that and it didn't work. In other words, you have to compare systems not arbitrarily pick out for comparison one type of costs.
2) Closely related to this point is the bizarre habit of taking about costs without mentioning benefits. The implicit argument appears to be that administrative costs are simply waste – this is the ancient cutting out the middleman fallacy. Administrative benefits, for example, reduce fraud and are a necessary consequence of making it easy for patients to get second and third opinions from different doctors.
3) Even if we could switch from a private to a public system and save administrative costs, the deadweight costs of taxation will far exceed any reasonable savings.
4) Any savings on administrative costs is a one-time level effect but the real issue with health care costs is growth as a share of GDP. (By the way, this same point explains why the debate over whether the public plan will discipline private monopolies is not especially important, monopoly–even if it is a problem–could at best explain a level effect not a growth effect which is where the action is.)
5) I'm not surprised that administrative costs under Medicare and under Canada's system suggest some potential cost reductions from moving to a single-payer system–again, Lada did save on marketing expenses–but it's a complete blunder to use Medicare administrative costs as an argument in favor of a "public option." The whole point of the public option, so we are told, is to compete on a level footing with private plans which means marketing expenses and all the rest.
Addendum: n.b. this post is about administrative costs not other reasons for preferring one system to another. See also Tyler on administrative costs further below.
Aid Realism for the Idealist
The failure of foreign aid to lead to economic development has left many cynics in its wake. For this reason, I enjoyed The Blue Sweater, Jacqueline Novogratz's story of moving from aid-idealism to aid-realism without ever passing through the way-station of aid-cynicism. As a naive, aid-idealist Novogratz spent a lot of time on the circuit in Africa; eventually hard lessons wore away the naivety but not the idealism. Of course, Novogratz learned a lot about the corruption, failure to experiment, and lack of accountability of the aid agencies but she also learned to be realistic about the do-gooders:
Philanthropy can appeal to people who want to be loved more than they want to make a difference.
But the hardest lessons were about the poor. In the late 1980s, Novogratz worked with a group of native women to build up a thriving business in Rwanda. Inevitably some of her friends became terrible victims of the 1994 genocide. Perhaps even worse, some of her friends became perpetrators. Hard lessons like these drove Novogratz's evolution.
I've read the following sort of thing many times:
It is so often the people who know the greatest suffering–the poor and most vulnerable–who are the most resilient, the ones able to derive happiness and shared joy from the simplest pleasures.
I've heard it so many times, I tend to dismiss it but Novogratz follows up with this:
That same resilience, however, can manifest itself in passivity, fatalism, a resignation to the difficulties of life that allows injustice and inequity to strengthen and grow…
Which, for me at least, turned a trite observation into an important insight.
Novogratz's experiences eventually developed into the Acumen Fund, a venture capital firm for aid. The idea is to invest patient capital in scalable, for-profit businesses that deliver services to the poor. The fund, for example, has invested in a firm producing drip irrigation systems in Pakistan, a Tanzanian firm that produces mosquito nets and an Indian firm producing internet-telephone kiosks in small villages.
The fact that the businesses have been for-profit has been critical. In selling bed nets for example the Tanzanian firm learned that talking about malaria doesn't sell. What sells, in the words of one of their top salespersons is, "The color is beautiful, and you can hang the nets in your windows so that your neighbors know how much you care about your family." As Novogratz puts it:
Beauty, vanity, status and comfort….The rich hold no monopoly on any of it. But we're a long way from integrating the way people actually make decisions into public policy instead of how we think they should make them.
Patient capital is no panacea–what is?–but by investing in entrepreneurs who must listen to their customers a charitable venture-capital firm can multiply the effectiveness of its philanthropy.
There is a powerful role both for the market and for philanthropy…Philanthropy alone lacks the feedback mechanism of markets, which are the best listening devices we have; and yet markets alone too easily leave the most vulnerable behind.
MJ, R.I.P
He's one of the few musicians I've been listening to since I was six years old. I've long thought I Want You Back is one of the best songs, period. She's Out of My Life has for a long time been a personal favorite, as is Girlfriend. Billie Jean survives being overplayed on muzak. Off the Wall is an underrated album, as is History. His personal legacy is perhaps a dubious one, but he was one of the great dancers and entertainers of his century and it is a shock to read of his passing. The J. Randy Taraborelli biography, despite stopping in the early 90s, is very good.
Today was not a good day for the 1980s (Fawcett, McMahon).
Kindle and DRM and Netflix too
After reading this post, I realize I don't understand my status quo DRM rights with Kindle. That's not a good sign. I did notice this sentence, which I didn't feel the need to parse any further:
Here is the major problem with this scenario.
As a reader, I find it good policy to keep the number of books on my Kindle to below twenty. That forces me to read the ones I order and it also protects me from "stranded" consumer durables. Uncertainty and confusion about my rights only strengthens my desire to keep that policy.
As a writer, I expect the Kindle is temporarily in my financial self-interest, as it gets more "influentials" reading my work and perhaps talking it up. In the longer run I suspect it means a lower equilibrium price for books. One question is whether publishers use "sticky" or inconvenient DRM practices as an implicit collusive method for limiting the spread of Kindle.
Today I was struck by this passage about the origins of Netflix:
Netflix's selection of more than 100,000 DVD rental titles is made possible by the "first-sale doctrine" of U.S. copyright law, which permits buyers of DVDs to lend them out without studios' consent.
In Netflix's early days, its buying team would sometimes purchase DVDs at local Wal-Marts or Best Buys if it couldn't get copies through studios, says Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer.
In contrast, to deliver movies and television shows over the Internet, Netflix has to license them from studios. So far, it has gotten only about 12,000 titles, a hodgepodge of older films such as "Diehard," episodes of popular TV shows including "30 Rock" and a smattering of new releases.
That's right, we had more innovation because some of the usual copyright strictures about negotiating rights did not apply. I am pro-copyright, but once again the default settings make it too hard for successful negotiations to occur.
Zotero
Zotero is a free program for citations management and bibliography generation designed to be competitive with Endnote and similar products. I've been using it for a couple of weeks. Zotero lives as a Firefox extension and it's best feature is the ease with which you can import citations from the web. If you are looking at a paper on JSTOR, for example, you can "one-click import" the citation. One-click import is also available from Amazon, Cite-Seer, ABI-Inform, the Library of Congress, many university library catalogs, Medline, Google books and many others.
Thus it's very easy to generate a citations list in Zotero by visiting a handful of large databases – this is especially easy for books and not too hard for recent articles but it's more difficult to find older articles in online databases. Zotero's interface is somewhat clunky so entering citations by hand is not as convenient as I would like. In addition to grabbing the citation, Zotero can grab entire PDFs so you can keep articles and citations in one database. Exporting of the citations in a variety of bibliographic format is clean and well done.
Zotero is only available as a Firefox extension (the developers take a perverse pride in this fact). The developers are at GMU, although I don't know the team at all. Zotero will import citations from another citations management program so switching is low cost. Worth checking out.
The Singularity is Near
Tom Vanderbilt, author of the excellent Traffic, has a very good piece in the latest NYTimes Magazine on data centers.
The specter of infinitesimal delay is why, when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s oldest, upgraded its trading platform in 2006, it decided to locate the bulk of its trading engines 80 miles – and three milliseconds – from Philadelphia, and into NJ2, where, as Thomas notes, the time to communicate between servers is down to a millionth of a second. (Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.)
…It seemed heretical to think of Karl Marx. But looking at the roomful of computers running automated trading models that themselves scan custom-formatted machine-readable financial news stories to help make decisions, you didn’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate his observation that industry will strive to “produce machines by means of machines” – as well as his prediction that the “more developed the capital,” the more it would seek the “annihilation of space by time.”
I like the quote but doubt that Marx is the best guide to this new world. try Charlie Stross instead.
My talk on economics for university administrators
Thank you all for the advice; in my talk I promoted the following ideas:
1. Many mid-level schools do not yet apply rigorous quantitative analysis in reviewing their fundraising techniques; this should change.
2. Norms will shift toward a greater inequality of rewards for lower-level staff. Yet any single administrator who tries to bulldoze through a business-like, highly-incentivized solution does so at his or her peril. The shift of norms will take a long time.
3. Community colleges are in many cases turning out to be stronger competitors than are for-profits.
4. The higher education bubble has burst. The expiration of stimulus funds in 2011 will be a crushing event for many public sector universities.
5. Faculty governance is essential for tenure and curriculum decisions. But faculty governance for setting university priorities is a big mistake.
6. The value of face-to-face classroom time (discussed in Create Your Own Economy, by the way) will prove robust. But the very best teachers of the future will take on an increasing role as editors, collage creators, and DJs. A brilliant scientist who doesn't understand YouTube will be crippled as a teacher. Adjuncts may lead the wave of innovation here.
7. The way to be fiscally responsible is to refuse luxury projects in good times. If bad times have come it is already too late.
8. Current administrators are using stimulus funds to buy off the old interest groups, under the view that these are temporary bad times. Relative to what will come, these are "good times," and much of that surplus ought to be put in reserve funds. That is not happening.
9. Many mid-level schools underinvest in making incremental improvements to their strong, core departments, because nobody gets much credit for that.
10. Being a good university administrator requires the right mix of idealism and cynicism and that is hard to come by.
What I’ve been reading
1. From London to Elista: The Inside Story of the Three Matches that Vladimir Kramnik Played for the World Chess Title, by Eugeny Bareev and Ilya Levitov. Via John Nye, the quality and drama of this book stunned me. Chess aside, the use of the dialogic form works remarkably well.
2. The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany. Fun, philosophical, erotic, and a bestseller in the Arab world. Many Americans don't know this book but it is worth picking up.
3. Lanark, by Alasdair Gray, This book is as good as I remember it; I was surprised to see it has only four reviews on U.S. Amazon. Many critics consider it the best and most creative Scottish novel of the twentieth century and of course it has tinges of science fiction and fantasy.
4. Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. If you are drawing inferences, keep in mind this means I had not read this book to date. It is a source for Roissy and also has some early anticipations of behavioral economics. Sporadically interesting, I would say.
5. Time Out Barcelona. The Time Out series is the most useful resource for urban travel, including for food. No other guide book comes close.
The new Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez biography
One day [Alvaro] Mutis climbed the seven flights of stairs, carried two books into the apartment without saying hello, slapped them down on the table, and roared: "Stop fucking about and read that vaina, so you'll learn how to write!" Whether all GarcÃa Márquez's friends really swore all the time during these years we will never know — but in his anecdotes they do. The two slim books were a novel entitled Pedro Páramo, which had been published in 1955, and a collection of stories entitled The Burning Plain (El llano en llamas), published in 1953. The writer was the Mexican Juan Rulfo. GarcÃa Márquez read Pedro Páramo twice the first day, and The Burning Plain the next day. He claims that he had never been so impressed by anything since he had first read Kafka; that he learned Pedro Páramo, literally, by heart; and that he read nothing else for the rest of the year because everything else seemed so inferior.
That is from the new and noteworthy Gerald Martin biography of GarcÃa Márquez. This very impressive (and enjoyable) book was seventeen years in the making. It's also not a bad way to learn about the political and economic history of northern Colombia. This should make any short list of either the best non-fiction books this year or the best literary biographies. The reader also learns the probable origins of the famed spat with Mario Vargas Llosa (p.375); it had to do with a woman, namely Vargas Llosa's wife.
The decline of chewing
According to Gail Civille, in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as twenty-five times before it was ready to be swallowed; now the average American chews only ten times.
That is from David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. This is a good book even if you've already read seven prior books on exactly the same topic. It's the best applied study in behavioral economics to date. I do object, however, to how the author aggregates fat, salt, and sugar, as if they were equally bad for you.
Via John Nye, here is a good article on how French baguettes are succumbing to the global trend for softer foods:
Bakers say that they are merely responding to market forces,
determined by the growing proportion of customers who demand a baguette
pas trop cuite (not too cooked). They argue that they cannot
impose a crunchy surface on a society that has grown accustomed to the
notion that food should melt in the mouth .
Mr Kaplan is appalled. “The question is: do the French care any
more, do they care about taste? When you eat their tomatoes, their
carrots and their merlotised wine, you start to wonder. Are they not
collaborating in their own cultural demise?”
…According to Kaplan, bakers are cutting cooking time – usually
between 18 and 22 minutes at 250C to 260C – by 60 seconds or more in
search of a less crusty crust.
The upshot is the loss of the Maillard reaction, a chemical process
occurring at high temperatures and leading to browning and crispiness,
that Kaplan says is vital to the production of a good loaf.
Here is Alex's earlier post on the declining quality of French bread.
Keynes’s *General Theory*, chapter 12
In practice we have tacitly agreed, as a rule, to fall back on what is, in truth, a convention. The
essence of this convention — though it does not, of course, work out
quite so simply — lies in assuming that the existing state of affairs
will continue indefinitely, except in so far as we have specific
reasons to expect a change. This does not mean that we really believe
that the existing state of affairs will continue indefinitely. We know
from extensive experience that this is most unlikely. The actual
results of an investment over a long term of years very seldom agree
with the initial expectation. Nor can we rationalise our behaviour by
arguing that to a man in a state of ignorance errors in either
direction are equally probable, so that there remains a mean actuarial
expectation based on equi-probabilities. For it can easily be shown
that the assumption of arithmetically equal probabilities based on a
state of ignorance leads to absurdities. We are assuming, in effect,
that the existing market valuation, however arrived at, is uniquely correct in
relation to our existing knowledge of the facts which will influence
the yield of the investment, and that it will only change in proportion
to changes in this knowledge; though, philosophically speaking it
cannot be uniquely correct, since our existing knowledge does not
provide a sufficient basis for a calculated mathematical expectation.
In point of fact, all sorts of considerations enter into the market
valuation which are in no way relevant to the prospective yield.
Nevertheless the above conventional method of calculation will be
compatible with a considerable measure of continuity and stability in
our affairs, so long as we can rely on the maintenance of the convention.
For if there exist organised investment markets and if we can rely
on the maintenance of the convention, an investor can legitimately
encourage himself with the idea that the only risk he runs is that of a
genuine change in the news over the near future, as to the
likelihood of which he can attempt to form his own judgment, and which
is unlikely to be very large. For, assuming that the convention holds
good, it is only these changes which can affect the value of his
investment, and he need not lose his sleep merely because he has not
any notion what his investment will be worth ten years hence. Thus
investment becomes reasonably “safe” for the individual investor over
short periods, and hence over a succession of short periods however
many, if he can fairly rely on there being no breakdown in the
convention and on his therefore having an opportunity to revise his
judgment and change his investment, before there has been time for much
to happen. Investments which are “fixed” for the community are thus
made “liquid” for the individual.
It has been, I am sure, on the basis of some such procedure as this
that our leading investment markets have been developed. But it is not
surprising that a convention, in an absolute view of things so
arbitrary, should have its weak points. It is its precariousness which
creates no small part of our contemporary problem of securing
sufficient investment.
The insights here have yet to be fully mined.
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
That's the new book by Geoffrey Miller, of The Mating Mind fame. The exposition is a bit of a sprawling mess but the best pages of content are fascinating. I recommend it and I am glad that I started reading it the moment I got my hands on it.
The core thesis is the Veblenesque point that marketing plays upon our weaknesses as evolved, biological creatures, obsessed with signaling:
From my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist, this is how consumerist capitalism really works: it makes us forget our natural adaptations for showing off desirable fitness-related traits. It deludes us into thinking that artificial products work much better than they really do for showing off these traits. It confuses us about the traits we are trying to display by harping on vague terms at the wrong levels of description (wealth, status, taste), and by obfuscating the most stable, heritable, and predictive traits discovered by individual differences research. It hints coyly at the possible status and sexual payoffs for buying and displaying premium products, but refuses to make such claims explicit, lest consumer watchdogs find those claims empirically false, and lest significant others get upset by the personal motives they reveal. The net result could be called the fundamental consumerist delusion — that other people care more about the artificial products you display through consumerist spending than about the natural traits you display through normal conversation, cooperation, and cuddling.
I very much agree. Miller also tells us that we can do better and offers us some (non-regulatory) proposals for lowering the cost of our signaling. (Don't buy a luxury car!) Would it be cheaper and more effective to wear credible, verifiable tattoos of our personality types from the six-factor model?
I'll be considering more from this book soon.