Results for “best book” 1835 found
The Dark Ages were Dark
It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both the East and the West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view; it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. This was a change that affected everyone, from peasants to kings, even the bodies of saints resting in their churches. It was no mere transformation — it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization.’
That is from Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. This recent book is the best integration of archaeology and economics I have seen; it is also a first-rate economic history in its own right, as well as a history of pottery. Highly recommended for those who think they might like it.
What do CEOs and other notables pay attention to?
Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry, has a good answer:
"As far as my media diet, I’m a hoover for print and will read whatever blows my way … I find New Scientist to be the best sci mag. Also subscribe to Wired, Onion and Resurgence. I use a feedreader to keep up with about 35 sources (news digests and blogs). We have an extensive, active backchannel portfolio of blogs for the Biomimicry Ravalli Republic.
POV: Nightline, Daily Show, NOW, Comedy Channel Presents, couple of
Showtime dramas. Love stand up comedy for its honesty and pathos about
the current state of things. And, of course, I can waste away my youth
surfing the web. Love living in this era."
Joe Tripodi of Allstate has another good response:
"I’d summarize as: Read about it; experience it; observe it. I get a ton of e-mails every day from Media Post, Brand Week, Ad Week, NYT,
etc, etc. I try reading books about the ‘new world order,’ but find
they are virtually obsolete before I finish them. Experience it! You
have to walk the talk. I have iPods (regular, Nano and Shuffle), three
TiVos (sacrilege, I know, but time is too short to watch all the
commercials), 8700c Blackberry, DirecTV, HDTV, etc. I try to spend time
regularly on new web destinations, especially those generating some
buzz. Observe it! I have three young children (10, 8, 6) and learn more
from them than any new-media ‘guru.’ They sit near the epicenter of
this ADD economy. Recently they’ve been swept away by the cultural
Tsunami called "American Idol." Lots of gaming, surfing, texting, etc.
Remember Barry Schwartz? He is the guy who wrote The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More. Here is his answer:
"Frankly, what I do is ignore new stuff as long as I possibly can. I
let the rest of the world force me to do new things just to be
compatible with them. My view is that anything that doesn’t last at
least three years after its initial appearance isn’t worth knowing
about. But I’m an old-fashioned guy."
Puts the whole book in perspective, doesn’t it?
Here is the whole story. Thanks to Tim Sullivan for the pointer.
My favorite things Austrian
I will restrict myself to the current borders:
Novel: Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew. This book, set in an insane asylum, is hilarious and is perhaps the least known of the Continental masterpiece novels of ideas. Der Untergeher [The Loser] is another brilliant book by Bernhard. Yes I will put these over Musil and of course Kafka worked in Prague and doesn’t count. Broch’s The Death of Virgil is a dark horse pick.
Music: This combination of category and place is a bit ridiculous, no? Just to mix it up, let’s pick Schoenberg’s Op. 31, Variations for Orchestra, or Webern’s Symphony in C, or Piano Variations, Op. 27, played by Pollini or Uchida. For Berg I’ll pick the Violin Concerto in A minor, or perhaps "Lyric Suite."
If we must look elsewhere, my favorite Mahler is the 9th, the live Karajan version. Favorite Bruckner is the 8th, the first Karajan version and the Bruno Walter recording of the 4th. Capriccio and Metamorphosen might be the most underrated Richard Strauss. My favorite Schubert CD stars Ely Ameling and Jorg Demus, and then Schnabel or perhaps Clifford Curzon doing the last Piano Sonata in B flat. The Hollywood does an amazing version of the String Quintet in C. Britten and Pears recorded the ideal Die Winterreise. I’ve yet to find the perfect version of Schubert’s 9th but I love Furtwaengler’s interpretation. Favorite Haydn, if we can count him as Austrian, would be the last six piano sonatas and the String Quartets, Op.76. Mozart I’ve already blogged.
Book about: How about Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a beautiful portrait of declining Vienna by a man who killed himself? Another good pick is Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna. Carl Schorske is not to be forgotten either.
Draftsman: Egon Schiele did incredible drawings. Try this one. Here is a beautiful painting by Schiele, who died at age 28.
Movie, set in: It is hard to go against The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.
Movie: What is the best Austrian movie? Here is a list, good luck. I’ve never seen one all the way through.
Movie star: Duh.
Here is an impressive list of Austrian scientists, including economists. Karl Pribram and Rudolf Hilferding remain underrated as economists. Mises is underrated as a theorist of public choice. Hayek was arguably the first neuroeconomist. Wieser anticipated much of modern "social economics." Freud was a brilliant literary analyst.
The bottom line: There are gobs and gobs and gobs. We haven’t even touched upon design. But the overall trajectory is not exactly positive once you crack the mid-1930s.
Round-up
1. How to make "The Long Tail" work.
2. The economics of orchestras.
3. The TradeSports.com dispute over the North Korean missile launch, and more here.
4. Another interview with Milton Friedman.
5. Betting markets in everything.
6. Farm subsidies and Africa; counter the conventional wisdom, by DSquared.
7. Interview with Charles Murray. Btw, I don’t think human achievement has declined.
8. Review of the new Adam Phillips book, his kissing and tickling book is wonderful.
New research on what triggers autism
1. Here is the story.
2. Your English is better than you think. But on incorrect uses of "hopefully" I will not cede ground.
3. Some books do better in paperback.
4. A Delta list of best barbecue restaurants, based on reader input, via Bob Lawson. The Virginia selections are weak plus they left off Lockhart, Texas altogether. It is a better list for the South proper.
5. Jane Galt on deficits, and also on "unfair competition," do go send her some compliments in return…
Trip thoughts
That was at the Hotel Real, the dish is called "Wiener Backhahn." When we asked how to get to the restaurant, one Lichtensteiner (what do you call them in the English language?) said "It is close. Lichtenstein is very small. (Pause) But it is very beautiful." Zurich has a high percentage of foreigners; it feels like 20 percent or more. The Western side of the city is now "cool," and almost bohemian; eat at LaSalle. The Swiss seem to have legalized prostitution. The French-speaking Swiss generally favor joining the EU; the German speakers — 63% of the country — do not. The German speakers also are more likely to speak good English than good French. Crossing the border, German bookstores do not feature Freakonomics prominently; their economics sections are full of doom and gloom about Germany; are Levitt and Dubner too entertaining for them? Some guy named Frank Schatzing has an 800-page German science fiction bestseller called Der Schwarm, just translated into English, is it any good? Swiss food prices have gone through the roof. I’ve experienced the $30 pizza, the $40 schnitzel, and the $42 breakfast, all good but none extraordinary. Rural Switzerland now has plenty of Thai restaurants. Switzerland was the first country where I first saw first-rate scenery, mountains, or for that matter cows. Does this mean I still overrate the value of the Swiss landscape? Paris was the first city where Natasha was able to go shopping and see the West; does she overrate it? Do I overrate German bread and orange juice? What was the first good blog you read?
The Pigou-Brennan-Buchanan club
Greg Mankiw asks for members in the Pigou club and lists a growing and illustrious set of people. I’ll opt in, though I would wish to change the name of the club. Geoff Brennan and James Buchanan, in their The Power to Tax, wrote one of the best and most important books on public finance in the twentieth century. Their message is simple: if you don’t always trust government, beware of "efficient taxes." Those same taxes will make it easier for government to extract excess revenue from the population. For instance lump sum taxation is not in every way a dream come true. It can turn into outright confiscation beyond reasonable levels.
I’ll fess up to the following. We have been fiscally irresponsible and must pay the bills. Global warming is a major problem and a carbon tax is at least possibly a partial solution. So the Brennan and Buchanan point, circa USA 2006, is less relevant than at many other times or in many other places. But hey, clubs are universal and forever and forever (at least my treehouse club was, when I was six). I’ll join, but I suspect Greg would not be fully on board with Pigou’s politics. There is a reason why Pigou taxes come from…Pigou. That same reason is why the concept should be broadened just a wee bit…
Strange questions I ask Bryan Caplan
Assuming you start from a multi-dimensional global utility maximum, which Lancastrian characteristics — with non-trivial shadow prices — would you like more of in a corresponding unconstrained equilibrium?
Forget about money or time, which obviously we all want more of. Which unbundlings do you desire?
I, for one, would like to have more of Bryan. But he is bundled with Fairfax. I travel a great deal and he usually stays put. I can’t get much more of him in my first best outcome. But if he were suddenly eating kabobs with me in Hyderabad, if only for an hour, how fun that would be. More generally, I would like to have a less wide circle of friends but my Wanderlust interferes.
I would like taste to be unbundled from calories. I would like books to be smaller, lighter, and easier to carry, if that were a free lunch so to speak. I would like fantasy novels to be bound by stricter rules.
What would you like to see unbundled?
The Redemption of Love
The full title is The Redemption of Love: Rescuing Marriage And Sexuality from the Economics of a Fallen World. The author is Carrie Miles, psychologist and also wife of my colleague Larry Iannaccone. Where is my review copy? In the meantime, here is a summary, it sounds very Protestant. Someone is going to write a bestseller on this topic, let’s see if it is Carrie. Here is an earlier book by Carrie and her husband.
Why open borders won’t work
The first issue is to pin down what we mean by open borders.
Land use restrictions are often a more important ""immigration
policy" than border control per se. It is not just how many people get
in at what cost, but who can afford to live here. This includes zoning laws,
restrictions on the number of people allowed to live in an apartment,
policies toward "squatters," and rules for the homesteading of public
property. So by "open borders" I mean also liberal land use policies;
nominally open borders would matter far less if unskilled laborers
couldn’t also afford to live in the U.S. (Note to anti-immigration
types: you are focusing too much on the ease of crossing the border
and not enough on the costs of living here. How much the best
immigration restrictions involve land use policy or border policy is a
curiously underexplored question.)
If both the border and land use were free, markets would be very
powerful in organizing mass migration. Consider Hyderabad. Many of
the very poor live either at or right next to garbage dumps. They live
in tents or ramshackle lean-tos. Their jobs often involve scavenging
the garbage dump for potentially useful scraps. Why do they live
there? Do they like the short commute? Is it because they love the
Indian culture one finds right next to the garbage dump? No, no, and
no. They live there because they will put up with almost anything to
have a chance of survival.
How many of these people would book passage on a slow ship to
Baltimore, with the hope of living in a richer garbage dump? The ship
would serve cheap rice and lentils, make them sew garments while sailing, and collect further payment five years after
arrival, tagging them with GPS if need be or "monitoring" relatives
back home. Or perhaps the Indian government would pay their way.
How about the nine or so million Haitians — almost all living in
extreme poverty — who face a much shorter and cheaper boat trip?
I can imagine the U.S. staying a high-quality capitalist democracy
with some percentage of the population living in garbage dumps and
shantytowns. While I think we are underinvesting in shantytowns, the permissible percentage is not very high and almost certainly falls short of fifteen percent. (Btw,
there is much complaining about the Mexicans, but in fact we share a
long land border with a relatively wealthy third world country; this is
rarely appreciated.)
That is why I do not favor unlimited immigration. To the extent
that nominally "open borders" would be tolerable, it is because we already impose
implicit immigration restrictions through land use policies.
That all said, I will reiterate my view that we could take in many
more immigrants than we are doing now, both skilled and unskilled.
Market day in Provence
No matter how unoriginal stallholders’ products may be, they have to seem to be for local folk. It is crucial that the winemaker from Caromb buy his Pataugas [basic country walking shoes] on the market, the Sanit-Didier road mender his balaclava, and that everyone see them do so, even if not many do the same. That way everyone can feel they have participated in that Friday morning’s local-life event. Moreover, "foreigners" like the idea of buying market products precisely because they are perceived to be used by natives.
That is from Michele de la Pradelle’s Market Day in Provence. This book is not easy to summarize, but it is one of the three or four best economic ethnographies I have read. You will find more information, including an excerpt, here.
The culture that is French, a continuing series
The best-selling book in French history?
Sadly it is The da Vinci Code. It is estimated that five million copies are already purchased and that one-quarter of the French reading public has read the work; see Business Week, 29 May 2006.
I fly to Bordeaux tonight, wish me luck, and don’t expect Latino immigration to be the topic of this blog for the next week…
My favorite things New York City
1. My favorite demographic charts: Track population changes by borough.
2. My favorite NYC dining guide blog: Click on the categories on the top row of the blog to see the whole thing.
3. Favorite neighborhood: To live in? Manhattan is getting so uncool. I will pick the corner of Hudson and Barrow, which is near W. Houston and the West Side Highway, just north of the Saatchi building. There it still looks and feels like the New York City I grew up with (from New Jersey, that is). But when will I have the money and the courage to try? The Upper East Side bores me and the best food is in Queens; neither is suitable for real life.
4. Favorite book about: Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan, by Philip Lopate. I am surprised how few people know this one. Compulsively readable, and it makes me want to write a comparable work. But "A Drive Around Fairfax"? No way.
5. Favorite dim sum: Oriental Garden, in Chinatown, Elizabeth St., make sure to arrive early. Don’t forget Flushing, especially if you have time to kill at LaGuardia. The juicy pork buns at Joe’s Shanghai? Jackson Diner is still great Indian food though it is not the revelation it once was; the competition has caught up with it.
6. Best lunch bargain: Nougatine, the bistro attached to Jean-Georges. Get the venison with green chiles for its amazing mix of textures and heat.
7. Favorite Seinfeld episode: How about Master of His Domain? Soup Nazi is overrated and in fact I don’t even like it. The one where Jerry and Elaine try to be together again is another favorite, plus Show Within a Show.
8. Favorite free activity that even most New Yorkers don’t do: Browse the auction displays at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, especially before the major auctions in May and November.
Movies, music, literature? Not today. You might as well try "My Favorite Things Not in New York" for an easier task.
Against Transcendence
Deirdre McCloskey gave the inaugural James M. Buchanan Lecture last week, The Hobbes Problem: From Machiavelli to Buchanan. It was a good start to the series, eloquent, learned, and heartfelt. McCloskey argued that the Hobbesian programme of building the polis on prudence alone, a program to which the moderns, Rawls, Buchanan, Gauthier and others have contributed is barren. A good polis must be built upon all 7 virtues, both the pagan and transcendent, these being courage, justice, temperance, and prudence but also faith, hope and love (agape).
In the lecture, McCloskey elided the difficult problems of the transcendent virtues especially as they apply to politics (I expect a more complete analysis in the forthcoming book). Faith, hope, and love sound pleasant in theory but in practice there is little agreement on how these virtues are instantiated. It was love for their eternal souls that motivated the inquisitors to torture their victims. President Bush wants to save Iran…with nuclear bombs. Faith in the absurd is absurd. Thanks but no thanks.
Since we can’t agree on the transcendent virtues injecting them into politics means intolerance and division. Personally, I’d be happy to see the transcendent virtues fade away but I know that’s
unrealistic. The next best thing, therefore, is to insist that the transcendent virtues be reserved for civil society and at all costs be kept out of politics. The pagan virtues alone provide room for agreement in a cosmpolitan society, a society of the hetereogeneous.
Of course, in all this I follow Voltaire:
Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable
than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations
meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the
Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same
religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There
the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends
on the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free
assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass.
This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: that man has his son’s foreskin cut off,
whilst a set of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled
over his child. Others retire to their churches, and there wait for the
inspiration of heaven with their hats on, and all are satisfied.If one religion only were allowed in England, the Government would
very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would
cut one another’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all
live happy and in peace.
French economics
Earlier I wrote that French students need more Bastiat and less Foucault. Supporting evidence is provided by The International Herald Tribune which notes:
In a 22-country survey published in January, France was the only nation
disagreeing with the premise that the best system is "the free-market
economy." In the poll, conducted by the University of Maryland, only 36
percent of French respondents agreed, compared with 65 percent in
Germany, 66 percent in Britain, 71 percent in the United States and 74
percent in China (!, AT)…."The question of how economics is taught in France, both at the bottom
and at the top of the educational pyramid, is at the heart of the
current crisis," said Jean-Pierre Boisivon, director of the Enterprise
Institute…"In France we are still stuck in 1970s Keynesian-style economics – we
live in the world of 30 years ago," he said. …And then there are the textbooks. One, published by Nathan and widely
used by final-year students, has this to say on p. 137: "One must
analyze the salary as purchasing power that you could not cut without
sparking a deflationary spiral and thus higher unemployment." Another
popular textbook, published by La Découverte, asks on p. 164: "Are
there still enough jobs for everyone?" It then suggests that the state
subsidize jobs in the public sector: "We can seriously envisage this
because our economy allows us already to support a large number of
unemployed people."These arguments were frequently used on the streets in recent weeks,
where many protesters said raising salaries and subsidizing work was a
better way to cut joblessness than flexibility.
Hat tip to Peter Gordon who is teaching in Paris but finds his students considerably more sophisticated.