Results for “best fiction” 291 found
Saturday assorted links
Saturday assorted links
1. “The Russian navy had to lease and purchase eight commercial transports in order to deliver supplies for the operation at the level of up to 50 sorties a day (which means one sortie per aircraft).” Link here. And: “Over the last three years I have found that the best way of learning what is really happening in the war is to visit military hospitals.”
2. Ted Gioia praises John Fowles.
3. This could pass as satire. (That link was taken down but it is still posted here.) Don’t neglect the subtitle of the publication itself. In fact you could have convinced me it was a bad right-wing satire of something that doesn’t happen, but I’ve seen it so many times in my Twitter feed I think it must be true.
4. Jonathan Haidt talk on how Ethical Systems Design could reduce inequality.
6. JEP piece on how the Fed plans to raise interest rates and how monetary policy works today. Boring, but a very good explainer.
*Genghis Khan*, by Frank McLynn
The subtitle is The Man Who Conquered the World, and this is one of the very best non-fiction books of the year, quite possibly the best. Virtually every page is fascinating and should be read carefully. It makes intelligible a period of history which is so often a blur to the unfamiliar Western reader,and rather than just throwing a bunch of dates and facts at you it tries to make them intelligible in terms of underlying mechanisms. Here is one summary bit:
The harshness of the Mongolian habitat and the complexities of nomadic pastoralism help to explain the many potentialities of Mongol society eventually actualised by Genghis Khan. Care of massive and variegated herds and flocks produced a number of consequences: adaptability and ingenuity of response and initiative; mobility and the capacity for rapid mobilisation; low levels of wealth and of economic inequality; almost total absence of a division of labour; political instability. Migration meant constant alertness and readiness to fight, since wealth in livestock is almost by definition highly vulnerable to raiding, reiving and rustling. Managing large animals was inherently more strenuous and dangerous than tending crops, so the very nature of pastoral life produced a hardier breed than would be generated by the peasantry. Migration in peacetime also produced martial qualities via the surplus energy available for fighting, since in a pacific context warriors could leave the minutae of herding and droving to women and children. when the fighting came, it was less destructive than for sedentary societies that had to defend fields of crops, cities, temples and other fixed points.
There were other military ‘spin-offs’ from pastoralism. Moving huge herds of animals generated logistical skills and the capacity to navigate through uncertain terrain, coordinating with far-flung comrades while doing so.
Strongly recommended, you can buy the book here.
What’s wrong with this picture?
The New York Times covers a controversy about a Texas history textbook:
Coby Burren, 15, a freshman at a suburban high school south of here, was reading the textbook in his geography class last week when a map of the United States caught his attention. On Page 126, a caption in a section about immigration referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as “workers” rather than slaves.
The black lives matter movement is upset that slaves are referred to as workers.
I am upset that the caption is factually incorrect even if rewritten not to use the word worker. In particular, it is not true that millions of slaves were brought from Africa to the southern United States. In fact, less than half a million came to the United States.
Here is Henry Louis Gates Jr:
The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial “gold standard” in the field of the study of the slave trade.) Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.
And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.
Here is the primary database for what we know about the Atlantic Slave Trade which lists 305,326 slaves brought to the USA. Gates goes on to note that some 60-70 thousand slaves initially brought to the Caribbean ended up in the United States so he estimates that perhaps 450,000 African slaves in total were brought to the U.S. over the course of the slave trade.
If you want to understand the slave trade it’s important to understand that the vast majority of the slaves taken from Africa were shipped to the Caribbean and South America. If you want to understand slavery in America it’s important to understand that most slaves in the United States were born into slavery. Also, as Gates notes, it’s a rather striking and amazing fact that “most of the 42 million members of the African-American community descend from this tiny group of less than half a million Africans.”
Regardless of whether you think that slaves are workers or not the textbook failed its students by getting the facts wrong. In a better culture, that failure would make for a controversy and a story in the New York Times.
Hat tip: Arthur Charpentier on twitter.
What I’ve been reading
1. Deep South, by Paul Theroux. It’s OK enough, but Theroux’s best writing was motivated by bile and unfortunately he has matured. Still, he can’t get past p.9 without mention Naipaul’s “rival book” A Turn in the South. My favorite Theroux book is his Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a delicious story of human rivalry and one of my favorite non-fiction books period.
2. Elmira Bayrasli, From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places. A well-written, completely spot on analysis about how the quality of the business climate needs to be improved in emerging economies, and about how much potential for entrepreneurship there is. If economists were to do nothing else but repeat this message, the quality and usefulness of our profession likely would rise dramatically.
3. Michael White, Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir. Nominated in the non-fiction National Book Award category, I actually enjoyed reading this one, all of it except the parts about…Vermeer. It’s better as a memoir of alcoholism and divorce, interspersed with visits to art museums.
Tom Gjelten’s A Nation of Nations is an interesting “immigration history” of Fairfax County. I enjoyed Deirdre Clemente’s Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style.
Jennifer Mittelstadt’s The Rise of the Military Welfare State is a useful history of how a social welfare state for the military was first created, for recruitment purposes, and then later dismantled.
I recommend L. Randall Wray’s Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist, forthcoming in November. Minsky isn’t so readable, but Wray is. I’ve just started my review copy, I hope to report more on it soon.
Saturday assorted links
1. Liz Lutgendorff is offended by fantasy and science fiction novels.
2. There is no great stagnation, drug delivery edition. And the value of certain and immediate rewards.
3. What do we infer from disclosure?
4. “Superfluids aren’t usually purely super…”
5. More on why fair trade doesn’t work.
6. Greece just got fifty-five billion euros in debt relief.
7. The LKY Musical: Singapore’s history set to song.
8. Oliver Sacks on his cousin Robert Aumann. And other things.
What I’ve been reading
1. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: on Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Don’t judge Graeber by his mistakes or by how he responds (doesn’t respond) to criticism. This one is still more interesting to read than most books. In fact, most of us quite like bureaucracy.
2. John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom. The usual dose of pessimism, with a choppier argument and a slightly larger typeface than usual. It induced me to order Mr. Weston’s Good Wine. In any case, I’ll still buy the next one, engaging with John Gray if nothing else has become a ritual. I once predicted to Jim Buchanan that John would end up converting to Catholicism, but I still am waiting.
3. Juan Goytisolo. I’ve tried to read a bunch of his books, so far they all bore me, in both Spanish and English, the fault is probably mine. Various sophisticates suggest he is great, should I keep on trying?
4. Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. He is one of the best non-fiction essay writers, and he remains oddly underrated in the United States. It is no mistake to simply buy his books sight unseen. I think of this book as “happiness for grumps.”
5. Harry G. Gelber, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 B.C. to the Present. No, this isn’t the best Chinese history book. But it is the one most written in a way that you will remember its contents, and in this context that is worth a lot.
Genetically Engineering Humans Isn’t So Scary (Don’t Fear the CRISPR, Part 2)
Yesterday I outlined why genetically engineered children are not imminent. The Chinese CRISPR gene editing of embryos experiment was lethal to around 20% of embryos, inserted off-target errors into roughly 10% of embryos (with some debate there), and only produced the desired genetic change in around 5% of embryos, and even then only in a subset of cells in those embryos.
Over time, the technology will become more efficient and the combined error and lethality rates will drop, though likely never to zero.
Human genome editing should be regulated. But it should be regulated primarily to assure safety and informed consent, rather than being banned as it is most developed countries (see figure 3). It’s implausible that human genome editing will lead to a Gattaca scenario, as I’ll show below. And bans only make the societal outcomes worse.
1. Enhancing Human Traits is Hard (And Gattaca is Science Fiction)
The primary fear of human germline engineering, beyond safety, appears to be a Gattaca-like scenario, where the rich are able to enhance the intelligence, looks, and other traits of their children, and the poor aren’t.
But boosting desirable traits such as intelligence and height to any significant degree is implausible, even with a very low error rate.
The largest ever survey of genes associated with IQ found 69 separate genes, which together accounted for less than 8% of the variance in IQ scores, implying that at least hundreds of genes, if not thousands, involved in IQ. (See paper, here.) As Nature reported, even the three genes with the largest individual impact added up to less than two points of IQ:
The three variants the researchers identified were each responsible for an average of 0.3 points on an IQ test. … That means that a person with two copies of each variant would score 1.8 points higher on an intelligence test than a person with none of them.
Height is similarly controlled by hundreds of gene. 697 genes together account for just one fifth of the heritability of adult height. (Paper at Nature Genetics here).
For major personality traits, identified genes account for less than 2% of variation, and it’s likely that hundreds or thousands of genes are involved.
Manipulating IQ, height, or personality is thus likely to involve making a very large number of genetic changes. Even then, genetic changes are likely to produce a moderate rather than overwhelming impact.
Conversely, for those unlucky enough to be conceived with the wrong genes, a single genetic change could prevent Cystic Fibrosis, or dramatically reduce the odds of Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer or ovarian cancer, or cut the risk of heart disease by 30-40%.
Reducing disease is orders of magnitude easier and safer than augmenting abilities.
2. Parents are risk averse
We already trust parents to make hundreds of impactful decisions on behalf of their children: Schooling, diet and nutrition, neighborhood, screen time, media exposure, and religious upbringing are just a few. Each of these has a larger impact on the average child – positive or negative – than one is likely to see from a realistic gene editing scenario any time in the next few decades.
And in general, parents are risk averse when their children are involved. Using gene editing to reduce the risk of disease is quite different than taking on new risks in an effort to boost a trait like height or IQ. That’s even more true when it takes dozens or hundreds of genetic tweaks to make even a relatively small change in those traits – and when every genetic tweak adds to the risk of an error.
(Parents could go for a more radical approach: Inserting extra copies of human genes, or transgenic variants not found in humans at all. It seems likely that parents will be even more averse to venturing into such uncharted waters with their children.)
If a trait like IQ could be safely increased to a marked degree, that would constitute a benefit to both the child and society. And while it would pose issues for inequality, the best solution might be to try to rectify inequality of access, rather than ban the technique. (Consider that IVF is subsidized in places as different as Singapore and Sweden.) But significant enhancements don’t appear to be likely any time on the horizon.
Razib Khan points out one other thing we trust parents to do, which has a larger impact on the genes of a child than any plausible technology of the next few decades:
“the best bet for having a smart child is picking a spouse with a deviated phenotype. Look for smart people to marry.”
3. Bans make safety and inequality worse
A ban on human germline gene editing would cut off medical applications that could reduce the risk of disease in an effort to control the far less likely and far less impactful enhancement and parental control scenarios.
A ban is also unlikely to be global. Attitudes towards genetic engineering vary substantially by country. In the US, surveys find 4% to 14% of the population supports genetic engineering for enhancement purposes. Only around 40% support its use to prevent disease. Yet, As David Macer pointed out, as early as 1994:
in India and Thailand, more than 50% of the 900+ respondents in each country supported enhancement of physical characters, intelligence, or making people more ethical.
While most of Europe has banned genetic engineering, and the US looks likely to follow suit, it’s likely to go forward in at least some parts of Asia. (That is, indeed, one of the premises of Nexus and its sequels.)
If the US and Europe do ban the technology, while other countries don’t, then genetic engineering will be accessible to a smaller set of people: Those who can afford to travel overseas and pay for it out-of-pocket. Access will become more unequal. And, in all likelihood, genetic engineering in Thailand, India, or China is likely to be less well regulated for safety than it would be in the US or Europe, increasing the risk of mishap.
The fear of genetic engineering is based on unrealistic views of the genome, the technology, and how parents would use it. If we let that fear drive us towards a ban on genetic engineering – rather than legalization and regulation – we’ll reduce safety and create more inequality of access.
I’ll give the penultimate word to Jennifer Doudna, the inventor of the technique (this is taken from a truly interesting set of responses to Nature Biotechnology’s questions, which they posed to a large number of leaders in the field):
Doudna, Carroll, Martin & Botchan: We don’t think an international ban would be effective by itself; it is likely some people would ignore it. Regulation is essential to ensure that dangerous, trivial or cosmetic uses are not pursued.
Legalize and regulate genetic engineering. That’s the way to boost safety and equality, and to guide the science and ethics.
Don’t Fear the CRISPR
I’m honored to be here guest-blogging for the week. Thanks, Alex, for the warm welcome.
I want to start with a topic recently in the news, and that I’ve written about in both fiction and non-fiction.
In April, Chinese scientists announced that they’d used the CRISPR gene editing technique to modify non-viable human embryos. The experiment focused on modifying the gene that causes the quite serious hereditary blood disease Beta-thalassemia.
You can read the paper here. Carl Zimmer has an excellent write-up here. Tyler has blogged about it here. And Alex here.
Marginal Revolution aside, the response to this experiment has been largely negative. Science and Nature, the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, reportedly rejected the paper on ethical grounds. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, announced that NIH will not fund any CRISPR experiments that involve human embryos.
NIH will not fund any use of gene-editing technologies in human embryos. The concept of altering the human germline in embryos for clinical purposes has been debated over many years from many different perspectives, and has been viewed almost universally as a line that should not be crossed.
This is a mistake, for several reasons.
- The technology isn’t as mature as reported. Most responses to it are over-reactions.
- Parents are likely to use genetic technologies in the best interests of their children.
- Using gene editing to create ‘superhumans’ will be tremendously harder, riskier, and less likely to be embraced by parents than using it to prevent disease.
- A ban on research funding or clinical application will only worsen safety, inequality, and other concerns expressed about the research.
Today I’ll talk about the maturity of the technology. Tomorrow I’ll be back to discuss the other points. (You can read that now in Part 2: Don’t Fear Genetically Engineered Babies.)
CRISPR Babies Aren’t Near
Despite the public reaction (and the very real progress with CRISPR in other domains) we are not near a world of CRISPR gene-edited children.
First, the technique was focused on very early stage embryos made up of just a few cells. Genetically engineering an embryo at that very early stage is the only realistic way to ensure that the genetic changes reach all or most cells in the body. That limits the possible parents to those willing to go through in-vitro fertilization (IVF). It takes an average of roughly 3 IVF cycles, with numerous hormone injections and a painful egg extraction at each cycle, to produce a live birth. In some cases, it takes as many as 6 cycles. Even after 6 cycles, perhaps a third of women going through IVF will not have become pregnant (see table 3, here). IVF itself is a non-trivial deterrent to genetically engineering children.
Second, the Chinese experiment resulted in more dead embryos than successfully gene edited embryos. Of 86 original embryos, only 71 survived the process. 54 of those were tested to see if the gene had successfully inserted. Press reports have mentioned that 28 of those 54 tested embryos showed signs of CRISPR/Cas9 activity.
Yet only 4 embryos showed the intended genetic change. And even those 4 showed the new gene in only some of their cells, becoming ‘mosaics’ of multiple different genomes.
From the paper:
~80% of the embryos remained viable 48 h after injection (Fig. 2A), in agreement with low toxicity of Cas9 injection in mouse embryos […]
ssDNA-mediated editing occurred only in 4 embryos… and the edited embryos were mosaic, similar to findings in other model systems.
So the risk of destroying an embryo (~20%) was substantially higher than the likelihood of successfully inserting a gene into the embryo (~5%) and much higher than the chance of inserting the gene into all of the embryo’s cells (0%).
There were also off-target mutations. Doug Mortlock believes the off-target mutation rate was actually much lower than the scientists believed, but in general CRISPR has a significantly non-zero chance of inducing an unintended genetic change.
CRISPR is a remarkable breakthrough in gene editing, with applications to agriculture, gene therapy, pharmaceutical production, basic science, and more. But in many of those scenarios, error can be tolerated. Cells with off-target mutations can be weeded out to find the few perfectly edited ones. Getting one complete success out of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of modified cells can suffice, when that one cell can then be replicated to create a new cell line or seed line.
In human fertility, where embryos are created in single digit quantities rather than hundreds or thousands – and where we hope at least one of those embryos comes to term as a child – our tolerance for error is dramatically lower. The efficiency, survivability, and precision of CRISPR all need to rise substantially before many parents are likely to consider using it for an unborn embryo, even to prevent disease.
That is, indeed, the conclusion of the Chinese researchers, who wrote, “Our study underscores the challenges facing clinical applications of CRISPR/Cas9.”
More in part two of this post on the ethics of allowing genetic editing of the unborn, and why a ban in this area is counterproductive.
Arrived in my pile
Gary B. Gorton, The Maze of Banking: History, Theory, Crisis. This volume collects his best articles.
Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock, and Rachel Jones, Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary. Appears to be the most thorough and comprehensive treatment to date.
Vishaal Kishore, Ricardo’s Gauntlet: Economic Fiction and the Flawed Case for Free Trade.
*The Age of the Crisis of Man*
That is the new book by Mark Greif, and the subtitle is Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973. I very much enjoyed grappling with this one. One of my more recent views is that the thinkers of the mid-twentieth century are in fact, as a whole, extremely underrated. They are not old enough to be classic and not new enough to be trendy or on the frontier. Their world faced problems which seemed totally strange to us in the 1990s, but which are starting to sound scarily relevant and contemporary. Yet our world is largely ignorant of their wisdom and creativity, in part because they often sounded dumb or schlocky or maybe they even were in some ways.
This book is sprawling, and while clearly written at the sentence-to-sentence level, it assumes some fair degree of background knowledge. Nonetheless for an intellectually-minded reader it is an excellent way to jump into the world inhabited by Karl Jaspers, Ortega y Gasset, Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Pynchon.
Leon Wieseltier has some interesting remarks on the book. Here is another interesting (if overlong) review, by Richard Marshall. Here is an excellent Adam Kirsch review, the best review as review.
Assorted links
1. An impressive display of, um…Big Data (pdf), addressing how suppliers discriminate against customers in Singapore. There is also an NBER version, but I don’t see it on their site at this moment.
2. The religion that is Iceland.
3. “…the greatest work of journalism from the nineteenth century.”
4. The Hospital is no Place for a Heart Attack. And few from the EU side like the Greek debt swap idea.
5. Best films of the decade? Winter Sleep should be added to the list immediately, it is Ceylan’s masterpiece. That, along with Uncle Boonmee, should be very close to the top.
7. Timothy Taylor on the new corporate income tax proposals.
Assorted links
1. The detailed program for the Coase conference, late March in DC.
2. The concept of tipping is spreading.
3. I am very happy to see my former Ph.D student, Shawn DuBravac, who recently finished his degree, at #10 on the NYT non-fiction bestseller list. His book Digital Destiny is here.
4. “The most unforgivable sin in the world,” Mr. McKuen told The Washington Post in 1969, “is to be a best-selling poet.” An excellent obituary.
5. Paul Krugman on how blogging is changing, or not.
7. Can you have a Chinese Communist Party without an ideology?
Top Ten MR Posts of 2014
Here is my annual rundown of the top MR posts of 2014 as measured by page views, tweets and shares.
1. Ferguson and the Debtor’s Prison–I’d been tracking the issue of predatory fining since my post on debtor’s prisons in 2012 so when the larger background of Ferguson came to light I was able to provide a new take on a timely topic, the blogging sweet spot.
2. Tyler’s post on Tirole’s win of the Nobel prize offered an authoritative overview of Tirole’s work just when people wanted it. Tyler’s summary, “many of his papers show “it’s complicated,” became the consensus.
3. Why I am not Persuaded by Thomas Piketty’s Argument, Tyler’s post which links to his longer review of the most talked about economics book of the year. Other Piketty posts were also highly linked including Tyler’s discussion of Rognlie and Piketty and my two posts, Piketty v. Solow and The Piketty Bubble?. Less linked but one of my personal favorites was Two Surefire Solutions to Inequality.
4. Tesla versus the Rent Seekers–a review of franchise theory applied to the timely issue of regulatory restrictions on Tesla, plus good guys and bad guys!
5. How much have whites benefited from slavery and its legacy–an excellent post from Tyler full of meaty economics and its consequences. Much to think about in this post. Read it (again).
6. Tyler’s post Keynes is slowly losing (winning?) drew attention as did my post The Austerity Flip Flop, Krugman critiques often do.
7. The SAT, Test Prep, Income and Race–some facts about SAT Test Prep that run contrary to conventional wisdom.
8. Average Stock Returns Aren’t Average–“Lady luck is a bitch, she takes from the many and gives to the few. Here is the histogram of payoffs.”
9. Tyler’s picks for Best non fiction books of 2014.
10. A simple rule for making every restaurant meal better. Tyler’s post. Disputed but clearly correct.
Some other 2014 posts worth revisiting; Tyler on Modeling Vladimir Putin, What should a Bayesian infer from the Antikythera Mechanism?, and network neutrality and me on Inequality and Masters of Money.
Many posts from previous years continue to attract attention including my post from 2012, Firefighters don’t fight fires, which some newspapers covered again this year and Tyler’s 2013 post How and why Bitcoin will plummet in price which certainly hasn’t been falsified!
What I’ve been reading
1. Emmanuel Carrère, Limonov, The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, A Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia. Blends fiction, non-fiction, and occasional social science (was a non-corrupt transformation of the Soviet Union really possible?, Gaidar ultimately decided it wasn’t), but in terms of the subjective experience of the reader it is most like a novel. Excellent and also entertaining. I consider this a deep book about why liberalism will never quite win over human nature. Here is an interesting Julian Barnes review, although in my opinion it is insufficiently appreciative.
2. Kenneth D. Durr, The Best Made Plans: Robert R. Nathan and 20th Century Liberalism. I may be biased because I just gave a talk at the Nathan Foundation and received it as a gift copy. I call this the “real history of economic thought.” It’s a look at the career of a man who worked with Simon Kuznets to improve gdp statistics, helped lead the war effort in the 1940s, supported the civil rights movement, founded a major economic consulting firm, and supported the idea and practice of economic development, most of all for South Korea and Myanmar. It’s a splendid look at twentieth century economics as it actually influenced the world, without centering the story on academia. By the way, here is Diane Coyle on Walter Lippmann.
3. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings. This account of 1970s Jamaica, centered on a plot to shoot Bob Marley, shows a remarkable amount of talent, as well as a mastery of plot construction and different novelistic voices, some of which are in Jamaican patois. If you pick up this book you will be impressed and indeed many of the reviews are glowing. Yet somehow never did I care, feel entertained, or wish to read further. I stopped. I remain interested in that era, but will instead recommend a viewing — or reviewing — of The Harder They Come or Marley.
4. John D. Mueller, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element. That element would be Providence, and this work looks at how Scholastic insights can serve as a foundation for economic thought. Loyal MR readers will know that is not exactly my brew, but some of you will find this of interest.