The Essential Norman Mailer

It is easy to hate his self-important puffery, but Norman Mailer remains one of America’s best writers.  His books include:

1. The Naked and the Dead – Outdated, but still full of powerful writing, and lacking many of the later objectionable mannerisms.

2. Advertisements for Myself – A collection of journalism, a mixed bag, but the peaks are high.

3. Armies of the Night – About the 1968 Chicago Convention, I’ve never read it but it gets consistent raves.

4. Of a Fire on the Moon – The story of America’s space program, and one of the best non-fiction books period.  As a writer, one of the books I most envy.

5. The Executioner’s Song – The story of Gary Gilmore, the first half is incredible — a candidate for "The Great American Novel" — although the second half meanders.

5. Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery – I usually hate historical fiction but this is gripping.

6. Harlot’s Ghost – His best book, 1168 pages of panache and joy.  One of the most underrated and underread of the important American novels. 

The thing is, he has many other books too.  His new The Castle in the Forest, a psychological autobiography of the young Hitler, is better than his bad books but it does not compare to the books on this list.

Burning Annie

A loyal MR reader mailed me a copy of his movie, Burning Annie.  A depressed college guy fails in love and lust because he obsesses over the pessimistic Woody Allen movie Annie Hall.  (You can put it in your Netflix queue, and it plays in NYC 2/7, here are reviews).  He refuses to tell bed-ready, nubile young women that he loves them, or even likes them, because he is unwilling to make himself vulnerable and open to rejection.  I wonder how much truth-telling stems from this motive. 

What are the best novels about politics?

Queried here, I will simplify and make it books, period, but restrict it to fiction, not counting philosophy.  My list of five:

1. Shakespeare’s Henriad, a no-brainer at #1, if you count it as more than one book it still should take up as many slots as it needs.  Psychology is primary and stands above politics, and libertinism is by no means unrelated to power.

2. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, vanity, pride, and self-deception are the keys to understanding political behavior, plus Swift shows an understanding of "the rules of the game."

3. Montesquieu, Persian Letters, yikes, have you ever seen that Monty Python skit "Summarize Proust"?

4. Sophocles, Antigone, the claims of the family vs. the claims of the state continue to plague Iraq and many other places.

5. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, the former is not just a good tale but also a profound comparative study of regimes, the latter is the brutal truths of war.

Interestingly none of these are proper novels.  I read Kafka’s The Trial as more about theology than worldly affairs.  As for politics as a profession, the source from The Economist recommends "Primary Colors", C.P. Snow’s "The Corridors of Power", and "All the King’s Men".

It is less fruitful and less fun to guess at the best novels about business and economics, perhaps because the relevant truths seem banal in a fictional context.

The demerits of RSS

Is RSS going mainstream?

I’ve had my RA set up this technology for me but I still don’t appreciate it or even use it.  First, I like the look of individual blog pages.  More importantly, reading blogs for me is a matter of mood.  Right now I feel like reading, say Jacqueline Passey rather than EconBrowser, or vice versa, and I don’t want all the new posts thrust in front of my nose at the same time.  I also fear that ongoing use of RSS would lead to reading inflation; I would add new blogs to my feed because it is easy to do so, but encounter the intransitivity of indifference.  I would end up overloaded.

My current reading method "by hand" takes more time, but hey reading blogs is fun and it should stay fun at the margin.  Who wants to be satiated in liquidity?  My current method also brings more discipline.  Do you all have thoughts on this matter?

Onion or not Onion?

Three
Death Row
inmates say the three-drug cocktail used in lethal injections have
not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for executions and want a
federal judge to issue an injunction to stop the state from using the drugs
until it complies with federal drug laws.

According to sources at the Allstate Insurance Company, CIA
Director Michael Hayden purchased nuclear-attack insurance Wednesday, paying a
$100,000 monthly premium for his homes in suburban Washington, Pittsburgh, and
near Cheyenne Mountain, CO.

Thanks to Monique van Hoek and Daniel Rothschild for pointers.

Bypassing computers to speak with a human being

Interrupt. Press 0 (or 0# or #0 or 0* or *0) repeatedly, sometimes quickly. Unfortunately, the same keystroke does not always work for each company. Many IVRs will connect to a human after a few "invalid entries," although some IVRs will hang up. 

Talk. Say "get human" (or "agent" or "representative") or raise your voice, – or even just mumble. The IVR might connect you to a human being after one of these key or unknown phrases. 

Just hold, pretending that you have only an old rotary phone. 

Connect to account collections or sales or account cancellation. These groups always seem to answer quickly. When you reach a real live person, immediately ask for the representative’s name and rep number. This way, the rep knows that you are writing it down and is thus are more likely to help you. Then ask the rep to transfer you to the department you need. Sometimes you’ll be put ahead of the queue, but at other times, you will be sent to the end. In that case, you’re back where you started. 

Make a toll call. For service on credit cards, if the expected wait time is too long, hangup and try to call back on the company’s non-toll-free number, as these numbers often have shorter queues.

I’ve done best with number four.  "Small steps toward a much better world," as they say.  The pointer is from Natasha.

Alan Reynolds’s *Income and Wealth*

1. I don’t agree with the most notorious claim of the book, namely that income inequality hasn’t gone up over the last few decades.  Gary Burtless has a good, non-polemical look at the data.  See also Bruce Bartlett.  Personally I am struck by what I know about philanthropy, art markets (booming prices, driven by wealth) and academic salaries.  At the micro-level each of these areas appears to reflect a trend of rising income inequality.  Even before I had heard of Piketty and Saez, I felt I was seeing their result right before my eyes.  In terms of more formal data, I also was much influenced by the Thomas Lemieux piece I cited earlier today (Reynolds cites it too, I might add, approvingly, though without considering this angle), which shows that composition effects virtually require income inequality to be rising.  Reynolds would have had a better book if he simply stated that income inequality isn’t going up as much as some people have claimed.

2. The book is of course polemical in style, so it is no surprise it would occasion polemical responses.  Nonetheless I have been disappointed by much of the critical reaction to the book, most typically Jonathan Chait at NR.  With any book, whether you like its attitude or not, the first questions are what the book gets right and what we can learn from it.  (I am someone who had GMU economics Ph.d. students read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed.)  Many of the critics aren’t asking these questions but rather they are using debating points, or attacks against Reynolds, to dismiss the book altogether.  On many issues Reynolds is correct or at least he makes arguments worth considering.  Often he is simply a massive tonic of common sense when countering the fuzzier-minded of egalitarian arguments.

Neither Reynolds nor the critics try hard enough to get at the real issues, namely which kinds of inequality are present, which are problems, and which are worth worrying about.  The Reynolds book would have done better to try to give us a deeper understanding of the actual problems, whatever they may be, and less to respond to the critics number-by-number; the latter approach rarely convinces many people. 

On specific points, the critics are too dismissive of consumption data, and Reynolds defends them too passionately.  And what about happiness?  Are there special problems concerning unequal health care?  Just how bad is emergency room care relative to gold-plated insurance plans?  Is the biggest problem of the poor, as one MR commentator points out, simply having to hang around other poor people?

Overall both philosophy (a rigorous treatment of which complaints are exactly complaints about inequality) and sociology are badly needed in this debate.  On both sides of the fence I yearn for just a bit more Amartya Sen.  The numbers, one way or the other, taken alone, aren’t going to convince very many people.

Markets in everything, deficit spending edition

The Illinois lottery may be up for sale.  The current status is discussed in yesterday’s NYT.  The state hopes to get $10 billion.  The lottery had $630 million in profits last year on sales of $2 billion.  The buyer would get all profit for 75 years.

Here is the source.  Larry Ribstein remarks: "Yet more evidence that a hedge fund is no match for a politician when it comes to short-term thinking."

Incomes and inequality: what the numbers don’t tell us

Here is my NYT column from today (right now the on-line piece has some typos/broken links, I hope they will be fixed), excerpts:

Much of the measured growth in income inequality has resulted from
natural demographic trends. In general, there is more income inequality
among older populations than among younger populations, if only because
older people have had more time to experience rising or falling
fortunes.

Furthermore, more-educated groups show greater income
inequality than less-educated groups. Uneducated people are more likely
to be clustered in a tight range of relatively low incomes. But the
educated will include a greater range of highly motivated breadwinners
and relaxed bohemians, and a greater range of winning and losing
investors. A result is a greater variety of incomes. Since the United
States is growing older and also more educated, income inequality will
naturally rise.

Thomas Lemieux, professor of economics at the
University of British Columbia, estimates that these demographic
effects account for about three-quarters of the observed rise in income
inequality for men and 69 to 95 percent of the observed rise in income
inequality for women (AER June 2006, earlier version at www.irs.princeton.edu/seminars/lemeiux.pdf, "Increasing Residual Wage Inequality: Composition Effects, Noisy Data, or Rising Demand for Skill")…In other words, rising income inequality is not just a result of
unfairness or bad public policy…

Studies of personal happiness, based on questionnaires and
self-reporting, indicate that the inequality of happiness is not
growing over time in the United States. Furthermore, the United States
has an inequality of happiness roughly comparable to that of Sweden or
Denmark, two nations with strongly egalitarian reputations. (See the
symposium in Journal of Happiness Studies, December 2005.) American
society offers good opportunities for people to be happy, even if not
everyone becomes rich.

My conclusion?

What matters most is how well people are doing in absolute terms.  We
should continue to improve opportunities for lower-income people, but
inequality as a major and chronic American problem has been overstated.

Income vs. consumption inequality

Some time ago, John Quiggin became apoplectic at libertarians citing TV and Playstation purchases as evidence against American poverty being a serious problem; Henry Farrell chimed in too.  John asserts that consumption data "tell[s] us precisely nothing about what’s happening to inequality."

I cannot agree with this claim:

1. Consumption is robust for many categories, not just fancy TVs.

2. The data indicates that the people buying the stuff are not miserable, or at least not miserable for economic reasons.  There are plenty of historical episdoes where consumption does fall, and we know that is not a pretty state of affairs.

3. The demand for flat TVs and the like is not just a relative price effect, it is also a wealth effect.

4. If robust demand for fancy TVs and PlayStations is not convincing, what kind of consumption data would be?  Let’s say there was a robust demand, among the middle classes, for medium-size yachts.  Rembrandt etchings?  Wouldn’t that show something?  It can be argued that "TVs are not enough," but that is not reason to reject consumption data out of hand.  It is a reason to look at more categories of consumption.

Consumption studies do have the following defects:

1. They sample smaller numbers of people than do good income studies, and they cannot pin down the consumption patterns of definite percentiles very easily.

2. Money spent is not always money well spent.

3. The data series do not go far back in time and there may be problems of consistency over time.

4. People may be borrowing and accumulating large debts.  Note that in this case, however, the comeuppance, however bad it may be, has yet to come.  It could instead be argued that "inequality will (someday, when the debts come due) be a serious problem."

Mark Thoma surveys some interesting pieces.  Here is a very detailed study of the topic.  Here are many excellent slides on the topic.

Consumption data, even if sometimes misused by zealous libertarians, are not a means of dismissing the poverty problem, but they do put that problem in another light. 

First, they show that income and wealth data overstate poverty and inequality problems.  Second, a focus on income data leads one to conclude that the elderly require most of the assistance.  A focus on consumption data lead one to conclude that helping parents with children is, in many cases, more important.  That sounds right to me.

Small steps toward a much better world

Via Henry Farrell, the probabilistic alarm clock:

Lifehacker links to
an invention that I’ve thought for years would be a good idea (I’m sure
that plenty of other people have had the same thought).   Many people
have their clocks running a few minutes fast, to encourage them to
leave earlier for appointments to get there on time etc.  The
problem with this is that if you’re half-way rational, you’ll correct
for the error, making it useless.  So the solution is to have a
probabilistic clock, where the clock is fast, but you aren’t sure how
fast it is within a given and relatively short time range.  Thus, you’re
more likely to depart early for your appointments and get there on time
(or a few minutes ahead, most probably, in many situations).  This is
exactly what some bloke has programmed, although it doesn’t appear that it has an alarm feature yet.

Tim Harford covered a similar topic last week.