Results for “self-recommending”
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Best non-fiction books of 2021

by  Tyler Cowen in

What an incredible year for non-fiction books!  But let me first start with two picks from 2020, buried under the avalanche of Covid news then, and missed because I was less mobile than usual.  These books are not only good enough to make this list, but in just about any year they are good enough to be the very best book of that year:

Edward Nelson, Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States, 1932–1972, volumes one and two.

Alexander Mikaberidze, The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History.

Also noteworthy is Reviel Netz, Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture, which I hope to write more about.

Per usual, there is typically a short review behind each, though not quite always.  As for 2021 proper, here were my favorites, noting that I do not impose any quota system whatsoever.  (And yet this list is somehow more cosmopolitan than most such tallies…hmm…)  I don’t quite know how to put this, but this list is much better than the other “best books of the year” lists.  These are truly my picks, ranked roughly in the order I read them:

Jin Xu, Empire of Silver: A New Monetary History of China.

Cat Jarman, River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads.

Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad.

Ryan Bourne, Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning Through Covid-19.

Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Amazon.

Ivan Gibbons, Partition: How and Why Ireland Was Divided.

Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Alan Taylor, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850.

William Deresiewicz, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, brief discussion of it here.

Roderick Matthews, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India.

Alejandro Ruiz, Carla Altesor, et.al., The Food of Oaxaca: Recipes and Stories from Mexico’s Culinary Capital.

Tomas Mandl, Modern Paraguay: South America’s Best Kept Secret.

Kara Walker, A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs To Be.

Tony Saich, From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party.

Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present.

Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography.

John B. Thompson, Book Wars: The Digital Revolution.

Scott Sumner, The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy.

Architectural Guide to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism.

McCartney, Paul. The Lyrics.  A remarkably high quality production, again showing McCartney’s skill as manager and entrepreneur.  Perhaps the biggest revelation is when Paul insists that if not for the Beatles he would have been an English teacher.  He also claims that he and not John was the big reader in The Beatles.  It is also striking, but not surprising, when explaining his lyrics how many times he mentions his mother, who passed away when Paul was fourteen.  There is a good David Hajdu NYT review here.

Bob Spitz, Led Zeppelin: The Biography.  They always end up being better than you think they possibly could be, and this is the best and most serious book about them.

gestalten, Beauty and the East: New Chinese Architecture.  Self-recommending…

Is there a “best book” of 2021?  The categories are hard to compare.  Maybe the seven volumes of Architectural Guide to Sub-Saharan Africa?  But is it fair they get seven volumes in this competition?  The McCartney?  (He took two volumes.)  The Pessoa biography?  Roderick Matthews on India?  So much to choose from!  And apologies to all those I have forgotten or neglected…

Read more!  And here is my favorite fiction of 2021 list.  And I will write an addendum to this list as we approach the very end of 2021.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Can a submerged Tuvalu still be a state?

2. Your periodic reminder to read Matt Levine.

3. Ross Douthat on why we need new universities (NYT).

4. Ten podcast episodes of Agnes Callard and Robin Hanson.  With transcripts, and here is Robin’s overview of the series, which is also a very good post on differing mental models.  Self-recommending!

5. New Doc Watson box set, and WSJ review here.  In fact, in today’s links, 4 out of the 5 are self-recommending.

My Conversation with the excellent Claudia Goldin

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the transcript and audio.  Here is part of the CWT summary:

Claudia joined Tyler to discuss the rise of female billionaires in China, why the US gender earnings gap expanded in recent years, what’s behind falling marriage rates for those without a college degree, why the wage gap flips for Black women versus Black men, theoretical approaches for modeling intersectionality, gender ratios in economics, why she’s skeptical about happiness research, how the New York Times wedding announcement page has evolved, the problems with for-profit education, the value of an Ivy League degree, whether a Coasian solution existed to prevent the Civil War, which Americans were most likely to be anti-immigrant in the 1920s, her forthcoming work on Lanham schools, and more.

Here is an excerpt:

COWEN: If you look at a school, say, like Duke or Emory, is it a long-run problem that if they admit people on their merits, there’ll be too many women in the school relative to men, and some kind of affirmative action will be needed for the males?

GOLDIN: These are private institutions, and they can generally accept whom they would like to accept for various reasons of diversity.

COWEN: Should they do that? Or should they just get in 76 percent women, say?

GOLDIN: I’m brought back to the original issues that were raised by a small number of liberal arts colleges and universities in the ’50s and the ’60s about why they should become coeducational institutions.

Those reasons were that their marginal student was not going to Princeton but going to Harvard, not going to Princeton but going to Penn, not going to Princeton but going to Cornell, because that student wanted an education that was more balanced in terms of what the world would look like when they got out. And that more balanced, then, was not necessarily Blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, but the one major thing that was missing from Princeton and Yale and Dartmouth and Amherst and Wesleyan and a whole bunch of places was women.

Those institutions, in a process that I’ve described in the origins of coeducation, led these institutions to move in the direction of accepting more women. Now what’s going through your mind, I think, is, “Yes, but they weren’t lowering quality. In fact, they were increasing quality.” Diversity, in any dimension, can be thought of as a plus for everyone.

It was about 10 years ago that some dean in a small liberal arts college in the Midwest admitted to the fact that they were accepting men with lower SAT, ACT, and grade point averages to increase diversity.

COWEN: Men, probably, are not less intelligent than women, on average. What’s the pipeline problem? Is it too much homework and too many extracurriculars in high school or something else? Where are we failing our young boys?

GOLDIN: We can go back to as early as we have data on high schools and know that girls attended high schools, graduated from high schools at far, far greater numbers than boys. If there is an issue here, it’s certainly not extracurriculars. It may have to do with what’s going on in your cells and this difference between this Y and this double X.

COWEN: The value of an Ivy League degree — what percentage of that value do you think comes from signaling as opposed to learning?

GOLDIN: Very little. I think that it’s not signaling. It’s probably networks.

Self-recommending…

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, The Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus.  Self-recommending (they were leaders on the team), most of all it is striking how much time they spend covering and complaining about problems in the science funding network.  Let’s improve that.  In any case I enjoyed the book.

2. Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-55.  A quite interesting book which considers how German women were disappointed in German men, how eastern German women dealt with Soviet soldier rape, how the Soviets resumed classical orchestral concerts within weeks (for their own pleasure), currency conversion, and more: “But Beate Uhse fell foul of the law for the first time, not because of violation of the moral code of corrupting the young, but for breach of price regluations.”

3. Jeevan Vasagar, Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia.  Selective rather than comprehensive, but entertaining and balanced and insightful.  Those interested in Singapore should read this book, and even Singapore experts will learn some new nuggets.  The author was the FT correspondent in Singapore from 2015 to 2017.

4. Mathilde Fasting and Øystein Sørensen, The Norwegian Exception: Norway’s Liberal Democracy Since 1814.  “This book started as an idea to explain Norwegian society to a broader public.”  I am not sure they quite succeed, but still it is the best single Norway book I know.  I hadn’t known for instance that Norway has two different official written languages.  In general there should be more books trying to explain highly successful countries!  This is a move in the right direction, and I am happy to see that the authors do not try to deny or run away from Norway’s first-rate performance.

5. James Hawes, The Shortest History of England.  One can pick nits with books such as these, but I found this one useful.  It stresses the role of the French in English history, and also the ongoing clash between the South and the North over who will rule whom.

There is also Robert Wuthnow’s Why Religion is Good for American Democracy (true), and Michael Taylor’s The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which dashed my hopes when I learnt that Alexander McDonnell, the Belfast-born 19th century chess player who famously sparred with Louis de la Bourdonnais, also was a strongly pro-slavery and pro-imperialism economist in his time.

Gordon S. Wood’s *Power and Liberty*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle is Constitutionalism in the American Revolution, and of course self-recommending.  Here is one excerpt:

The breadth and depth of popular interest in the Constitution in 1787-1788 was remarkable.  The towns of Massachusetts, for example, elected 370 delegates to the state’s ratifying convention, of whom 364 attended.  Most were eager to meet and discuss the Constitution.  It took six days for the delegates from Bath, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), to make their way south across rivers and through snow to Boston.  The people of Massachusetts believed they were involved, as the little town of Oakham told its delegates, in deciding an issue of “the greatest importance that ever came before any Class of Men on this Earth.”

And this:

Many expected the electoral college to work as a nominating body in which no one normally would get a majority of electoral votes; therefore, most elections would take place in the House of Representatives among the top five candidates, with each state’s congressional delegation voting as a unit.

You can buy it here.

What we learned doing Fast Grants

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is my new piece with Patrick Collison and Patrick Hsu.  The title says it all, here is one excerpt:

…we recently ran a survey of Fast Grants recipients, asking how much their Fast Grant accelerated their work. 32% said that Fast Grants accelerated their work by “a few months”, which is roughly what we were hoping for at the outset given that the disease was killing thousands of Americans every single day.

In addition to that, however, 64% of respondents told us that the work in question wouldn’t have happened without receiving a Fast Grant.

For example, SalivaDirect, the highly successful spit test from Yale University, was not able to get timely funding from its own School of Public Health, even though Yale has an endowment of over $30 billion. Fast Grants also made numerous grants to UC Berkeley researchers, and the UC Berkeley press office itself reported in May 2020: “One notably absent funder, however, is the federal government. While federal agencies have announced that researchers can apply to repurpose existing funds toward Covid-19 research and have promised new emergency funds to projects focused on the pandemic, disbursement has been painfully slow. …Despite many UC Berkeley proposals submitted to the National Institutes of Health since the pandemic began, none have been granted.” [Emphasis ours.]

And:

57% of respondents told us that they spend more than one quarter of their time on grant applications. This seems crazy. We spend enormous effort training scientists who are then forced to spend a significant fraction of their time seeking alms instead of focusing on the research they’ve been hired to pursue.

The adverse consequences of our funding apparatus appear to be more insidious than the mere imposition of bureaucratic overhead, however.

In our survey of the scientists who received Fast Grants, 78% said that they would change their research program “a lot” if their existing funding could be spent in an unconstrained fashion. We find this number to be far too high: the current grant funding apparatus does not allow some of the best scientists in the world to pursue the research agendas that they themselves think are best.

And:

Some of the other Fast Grants investments were speculative, and may (or may not) pay dividends in the future, or for the next pandemic. Examples include:

  • Work on a possible pan-coronavirus vaccine at Caltech.
  • Work on a possible pan-enterovirus (another class of RNA virus) drug at Stanford University that has now raised subsequent funding.
  • Multiple grants going to different labs working on CRISPR-based COVID-19 at-home testing. One example is smartphone-based COVID-19 detection, being worked on at UC Berkeley and Gladstone Institutes.

Self-recommending…

*Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new and very interesting book by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein.  Think of “noise” as the new major problem rather than bias.  Here is one excerpt:

…we presented our findings to the senior managers of an asset management firm, prompting them to run their own exploratory noise audit.  they asked forty-two experienced investors in the firm to estimate the fair value of a stock (the price at which investors would be indifferent to buying or selling).  The investors based their analysis on a one-page description of the business; the data included ismplified profits and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements for the past three years and projections for the next two.  median noise, measured in the same way as in the insurance company, was 41%.  Such large differences among investors in the same firm, using the same valuation methods, cannot be good news.

I will be covering this book more soon, you can pre-order it here.  And here Tim Harford does FT lunch with Kahneman, self-recommending.

My excellent Conversation with John Cochrane

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, transcript, and video.  So many good parts it is hard to excerpt, here is part of the summary:

John joined Tyler to apply that habit of mind to a number of puzzles, including why real interest rates don’t equalize across countries, what explains why high trading volumes and active management persist in finance, how the pandemic has affected his opinion of habit formation theories, his fiscal theory of price level and inflation, the danger of a US sovereign debt crisis, why he thinks Bitcoin will eventually die, his idea for health-status insurance, becoming a national gliding champion, how a Renaissance historian for a father and a book translator for a mother shaped him intellectually, what’s causing the leftward drift in economics, the need to increase competition among universities, how he became libertarian, the benefits of blogging, and more.

Here is one bit from John:

COCHRANE: You ask two questions here. One is active management, and the other is trading. I’d like to distinguish them. It’s a puzzle in the Chicago free market sense.

Let me ask your question even more pointedly. If you believe in efficient markets, and you believe in competition, and things work out right, we’ve scientifically proven since the 1960s, that high-fee active managers don’t earn any more than a proverbial monkey throwing darts in a well-managed slow index. So why do people keep paying for high-fee active management?

Chicago free market — we’re not supposed to say, “Oh, people are dumb for 40 years — 50 years now,” [laughs] but there’s a lot of it. It’s one of those things. Active management is slowly falling away. The move towards passive index investment is getting stronger and stronger.

There’s a strong new literature, which I’ll point to. My colleague here, Jonathan Berk, has written some good articles on it. This is the puzzle of efficient markets. If everybody indexed, markets couldn’t be efficient because no one’s out there getting the information that makes markets efficient. Markets have to be a little inefficient, and somebody has to do the trading.

Your second question is about trading. Why is there this immense volume of trading? When was the last time you bought or sold a stock? You don’t do it every 20 milliseconds, do you? [laughs]

I’ll highlight this. If I get my list of the 10 great unsolved puzzles that I hope our grandchildren will have figured out, why does getting the information into asset prices require that the stock be turned over a hundred times? That’s clearly what’s going on. There’s this vast amount of trading, which is based on information or opinion and so forth. I hate to discount it at all just as human folly, but that’s clearly what’s going on, but we don’t have a good model.

Self-recommending.

Emmott Interviews Tabarrok for the Browser

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist and now co-director of the Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy, talks to Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and co-author of the blog Marginal Revolution, on lessons learned from the pandemic so far, and what lies ahead.

Self-recommending. I’d say it’s a very good interview but there was no question that I was outclassed by Bill Emmott’s zoom background, live from Dublin. Many thanks to the ever-excellent The Browser for hosting.

https://youtu.be/0FBjW6KqyTU

The very very best books of 2020

by  Tyler Cowen in

You may recall I already posted my best non-fiction books and best fiction books of 2020.  But, unlike on previous lists, I didn’t pick a very best book of the year because in my gut I felt it had not yet arrived.  Now I have a top three, all of which came after I posted my original list.  Here are my top three picks for the year:

David S. Reynolds. Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times.  At some point I vowed never to read another Lincoln biography, but this one won me over with its readability and also grasp of the broader cultural and political context.  You may know Reynolds from his excellent Walt Whitman book — could there be a better background to write on Lincoln?  Conceptual throughout.  At 932 pp. every page of this one is instructive, even if you feel sated in Lincoln as I did.

Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.  This is like the Lincoln biography — I was convinced I didn’t want to read a thousand pages about her (though I am a fan).  And yet I keep on reading, now at about the halfway mark and I will finish with joy.  This is one of the best and most gripping biographies I have read, covering growing up as a brilliant young woman in the 1950s, poetry back then, dating and gender relations amongst the elite at that time, how mental health problems were dealt with, and much more.

Jan Swafford, Mozart: the Reign of Love.  Self-recommending.  A wonderful biographer covers one of the most important humans, to produce the best Mozart biography of all time.  You may recall I also had high praise for Swafford’s Beethoven biography from 2014.

Those are my top three books of the year.  I think you can make a good case for Joe Henrich’s WEIRD book having the most important ideas of the year in it, but, perhaps because I already had read much of the material in article form, I didn’t love it as a book the way I do these.

Finally, I will note that the “best books lists” of other institutions have grown much worse, even over the last year.  A good list has never been more valuable, and please note my recommendations are never done to fill a quota, “achieve balance,” right previous wrongs, or whatever.  They are what I think are the best books.  Scary how rare that has become.