Results for “dylan” 123 found
The best non-fiction books of 2016
In most cases, my review is behind the link, though a few times it leads merely to the Amazon page. If I wrote only a few words about the book, I have reproduced them directly in this post. And the books are listed, more or less, in the order I read them. Apologies if I forgot your book, each year I do neglect a few. Here goes:
Robert J. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, my review is here.
Marco Santagana, Dante: The Story of His Life.
Melancholy, by László F. Földényi.
Ji Xianlin, The Cowshed: Memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The classic account of its kind, in this edition brilliantly translated and presented.
Robin Hanson, The Age of Em. Unlike any other on this list, this work created a new genre.
Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries.
Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve. Fun, engaging, and informative, worthy of the “best of the year non-fiction” list.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History.
Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia.
Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism.
Marie Kondo, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying.
Peter Parker, Housman Country: Into the Heart of England. It’s already out in the UK, which is where I bought my copy.
Lawrence Rosen, Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco. Superb descriptive anthropology.
Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. Due out in February, the UK edition is already out. Substantive and delightful on every page.
Kerry Brown, CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping.
Richard van Glahn, The Economic History of China: From Antiquity through the 19th Century.
Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam. The best general history of Vietnam I know, and it does not obsess over “the Vietnam War.” Readable and instructive on pretty much every page.
Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran.
William Domnarski, Richard Posner.
Peter Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs.
Daniel Gormally, Insanity, Passion, and Addiction: A Year Inside the Chess World. A personal favorite, you can read this as a study in labor economics as to why people hang on to crummy jobs.
Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders. Short descriptions of places you ought to visit, such as ossuaries, micronations, museums of invisible microbes, the floating school of Lagos, the Mistake House of Elsah, Illinois, Bangkok’s Museum of Counterfeit Goods, and the world’s largest Tesla coil in Makarau, controlled by Alan Gibbs of New Zealand. The selection is conceptual, so I like it. I will keep this book.
Jean Lucey Pratt, A Notable Woman.
Ben H. Shepherd, Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich.
Sebastian Mallaby, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives.
Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China.
Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls.
Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts.
Here is Arnold Kling’s list. Here is my list of the year’s best fiction.
I would describe this year as thick in wonderful, superb books, though I remain uncertain which of these is truly the year’s winner. So many plausible contenders! I can only promise I’ll continue to cover what comes out between now and the end of the year, and apologies if one or two of those above are from late 2015.
Assorted Tuesday links
1. Could TPP survive without the United States?
2. Dan Ariely has a new book coming out, Payoff.
3. Michael Lewis on Tversky and Kahneman. Recommended, plenty of new information in the piece.
4. Fed chair rumors for 2018 (speculative).
5. Sam Tanenhaus on Dylan, including Springsteen vs. Dylan, a good piece on a topic with much chaff these days.
6. Nate Silver: “The Electoral College serves to constrain financial & ground game advantages, because you encounter diminishing returns in the swing states.”
How bad is it to hire an ex-con?
…individuals with criminal records have an involuntary separation rate that is no higher than that of other employees and a voluntary separation rate that is much lower. Employees with a criminal record do have a slightly higher overall rate of discharge for misconduct than do employees without a record, although we find increased misconduct only for sales positions. We also find that firms that do not use information about criminal backgrounds seem to compensate by placing more weight on qualifications that are correlated with a criminal record, such as low educational attainment.
That is from a new paper by Dylan Minor, Nicola Persico, and Deborah M. Weiss.
Monday assorted links
1. Arnold Kling on Cass Sunstein and books to change people’s minds.
2. “Methodological terrorism“? With a significant cameo by Andrew Gelman.
4. “A 2015 analysis published in The BMJ found 727 potential references to Dylan songs in a search of the Medline biomedical journals database; the authors ultimately concluded that 213 of the references could be “classified as unequivocally citing Dylan.”” Link here.
Sunday assorted links
1. Ursula Le Guin profile. And Bob Dylan as Richard Wagner.
2. Tom Sietsema on the Michelin picks for D.C.
3. Maria Konnikova reviews Tim Harford at NYT.
4. Inaction markets in everything, age of television college football edition.
5. David Warsh on the Laureates.
6. If you could get everyone to read one book, what would it be? I find most of the listed answers strange, and overly specific, and dependent on the readers already knowing plenty of other books. Surely your selection needs to be a bestseller if indeed by “everyone” you mean everyone. I find The Bible, Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things, or even Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or perhaps a book about the enjoyment of sex, to be more plausible picks. Which book would you recommend?
My Conversation with Ezra Klein
The very beginning is a little slow, but I thought Ezra was one of the very best guests. The topics include the nature and future of media, including virtual reality, the nature of leadership (including Ezra’s own), how running a project shapes your political views, a wee bit on health care, what he thinks are the Obama and Clinton models of the world, Robert Putnam’s research on the costs of diversity, the proper role of shame in society, animal welfare, and of course Ezra’s underrated and overrated, with takes on Bob Dylan, The Matrix, William F. Buckley, Joe Biden, and more. There is no video but here is the podcast and transcript. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: …Now Putman, let me ask you about Putnam, and how Putnam relates to Donald Trump. As you know, Robert Putnam at Harvard, he has some work showing that when ethnic diversity goes up that there’s less trust, less cooperation, less social capital.
If you think of yourself in the role of an editor, so you have an American society, diversity has gone up, and a lot of people have reacted to this I would say rather badly — and I think you would agree with me they’ve reacted rather badly — but there’s still a way in which the issue could be framed that while diversity is actually a problem, we can’t handle diversity.
Putnam almost says as such, and do you think there’s currently a language in the media where you have readers who are themselves diverse, where it’s possible not to just be blaming the bigots, but to actually present the positive view, “Look, people are imperfect. A society can only handle so much diversity, and we need to learn this.” What’s your take on that?
KLEIN: I strongly agree. We do not have a language for demographic anxiety that is not a language that is about racism. And we need one. I really believe this, and I believe it’s been a problem, particularly this year. It is clear, the evidence is clear. Donald Trump is not about “economic anxiety.”
COWEN: A bit, but not mainly, I agree.
KLEIN: That said, I think that the way it’s presented is a choice between economic anxiety and racism. And one I don’t think that’s quite right, and two I don’t think that’s a productive way of having that conversation.
COWEN: Why don’t we have that language? Where did it go, or did we ever have it?
And:
COWEN: You see this with Medicaid. A lot of people don’t sign up. They don’t have addresses. You can’t even get them, whatever.
KLEIN: They don’t like doctors. They’re afraid of doctors.
COWEN: This is me.
KLEIN: You’re afraid of doctors?
COWEN: “Afraid” isn’t the word.
KLEIN: Averse. [laughs]
COWEN: Maybe dislike. Averse. [laughs] They should be afraid of me, perhaps.
Definitely recommended. The same dialogue, with a different introduction, is included in The Ezra Klein Show podcast.
What I’ve been reading
1. Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders. Short descriptions of places you ought to visit, such as ossuaries, micronations, museums of invisible microbes, the floating school of Lagos, the Mistake House of Elsah, Illinois, Bangkok’s Museum of Counterfeit Goods, and the world’s largest Tesla coil in Makarau, controlled by Alan Gibbs of New Zealand. The selection is conceptual, so I like it. I will keep this book.
2. James T. Hamilton, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism. A highly original look at exactly what the subtitle promises, I thank Jay for keeping Cowen’s Second Law valid. Has this topic ever been more important than this year?
3. Andre Schlueter, Institutions and Small Settler Economies: A Comparative Study of New Zealand and Uruguay, 1870-2008. There should be more such books! New Zealand and Uruguay had roughly comparable per capita incomes in 1920, yet New Zealand pulled away and never gave back much of that lead. One factor, according to the author, was that the Kiwis had about 40% public ownership of farm land in 1930, resulting in a greater distribution of gains from agriculture and eventually a more egalitarian polity. Uruguay, in contrast, had engaged in some badly-run land privatizations and ended up with excess concentration. New Zealand also took the lead on frozen meat shipments, and New Zealand had a much more rapid recovery from the Great Depression, among other factors, and in Uruguay the enforceability of contract rights slipped away considerably in the 1940s and 1950s. In sum, Uruguay ended up with more rent-seeking policies that redistributed resources toward elites. I can’t believe this one wasn’t a bestseller.
4. John Richard Boren, For Intellectual Property: The Property Ideas of Andrew J. Galambos. As far as I can tell from this intriguing but maddeningly vague book, and based on what I have heard, Galambos was a 1960s-70s libertarian astrophysicist who believed in intellectual property rights for all ideas, indeed in ideas and not just for the expression of ideas as under current law. The rumor, possibly apocryphal, was that those who knew his true doctrines were forbidden to explain them to others without first making the requisite payments. I saw this in the bibliography in the back of the book:
Sic Itur Ad Astra, Volume One by Andrew J. Galambos. This is the transcript of his 1968 delivery of Courses V-50 and V-50X. The book discloses the basics of the Science of Volition but has been removed from sale by Galambos’ trustees. Used copies are sometimes available. Some of Galambos’ recorded lectures…can be heard online at the FEI website, www.fei-ajg.com, where the trustees have imposed significant restrictions on access. Only one Galambos course, V-76…is available for purchase on CD without restrictions.
In fact I know more than I am letting on.
5. James Joyce, Ulysses, always worth a reread, in bits and pieces. Don’t start on p.1. That way, you won’t be discouraged by not knowing what is going on. That is serious advice.
I have browsed the useful-seeming Johan A. Lybeck, The Future of Financial Regulation: Who Should Pay for the Failure of American and European Banks? Most books with titles like that are bad and boring, this seems to be a very useful collection of facts about previous bailouts.
Saturday assorted links
1. The case for the Clinton Foundation, by Dylan Matthews. And a look from The Economist.
2. Larry Summers on Shimon Peres.
5. Which states are sung about the most? (hint: not Connecticut)
Rigged elections for me but not for thee
Donald Trump created quite the stir a few days ago when he suggested that the forthcoming Presidential election was going to be “rigged.” I’m not sure what exactly he meant by that, or even if it’s worth debating, but I did see my Tweeter feed respond with real furor. This will undercut faith in democracy I read, and thus the media needs to call him out on it. Yet over the last few years or indeed decades I also have seen the following:
1. Numerous arguments insist that money buys elections and campaign finance reform is imperative. That’s not exactly my view, with Trump himself now being Exhibit A on the other side of the issue, but please try to be consistent. A lot of you believe that elections are (were?) rigged! (Hey, psst…when can we go back to them being rigged again? Asking for a friend!)
2. Numerous arguments that Republican-backed voter registration requirements are keeping significant numbers of voters, most of all minority voters, away from the polls. That wouldn’t quite count as “rigging,” because the outcome still is not preordained, but it would be a form of slanting.
3. Not long ago, the conventional wisdom was that the race would be Clinton (Hillary) vs. Bush (Jeb). Fortunately, that is not rigging, rather we call it “spontaneous order.” Besides, it didn’t happen. We ended up with Clinton vs…Tormentor of Bush.
4. Do we not all teach the Gibbard-Sattherthwaite theorem to our Principles classes on week three? In case you forget, the theorem shows that under some fairly general assumptions elections processes are manipulable in a rigorous sense which is defined in social choice theory. You can think of this as a corollary of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem, actually.
People, I am so glad we don’t teach our students that elections are rigged, it is so much more important to teach that they are “manipulable” in the precise sense defined by social choice theory. Sadly, Mr. Trump failed that part of the course, because the silly boy wrote down the word “rigged” instead and botched the whole answer, heal so messed up the distinction between inter- and intra-profile versions of the theorem.
5. A related branch of social choice theory, stemming from Dick McKelvey’s work in 1979, suggests that when the policy space has more than one dimension, the agenda setter in Congress has a great deal of power and typically can shape the final outcome. True, that is Congress rather than a general democratic election. By the way, how many dimensions does the policy space have these days? If you’re not sure, that means the answer is “more than one.” Good thing that only “Congress keystone of the Washington establishment” is rigged!
6. Major political scientists from schools such as Princeton tell us that elites determine policy and ordinary voters have very little say in what happens. Don’t know if he used “the r word” or not! (By the way, I agree with the critique of Dylan Matthews.)
7. The American electoral system is designed to give the two major parties a huge initial advantage. I’m not suggesting that the public is actually itching to elect Jill Stein, but it would shape final outcomes a good deal, for better or worse, if the electoral playing field were more even in this regard.
Personally, I think median voters more or less get what they want on a large number of issues, especially broad-based ones in the public eye. You won’t find the word “rigged” popping up too much in the MR search function, besides I started blogging (and breathing) after Kennedy vs. Nixon. But my goodness, I can in fact understand why Donald Trump thinks the system is rigged. For years, you have been telling him that it is.
p.s. I don’t in fact teach the Gibbard-Sattherthwaite theorem in Principles and you won’t find it in the world’s very best Principles textbook. That we rigged.
Addendum: How many Democrats have alleged that the 2000 Presidential election was rigged? Or that today most Americans want some form of tougher gun control, but that the system is rigged against that outcome happening?
My Conversation with Cass Sunstein
There is audio, video, and transcript at the link. I introduced Cass like this:
The Force is strong with this one. Cass is by far the most widely cited legal scholar of his generation. His older book, Nudge, and his new book on Star Wars are both best sellers, and he was head of OIRA [Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs] under President Obama from 2009 to 2013. Powerful, you have become.
So tonight I’d like to start with a survey of Cass’s thought. We’re going to look at legal theory and then go to Nudge and then consider Star Wars, how it all ties together, and then we’re going to talk about everything.
On every point Cass responded clearly and without evasion. We talked about judicial minimalism, Bob Dylan’s best album, the metaphysics of nudging, Possession, the ideal size of the Supreme Court, the wisdom of Yoda, Hayek, why people should choose their own path, the merits of a banned products store, James Joyce, why the prequels are underrated, and which of the first six movies is the worst of the lot. Here is one bit:
COWEN: Let’s take a concrete example from real life: Jedi mind tricks. Obi-Wan comes along and says, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” And what does the stormtroooper do? He goes away. Now, is that a nudge?
SUNSTEIN: No, it’s a form of manipulation. So — .
[laughter]
COWEN: OK, but how do you draw the metaphysical categories? It seems like a nudge that just happens to work all the time.
SUNSTEIN: OK. I’ll give you a quick and dirty way of getting at that…
Here is another:
COWEN: If you were to pick one character from Star Wars who would nudge you — you get to elect them; you’re the only vote. Even Samantha doesn’t get a vote, just Cass — not your children — which character would you pick? Whom would you trust with that nudge? It’s a universe full of Jedi here, right?
SUNSTEIN: Yoda.
COWEN: Yoda?
SUNSTEIN: I trust that guy.
COWEN: But I worry about Yoda.
SUNSTEIN: I trust him.
Finally:
SUNSTEIN: Thank God for libertarian paternalism, that Luke has a choice. The Sith, by the way, like the Jedi, respect freedom of choice. In the crucial scene in Episode III where the question is whether Anakin is going to save the person who would be emperor, he says, “You must choose.” And so there’s full respect for freedom of choice. Nudgers have that. Good for them.
COWEN: Bad guys always tell you the deal, and then they say, “Choose evil.” It seems the good guys always mislead you.
There’s this funny tension. Star Wars makes me more nervous about nudge. I’m not like this huge anti-nudge guy, but when I look at Obi-Wan and Yoda lying to Luke — “Ben, Ben, Ben, why didn’t you tell me?” How many times have I heard that in these movies?
…SUNSTEIN: It’s fair to ask whether Obi-Wan and Yoda had it right.
There is much, more more…self-recommending!
https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/cass-sunstein-star-wars-nudge-a7c874f3ce8c#.am5grz4nh
Google Correlate
Which search terms correlate with support for which politicians? Why not at least ask this question?
John Kasich. Places that like Kasich are richer in some fairly policy-wonkish search terms: “net cost,” “renewable portfolio standard,” the economist Joseph Stiglitz, Financial Times writer Martin Wolf, and Vox writer Dylan Matthews. These terms have a ring of plausibility. They might be good fodder for small talk…if you are talking with a Kasich supporter!
But then there are terms that I don’t entirely understand: Route 73 and Haven Pizza. Maybe someone can explain those to me. It is also true that with billions of search terms to choose from, occasionally a correlation will arise by chance. These might be false positives.
Ted Cruz. Many Cruz-related search terms are related to domestic life of a certain kind: family photos, felt Christmas stockings, scentsy plug ins, balloon animals, Baby Trend car seats, and DIY cribs. Easy enchiladas are particularly Cruz-y. Mmmm, enchiladas. And udder covers…I wasn’t expecting that one. Maybe the Cruz campaign could start distributing Cruz-themed udder covers!
Donald Trump. Note that the correlations are weaker. That could be because Trump support is broad-based in the Republican Party. Or it could be that the connection between the voter and the Google-searcher is indirect (i.e. they are different individuals who live near one another).
That is from Sam Wang, via the keen-eyed Jordan Schneider. And what about the Democrats?
Near Clinton supporters it’s cheap bedroom furniture, Nicki Minaj fans, and pink hoverboard shoppers. And “career in” – Google auto-complete as a job counselor!
And the strongest correlate with Bernie Sanders support?: “candied nuts,” next in line is “best oatmeal,” ladies and gentlemen that is proof this is not just data mining and false correlations. The list is dominated by recipe terms, and “corn syrup substitute” is number four! Oh where oh where is Martin Wolf?
Thursday assorted links
1. New Zealand is also undershooting its inflation target.
2. Computer generates all possible ideas to beat patent trolls.
3. Predicting stock market reaction to FOMC announcements via Twitter feeds (pdf).
5. “The data shows that Dylans, Hillaries and Krishnas who have made recent political donations are more likely to be liberals, while Donalds, Brittanies and Dentons are disproportionately conservative.” If you name is Duane, guess what? Alternatively, try Dylan or Miriam.
Robert Whaley speaks
On my iPhone are 55 albums by Bob Dylan, 16 albums by Leonard Cohen and 34 albums by Steve Earle. That’s all I listen to. It’s the storytelling in their lyrics. Dylan’s album “Tempest” is one of his best. The title song is a haunting 14-minute song about the sinking of the Titanic. I have every one of his albums except the last one where he interprets Frank Sinatra. That was out of line. He must have needed money. And I actually bumped into Steve Earle at the airport and introduced myself. My wife was just disgusted that I’d go and bother him, but he was very receptive. No, I did not tell him I developed the volatility indices.
Here is the rest of the interview.
Does New Zealand have the best-designed system of government in the world?
Dylan Matthews says yes. He cites their mixed-member proportional representation, their unicameral legislature, and monarchy. He left out the biggest advantage of New Zealand government — not very much federalism! Admittedly, more populous countries cannot achieve that same outcome with equal ease.
I also would make a case for preferring the earlier New Zealand Westminster system to proportional representation. What is really the advantage of giving those small parties — not all of which have a fully responsible sense of governing — leverage over their pet issues? The process of coalition formation decreases accountability and blurs what elections are really about. PR makes more sense in fractious or ethnically split countries, where various groups require a sense of representation. New Zealand has long had separate arrangements for special Maori representation, and in any case Kiwi PR has not evolved to be primarily about giving Maori added voice (the ostensibly “Maori party” holds only two seats). To the extent such additional voice is desirable, it can best be done other ways.
The Case for Open Borders
Dylan Matthews summarizes the The Case for Open Borders drawing on an excellent interview with Bryan Caplan. Here is one bit from the interview:
Letting someone get a job is not a kind of charity. It’s not a welfare program. It’s just the government leaving people alone to go and make something out of their lives. When most people are on earth are dealt such a bad hand, to try to stop them from bettering their condition seems a very cruel thing to do to someone.
My elevator pitch has no economics in it, because the economics is actually too subtle to really explain in an elevator pitch. If I had a little bit more time, I would say, “What do you think the effects for men have been of more women in the workforce?”
Are there some men who are worse off? Sure. But would we really be a richer society if we kept half the population stuck at home? Isn’t it better to take people who have useful skills and let them do something with it, than to just keep them locked up someplace where their skills go to waste?
Isn’t that not just better for them, but better for people in general, if we allow people to use their skills to contribute to the world instead of keeping them shut up someplace where they just twiddle their thumbs or do subsistence agriculture or whatever?
On the economics, David Roodman has a characteristically careful and comprehensive review written for Givewell of the evidence on the effect of immigration on native wages. He writes, “the available evidence paints a fairly consistent and plausible picture”:
- There is almost no evidence of anything close to one-to-one crowding out by new immigrant arrivals to the job market in industrial countries. Most studies find that 10% growth in the immigrant “stock” changes natives’ earnings by between –2% and +2% (@Longhi, Nijkamp, and Poot 2005@, Fig 1; @Peri 2014@, Pg 1). Although serious questions can be raised about the reliability of most studies, the scarcity of evidence for great pessimism stands as a fact (emphasis added, AT)….
- One factor dampening the economic side effects of immigration is that immigrants are consumers as well as producers. They increase domestic demand for goods and services, perhaps even more quickly than they increase domestic production (@Hercowitz and Yashiv 2002@), since they must consume as soon as they arrive. They expand the economic pie even as they compete for a slice. This is not to suggest that the market mechanism is perfect—adjustment to new arrivals is not instantaneous and may be incomplete—but the mechanism does operate.
- A second dampener is that in industrial economies, the capital supply tends to expand along with the workforce. More workers leads to more offices and more factories. Were receiving economies not flexible in this way, they would not be rich. This mechanism too may not be complete or immediate, but it is substantial in the long run: since the industrial revolution, population has doubled many times in the US and other now-wealthy nations, and the capital stock has kept pace, so that today there is more capital per worker than 200 years ago.
- A third dampener is that while workers who are similar compete, ones who are different complement. An expansion in the diligent manual labor available to the home renovation business can spur that industry to grow, which will increase its demand for other kinds of workers, from skilled general contractors who can manage complex projects for English-speaking clients to scientists who develop new materials for home building. Symmetrically, an influx of high-skill workers can increase demand for low-skill ones. More computer programmers means more tech businesses, which means more need for janitors and security guards. Again, the effect is certain, though its speed and size are not.
- …one way to cushion the impact of low-skill migration on low-skill workers already present is to increase skilled immigration in tandem.
Plaudits are due to Givewell. While others are focused on giving cows, Givewell is going after the really big gains.