Results for “self-recommending” 168 found
Best fiction of 2015
I thought it was a stellar year for fiction, even though most of the widely anticipated books by famous authors disappointed me. These were my favorites, more or less in the order I read them, not in order of preference:
Michel Houellebecq, Soumission/Submission. The correct reading is always a level deeper than the one you are currently at.
Larry Kramer, The American People. Epic, reviewed a lot but then oddly overlooked in a crowded year.
The Seventh Day, by Yu Hua. Perhaps my favorite of all the contemporary Chinese novels I have read: “Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest.”
Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz, New World, “An innovative story of love, decapitation, cryogenics, and memory by two of our most creative literary minds.”
Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. Fun without being trivial.
Elena Ferrante, volume four, The Story of the Lost Child. See my various posts about her series here, one of the prime literary achievements of the last twenty years.
The Widower, by Mohamed Latiff Mohamed. My favorite novel from Singapore.
The Meursault Investigation, by Kamel Daoud. I’ll teach it this coming year in Law and Literature.
Eka Kurniawan, Beauty is a Wound. It’s been called the Garcia Marquez of Indonesia, and it is one of the country’s classic novels, newly translated into English. Here is a good NYT review.
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti. Okorafor is American but born to two Nigerian parents, this science fiction novella is creative and fun to read. Ursula K. Le Guin likes her too.
Of those, Houllebecq and Ferrante are the must-reads, the others are all strong entries, with New World being perhaps the indulgence pick but indulgences are good, right?
And here are three other new books/editions/translations which I haven’t had any chance to spend time with, but come as self-recommending:
The Poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1 and volume 2, annotated. Rave reviews for those.
Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Dennis Washburn.
Homer’s Iliad, translated by Peter Green. Also gets rave reviews.
*The Midas Paradox*
The author is Scott Sumner and the subtitle is Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression. Here is part of the Amazon summary:
Economic historians have made great progress in unraveling the causes of the Great Depression, but not until Scott Sumner came along has anyone explained the multitude of twists and turns the economy took. In The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Sumner offers his magnum opus—the first book to comprehensively explain both monetary and non-monetary causes of that cataclysm.
Drawing on financial market data and contemporaneous news stories, Sumner shows that the Great Depression is ultimately a story of incredibly bad policymaking—by central bankers, legislators, and two presidents—especially mistakes related to monetary policy and wage rates. He also shows that macroeconomic thought has long been captive to a false narrative that continues to misguide policymakers in their quixotic quest to promote robust and sustainable economic growth.
Self-recommending!
Orszag and Furman on rents and inequality
I haven’t read through this new paper yet (pdf), but the authors and title make it self-recommending. Here is one bit taken from a quick perusal:
Figure 8 presents the distribution of the return on invested capital (ROIC) for publicly traded non-financial U.S. firms from 1965 through 2014, excluding good will (an intangible asset reflecting the excess of the price paid to acquire a company over the value of its net assets). This analysis excludes financial firms, where ROIC data is considerably more scarce. As the chart shows, the 90th percentile of the return on invested capital across firms has grown markedly since around the early 1990s. The 90/50 ratio—that is, the ratio of the 90th percentile of the distribution of capital returns to the median—has risen from under 3 to approximately 10. In addition, the dramatic returns on invested capital of roughly 100 percent apparent at the 90th percentile, and even 30 percent apparent at the 75th percentile, at the very least raise the question of whether they reflect economic rents.
Do read the whole thing, as will I. Here is a related Peter Orszag Bloomberg piece.
What I’ve been reading
1. Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help. Profiles of people who are obsessed with helping others. That is a wonderful premise for a book, somehow for my taste it didn’t run quite deep enough. Still, many people will like this one a great deal.
2. Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945. I read only about a fifth of this one. I thought it was a very high quality treatment of how German citizens perceived WWII, and also quite readable. It didn’t match my interests at the moment, but I am happy to recommend it.
3. J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy. A running dialogue between Coetzee and a psychotherapist, some of it is interesting. Some of it. But after the early sections on the dangers of storytelling, I got bored. Surely at some point empiricial psychology deserved a mention.
4. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Inequality. A very short book, but longer than the blurb I wrote for it: “Economic equality is one of today’s most overrated ideas, and Harry G. Frankfurt’s highly compelling book explains exactly why.”
5. Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. What makes some people very good at forecasting? Self-recommending, here is a good Q&A with Tetlock. The real question of course is why isn’t everyone working on this?
The wise Dani Rodrik knows that a Conversation with Tyler usually starts early
Don Boudreaux had asked Dani why favor free trade within nations, but not always favor free trade across nations? Dani wrote a long response here, self-recommending, do read the whole thing, but here is a brief excerpt:
So the national market and the international market are different. The defining characteristic of a national market is that it is deeply embedded in a set of social and political institutions – a common legal and regulatory framework provided by the nation-state. The international market is at best weakly embedded in transnational arrangements, and the arrangements that do exist such as the WTO and bilateral investment treaties are commercial rather than fully-fledged political/redistributive/regulatory arrangements.
On Thursday the dialogue will continue…
My conversation with Luigi Zingales
The transcript is here, with a podcast version, and there is also a YouTube version at the link, with cleaned-up audio compared to any earlier link you may have come across. Luigi was wonderful, and also fantastically witty. The topics included Italy, Donald Trump, Antonio Gramsci, Google and conglomeration, Luchino Visconti, Starbucks, and the surprisingly high productivity of Italian cafés.
Here is one excerpt:
I don’t understand why in the United States the only thing that is really noncompetitive is sports. In Europe, the only thing that is really competitive is sports.
And another:
COWEN: …Angela Merkel, overrated or underrated?
ZINGALES: I think she’s probably underrated. I’m impressed by her ability to, number one, run Europe for the interest of Germans in a very effective way.
The longest bit from me is where I compare and contrast Luigi with Gramsci, another theorist of hegemony, and try to sum up Luigi’s work; you can find that on the video or in the transcript.
And again from Luigi there is this:
…when I arrived in this country 27 years ago, you were not really drinking coffee. You were drinking a dark thing that tastes like I don’t say what because we’re online. The culture of coffee did not exist here.
The culture of coffee and a café where you seat and drink, et cetera, what Starbucks is, is an Italian or at most French culture. Why were you unable to export this? This is my little explanation. By the way, the only country in the world where Starbucks has not arrived is Italy.
Luigi then considers when Italian coffee is better tasting and better run at the artisan level, yet without the same possibilities for corporate expansion. I liked this sentence from Luigi:
The extreme agency problems of Italy make it difficult to scale firms.
And finally:
One thing I can predict fairly confidently is that we are not going to pay the debt.
This is also a worthwhile observation:
When you’re down to one or two kids, the chance that one is an idiot is pretty large.
His favorite film is Visconti’s The Leopard, a good pick. And he was the public choice scholar who forecast the rise of Donald Trump, as we discuss in the chat. Self-recommending.
*Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Anthology*
An excellent collection, edited by Jonathan Anomaly, Geoffrey Brennan, Michael C. Munger, and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, self-recommending. If I wanted a one-stop collection on PPE for teaching purposes, this exactly what I would use.
*Phishing for Phools*
The authors are Nobel Laureates George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller and the subtitle is The Economics of Manipulation and Deception. It’s a popular take on how markets trap you and your preferences in places you don’t want to be. Self-recommending of course.
There are chapters on advertising, tobacco, alcohol, junk bonds, credit cards, pharmaceuticals (some), and yes government. My main complaint about the book is that its chooses easy targets and doesn’t puncture enough sacred cows. For instance the chapter on government criticizes spending money on lobbying, whereas I would have preferred an attempt to show that an apparently beneficial and popular institution is in fact bad and appealing to the weaker elements in our preferences. I wonder to what extent what the authors call “The Resistance and its Heroes” is in fact another example of…phishing for phools. In other words, I wish this book were more Hansonian.
By the way, I have never eaten too much ice cream.
Arrived in my email
The book itself has not yet come to my pile, though perhaps it still will. This one is self-recommending, so here is the basic information, it is due out June 2:
Alvin Roth, Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design.
If you do not know why this is self-recommending, here are previous MR posts on Alvin Roth. And here is the book’s home page.
Two new and excellent short e-Books
Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy. The tag “self-recommending” was made for books like this one. According to Rauch, transparency is overrated and politics should be more transactional.
Jeffrey Towson and Jonathan Woetzel, The One Hour China Consumer Book: Five Short Stories That Explain the Brutal Fight for One Billion Customers. The short tale of why the most successful beer companies are the state-owned enterprises is alone worth the price of this book.
And I just downloaded Hugo Dixon’s The In/Out Question, which argues the UK should try to stay in the European Union…
The new Levitt and Dubner book is due out in May
When to Rob a Bank: …And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants
Drawn from the Freakonomics blog, self-recommending of course…
The transcript of my talk with Peter Thiel
You will find it here. Here is one excerpt:
TYLER COWEN: New York City, overrated or underrated?
PETER THIEL: That’s massively overrated.
TYLER COWEN: Why?
PETER THIEL: We had a 25-year boom in finance, from ’82 to ’07. I think that’s slowly ebbing, slowly abating. It’s going to be increasingly regulated, and so if you want a long/short blue state trade, you want to be long California, short New York. The long/short red state trade, by the way, is you want to be long Texas, short Virginia.
If you ask, what do Virginia and New York have in common, and what do Texas and California have in common? Both Texas and California are very inward-focused places. California, both the Hollywood version and the Silicon Valley version, are very focused in on themselves. Texas is also a very inward-focused place.
What Virginia and New York, or let’s say DC and New York City, have in common is that they’re centers of globalization. Finance is an industry that’s fundamentally leveraged to globalization, and DC is fundamentally leveraged to international geopolitics.
I would bet on globalization slowly being in abeyance. I think with the benefit of hindsight, we will realize that 2007 was not just the peak year of the finance boom, but also the peak year of globalization, like maybe 1913. Happily, it hasn’t resulted in a world war, at least not yet, but I think we are in this period where globalization is steadily pulling back.
And so you want to be in places or industries that are levered to things other than globalization.
Self-recommending…The YouTube and podcast versions are here.
Ben Bernanke’s blog
For those of you who wonder what “self-recommending” means, now you ought to know…
Addendum: Modeled Behavior adds comment. So does Paul Krugman.
Hayek on Mill and the Mill-Taylor Friendship
That is the newly published volume 16 of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, edited by Sandra J. Peart. Of course this is splendid from beginning to end, including Peart’s introduction, the letters, Hayek’s commentary, and assorted documents, and the book even contains three very nice poems written by Harriet Taylor.
Is Hayek here blaming Taylor for moving Mill in a collectivist direction? Is that the Straussian reading of this book and the reason why Hayek did it?
If there were a phrase for “one step above and beyond self-recommending,” this volume would get it.
How Andrew Sullivan changed America
I wrote a short piece on this for Vox, here is one excerpt:
Who is the most influential public intellectual of the last 20 years?
This designation should go to someone who actually has helped change the world, rather than just changing lots of minds. It also should go to someone who has embodied key trends of the time, noting that for both standards I am focusing on the United States.
Based on those standards, I am inclined to pick Andrew Sullivan, who is most recently in the news for his announcement that he is quitting after fifteen years of blogging.
Any discussion of Sullivan’s influence must begin with gay marriage. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia already have legalized gay marriage, representing a majority of the American population, with possibly Alabama and others to follow. A broader Supreme Court decision for nationwide legalization may be on the way. More generally, gay rights have taken a major leap forward.
…I thought long and hard before selecting Andrew for the designation of most influential public intellectual. Perhaps Paul Krugman has changed more minds, but his agenda hasn’t much changed the world; we haven’t, for instance, gone back to do a bigger fiscal stimulus. Peter Singer led large numbers of people into vegetarianism and veganism and gave those practices philosophic respectability; he is second on my list. A generation ago, I would have picked Milton Friedman, for intellectual leadership in the direction of capitalist and pro-market reforms. But that is now long ago, and the Right has produced no natural successor.
Self-recommending! And again, please note, you should not confuse the designation “most influential” with “the person who, I, the reader, would most like to see elevated in status.” That would be a fallacy of mood affiliation.