Results for “best book” 1835 found
Assorted links
2. Markets in everything: road kill toys.
3. Dynamic pricing for hockey games; why doesn't everyone do this?
4. Five questions for Doug Irwin.
5. The historical roots of the financial crisis, by Arnold Kling.
6. What if yesterday's books were retitled today? Two of my favorites were:
Then: Declaration of Independence
Now: The Pursuit of Happiness: How to get control of your continent and have fun doing it!
And this:
Then: Quotations from Chairman Mao (or "the Little Red Book")
Now: You're Telling Me Comrade! Hilarious but helpful sayings from China's Best Selling Author
Nova Scotia markets, not in everything
Maple syrup curry, which I have now seen on three restaurant menus in so many days.
Amateur crafts are extremely common, as in New Zealand. It is a plausible claim that the blueberries here are the world's best. Natives claim it has Canada's warmest winter.
At Peggy's Cove a ragged Scot-looking woman blew loudly into bagpipes, thereby competing for donor attention with a ragged Scot-looking woman punching an accordion and wailing, all to the detriment of the Coase theorem.
For a while George Washington held out hope that Nova Scotia would join in the rebellion against the British crown. Later American ships attacked Lunenberg several times, starting in 1782, mostly for reasons of plunder.
In 1790 black Nova Scotians were strongly encouraged to move to what is now Sierra Leone. There was a second "purge" of black residents in the 1960s, when the neighborhood of Africville was torn down and its residents were encouraged to leave. Black residents were prominent in the history of Nova Scotia although it seems this is being forgotten.
Overall this is an underrated tourist destination (it is an easy direct flight from Dulles) and I recommend Lesley Choyce's Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea.
Don Boudreau is prominently represented in the Halifax museum collection.
They don't do much with it (avoid the cream sauce), but arguably Nova Scotia has the best seafood in all of NAFTA. No way do they ship the good lobsters out.
Simon Newcomb, the most important economist from Nova Scotia
Yes, Simon Newcomb (1835-1909). Newcomb was a polymath and he made important contributions to time-keeping, astronomy (most of all; he was arguably the most famous American astronomer of the 19th century), statistics, mathematics, and economics. He was especially good at coming up with new ways of calculating tables for almanacs and he was deeply interested in lunar and planetary tables. He sought to bring the scientific method to research on parapsychology. He even wrote a science fiction novel. In preparation for my Nova Scotia trip I have been rereading his Principles of Political Economy.
In economics Newcomb is best known for producing the earliest version of the equation of exchange as a means of representing the quantity theory of money. He had a remarkably good understanding of monetary velocity and the purchasing power of money, favoring a "tabular standard."
The most interesting part of the text are the questions at the end of each chapter. Many show that Newcomb knew more than the text itself let on. Others are bizarre and would not be found in 2009. How about this one?:
16. How does the modern system of production by large organizations operate upon the shiftless class who will never stick to a regular line of work? Show why, when this class really wants to work, it is harder to get it than it would be in a primitive economy.
Despite its possible inappropriateness, it is nonetheless an interesting question about fixed capital and unemployment. If you want insightful questions, here are a few picks, taken from a single page, chosen randomly:
Define what portion of the price paid for a coat goes to compensate the friction of exchange.
Does the proportion of the population engaged in intellectual pursuits tend to increase or diminish with the increase of wealth?
Is there any method of calculation by which we can approximate to the total population which the earth can sustain? If so, state the method, and show what data are necessary to apply it.
Has cheap transportation of passengers and goods across the ocean tended to retard or to stimulate emigration?
I have seen many worse questions in contemporary principles texts. He also formulated Benford's Law:
In 1881, Newcomb discovered the statistical principle now known as Benford's law, when he observed that the earlier pages of logarithm
books, used at that time to carry out logarithmic calculations, were
far more worn than the later pages. This led him to formulate the
principle that, in any list of numbers taken from an arbitrary set of
data, more numbers will tend to have the leading digit "1" than any
other leading digit
He was mostly self-taught. He suffered problems at the age of seven and was removed from school and it seems he never returned. Later his father tortured him with farm work to help improve his manual dexterity (it didn't seem to work). He was an expert chess player and could recite large amounts of poetry from memory. He started studying astronomy before he was ten. Next week I will read his autobiography, available on-line.
Here are quotations from Newcomb; I have read that the "anti-flight" remarks are ripped from context and are misleading. There is a crater, an asteroid, and a Canadian writing award named after him.
Here is Newcomb on libertarian ethics and wanting to be left alone.
If you have any interest in the history of economic thought, or in 19th century North American intellectual history, you should read Simon Newcomb. Here are some of his on-line works. When he died, President Taft and many foreign dignitaries attended his funeral. But today Newcomb is very much an underrated thinker and an underrated historical figure.
Newcomb's father once wrote to him: "You were an uncommon child for truth, I never knew you to deviate from it in one instance."
*Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate*
That's the new book by Diego Gambetta and it is the best applied book on signaling theory to date. Gambetta's task is well summarized by a single sentence:
Given these propensities, one wonders how criminals ever manage to do anything together.
The signaling problems faced by criminals are unusual in the following regard. On one hand they wish to signal a certain untrustworthiness, namely that they are criminals in the first place. This is useful for both meeting other criminals and also for intimidating potential victims. On the other hand, the criminals wish to signal that they are potentially cooperative, for the purpose of working with other criminals. Sending these dual signals isn't easy and Gambetta well understands the complexity of the task at hand. As Henry points out, facial tattoos are one particular effective method of signaling that one is a criminal for life.
Here is a passage which I found striking:
…Women are significantly less violent than men in the outside world and less lethal when they are violent. This holds in all times and places for which relevant data exist. And yet in prison this universal fact is overturned: women become at least as violent and often more prone to violence than men are. Although women in prison rarely commit homicide, a large study of Texas prisons by Tischler and Marquart showed that there was no difference between women and men in the incidence of violent episodes. Table 4.2, based on comprehensive statistics for England and Wales, shows that the gender pattern is even reversed; women assault each other twice as much as men do, and they fight one and half times as much as men do, a result that disconfirms the testosterone hypothesis.
Generally, women are convicted of proportionally fewer violent offenses than men are and have shorter criminal histories, two circumstances that rule out some of the possible selection effects that could explain away the high rates of female prison violence…
Gambetta wonders whether women in prison resort to violence so frequently because they have fewer alternative credible means of signaling toughness.
*The Inheritance of Rome*
What can I say? I have to count this tome as one of the best history books I have read, ever. The author is Chris Wickham and the subtitle is A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. The author states that this is a book written “without hindsight” so the focus is not on how early medieval times were a precursor of this, that, or the other. In addition to its all-around stunningness, it has the following:
1. Extensive use of Egyptian archives, which it turns out are extensive from this period. Egypt may have been the most advanced part of the world at that time.
2. Fluid integration of historical and archeological sources.
3. An emphasis on “localization” as the fundamental change following the fall of the Roman Empire, and numerous micro-studies of exactly how that localization occurred. Cities shrank, trade networks dried up, etc.
4. An illuminating discussion of how family control made it incentive-compatible to invest so much wealth in monasteries.
5. An interesting hypothesis as to why so many Islamic cities ended up with such narrow streets (I may blog this separately).
6. How the peasantry ended up so downtrodden in England.
7. How the fall of the Roman Empire really happened (more or less).
8. How the Carolingian, Byzantine, and Abbasid empires all drew upon their Roman heritage in varying ways.
And more. If a while ago I defined the category “a book after which you don’t want to read any other book,” I’ll try a new designation: “a book which makes you want to spend a month or more reading follow-up works in the same area.”
Here is one very good review. I got a kick out of one of the Amazon reviews:
This is a challenging book to read. There is so much information
crammed into every page that you have to read slowly or you’ll miss
something. And there are 550 pages of this.
Content! Heaven forbid!
What if culture froze and had to be recycled?
Robert Wiblin, a loyal MR reader, asks:
Thought experiment for MR: what if the law said we couldn't make any new art (movies, novels, music etc). And perhaps said we ought to rerelease each year the art that first appeared 50 or 30 years ago. How would people's leisure activity and society's cultural evolution change?
I pose a similar question in my book Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding. After the adjustment process, I believe that matters would settle in an orderly fashion, although whether we pick the art from 30 or 50 years ago would make a big difference in terms of the required rejiggling of our aesthetic sensibilities. We would pick out bestsellers from 30 or 50 years ago and some of them would be in demand, if only because people wish to share common cultural experiences. Overall it is the more obscure books from that era that would likely rise to be the bestsellers today.
1979 is barely an aesthetic leap; could not The Clash be a hit today? How about Madonna? Is it so ridiculous to think that people still might go hear The Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney in concert? How about buying a Stephen King book? Here are the top songs from 1959 (yikes!), but recall that same year brought many excellent jazz albums.
The entire process would work better if the material from the past were temporarily unavailable prior to its rerelease.
It's an interesting idea to relive the release of the culture of the past but with today's sensibilities. What we would like to think we would like is probably not what we would like at all. And maybe some works we like only because they are in our past.
Finally, everyone is so ga-ga over arts subsidies, but it is remarkable how many models with microfoundations instead imply that we should tax the arts.
Adam Phillips on moderation and balance
Here is the closing bit of the essay:
There is, though, a third possibility, the one that I want to end on because it seems to me potentially the most interesting, though perhaps the most daunting. This is that the religious fanatic is someone for whom something about themselves and their lives is too much; and because not knowing what that is is so disturbing they need to locate it as soon as possible. Because the state of frustration cannot be borne – because it is literally unbearable, as long-term personal and political injustice always is – it requires an extreme solution.
In this account our excessive behaviour shows us how obscure we are to ourselves or how we obscure ourselves; how our frustrations, odd as this may seem, are excessively difficult to locate, to formulate. Wherever and whenever we are excessive in our lives it is the sign of an as yet unknown deprivation. Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.
What I’ve been reading
1. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding. Maybe I should define a new category: "Good enough to finish." This is one of the better recent books on the economics of culture.
2. The Great Contraction, Friedman and Schwartz. Classic economics books like this are almost always worth a reread. I had forgotten just how bad was the year 1931.
3. Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, by Andrew Coe. There is way too much well-known diplomatic history in this book, but the best fifty pages are good enough to make it worthwhile. That said, I could have saved a lot of time, by flipping rapidly through the boring pages. had I not been reading it on my Kindle.
4. A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece, collated and edited by Jane Jacobs. A reasonably interesting look at Alaskan, Aleut, and Russian culture around the turn of the century, as told through the eyes of a settler woman and edited by Jacobs (with how much intervention I am not sure). This makes for a good contrast with Jacob's work on urban economies. It's not thrilling all the time but overall I would recommend it.
5. Middlemarch, by George Eliot. No other book I have tried so profits by a reread on Kindle. Given its density of information, it's simply much better when there is less on each page.
*Imperial*, by William Vollmann
It is glorious in its 1100 pp. plus of text, analytical diatribes, love stories, monomaniacal rants, ecological analyses, and unevenly eloquent prose. I'm on p.206 and so far it's a first-rate book on the Mexican-American border (Imperial is a county in California), low lifes, the desperation of America's empty spaces, and this is from an author who issues books like others do blog posts.
Suddenly I turn the page and see a heading: Warning of Impending Aridity. Some text follows:
This book represents my attempt to become a better-informed citizen of North America. Our "American dream" is founded on the notion of the self-sufficient homestead. The "Mexican dream" may be a trifle different, but requires its kindred material basis. Understanding how these two hopes played out over time required me to cultivate statistical parables about farm size, waterscapes, lettuce prices, etcetera. I have harvested them (doubtless bruising overripe numbers on the way), and now present them to you. Some of them may be too desiccated for your taste. If you skip the chapters devoted to them, you will finish the book sooner, and never suspect the existence of my arithmetical errors. As for you devotees of Dismal Science, I hope you will be awestruck by my sincerity about Mexicali Valley cotton prices.
Jason Kottke has an excellent post on Vollmann's book, with links and excerpts. One description is: "Just write that it's like Robert Caro's The Power Broker," she said, "but with the attitude of Mike Davis's City of Quartz"…but even that turns out to be inadequate:
Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.
How's that for the best sentence I read last night (it's from Sam Anderson)? As Vollmann himself once said: 'I used to think the Imperial Valley was hot, flat and boring,'
You can buy it here. Here is an Imperial slide show.
Assorted links
1. Top ten books in international economic history?
2. Slovakian review of Create Your Own Economy.
3. Eric Falkenstein on high-frequency trading.
4. Cronenberg to film DeLillo's Cosmopolis.
5. Surprising facts about best-selling authors; yes Sidney Sheldon is the same guy behind I Dream of Jeannie.
High-frequency trading
A few MR readers ask about high-frequency trading. Senators are calling it unfair because some traders have access to more powerful computers,and better quants, than do others. The traders with the most powerful aids get there first and make more money. Here is a typical critique. Felix Salmon is also skeptical.
I do not worry about high-frequency trading. Telegraphs and telephones also brought their own, earlier versions of high-frequency trading. As did stock index futures. There are second-best arguments relating to hockey helmets and the like but that is the case with most forms of progress and greater economic speed. You don't have to think that the current profits measure the current social value of high-frequency trading to argue that the overall trend should be allowed. The correct judgment of efficiency occurs at the system-wide level, not at the level of the individual trading strategy. The short-run story is that private profits exceed social returns but in the longer run the trading activity and liquidity brings increasing social returns and better communication of information.
I'm not a believer in the strong versions of efficient markets hypotheses, so I do admit that high-frequency trading, like just about every other trading strategy, can bring short-run "whiplash" effects on market prices. But if you don't like it, you can trade yourself at much lower frequencies, which is probably what you should be doing anyway. At the same time high-frequency trading smooths out or shortens many other cases of price whiplash. High-frequency trading brings more liquidity into the market. Call it "low quality liquidity" if you wish, but it still looks like net liquidity to me.
The complaint is that this liquidity sometimes vanishes. Maybe high-frequency trading can scare other traders out of the market;
that charge has been leveled against every method of informed
trading. In the short run it is sometimes true but markets respond by
upping the general requirements for quality trading and many market
participants rise to meet the new standard or else switch to longer
time horizons.
On the critical side there is lots of talk of "unfairness" and "manipulation," combined with snide references to the financial crisis. I'd like to see a serious efficiency argument against high-frequency outlined and defended, without the polemics. That would include a case that regulation will prove workable and catch only the "bad liquidity," while at the same time avoiding capture by envious and inferior competitors.
If high-frequency trading is used to trick other traders into revealing their demand schedules, and then canceling orders, I can see a case for regulating that particular practice. On that issue, here is background, from a critic, but note that these charges seem to be unverified.
The philosophical question is why it might possibly be beneficial to have market prices adjust within five seconds rather than within fifteen. One second rather than five? 0.25 rather than one? If you had been writing in the year 1800, what comparisons would you have chosen?
Remember that old comic book where they had Superman race against The Flash? The Flash won. Someone had to, just keep that in mind.
Assorted links
1. The courageous Bruce Bartlett, on taxes.
2. Harvard University Press will publish one thousand digital books.
3. Countercyclical assets: remaindered books.
My favorite things Alabama
1. Popular music. Emmylou Harris is from Birmingham and I like her albums with Gram Parsons. "The New Soft Shoe" is an excellent song. While I appreciate Nat King Cole in the abstract I never choose to put it on. Lionel Richie has a nice voice but the sound is too bland for my taste.
2. Painter: The early Howard Finster is excellent, although he churned out weak material for a long time later on.
3. Jazz: Lionel Hampton is the obvious choice, but I will pick Sun Ra, who is a musical god of sorts for me. Jazz in Silhouette is the best place to start, although it does not communicate the overall diversity of his work. He remains an underrated musical figure.
4. Country music: Hank Williams. Even if you hate country music you should buy the two CDs of his collected works. I also love Shelby Lynne; start with I am Shelby Lynne.
5. Bluegrass: The Louvin Brothers. Tragic Songs of Life is one of my favorite albums as it has a deeply scary and tragic feel; again you can love it even if you hate country and bluegrass. Do you know the song "The Great Atomic Power"?
6. Writer: I can't make my way through To Kill a Mockingbird. Who else is there? Wasn't one of Charles Barkley's books funny? I've never finished a Tobias Wolff novel, too stilted. Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King were very good writers, though they don't quite fit the category. Same for James Agee. Truman Capote would be an easy pick except I don't enjoy his books. Zora Neale Hurston was born in the state though I am inclined to classify her under "Florida."
7. Quilters: From Gee's Bend, Alabama, there is an entire tradition. The traveling exhibits of these works are excellent.
8. Gospel: Blind Boys of Alabama. They transfer better to disc than do a lot of gospel groups.
9. Song, about: Don't go there.
10. Movie, shot in. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As for "Movie, set in" here is a worrying list. Maybe I'll go with Fried Green Tomatoes, although the book is supposed to be better and more open about the sexuality of the main characters.
The bottom line: There are some major stars here and I haven't even mentioned the famous athletes.
Markets in everything; the culture that is Japanese
This year Japan has gone konkatsu-crazy, with the trend spawning countless magazine articles, a weekly TV drama and a best-selling book.
A Tokyo shrine now offers konkatsu prayer services, a Hokkaido baseball
team has set up special seats for those looking for mates, and a Tokyo
ward office arranges dating excursions to restaurants and aquariums.
A lingerie maker has even come up with a konkatsu bra with a ticking clock that can be stopped by inserting an engagement ring.
Here is much more. I thank KunLung Wu for the pointer.
Getting stuck in the bad equilibrium in India
The poor in India are victims of state indifference and corruption; somewhere between a quarter and a half of all subsidized food meant for them, for example, is stolen by corrupt government officials. And yet if one asks the poor what jobs they would like their children to have the number one answer is to work for the government. (See also my earlier post on Regulation and distrust for a model.)
To the poor the state is both an enemy and a friend. It tantalizes them with a ladder that promises to lift them out of poverty but it habitually kicks them in the teeth when they turn to it for help. It inspires both fear and promise. To India's poor the state is like an abusive father whom you can never abandon. It is through you that his sins are likely to live on.