Results for “best book”

2008 found

Yet while crowds may be good at making predictions, they’re often lousy at recognizing their own self-interest.  That problem is explored in the best political book this year: “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.”

Here is the gated NYT link.

1. Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, by Robert Frank (the economist Robert Frank).  The best statement of the Frankian world view; every book of his is full of ideas and there are very few authors you can say that about.

2. John Lanchester, A Family Romance.  Imagine finding out your mother was once a nun and then that she led a life of lies.  I would have liked this book much better had it not been fiction.  It felt so real and even has good photos but I am disappointed to keep on thinking it is only a story. 

3. Gunther Grass, Peeling the Onion.  Why oh why oh why do I let myself be fooled.  There is only one author I find flat out too obnoxious to read, and it is this guy.  And that was before I learned of the whole SS business.  I had heard this one is different, but it isn’t.  Or it is, but he’s still too far over the line for that to matter.

4. Elizabeth Currid, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion Art & Music Drive New York City.  The title says it all.

5. The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, by Christine Kenneally.  The early chapters have excellent material on the contributions of Chomsky and Pinker, but after that it bored me.

Lately I’ve been intrigued with the idea of individualized uses of mass communication technologies.  Imagine if they made an episode of Seinfeld tailored for your personal consumption.

So I’d l like to try an experiment. I will make a podcast — a personalized podcast — just for you.

You can ask me anything you want, and I’ll try my best to answer the question.

I believe this will be fun for me.  But to give it a chance of being fun, I need a principle of rationing.

So if you want the podcast, pre-order my Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.  The Amazon link is here, Barnes&Noble is here.

There are a few simple rules:

1. Write me at [email protected] that you have pre-ordered.  You must pre-order (and write me) before 8 p.m. (EST) on Thursday, July 26.

2. We again use the honor system.  Last time I was amazed how many people submitted proof of purchase voluntarily, without my even asking. 

3. When you write to me, include your question.  Only one question per purchase.

4. I’ll write you back with a link to the personalized podcast.  If I can’t answer or at least address your question (e.g., "Who is the mightiest tailor in the Ukraine, and why?"), I’ll let you know and you can try another question.

5. The offer of the secret blog has expired, you get only the podcast.

What if I’ve already pre-ordered?  Don’t worry. 

One option is to order another copy.  But I don’t wish to penalize lovers of secret blogs (I’m one myself).  A second and cheaper option is to review the book on either Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble.com.  If you have already pre-ordered and you write a review within three weeks of publication date (Aug.2, so that’s Aug.23), at the right time just send me a copy of the review along with your podcast question.  I’ll record these additional podcasts later in August.  That way you’ll have both a secret blog and a personalized podcast.

When will I get my podcast?  I have blocked off several days this week to do nothing but record your podcasts.  Call me crazy but I’m quite looking forward to it.  (Since I’ve blogged every day for four years, perhaps you’ll believe I am an outlier.)  We’ll see how long the process takes, but if you wish to be early in the queue, pre-order and write in now.  I’ll answer questions in the order I receive them.

How long will my podcast be?  That depends on your question.  But I envision my answers as roughly comparable to the answer I would give a good friend over dinner.

What can I do with my podcast?  You can link to it, send it to your friends, or disseminate it as you wish. 

I do want to receive your interesting questions and even your silly questions.  But impossible questions involving paradoxes of self-reference will be returned automatically.  And when it comes to the Newcomb problem, let me tell you right now, the cautious Tyler is taking only one box…

1. Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.  My consumer surplus from this book was huge.  The author calls it an "economic history" of the graphic novel; he hasn’t read Bob Fogel but it remains one of the best introductions to any topic.

2. Martin Krause, La Economia Explicada a Mis Hijos, and Por el ojo de una aguja.  Economics, explained through the medium of literature and fables, from an Argentinian classical liberal.

3. Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think is Right is Wrong.  The claim is that happiness follows from self-knowledge, self-control, self-realization, and awareness of death.  There is little consideration of what is the proper margin for each.

4. Alfredo Jose Estrada, Havana: Autobiography of a City.  One of the best city biographies, almost as good as the books on Cairo.

5. Ruth Rendell, The Water’s Lovely.  I used to think she was past her peak, but the first third of this is superb and the rest stays pretty good.

How many more times will someone suggest this book in the comments section of this blog?  I like this book and I think it offers a real contribution.  Nonetheless I feel no need to suggest it in the comments sections of other peoples’ blogs.

I do not treat this book as foundational because of personal experience.  I’ve spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan, and spent much time chatting with the people there.  They are extremely smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring.  And that’s in their second language, Spanish.

I’m also sure they if you gave them an IQ test, they would do miserably.  In fact I can’t think of any written test — no matter how simple — they could pass.  They simply don’t have experience with that kind of exercise.

When it comes to understanding the properties of different corn varieties, catching fish in the river, mending torn amate paper, sketching a landscape from memory, or gossiping about the neighbors, they are awesome.

Some of us like to think that intelligence is mostly one-dimensional, but at best this is true only within well-defined peer groups of broadly similar people.  If you gave Juan Camilo a test on predicting rainfall he would crush me like a bug.

OK, maybe I hang out with a select group within the village.  But still, there you have it.  Terrible IQ scores (if they could even take the test), real smarts.

So why should I think this book is the key to understanding economic underdevelopment?

Addendum: I am sorry there have been too many nasty comments, so I have taken the comments down.  They aren’t deleted forever, I like to think that I will have time to pick out the bad ones and put the thread back up.  I do understand that most of you (and not just on one side of the debate) are capable of discussing this topic with the appropriate tone.

1. Vie Francaise, by Jean-Paul Dubois.  He is the French Philip Roth; the bottom line is that I finished it, and not just because of the occasional mentions of Adam Smith.

2. Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, by Gerd Gigerenzer.  The author is a smart guy and an accomplished scholar, but despite his best efforts this book is a few years too late.

3. Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok.  Inflation vs. cyclic theories, the latter help you stay an agnotheist by resolving the Goldilocks problem; only some of the universes through time have order as we know it.  I enjoyed it, even though I am sick of popular physics books.  It’s also the first time I’ve understood anything about the Higgs field debates.  Recommended.

4. The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society, by Mark A. Smith.  The main thesis is that right wingers have made America a more conservative society by framing issues in terms of economic reasoning.  Maybe I am too close to the topic, but I didn’t learn anything from the book.  At the very least it should interest progressives looking to mimic the successes (?) of the right wing.

5. Blankets, by Craig Thompson.  This I loved and read in one sitting; it is a very good introduction to graphic novels, especially if you are not thrilled by Alan Moore.

Yes it is "Underrated Week" and our next genre is science fiction.

But – sorry guys — I don’t think there is much underrated science fiction.  You might think the genre as a whole is underrated, but within the genre there are so many sad desperate souls (I know, I am one of them) who will clutch at straws and elevate the mediocre into the worthwhile and the worthwhile into the superlative.

Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s.  Since that time its most glorious achievements have been on the screen, not on the printed page.  There are some excellent individual books, such as Eon or Hyperion, but the genre is mostly retreads.  Nor do I think much of attempts to cross science fiction with "serious fiction," whether it is coming from Philip K. Dick or Doris Lessing.  Yes the idea is cool but the execution is usually quite flawed.

Still we all must have our picks, so here are mine:

1. Sphere, from Michael Crichton.  Forget the last few books.  He is the best science fiction writer in contemporary times, though his publisher works very hard to make sure that label does not stick.

2. Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon.  Read Stapleton if you fervently believe that British Hegelianism is the missing element in most science fiction.  Yet this is probably my favorite science fiction novel of all time, who else can credibly skip over 20,000 years in a single breath?  "Civilizations rose and fell, yet now we must move on," or something like that.  Honorable mentions go to Stapledon’s Odd John and especially Sirius.

3. Jonathan Lethem, Gun with Occasional Music.  This is marketed as contemporary literature, which keeps away the science fiction fans.

It is hard to call Joe Haldeman underrated but still there are fans who don’t know he is one of the best science fiction writers, period.

I guess there is some underrated science fiction after all.

Crying Uncle: OK people, I retract the claim "Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s."  Card and Butler are the most convincing counterexamples.

Here is one nomination for the most overrated novel of the 20th century.

I wonder about Gide and Sartre as well.  J.D. Salinger is too easy a target, as is John Barth.  How about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird?  I keep on thinking there is an obvious and juicy British nomination (just look up how the Penguin Guide to Classical Music treats Elgar recordings), but I can’t settle on a single glaring name which stands above all others.

For the most overrated major author, I’ll pick Carlos Fuentes.  I love Mexico (and I’ve tried reading his works in Spanish), but I find he deadens the place rather than bringing it to life.  Had he not been around for the fashionably left-wing, anti-imperialist 1960s, he’d just be another guy with a pen.

The most overrated good book is Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, which although very good is far from his best work.

What are your picks?

The book is very stimulating, here is one excerpt from my review on Slate.com:

Another human failing stems from the nature of happiness.  In the short run, people’s happiness is often shaped more by how many "positive events" occur in their day than by the arrival of one important piece of good news.  Winning $100,000 in the lottery feels almost as good as winning $1 million.  We therefore look, consciously or not, for small but repeated successes when we should be shooting for "one large win."  It’s easy to see why:  Big payoffs come only rarely, and perhaps late in life; in the meantime, who wants to keep on feeling like a loser?

Here is another bit:

Oddly, Taleb’s argument is weakest in the area he knows best, namely finance. Only on Wall Street do people seem to give proper credence–not too much, not too little–to very unlikely events. It is easy enough to use hindsight to identify the black swans Wall Street has missed, such as stock-price crashes. But it is harder to argue that the market undervalues surprise more generally. Stock and bond markets offer simple ways to bet on black swans. In financial terminology, you can purchase an option that is "deeply out of the money"; for instance, you can bet that Google shares will rise or fall in value an enormous amount over the next three months. These investments pay off precisely when the rest of the market does not anticipate the scope for surprise. Yet "long-shot" strategies are well-studied, and they do not yield extra profit. In other words, organized securities markets track rare and unpredictable events as well as the current state of knowledge will allow. If you don’t believe me, it is easy enough to bet on the Los Angeles Clippers to win the 2008 NBA title, or to bet on the longest odds at the racetrack. Such actions are hardly the path to either happiness or riches.

Here is my previous post on the book.  Here is Taleb’s podcast on EconTalk.  If you’ve read the book, do tell us what you thought of it…