Results for “best book” 2009 found
The Unfairness Doctrine
The great George Will hits another one out of the ballpark with some useful reminders:
Government pratfalls such as the Disinformation Governance Board are doubly useful, as reminders of government’s embrace of even preposterous ideas if they will expand its power, and as occasions for progressives to demonstrate that there is no government expansion they will not embrace.
…Using radio spectrum scarcity as an excuse, even before the Fairness Doctrine was created, Republicans running Washington in the late 1920s pressured a New York station owned by the Socialist Party to show “due regard” for other opinions. What regard was “due”? The government knew. So, it prevented the Chicago Federation of Labor from buying a station, saying all stations should serve “the general public.”
In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration conditioned one station’s license renewal on ending anti-FDR editorials. (Tulane Law School professor Amy Gajda’s new book, “Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy,” reports that earlier, FDR had “unsuccessfully pushed for a code of conduct for newspapers as part of the Depression-era National Recovery Act and had envisioned bestowing on compliant newspapers an image of a blue eagle as a sort of presidential seal of approval.”)
John F. Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission harassed conservative radio, and when a conservative broadcaster said Lyndon B. Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 as an excuse for Vietnam escalation, the Fairness Doctrine was wielded to force the broadcaster to air a response.
Hat tip: Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.
*21st Century Monetary Policy*
I am pleased to have received an autographed copy of this very carefully done work. I think it is (by far) the best treatment of what the Fed has been up to since the 1970s, at least on the monetary policy front. There really isn’t anyone who would know better than Ben, keeping in mind he was not only Fed chair but also a top, possibly Nobel-quality monetary economist and also economic historian. The clarity and writing quality are high.
In one way, however, this is an unusual book — there is remarkably little “of Ben” in the book. To be clear, Ben already has published his personal memoir. Still, if most of this book had been written by someone else, I would not have known. Or maybe that is what it means to “put Ben in this book.” Imagine Elon Musk writing a book on rocketry and focusing on the rockets.
In any case recommended. Here is a good David Leonhardt NYT review. It is striking to me how few reviews there are so far — why? Therein lies a lesson too, though I have yet to figure out what it is.
What I’ve been reading
1. Paul Strathern, The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo. It is not just Dante and Galileo, there is also Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo, Fra Filippo Lippi, Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and many more, all from one small region of Italy. This book doesn’t answer how that all happened, but it is perhaps the best survey of the magnitude and extent of what happened, recommended and readable throughout, good as both an introduction and for the veteran reader of books about Florence. While we are at it, don’t forget Pacioli and the first treatise on double-entry bookkeeping.
2. Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings. A hard book to explain, mostly it is about how careers end or collapse or implode, only some of it is about Federer. “De Chirico lived till he was ninety but produced little of value after about 1919.” Calling a book a “tour de force” almost certainly means it isn’t, but this book…is a tour de force.
3. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. One or two-page sections on the work habits of famous artists, the selection of names is intelligent and this book is like potato chips in the good sense of the term.
4. Asa Hoffman with Virginia Hoffman, The Last Gamesman: My Sixty Years of Hustling Games in the Clubs, Parks and Streets of New York. A fun look back at the NYC chess world of the 1970s and trying to make a living as a chess and Scrabble hustler. I knew Hoffman a bit back then, and even as a kid I wondered “is this guy happy?” In the book he says he has largely been happy! I am still wondering. Maybe the secret is to play a game many discrete times where your losses are temporary and swamped by rapidly forthcoming wins? I am reminded of the words of the recently deceased grandmaster and centenarian Yuri Averbakh (NYT): “The main thing was that I never obtained great pleasure from winning,’’ he wrote. “Clearly, I did not have a champion’s character. On the other hand, I did not like to lose, and the bitterness of defeat was in no way compensated for by the pleasure of winning.”
5. Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796. A good and very useful general introduction to the history of the latter part of the story of Italy.
Some blurbs for *Talent*, with Daniel Gross
“Talent” is what happens when two brilliant and profoundly iconoclastic minds apply their imagination to one of the hardest of all business problems: the search for good people. I loved it.”
–Malcolm Gladwell
“Talent is everything―whether in investing and building startups, or in other creative endeavors. Between product, market, and people, I’ve always bet on the last one as the biggest predictor of success. But while talent may be everywhere, it’s unevenly distributed, and hard to ‘find.’ So how do we better discover, filter, and match the best talent with the best opportunities? This book shares how, based on both scientific research and the authors’ own experiences. The future depends on this know-how.”
―Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
“The most important job of any leader is to find individuals with a ‘creative spark,’ and the potential to discover, invent and build the future. If you want to learn the art and science of spotting and empowering exceptional people, Talent is brimming with fresh insights and actionable advice.”
―Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and former CEO of Google
“I do not know of any skills more worth developing than the ability to find exceptional undeveloped talent. I have spent many years trying to get good at that, and I was still astonished by how much I learned reading this book.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, formerly of YCombinator
“Two of the premier talent spotters working today, Cowen and Gross have written the definitive history of identifying talent. Anyone who is interested in innovation, entrepreneurship, or the roots of America’s start-up economy must read this book.”Christina Cacioppo is CEO and co-founder of Vanta
You can order here on Amazon or here on Barnes & Noble.
Recommended!
*The Baby on the Fire Escape*
An excellent book, full of substance and going well beyond cliche, the author is Julie Phillips and the subtitle is Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. Strikingly unsentimental, it covers women writers who balanced (or didn’t balance) their creative urges with their child-rearing responsibilities. Excerpt:
Grace Hartigan married at nineteen and had her son the same year, 1941. In 1975 she said:
“My son bitterly opposed my painting. He would stay after school and would come in at five o’clock, look at me, and say: “I know, you have been painting again.” When he got to be twelve and his father had remarried, I sent him to California. I have never seen him since. It is a very bitter relationship.”
I especially enjoyed the chapters on Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin, and Angela Carter. Will make the year’s “Best Non-Fiction” list.
Does the right-wing or left-wing have better graphics?
Tom Martin emails me:
Might be my aging brain hallucinating again, but I would swear that the average right-leaning publication has fairly ugly graphics and the average left-leaning publication is ‘nicely/artfully’ designed.
• National Review: consistently ugly covers
• Bryan Caplan’s new book: not a cover of beauty
• The New American: ugly
• Reason: getting better, but from an ugly past just 5 years ago
• The American Spectator: goofy?
Compared to:
• New Yorker
• New York Times
• Atlantic
• Dissent
• Jacobin
Maybe my tastes are just left wing, despite my politics, but I sense there is something deeper here.
Agree? If so, what is the best theory of this? I don’t think it is educational polarization alone, as the readers of say National Review, or for that matter MR, are going to be pretty highly educated. Nor do I think it is about budget per se, though that is likely one factor.
How can we improve the NIH?
The NIH’s extramural research is systematically biased in favor of conservative research. This conservatism is a result of both institutional inertia, concerns by the NIH leadership that the organization could lose the support of Congress, and efforts by NIH beneficiaries to maintain the status quo.
The extramural grant distribution process, which is run through peer review “study sections,” is badly in need of reform. Though there is considerable variability among study sections, many are beset by groupthink, arbitrary evaluation factors, and political gamesmanship. The NIH may be hamstringing bioscience progress, despite the huge amount of funds it distributes, because its sheer hegemony steers the entire industry by setting standards for scientific work and priorities.
Most problematic, the NIH is highly resistant to reform. Many proposals have been shot down during discussion phases, or scaled back before implementation. The NIH’s own internal review board has been inactive since 2015, as mentioned at the start of this report section. Still, many of the NIH’s problems are likely a natural product of being a $40 billion+ per year government bureaucracy.
That is from Matt Faherty, and here is 33,000 or so words more on why the NIH is a good idea, what is wrong with the NIH, and how to improve it. It is by far the best piece written on the NIH, and if it were to count as a book would be on the year’s “best of” list.
The piece is based on extensive interviews, and here is one reflection of that:
An anonymous comment on an NIH article reflected the sentiments of the most negative interviewees:
“It is well known that NIH ‘confidentiality’ [of the primary reviewer to the grant applicant] is anything but, and a young PI risks career and reputation if they shoot down big names (not all, but there is a mafia of sorts). I’ve sat on panels, I’ve seen the influence from afar. Young PIs fall over themselves to get it good with the power brokers. I’ve seen young PIs threatened when they mentioned quietly that Big Boss X has data that is wrong. Some fields are worse than others, but it is overall a LOT uglier than most would believe.”
As for two meta-points, a) it is striking how little quality analysis of the NIH has been done, and b) how many of the respondents to this current work feared consequences for their careers, some responding only on an off the record basis. I am proud to have supported this work through Emergent Ventures.
My YouTube viewing habits
Abe emails me:
Tyler, I really enjoyed your recent podcast with Russ Roberts talking about favorite books and reading strategies. On the podcast, you mentioned YouTube a couple of times. I was hoping Russ would ask you about your YouTube habits, but he didn’t, so I thought I’d email to ask. What type of things do you watch on YouTube? Do you have any favorite channels or strategies for finding good content? I think it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the subject.
My habits here are primitive, and not recommended for most of you sophisticates, but here goes:
1. I don’t subscribe to YouTube channels.
2. I watch some reasonable percentage, at least in part, of what people send me.
3. I watch prospective guests for CWT, to experience their conversational rhythms and mannerisms and “tics.”
4. I listen to music, especially when I am traveling, mostly classical music recitals or “world music,” to use a much-abused phrase. For many “world musics,” the visual element is all-important. I love Led Zeppelin, but I don’t click on them in this medium. Piano and guitar recitals I enjoy much more than orchestral music, at least on YouTube.
5. Sometimes I watch videos on science, or occasionally econometrics. It is often the best way to learn new concepts in these areas.
6. I watch Magnus Carlsen play BanterBlitz and engage in related chessboard antics in other forums, mostly while I am exercising on the Peloton. If you understand chess reasonably well, he is one of the greatest entertainers of our time, in addition to being the best chessplayer ever.
7. I don’t listen on speeds other than 1x. Doing so would disrupt the purposes mentioned above! If I am just trying to absorb information rapidly, typically I would prefer a book. The information from #5 usually is difficult enough for me to stick with 1x. If it is just someone blabbing, typically I care about the true human rhythms of speech, or I just won’t do it.
What else?
Monday assorted links
1. MIE: “Dunkin Donuts sells a $65 adult onesie.”
3. New Economistts for Ukraine group.
4. Claims about Moskva, the ship.
5. Steven Johnson at NYT covers Large Language Models.
6. Mark Lilla reviews the new Jerry Muller book on Jacob Taubes (NYT).
7. The value of “individualism” best predicts support for market-oriented policies.
Talent rules in the NBA
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
With the basketball playoffs starting this week, it is worth asking what can be learned from the NBA’s more recent history. This year the NBA story is one of talent — extreme talent. Talent so plentiful that even the middling teams are full of strong players. The broader lessons for the world economy are very optimistic.
Consider the three players competing for the Most Valuable Player award — Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Their play and statistics have been stratospheric. Embiid, for instance, led the league scoring, is a leading rebounder and defender, and his team is in contention for an NBA title. Yet he is not favored to win the award because the other contenders are (at least in my eyes) better yet. My pick is Jokic, who is the first NBA player with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 500 assists in a season.
Other top players, such as Jayson Tatum, Luka Doncic and Ja Morant, might in other years be obvious MVP winners. But this year they don’t stand a chance. LeBron James, Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Stephen Curry — the best players from the recent past — are still amazing but are practically also-rans.
And:
The lessons and implications for the broader economy and society are insanely bullish. If the NBA can do this, other parts of the world can, too. Just imagine business and science (and maybe politics?) all improving at the rate of professional basketball. The most important form of wealth today is human capital. As the world moves further from a brute-force economy, human capital is also the major force driving productivity.
The NBA shows that it is possible, over time, to do a much better job of both finding and mobilizing talent. Granted, most parts of the world are not as well-run as the NBA, so the process will be slower than it ought to be. But it is underway.
The implications are staggering. Yes, global problems are piling up at an alarming rate. On the other hand, global talent is more accessible than ever. Which phenomenon is likely to turn out to be of greater consequence? As the co-author of a forthcoming book on the importance of talent, I suspect you can guess my view.
And I am still picking the Milwaukee Bucks to win the NBA title this year.
My excellent Conversation with Roy Foster
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary;
Roy joined Tyler to discuss why the Scots got off easier than the Irish under British rule, the truths and misconceptions about Ireland as a policy laboratory for the British government, why spoken Irish faded more rapidly than Welsh, the single question that drove a great flowering of Irish economic thought, how Foster’s Quaker education shaped his view of Irish history, how the Battle of the Somme and the 1916 Easter Rising cemented the rift between the Northeast and the rest of the country, what went wrong with Irish trade policies between the 1920s and 1970s, the power of Irish education, why the re-emergence of The Troubles in the 1960s may not have been as inevitable as many people believe, the cultural effects of Ireland’s pro-Allied neutrality in World War II, how Irish visual art is beginning to be looked at in a similar way to Irish literature, the social and economic changes of the 1970s that began to radically reshape Irish society, the reasons for Ireland’s openness to foreigners, what Irish Americans misunderstand, and more.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: If we think of the 19th century, as you know, I think it’s in 1831 that free universal schooling comes to Ireland. Are there ways in which, in the 19th century, Ireland is more modern than Britain?
FOSTER: That’s a very interesting and subtle question.
There is a theory that Ireland is used as a laboratory for British government and that they will apply further afield, in India and the Caribbean, models and lessons that they’ve learned in Ireland, which is sometimes referred to as Britain’s oldest or England’s oldest colony.
I have a slight problem with that, because Ireland is a very special kind of colony, if it’s a colony: it’s a metropolitan colony. The original inhabitants remain, one could say, in a far stronger position than in many of the areas of the British Empire, where they are effectively either enslaved or wiped out. But the point is really that what’s happening in Ireland in the 18th and 19th century is, as I’ve said earlier, a kind of dispossession.
But at the same time, there are elements — and this is true from the Act of Union, which abolishes the old, very elite Irish Parliament in 1800 — there are elements of experimentation in the British government of Ireland which aren’t (I have to say this) entirely malign, and you zero in on education. The attempt that was being made in the early 1830s was to introduce a nondenominational form of primary education for the Irish people.
Ireland being Ireland, it was rapidly denominationalized: the Catholics used it for their purposes and the Protestants used it for their purposes. But the theory of it was that you had to overcome the religious differences, which by the early 19th century seemed to dictate everything that was happening in Ireland.
The great novelist William Thackeray, who was married to an Irish woman, said when he did a tour of Ireland and wrote his Irish Sketch Book, “Where to get at the truth in this country: it is not possible. There are two truths, the Catholic truth and the Protestant truth.” By the early 19th century, this seemed all too true.
Substantive throughout, in my view one of the very best CWTs in some while.
What I’ve been reading
1. Alan Bollard, Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars. A useful book on a much underrated topic. Keynes, Kantorovich, and Leontief receive the most attention, though the book also covers of Takahashi Korekiyo of Japan. My main complaint is the absence of Thomas Schelling.
2. Elizabeth Wilson, Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin’s Russia. She converted from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity, and her career spanned from the 1920s through 1970. She was at times out of favor, other times Stalin’s favorite pianist. Called a “holy fool” by many, this is an excellent biography that brings its subject to life. And her playing was full of depth, albeit with often creaky sound..
3. Ian Barnes, Restless Empire: A Historical Atlas of Russia. One of the very most useful books for understanding Russian history — about half of this one is maps! Changing maps over the ages. These are the maps that Putin looks at, you should too. A high quality book in all regards.
4. Sarah Weinman, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free. The murderer is Edgar Smith and the conservative is William F. Buckley — how could anyone have been fooled by these remorseless criminals? A good look at what had been becoming a forgotten episode. A tale of self-deception to the nth degree.
5. Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. Yes, the empire truly was based in unacceptable levels of violence, and at its very core. This excellent book is the very best demonstration of those propositions. Historically thorough, and covers more than just a few cases.
There is a new reissue, with a new and good introduction, of Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: Black Society in Jamaica, 1655-1838.
Ben Westhoff, Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and my Search for the Truth is a very good narrative by a very good author.
Jeevan Vasagar, Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia is a decent first book to read on Singapore, although mostly it was interior to my current knowledge set.
The virtues of seaweed collecting
Nineteenth-century seaweed albums have a baked-in melancholy. Despite the best intentions, they do not flatter seaweed. The samples are brittle where the plant was pliant, opaque when once translucent, flaccid where previously ballooned. The displacement from sea to paper steals a measure of the plants’ integrity, and time leaches away the rest. In every respect, the wonders of seaweed have fled the book. And yet, these albums still speak — not of seaweed exactly, but of the collector’s care and devotion. There is a particular kind of eros that thrums between a receptive human and the natural world; the contours and depth of this eros is the true subject of a seaweed album.
Here is much more, interesting throughout, via Jodi Ettenberg.
*Amongst Women*
That is the title of a 1990 Irish novel by John McGahern, well-known in Ireland but as of late not so frequently read outside of Ireland. In addition to its excellent general quality, I found this book notable for two reasons. First, it focuses on the feminization of Ireland, being set in the mid-century decades after independence. An IRA veteran slowly realizes that the Ireland he fought for — a place for manly men — was a figment of his civil war imagination, and not an actual option for an independent, modernizing Ireland. The latter will be run according to the standards and desires of women, and actually be far more pleasant, whether or not Moran likes it. Second, the book is an excellent illustration of the importance of context for reading fiction. The story reads quite differently, depending how quickly you realize the protagonist is an IRA veteran with his wartime service as a fundamental experience. Few readers will know this from the very beginning, but I suspect many Irish readers — especially older ones — will figure this out well before they are told. In general, the very best fiction is context-rich, and this is one reason why many people may not appreciate all of the literary classics.
What I’ve been reading
1. John Elliott Cairnes, The Slave Power, from 1862. Cairnes remains greatly underrated as an economist. But The Slave Power is most remarkable for seeing that slavery was a system that pervaded (and corrupted) all aspects of the economy and society of the South. An excellent early integration of economic reasoning and sociology. And to think he wrote this from Galway, not Mississippi.
2. Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer: A Biography. A revelatory book that proves Stettheimer’s reputation deserves to be upgraded to the top tier of American artists of her time. The color plates are wonderful. I hadn’t known of her inspiration coming from Ballet Russe works. For those who care, definitely recommended, deserves to make the best of the year list.
3. Stanislaw Lem, The Invincible. One of the better Lems, reminds me of a Star Trek episode, with shades of gray goo hypotheses and an East Bloc ending.
I liked Meghan O’Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness.
John Davis, Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher is mostly a social history.
There is also Penelope J. Corfield, The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 18th-Century Britain.
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy elicited this blurb from me: “How does the concept of intangible capital help explain some features of what has gone wrong in our world? How is the concept of intangible capital key to fixing what has gone wrong and improving our world? This is the go-to book for those and other critical questions for boosting economic growth.”