Results for “best book” 2009 found
Models as indexing, and the value of Google
There are many arguments for the use of models in economics, including notions of rigor and transparency, or that models can help you to see relationships you otherwise might not have expected. I don’t wish to gainsay those, but I thought of another argument yesterday. Models are a way of indexing your thoughts. A model can tell you which are the core features of your argument and force you to give them names. You then can use those names to find what others have written about your topic and your mechanisms. In essence, you are expanding the division of labor in science more effectively by using models.
This mechanism of course requires that models are a more efficient means of indexing thoughts than pure words or propositions alone. In this view, it is often topic names or book indexes or card catalogs that models are competing with, not verbal economics per se.
The existence of Google therefore may have lowered the relative return to models. First, Google searches by words best of all. Second and relatedly, if you have written only words Google will help you find the related work you need, scholar.google.com kicks in too. In essence, there is a new and very powerful way of finding related ideas, and you need not rely on the communities that get built around particular models (though those communities largely will continue).
It is notable that open access, on-line economics writing doesn’t use models very much and is mostly content to rely on words and propositions. There are several reasons for this, but this productivity shock to differing methods of indexing may be one factor.
Still, it is not always easy to search by words. Many phrases — consider say “free will” — do not through search engines discriminate very well on the basis of IQ or rigor.
My Conversation with Agnes Callard
She is a philosopher at the University of Chicago, here is the transcript and audio. We covered Plato and Socrates, what Plato is on about at all, the virtues of dialog and refutation, whether immortality would be boring, Elena Ferrante, parents vs. gangsters and Beethoven vs. Mozart, my two Straussian readings of her book, Jordan Peterson, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the best defense of reading the classics, and the Agnes Callard production function (physics to classics to philosophy), all in suitably informationally dense fashion.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I have a friend who’s interested in longevity research…and he tells me there’s maybe a 10 percent chance that I actually will live forever due to possible scientific advances. I’m skeptical, but let’s just say I were to live forever. How bored would I end up, and how do you think about this question?
CALLARD: [laughs] I think it depends on how good of a person you are.
COWEN: And the good people are more or less bored?
CALLARD: Oh, they’re less bored. One thing is that you’re kind of having to live with yourself for a very long time if you’re immortal, or even just live for a couple thousand years, and a bad self, I think, is hard to live with. By bad, I don’t just mean sort of, let’s say, cruel to people or unjust. I also mean not attuned to things of eternal significance.
I think you can get by in a 100-year life not being too much attuned to things of eternal significance because there’s so much fascinating stuff out there, and one can go from one thing to the next and not get bored. But if we’re talking about eternity, or even thousands of years, you’d better find something to occupy you that is really riveting in the way that I think only eternal things are.
I think that what you’re really asking is something like, “Could I be a god?” And I think, “Well, if you became godlike, you could, and then it would be OK.”
COWEN: Let me give you a hypothesis. You can react to it. That which is cultural, say, listening to music, I would get bored with, even though wonderful music maybe continually will be created. But those activities which are more primeval, more biological — parenting, sex, food, sleep, maybe taking a wonderful shower — that are quite brute, in a way, maybe I would substitute more into those as an immortal? Yes?
CALLARD: I don’t see why you wouldn’t get just as bored of bodily pleasures.
COWEN: You’re programmed for those to be so immediate and riveting, right? You evolve to be maybe an 80-year-old being, or perhaps even a 33-year-old being, so you are riveted on things like reproduction and getting enough sleep. And that stays riveting, even when you’re on this program to live 80,000 years.
CALLARD: I think that at least some of those activities stay riveting for us over the course of our lives because their meaning changes…
And:
COWEN: Let’s turn now to your new book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. There’s a sentence from the book. Let me read it, and maybe you can explain it. “Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.” What’s a proleptic reason?
This was my favorite part, though perhaps few of you will get the joke:
COWEN: On aspiration, what do you think of Jordan Peterson?
CALLARD: I had this odd feeling. He only became known to me quite recently, in the past couple of weeks. I was listening to him talk, and I was thinking he sounds a little bit like Socrates, but not Socrates. I was like, “Who is that? Who is he reminding me of?” And it’s Xenophon’s Socrates.
Here you can buy her just-published book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. You cannot follow her on Twitter.
*Neruda: The Poet’s Calling*
That is the new and excellent biography by Mark Eisner, here is one good bit:
“The antagonism toward Borges may exist in an intellectual or cultural form because of our different orientation,” Neruda answered. “One can fight peacefully. But I have other enemies — not writers. For me the enemy is imperialism, and my enemies are the capitalists and those who drop napalm on Vietnam. But Borges is not my enemy…He understands nothing of what’s going on in the contemporary world; he thinks that I understand nothing either. Therefore, we are in agreement.”
And:
After [Juan Ramón] Jiménez’s “great bad poet remark, Neruda and his friends started to prank call Jiménez’s house, hanging up the phone as soon as he answered.
This book is remarkably well-constructed and easy to read, the best treatment of one of the 20th century’s greatest poets.
Mexico City travel tips
I’m a loyal MR reader and follower of your work. I’m so grateful for your work and your generous spirit. I’m sure you get inundated with email and other correspondence but I’m adding to the pile by requesting that someday you’ll post advice for a Oaxaca or Mexico City visit. I assure you that it would be carefully studied and utilized.
Happy Easter!
Here are my tips for Mexico City, taken from an email I sent to a friend a while ago, note I start with food but do not end there:
“1. Your number one task is to find a seller of tlacoyos in the street. This is likely a solo woman with a stand, on a corner. They are all over Mexico City, though whether in Condesa I am not sure. The vegetarian offerings are no worse, also, with beans and blue corn tortilla and cheese. Get these, and they are in general quite sanitary. You simply need to ask around, they will not be in highly visible places. I think about them often.
2. Ask for “tacqueria” rather than tacos, the latter might lead you into a restaurant.
2b. Most food in Condesa will be fine but underwhelming, think Clarendon. Try to find street food there.
3. The street food is the best food there and it is safer to eat than the restaurant food (though the latter is usually safe too).
4. Try a sandwich once or twice, just ask around, no need for a fancy place, these usually close by mid-afternoon. My favorite sandwich is the Hawaii, though I believe that is a purely subjective judgment, I do not think it is the best per se. The whole bakery culture there is quite interesting and often neglected by food people but it is important.
5. When you take a taxi out to the pyramids, there is excellent food along the way, in the middle of nowhere, have the driver stop and bring you somewhere. The pyramids are one of the best sights in this hemisphere, by the way, better than those in Egypt I think. There are also smaller pyramid sites on the way to the big pyramid site, worth visiting and also near some superb food.
6. Favorite fancy place there is Astrid and Gaston, not cheap but it won’t bankrupt you either. Peruvian/Mexican fusion, nice to sit in too.
7. If you need a break from Mexican food, the Polish restaurants there are quite good, that would be my back up choice. Of Asian food the Japanese offerings might be the best. French and German can be quite good there, though not original. Avoid “American.” Other Latin cuisines will in general be quite good there, including the steakhouses.
8. Go to Coyoacan (a suburb, sort of, but not far) and see the Frida Kahlo museum. The food stalls (“comedores”) there are not only excellent, but they look the most sanitary and mainstream of just about any in Mexico. Even your aunt could be tempted to eat there. A good stop, try a whole bunch of things for $1.50 a piece, you could spend two hours there eating and not get bored and get to sample a lot of the main dishes. Also a fun hangout.
9. When we flew into the airport, we immediately asked the taxi driver to bring us somewhere superb for a snack. Of course there was somewhere within five minutes, right nearby. Do this if you can open a line of communications.
9b. Walking is often the wrong way to find great food there, unless you are walking and asking. Walking and looking doesn’t work so well, because you are on the wrong streets if you are walking to just be walking around. Vehicles are the key, or asking and then walking to follow the advice, not to follow your walking instincts.
10. Chiles en Nogada is a seasonal dish, superb, I am not sure if they will still have it but ask around and get it if you can. It is delicious and a real treat, not to be forgotten.
11. Treat breakfast as a chance at some street food, don’t fill up on a traditional breakfast, least of all a touristy Mexican one. It will always be OK, but rarely interesting, even if it sounds somewhat authentic. Get a tlacoyo or something in the street. Any food represented by an Aztec word will be excellent, pretty much as a rule.
The non-food tips I will send separately. But the food is all about improvising, not about finding good restaurants. Most of the mid-tier restaurants are decent but for me ultimately a bit disappointing. Either go fancy or go street. Don’t trust any of the guidebook recommendations for mid-tier places, they will never be bad but mostly disappoint compared to the best stuff there.
Non-food
The Anthropology Museum is a must.
My personal favorite museum is Museo del Arte Popular, the popular art museum downtown, but I consider that an idiosyncratic preference.
Visit the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the murals there, and across the street House of Blue Tiles, get a juice there and see their murals too. Then walk from there down to the Zocalo on the main street, there is the number one walk in Mexico for a basic introduction to downtown. In fact that is the first thing I would do to get an overview of downtown and the older part of the city, even though that is not where you will end up hanging out.
The mural sites are in general excellent, I believe the best one is called Ildefonso.
I often find male clothes shopping there to be highly profitable, good mix of selection and prices. Polanco is the part of town you would go to for that, right near Pujol and also Astrid and Gaston, in fact.
Hotel Camino Real is a classic site, you can get a drink there at night with the funny colored lights. The movie Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was shot there in part, a great film. The Mexico City movie is Amores Perros, a knockout. Y Tu Mama Tambien is another, you probably know these already. I also like the old Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel, made while he lived there for a while.
The classic Mexico novel is Roberto Bolano, *The Savage Detectives*, a great read and one of the best novels of the latter part of the 20th century, the English translation is first-rate too, as good as the Spanish in my view.
I don’t like much of the music, but perhaps that is the point. Control Machete, a Mexican rap group, works pretty good as soundtrack while you are being driven around the city.
The Alan Riding book, while now badly out of date, is still an excellent overview of the older Mexico, great for background, Distant Neighbors it is called.
Have a cabbie drive you around different neighborhoods, to see rich homes, poorer sections, particular buildings. Mexico City is first-rate for contemporary architecture although most of it is quite scattered, no single place for walking around it that I know of.
Art galleries there are good for browsing, often in or near Polanco, the wealthy part of town.
Insurgentes is a good avenue for cruising.
Avoid Zona Rosa altogether at all costs, bad stuff, lots of pickpockets, no redeeming virtues whatsoever, do not be tempted.”
*Who We Are and How We Got Here*, by David Reich
This is a truly excellent work, readable and informative at A to A+ quality, and the subtitle is Ancient DNA and the new Science of the Human Past. It has occasioned some public controversy for its discussion of race and genetics, but most of all this is a book about how science is done. For instance, the page and a half discussion of how researchers try to ensure that human DNA does not contaminate Neanderthal DNA is just beautiful.
Here is one good summary passage:
The case of the Ancient North Eurasians showed that while a tree is a good analogy for the relationships among species — because species rarely interbreed and so like real tree limbs are not expected to grow back together after they branch — it is a dangerous analogy for human populations. The genome revolution has taught us that great mixtures of highly divergent populations have occurred repeatedly. Instead of a tree, a better metaphor may be a trellis, branching and remixing far back into the past.
Here is another excerpt of note:
Analyzing our data, he [Iosif Lazaridis] found that about ten thousand years ago there were at least four major populations in West Eurasia — the farmers of the Fertile Crescent, the farmers of Iran, the hunter-gatherers of central and western Europe, and the hunter-gatherers of eastern Europe. All these populations differed from one another as much as Europeans differ from East Asians today.
The concept of “ghost populations” will enter your mental conceptual vocabulary. And:
The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.
Most of all, this is a science book, not a “race book.” (“Having been immersed in the ancient DNA revolution for the past 10 years, I am confident that anyone who pays attention to what it is finding cannot come away feeling affirmed in racist beliefs.”) You may know that Reich is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Here is his earlier NYT essay (though I think the very first link in this post is the best place to start, do read that carefully), well done but not quite representative of the book either. You can buy it here, this is definitely one of the books of the year and one of the best popular science books of any year.
Friday assorted links
1. How did changes in tennis rackets alter the game?
3. An oddly instructive piece (NYT, Virginia Woolf). Not a recommended reading, however. Is this what Tocqueville had in mind?
4. Cat hotel opens in Iraq. And those new service sector jobs, Gerald Murnane Australian bartender edition (NYT).
5. How arrow-wielding men mapped Britain in the 1940s.
6. Is jazz music moving to shorter formats? And a housing/transit bargain for NYC.
*Cognitive Gadgets*
The author is Cecilia Heyes, and the subtitle is The Cultural Evolution of Thinking, published by Harvard/Belknap. It is not always a transparent read, but this is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences.
From the book’s home page:
…adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.
The key substantive points from this are malleability and speed of evolution, and overall in her theory there is a much lower reliance on cognitive instincts and thus a fundamentally different account of social evolution: “In contrast, the cognitive gadgets theory applies cultural evolutionary theory to the mechanisms of thought — the mental processes that generate and control behavior.”
And “…social interaction in infancy and childhood produces new cognitive mechanisms; it changes the way we think.”
The chapter on imitation is the best appendage to Girard on memesis I know. One interesting point is that most people find it quite hard to imitate how they look to others when say they tell a joke or make love. To imitate successfully, you need to develop particular sensorimotor capacities. Otherwise, you can be thwarted by a kind of “correspondence” problem, not knowing how the objective and subjective experiences of imitation match up properly. This too we learn through cultural gadgets.
Mindreading is also a mental gadget, it must be learned, and it is surprisingly similar to print reading. In an odd twist on Julian Jaynes, Heyes suggests that humans five or six thousand years ago may not have had this capacity very strongly. And as with print reading, there is cross-cultural diversity in mindreading. There is no mindreading instinct and we all must learn it, autistics too.
What about language? Rather than Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, there are instead “domain-general processes of sequence learning.” This in turn leads to a complex and quite interesting take on how, while non-human animals do also have language, it is quite different from ours (p.187).
Most generally, if someone is trying to explain X, maybe both genetic/instinct and cultural evolution accounts of X are wrong — try a cultural gadget approach! And think of this book as perhaps the best attempt so far to explain the weirdness of humans, relative to other animals.
Note also that in this view, humanity is relatively vulnerable to cultural catastrophes, as we cannot simply bounce back using enduring instincts. Furthermore, social media may indeed matter a great deal, and in revisionist terms some parts of Marx are not as crazy as they may seem (my point this latter one, not hers).
I need more time (years?) to digest the contents of this book, and decide how much I agree. It is somehow neither hard nor easy reading, but most MR readers should be able to make their way through it. Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.
Buy it on Amazon here. Here is a Heyes lecture on related ideas, also click through to part II.
My advice for a Paris visit
This is for another friend, here are my pointers:
1. Find a very good food street/corner and take many of your meals there. I’ve used Rue Daguerre and around Rue des Arts (Left Bank) for this purpose, but there are many others. Spend most of your money in the cheese shop, asking them to choose for you, but supplement with bread, fruit, and of course chocolate. This beats most restaurant meals, noting it won’t be cheap either. And yes it is worth paying $8 for a bar of chocolate there.
2. Do track down medieval Paris, most of all the cathedrals. This will bring you by other delights as well.
3. Especially on the Left Bank, Paris is one of the very best walking cities. Avoid Champs-Élysées and environs, a broad-avenued, chain store-intense corruption of what Paris ought to be. Avoid Jardin Luxembourg and the surrounding parts as well, they are urban deserts.
4. Get a peek of the major bridges over the Seine, if only by traversing them.
5. You don’t in fact have to stand in line to see the Mona Lisa. It’s a lovely painting, but at this point in human civilization it is OK to skip it. You don’t need to hear “Bohemian Rhapsody” again either. But you should go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. And in the Louvre, don’t neglect the Poussin room, the Michelangelo sculptures, or the Flemish and 17th century works.
6. The Louvre, d’Orsay, Cluny, and Branly (ethnographic) are the essential museums in town. Check out Grand Palais and Petit Palais for possible exhibits. When walking around, keep your eye out for posters (yes, posters) advertising exhibits and concerts.
7. If you want to spend forty euros for a very good but not revelatory lunch, find a “cool” area with lots of restaurants and poke your head in at their opening, at 12:30, to ask for a table. By 12:45 it is too late and you are screwed and back to your favorite cheese shop. By the way, I don’t think Paris is the best city in which to spend $200 on a meal.
8. In most of the parts of Paris you are likely to frequent, do not try to eat any Asian or “ethnic” foods. The best restaurants of those kinds are in north Paris, on the way to the airport, but no one visits there. Couscous in Paris is boring.
9. Belleville is the gentrifying Brooklyn of Paris, with relatively few tourists, if that is what you are looking for. Avoid Montmartre. For practical reasons, I’ve spent a lot of my Paris time near Unesco, in a neighborhood that is a bit sterile but very beautiful and it gives you a decent sense of well-to-do residential Paris life. Develop your mini-Paris residential life somewhere, and make your time there more than just a tourist visit. The site I should not enjoy but do is Le Dôme des Invalides, also the tomb of Napoleon.
10. The essential Paris movies are lots of Godard (Breathless, Band of Outsiders, others), Jules and Jim, and Triplets of Belleville. Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 for those with an experimental bent. Eric Rohmer for something light-hearted. Amélie and Before Sunset are both rewarding, though at the margin Godard usually is what Americans are lacking.
11. Carry along Hugo and Balzac to read. Flaubert and Proust are wonderful, but they are more “interior” authors and thus you can imbibe them anywhere. Do not forget Houllebecq’s Submission. I do not love most of the well-known non-fiction books on Paris; perhaps they become corrupted through the chance of being truly popular. Do read Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France and try to dig up a useful architectural guide to the city. I’m also a big fan of Hazel Rowley’s Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
12. Don’t go expecting Parisians to be rude, I have never (well, once) found that to be the case in more than six months spent in the city.
13. My overall take is this: Paris today is fairly sterile in terms of overall creativity, or for that matter business dynamism. But Parisians have perfected the art of taste along a number of notable dimensions, like nowhere else in the world. If your trip allows you to free ride upon those efforts in a meaningful way, it will go very well.
Thursday assorted links
1. New results about Denisovans.
2. “…the evidence suggests that electoral incentives successfully induce incumbents to exert professional effort.” And eliminating the university Boards of Regents would be a big mistake for Arizona.
3. Who’s complacent? The culture that is Maine.
4. China extrapolation of the day: “The famine in China 1959-61 was the single biggest in history, in terms of numbers of deaths. But in terms of long-run population trends, the impact was remarkably small.” And Amazon might produce three seasons of The Three-Body Principle.
5. A good take on Facebook and the Zuckerberg speech.
6. I recommend the Israeli movie Foxtrot, though it is best to see it without spoilers and without reading reviews.
Ten favorite science fiction novels
That is from a reader request, please note I am not saying these are the best (that would be a separate query). Here goes, noting I am engaging in some bundling of volumes and sequels:
1. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, Star Maker. Who needs characters and plot when such a compelling mega-Hegelian take is on the table? His other novels are underrated as well.
2. Isaac Asimov, original Foundation Trilogy. But no, the books didn’t want to make me become an economist and in fact when I read them at age fourteen (?) I recoiled at their historicist, anti-Hayekian, and anti-Popperian nature. I, Robot is actually a more important book, and one of the most influential of its century, but it is less fun to read.
3. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, doubles and erotic guilt, with a touch of Girard, check out the Tarkovsky film as well.
4. Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, her masterpiece, sadly I find The Dispossessed pretentious and unreadable.
5. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. And once again, why haven’t they turned this into a movie?
6. Dan Simmons, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. I’m not sure these are important science fiction, but they sure hold your interest.
7. Larry Niven, Ringworld. Read this one through the lens of Dante.
8. China Mieville, Embassytown. It demands serious attention, but worth a try even if you don’t enjoy his other books.
9. Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem trilogy. Again note the first volume is tough sledding for quite a while.
10. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game trilogy, it only gets great at the end of the first volume, nonetheless deeply worth it.
Assorted notes: I would have said Dune, except that last year I tried to reread it. John Wyndham deserves a lifetime achievement award. Philip K. Dick is “idea rich,” but basically a bad and overrated writer. And don’t kid yourself, Neuromancer, while important, isn’t that much fun either. A big chunk of Verne and H.G. Wells is worth reading, more than just the famous ones. I’m a fan of Neal Stephenson, but not sure my favorite works of his count toward this category. Huxley’s Brave New World would make the list if it counts. Gene Wolfe is OK, but no need to lecture me about him in the comments, same for Ray Bradbury. Some Heinlein holds up fine, but most does not. Vonnegut no, but I like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series if it counts as science fiction. There is also Iain Banks.
Honorable mentions: Joe Haldeman, The Forever War; Greg Bear, Eon; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, if that one counts as belonging to the genre. High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand, again if they count. Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.
One smart guy’s frank take on working in some of the major tech companies
This is from my email, I have done a bit of minor editing to remove identifiers. It is long, so it goes under the screen break:
Background
I joined Google [earlier]…as an Engineering Director. This was, as I understand it, soon after an event where Larry either suggested or tried to fire all of the managers, believing they didn’t do much that was productive. (I’d say it was apocryphal but it did get written up in a Doc that had a bunch of Google lore, so it got enough oversight that it was probably at least somewhat accurate.)
At that time people were hammering on the doors trying to get in and some reasonably large subset, carefully vetted with stringent “smart tests” were being let in. The official mantra was, “hire the smartest people and they’ll figure out the right thing to do.” People were generally allowed to sign up for any project that interested them (there was a database where engineers could literally add your name to a project that interested you) and there was quite a bit of encouragement for people to relocate to remote offices. Someone (not Eric, I think it probably was Sergey) proposed opening offices anyplace there were smart people so that we could vacuum them up. Almost anything would be considered as a new project unless it was considered to be “not ambitious enough.” The food was fabulous. Recruiters, reportedly, told people they could work on “anything they wanted to.” There were microkitchens stocked with fabulous treats every 500′ and the toilets were fancy Japanese…uh…auto cleaning and drying types.
And… infrastructure projects and unglamorous projects went wanting for people to work on them. They had a half day meeting to review file system projects because…it turns out that many, many top computer scientists evidently dream of writing their own file systems. The level of entitlement displayed around things like which treats were provided at the microkitchens was…intense. (Later, there was a tragicomic story of when they changed bus schedules so that people couldn’t exploit the kitchens by getting meals for themselves [and family…seen that with my own eyes!] “to go” and take them home with them on the Google Bus — someone actually complained in a company meeting that the new schedules…meant they couldn’t get their meals to go. And they changed the bus schedule back, even though their intent was to reduce the abuse of the free food.)
Now, most of all that came from two sources not exclusively related to the question at hand:
Google (largely Larry I think) was fearless about trying new things. There was a general notion that we were so smart we could figure out a new, better way to do anything. That was really awesome. I’d say, overall, that it mostly didn’t pan out…but it did once in a while and it may well be that just thinking that way made working there so much fun, that it did make an atmosphere where, overall, great things happened.
Google was awash in money and happy to spray it all over its employees. Also awesome, but not something you can generalize for all businesses. Amazon, of course, took a very different tack. (It’s pretty painful to hear the stories in The Everything Store or similar books about the relatively Spartan conditions Amazon maintained. I was the site lead for the Google [xxxx] office for a while and we hired a fair number of Amazon refugees. They were really happy to be in Google, generally…not necessarily to either of our benefit.)
I was there for over ten years. Over time, the general rule of “you get what you incent” made the whole machine move much less well and the burdens of maintaining growth for Wall Street have had some real negative impact (Larry and Sergey have been pushing valiantly for some other big hit of course).
So, onto the question at hand:
I know bits and pieces about Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. I’ve known some people who’ve worked at Netflix but generally know less about them. Google I know pretty well. I’ve worked at a bunch of startups and some bigger companies. I haven’t worked for a non-tech company (Ford) since I was 19 (when I was an undergrad I worked in the group that did the early engine control computers…a story in itself).
I think the primary contributions the tech companies make to organizational management are:
significantly decreasing the power that managers hold
treating organization problems as systems problems to be designed, measured, optimized, and debugged [as a manager, I, personally, treat human and emotional problems that way also]
high emphasis on employing top talent and very generous rewards distributed through the company**only possible in certain configurations of course.
What also went well at Google: Google avoided job categories that were, generally, likely to decrease accountability:
Google avoided the job class of architect — which was both high status and low accountability, making it an easy place for pricey senior people to park and not have much impact (Sun Microsystems was notorious for having lots and lots of architects)
Google avoided the category of project manager, which would have allowed engineering managers to avoid the grungy part of their job (and be out of touch with engineering realities). I don’t know the history of that particular orientation — we did have something called a TPM (“technical program manager”) who were intended to make deep technical contributions, not just keep track of projects.
Google exploited “level of indirection” to avoid giving managers power over their employees or the employees excess emotional bonds to their managers.
hiring committees who would remove the managers from the process of hiring and (mostly, especially in the early days) project assignment
promotion committees who would judge promotion cases, removing the power of promotion from the manager (didn’t scale well, as indicated by the link I sent you)
raises had a strong algorithmic component; promotions and bonuses were both linked to performance ratings in a way such that getting high scores (at the current level) led to big bonuses, so if an employee’s case wasn’t perfect for promotion they wouldn’t feel they were incurring a financial penalty. That gave promotion committees more liberty to say “no by default” and managers less incentive to fight like badgers to get their people promoted.
What didn’t go so well
The industry has its own weird relationship to business:product managers can be valuable if they have either strong business skills or a deep instinct for something amazing that should be built to create a business. Google (and others) explicitly treated product managers as “mini-CEOs” so they attracted a lot of people who…wanted to be a mini-CEO…but weren’t necessarily cut out for a CEO role. (At this point I have a generally low opinion of product managers and people who aspire to product management, with notable exceptions of course.)
Google- and software industry-specific: lots of developers want to make free software, lots of developers only know how to make things for other developers, so trying to be in a business where there’s deep domain knowledge required, or lots of actual business competition (where marketing, awareness, and business strategy are key) mean that overfocus on really, really smart software engineers as the almost exclusive hiring target makes it difficult to succeed.
Selling ads…I’m not in favor of it as an engine of commerce. Amazon has profound and distinguished power accrued over time by ruthless exploitation of scale in low margin industries where everyone is “making it for a dollar, selling it for two…” which makes them very dangerous for every competitor.
You get what you incent
product managers were rewarded for launching, which means they’d tend to launch and ditch
it’s hard not to reward managers for group size; Google was no different — this was the place where it was hardest to avoid fiefdoms that come with centralization of powerWhat degraded over time at Google:
Some things having to do with too much money, not necessarily related to tech management in particular:
sense of company mission vs. sense of entitlement.
pursuing company mission vs. individual advancement.
influx of people responding primarily to financial rewards (related).
Some things related to scale that might work better in an organization based on tight, interpersonal relationships (the opposite of the decreased manager power referenced above):
some processes implicitly dependent on people largely knowing one another or being one degree of separation apart (e.g., promotion)
the ability to reward creative, risky work; the ability to reward engineering work that had little visible outcome.Other companies in bits and pieces
As indicated I’m very admiring of Amazon’s strategic approach and its business-first focus. Google did a lot of awesome stuff, but it had incalculable waste and missed opportunities because of the level of pampering and scattershot approach. If you want a real tech company model, I’d pick Amazon (even though I’m not sure I’d ever work there).
Facebook is kind of nothing. It’s a product company and I (personally) don’t think the product is very compelling. I think they hit a moment and will see the fate of MySpace in time. I can’t pick out product innovations that were particularly awesome (other than incubating on college campuses and exploiting sex more or less tastefully). And, their infrastructure is pretty crude which means they’ll run into the problem, eventually, hiring the kind of people who can do the kind of scaling they’re going to need.
Apple — I don’t know a ton about them currently, but they’re old. Real old. I interviewed there some time ago and they told me they like to set arbitrary deadlines for their projects because once people are late they work harder. I didn’t pursue the job further, although I have no idea if that’s any sort of a broad practice or a current practice. What they *do* epitomize is the notion that new business models are more important than new technologies so things like flat rate data plans, $.99 songs, not licensing their OS, are real, interesting tech company contributions — I haven’t seen much of that sort of thing since Steve Jobs died, but I’m also not that close to them. That’s obviously not exclusive to tech companies, but something that may be more possible where you have new inventions.
Microsoft — the epitome of high pressure big software, abuse of market dominance, decline, and then pivot into new relevance. IBM II. I don’t know that there’s much about their culture or current business that’s particularly admirable. They’ve got this “partner” system that’s insane where they’ve set up a high stakes internal competition that just looks terrible for any kind of team cohesion or morale. I wouldn’t want to work there, either, although (like Amazon) I have a number of friends I really respect who work there. Generally, there are tradeoffs for having an environment with lots of competition for material rewards — I don’t personally like them so they won’t attract people like me… so I’d like to believe they’re terrible for business…although I’m not at all sure that’s true.
Netflix — little info, really. Competent and pivoting but I don’t know much good or bad.
Amazon — totally admirable, really scary, really effective, and very business-focused. Changing capex into opex via Cloud was one of those changes in business mode that I saw in Apple, along with “sell close to cost using Wall Street money so that no one can compete while you push down costs via scale so no one new can afford to enter the market.” They also are willing to ditch products that don’t work. It sounds like a hard place to work.
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Challenges I see in other industries: low imagination, fiefdoms / politics, inefficiency, communication problems…all could benefit from tech company input. If you’re in a low margin, low revenue business…it’s just going to be hard without the ability to attract and retain top talent, which is usually going to have a money component. But, best practices certainly help along with awareness of the importance of things like business model, systems design within the business, communication and culture, relationships to power, politics, and incentives…
Remaining challenges in tech industry: scaling and incentives (and incentives at scale :). I also see a major extrovert bias, which might seem a little funny for tech. But, again, product managers (or, God forbid, Sales people) are all really subject to the “let’s just get some people in a room” style of planning and problem resolution. I firmly believe some massive amount of productivity is squandered from people choosing the wrong communication paradigm — I think it’s often chosen for the convenience or advantage of someone who is either in an extrovert role or who is just following extrovert tendencies. Massive problem at Google, which is ironic given their composition. Amazon had some obvious nods to avoiding these sorts of things (e.g., “reading time”) but I don’t know how pervasive they were or how effective people believed them to be.
I thank the author for taking the time to do this, of course I am presenting this content, not endorsing it.
Growth Mindset Replicates!
A lot of psychological research has failed to replicate, throwing cold water on the entire field. “Grit” and the “growth mindset”, the two taglines of superstar researchers Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck, checked all the boxes for predictive failure including the requisite TED talks (Duckworth, Dweck), best-selling popular books (Duckworth, Dweck) and genius awards and, to be sure, there has been lots of puffery about the “incredible potential” and “profound impact” of grit and the growth mindset. But, to their great credit, Duckworth and Dweck have taken the replication crisis to heart and have sought to address it. Working with a large team (PI David S Yeager), the authors have tested a growth mindset intervention in 65 randomly chosen schools with over 12,000 students representative of the United States grade 9 population.
Here is what is notable: The analyses were pre-registered, the data were collected by independent researchers and key parts of the model were analyzed by independent statisticians in a blinded dataset.
To achieve arms-length independence, a research firm not involved in designing the materials or study hypotheses drew the sample, recruited schools, facilitated treatment delivery, obtained administrative data, and cleaned and merged data. Data were processed blind to treatment status.
…A random sample of schools, rather than a convenience sample, meant that it represented the full array of the U.S. public educational contexts.
… Data were analyzed following a pre-registered analysis plan (the so-called “preregistration challenge,” osf.io/afmb6/) that was developed by an interdisciplinary team, including one external evaluator. All analyses were “intent to treat” (ITT); data were analyzed as long as students saw the first page of the randomized materials.
… independent statisticians reproduced the key moderation findings by estimating a hierarchical, nonlinear Bayesian model using a blinded dataset that masked the identities of the variables, to further reduce the possibility of chance findings.
Ok, so what were the results?
Based on administrative records, 9th grade adolescents assigned to the growth mindset
intervention, as compared to the control activity, earned slightly higher GPAs in core classes at
the end of 9th grade. On a 4-point grade metric (“A” = 4.0, “B” = 3.0, etc.), the average treatment
effect was 0.03 grade points, SE = .01, N = 12,542 students, k = 65 schools, t = 3.09, P = .003.
In other words, a small, positive effect. But this small effect is coming from a small intervention, two online survey/interventions of 25 minutes each that could be easily scaled to the entire country or even worldwide. We have come a long way from the “mindset revolution” but who am I to discount a marginal revolution? Moreover, the average effect hides heterogeneity, the effect was bigger on the students who needed it most.
…as expected, average effects were small because many students
are already doing well, do not have motivational issues, or are not in environments that
encourage or support growth-mindset behaviors. When we take account of such factors, more
noteworthy effects emerge. The improvements in the gateway outcome of 9th grade GPA were
concentrated among adolescents who are at significant risk for compromised well-being and
economic welfare: those with lower levels of prior achievement attending relatively lower achieving schools. The finding that an intervention can redirect this adolescent outcome in this
sub-group, in under an hour, without training of teachers, and at scale (i.e. in a random sample
of nation’s schools), represents a significant advance.
Overall, this is a very impressive study and one that I suspect will be used to mark the beginning of the post-replication-crisis era.
The ending of the post-replication-crisis era also makes another trend clear–the future of social science will be even more hierarchical and unequal–future social science will be done by large, well-funded teams, run by superstar researchers at top universities. This study, for example, had 10 co-authors from multiple universities and probably cost well over a million dollars. The smaller the effect the bigger the team that will be needed to find it.
Addendum: A big meta-analysis out today also finds very small effects for growth mindset (correlation of growth mindset with achievement=.01) but the effects are probably real especially for academically high-risk students and low-SES students and perhaps they could be magnified by better interventions.
Hat tip: Stuart Richie.
How can families afford children?
Answer me the riddle: The richer the society becomes the less families can afford children? (Note look at India being at replacement level fertility and it is the rich areas bringing the average down.)
I have three boys and wonder how they are ever going to be able to afford a family of more than 1 children in 2030.
“Afford” is a tricky word here. If the goal is simply to avoid bankruptcy, at the expense of the life satisfaction of the main child rearer (usually the wife), that isn’t so difficult for most Americans and Europeans. But of course people wish to maximize utility. And so here are some trends operating against having large numbers of children:
1. Jobs for women are higher-paying and more satisfying than ever before, and that raises the opportunity cost of having large families.
2. Divorce is these days socially imaginable, and for many people desirable if feasible. The larger the number of children, the harder it is to take advantage of the divorce option, and so that too encourages smaller families.
3. Living space has become especially costly in so many of the major Western cities and suburbs.
4. Given the connection between where you live and your public school system, the very best neighborhoods have become very costly positional goods, in part because of their school systems and the embedded social peers for your kids (even if they bus away to private schools.)
5. Child care is subject to some version of the cost disease, as is higher education. Those services have risen in relative prices and some would say they also have decreased in reliability.
6. These days, there is much more you can do for your single kid (or two), including fancy SAT tutors and unending extracurricular activities. You thus are less likely to arrive at the “I can’t do any more for this kid, let’s summon up another to keep me busy” point than formerly was the case. In Beckerian language, you always have the option of a greater investment in quality, in lieu of boosting quantity.
7. Daughters are no longer less popular than sons and arguably they have become somewhat more popular (NYT). So the notion that you must keep on having kids until a son arrives is weaker than it used to be. The first child is already a “quality child,” no matter what the gender.
8. Most Westerners are on the whole less religious, and this too diminishes the motives for having a larger number of children, for whatever reasons.
9. The decline of the extended family, with babysitting grandparents, is hardly new news. Still, I suspect both work and leisure opportunities for the elderly have improved, which lowers their desire to babysit. Some prefer watching those same babies on Facebook.
That’s a lot of weight operating against multiple children — praise to those who manage nonetheless!
The cinematic culture that is Mexico
If Mr. del Toro wins the best director award at the Oscars, it will be the fourth time a filmmaker from Mexico has taken the prize in five years, all with unconventional films. Alejandro G. Iñárritu won in 2015 for “Birdman,” the bizarrely hilarious tale of an aging superhero actor trying to get serious on Broadway, and he did it again in 2016 with “The Revenant,” a radically different western focused on a quest for revenge in subzero temperatures. Alfonso Cuarón triumphed in 2014 with “Gravity,” a sci-fi story that many said was impossible to make, before it made over $723 million at the worldwide box office.
Referred to as “The Three Amigos,” the title of a book about their transnational cinema, these directors are not the only Mexican filmmakers who have won recent accolades in Hollywood. There is also the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who has three Oscars; Rodrigo Prieto, who shot “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Argo” and “Brokeback Mountain”; and another Oscar winner, the production designer Eugenio Caballero.
The Amigos’ success shows the strength of an artistic circle; they are longtime friends who have encouraged one another to take risks.
Here is the NYT piece by Ioan Grillo, referred to me by Kevin Lewis. Also from the NYT here is Veronique de Rugy on Trump and protectionism.
The contributions of Rene Girard
Carl L asks: Address the scapegoating theory of René Girard in general, and its possible application to economics. Peter Thiel has repeatedly cited Girard as an important influence and has even said his theory was partly the reason he invested in Facebook.
From my idiosyncratic point of view, here are a few of Girard’s major contributions, noting that I am putting them into “stupid simple” language, rather than trying to communicate his nuances:
1. His understanding of Christianity as fundamentally and radically different from earlier religions, as it exalts the individual victim rather than the conqueror. Here is one point from a summarizer: “Christianity is the revelation (the unveiling) of what the myths want to veil; it is the deconstruction of the mono-myth, not a reiteration of it—which is exactly why so many within academe want to domesticate and de-fang it.”
2. Seeing violence as a chronic problem of human societies, rather than as the result of a bug in rational choice or the collapse into a bad game-theoretic solution.
3. Understanding the import of “mimetic desire,” namely the desire to copy others, and also why this is not always an entirely peaceful process, due to scarcity. The tech world, by the way, at least pretends to have found a solution to this in its extreme scalability of product; we’ll see how that pans out.
4. A theory of mediated and triangulated desire, not yet absorbed by behavioral economics, and partly summarized here: “Whereas external mediation does not lead to rivalries, internal mediation does lead to rivalries. But, metaphysical desire leads a person not just to rivalry with her mediator; actually, it leads to total obsession with and resentment of the mediator. For, the mediator becomes the main obstacle in the satisfaction of the person’s metaphysical desire. Inasmuch as the person desires to be his mediator, such desire will never be satisfied. For nobody can be someone else. Eventually, the person developing a metaphysical desire comes to appreciate that the main obstacle to be the mediator is the mediator himself.”
5. First and foremost approaching societies from an anthropological point of view, prior to the economic method.
6. Understanding various social situations in terms of the need of finding a scapegoat to sacrifice, if not violently with some kind of resolution and catharsis. These days one of those victims would be the big tech companies, as it is remarkable how many weakly-argued critiques of them make the paper every day. You’ll understand these writings through the eyes of Girard, not economic theory. Girard is also one of the best lenses for understanding the writings of bad and manipulative pundits.
7. Girard is of great use for understanding literature. Try any Shakespearean play with “doubles,” Merchant of Venice, Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (an all-time favorite), or Coetzee’s Disgrace, all Girardian to the core and very much illuminated by familiarity with his key ideas. These are perhaps his most underrated contributions. Shakespeare, by the way, is Girard’s most important precursor, also throw in the New Testament, Hobbes, Tocqueville, and maybe Montaigne.
What should you read by him?: Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Theatre of Envy.
Where is Girard weakest: His theory of language, his overemphasis on the destructive nature of mimesis, excess claims to have discovered universal mechanisms, just making lots of stuff up, and not knowing enough economics or empirical anthropology.
How important is he?: If you had to pick twenty thinkers from the latter half of the 20th century, he is definitely one of them. By the way, Foucault and Baudrillard might be the other French writers on that list.