Results for “best book” 2009 found
*Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power*
I quite liked this book, which is by Jon Meacham. Here is the bit best suited to MR:
“She [Sally Hemings] was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved,” said Madison Hemings. “So she refused to return with him.”
It was an extraordinary moment. Fresh from arranging terms with the bankers of Europe over a debt that was threatening the foundation of the French nation, Thomas Jefferson found himself in negotiations with a pregnant enslaved teenager who, in a reversal of fortune hardly likely to be repeated, had the means at hand to free herself.
…So he began making concessions to convince Sally Hemings to come home to Virginia. “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years,” Madison Hemings said.
Sally Hemings agreed…
Their father kept the promise he had made to Sally in Paris. “We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born,” Madison Hemings said. It was one of the most important pacts of Jefferson’s life.
Robert Solow on Hayek and Friedman and MPS
The TNR essay is here, prompted by the publication of Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Great Depression. Excerpt:
The MPS was no more influential inside the economics profession. There were no publications to be discussed. The American membership was apparently limited to economists of the Chicago School and its scattered university outposts, plus a few transplanted Europeans. “Some of my best friends” belonged. There was, of course, continuing research and debate among economists on the good and bad properties of competitive and noncompetitive markets, and the capacities and limitations of corrective regulation. But these would have gone on in the same way had the MPS not existed. It has to be remembered that academic economists were never optimistic about central planning. Even discussion about the economics of some conceivable socialism usually took the form of devising institutions and rules of behavior that would make a socialist economy function like a competitive market economy (perhaps more like one than any real-world market economy does). Maybe the main function of the MPS was to maintain the morale of the free-market fellowship.
Solow neglects to mention that Milton Friedman turned out to be right on most of the issues he discussed (though targeting money doesn’t work), that MPS economists shaped at least two decades of major and indeed beneficial economic reforms across the world, or that some number of the economists at MIT envied the growth performance of the Soviet Union and that such remarks were found in the most popular economics textbook in the profession. You can consider this essay a highly selective, error-laden, and disappointing account of a topic which could in fact use more serious scrutiny.
By the way, if you read Solow’s own 1962 review of Maurice Dobb on economic planning (JSTOR gate), it shows very little understanding of Hayek’s central points on these topics, which by then were decades old. Arguably it shows “negative understanding” of Hayek.
Or to see how important Friedman’s work on money and also expectations was, try comparing it with…um…the Solow and Samuelson 1960 piece on the Phillips Curve (JSTOR), which Friedman pretty much refuted point by point. Here is the closing two sentences of that piece:
We have not here entered upon the important question of what feasible institutional reforms might be introduced to lessen the degree of disharmony between full employment and price stability.These could of course involve such wide-ranging issues as direct price and wage controls, antiunion and antitrust legislation, and a host of other measures hopefully designed to move the American Phillips’ curves downward and to the left.
And Solow wonders why the Mont Pelerin Society and monetarism were needed. Solow should have started his piece with a sentence like “Milton Friedman was not right about everything, but most of his criticisms of my earlier views have been upheld by subsequent economic theory and practice….”
Greg Ransom…telephone!
For the pointer I thank Peter Boettke.
Simon Blackburn suffers from mood affiliation
Via Ross Douthat, here is the close of Blackburn’s review of the new Thomas Nagel book:
There is charm to reading a philosopher who confesses to finding things bewildering. But I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence. It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off. If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.
The Nagel book continues to go up in my eyes.
Why Milk?
Throughout evolutionary history, most adult homo sapiens could not drink milk. Even today, most adults cannot drink milk. Adults who cannot drink milk don’t seem to lose very much, particularly as they can still eat yogurt and cheese. And yet the gene that allowed some adults to drink milk spread incredibly rapidly suggesting massive advantages to milk drinkers. Why? No one knows for sure but it seems to coincide with civilization. Slate has more:
[A]round 10,000 B.C….a genetic mutation appeared, somewhere near modern-day Turkey, that jammed the lactase-production gene permanently in the “on” position. The original mutant was probably a male who passed the gene on to his children. People carrying the mutation could drink milk their entire lives. Genomic analyses have shown that within a few thousand years, at a rate that evolutionary biologists had thought impossibly rapid, this mutation spread throughout Eurasia, to Great Britain, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, India and all points in between, stopping only at the Himalayas. Independently, other mutations for lactose tolerance arose in Africa and the Middle East, though not in the Americas, Australia, or the Far East.
In an evolutionary eye-blink, 80 percent of Europeans became milk-drinkers; in some populations, the proportion is close to 100 percent. (Though globally, lactose intolerance is the norm; around two-thirds of humans cannot drink milk in adulthood.) The speed of this transformation is one of the weirder mysteries in the story of human evolution, more so because it’s not clear why anybody needed the mutation to begin with.
…A “high selection differential” is something of a Darwinian euphemism. It means that those who couldn’t drink milk were apt to die before they could reproduce. At best they were having fewer, sicklier children. That kind of life-or-death selection differential seems necessary to explain the speed with which the mutation swept across Eurasia and spread even faster in Africa. The unfit must have been taking their lactose-intolerant genomes to the grave.
…The rise of civilization coincided with a strange twist in our evolutionary history. We became, in the coinage of one paleoanthropologist, “mampires” who feed on the fluids of other animals. Western civilization, which is twinned with agriculture, seems to have required milk to begin functioning. No one can say why.
Hat tip: John Chilton.
*The Bretton Woods Transcripts*
That is the new eBook edited by Kurt Schuler and Andrew Rosenberg. I cannot open the file they sent along to me, but Amazon summarizes:
The Bretton Woods Transcripts is the confidential, verbatim record of meetings of the historic conference that established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Bretton Woods conference, named after the New Hampshire town where the conference was held in July 1944, began a new era in international economic cooperation that continues today. Delegates from 44 countries attended the conference. The best known then and now was John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century.
A companion Web site for the book contains extensive background material, including photos of the original transcripts and previously unreleased conference documents: http://www.centerforfinancialstability.org/brettonwoods.php
*Mismatch*
The authors are Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and the subtitle is How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.
Here is the book’s website, and a summary:
… law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr. draw on extensive new research to prove that racial preferences put many students in educational settings where they have no hope of succeeding. Because they’re under-prepared, fewer than half of black affirmative action beneficiaries in American law schools pass their bar exams. Preferences for well-off minorities help shut out poorer students of all races. More troubling still, major universities, fearing a backlash, refuse to confront the clear evidence of affirmative action’s failure.
As you may know, the Supreme Court starts hearing oral arguments on affirmative action on October 9th. I have not much followed the empirical debate on affirmative action, but it seems to me this is likely the best recent book on the “anti” side. On the pro side, you can read The Shape of the River, by William Bowen and Derek Bok.
From the Institute for New Economic Thinking
We would like to introduce our new blog on the website of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) entitled ‘Reading Mas-Colell’, which will initially run in the fall of 2012, alongside our teaching of a course which uses the textbook on microeconomics by Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green. We hope to make a modest contribution to economic thinking by engaging in selective close reading and commentary on a very influential text, which in certain ways has become a ‘Bible’.
Our goal is to help through the blog to change the way in which economics teaching is approached at the Ph.D. level (many agree that it is limited and limiting). We hope to generate a lively conversation on how economics is taught and practiced today.
You can find the blog on the INET website at:
http://ineteconomics.org/blog/reading-mas-colell
We very much hope that you and your readers will participate in the conversation that we hope to generate.
Best wishes,
Sanjay G. Reddy and Raphaele Chappe
My all-time favorite things Ontario
1. Short story author: Alice Munro I consider one of the very best writers ever, from anywhere or any period. Read them all, and there is a new collection coming this November. Here is one place to start.
2. Movie, set in: Dead Ringers, by David Cronenberg, one of my favorite films period.
3. Director: After Cronenberg there is James Cameron, hate me if you want but I find his movies splendid. Sarah Polley remains underrated in the United States, start with Away From Her, another of my all-time favorites.
4. Novelist: Margaret Atwood, especially Cat’s Eye. I used to like Robertson Davies, but somehow his novels have not stuck with me.
5. Pianist: I used to think that only half of Glenn Gould’s recordings were tolerable, but in the last five years I have come to see his Haydn and Brahms recordings as masterpieces. Now it’s only the Mozart and Beethoven I can’t stand. Don’t forget the Berg Sonata and of course the Bach and also his writings.
6. Architect: Frank Gehry comes to mind, though I do not like the new rendition of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
7. Alanis Morissette song: “Head Over Feet.”
8. Comedian: I love Mike Myers in “Wayne’s World” and Jim Carrey in “Ace Ventura” and “The Cable Guy.”
9. Favorite Neil Young album: Everybody Knows this is Nowhere.
10. Blogger: Ahem! Cory Doctorow deserves mention too.
We haven’t even touched the painters.
What strikes me is not only how strong this list is, but how little thought was required to compile it.
Imitation Ain’t Easy
On the Syfy tv show Alphas one of the characters is able to see something once and learn it perfectly. Thus, she can learn a martial art, or how to fix a car, or how to speak a language just by imitation. This ability is rightly considered a superpower. Yet, in economic models it’s assumed that everyone has this ability.
Imitation, however, is difficult even when knowledge is freely available. In Launching I give the example of The French Laundry Cookbook which promises that with “exact recipes” and “simple methods” that “you can now re-create at home the very experience the Wine Spectator described as ‘as close to dining perfection as it gets.'” Yet despite exact recipes and simple methods we don’t see imitations of the restaurant twice named the best in the world popping up in Muncie, Indiana (trust me on that one).
Similarly, in Apple v. Samsung the jury found that Samsung copied Apple and indeed they copied Apple well enough to survive but nowhere near well enough to eliminate Apple’s monopoly power as Eli Dourado points out:
According to a recent article at Fortune, Apple sells 8.8% of mobile phones, but it has 73% of profits in the market. Samsung sells 23.5% of phones and earns 26% of profits. Everyone else is barely breaking even or losing money.
This does not look like a market in which Apple’s competitors are successfully copying it. It looks like a market in which Apple’s competitors are trying to copy Apple, and failing.
The point of patents is to incentivize innovation through a grant of monopoly. But what Apple’s success, pre-verdict, clearly shows is that in many markets, mobile computing among them, it’s a lot harder to copy innovations than you think. Apple’s real innovation is putting designers in charge and building a corporate culture in which everything is subordinated to making elegant products that people want to use. I’d like to see Samsung try to copy that, but I think the difficulty of doing so gives Apple all the monopoly it needs.
On the Origin of Specie
An article in The Economist (from which I have nabbed the title of this post) argues that money, particularly coins, had to have “developed not as a private-sector attempt to minimise the costs of trading, but as a government operation.” In fact, there are many examples of private coinage. In an earlier post on George Selgin’s excellent book Good Money I wrote about private coinage in Britain:
At the dawn of the industrial revolution as workers left the fields and moved to industrial employment the demand for a means of payment increased dramatically. Workers, once paid in kind, needed to be paid in a medium they could use to buy the necessities of life. Small-tender bank notes, however, were illegal and in Great Britain the production of coin was monopolized by the Royal Mint which failed to provide enough high quality coin to meet the demands of workers and business.
The Royal Mint had neither the will nor the technology to meet demand. In a story reminiscent of the Soviet nail factory one historian explained the incentives of the Royal Mint:
The public coiner, the Royal Mint, was charged with providing a stipulated amount of coinage each year rather than a stipulated number of coins. It did not take the eighteenth-century equivalent of rocket science to figure out that it was far easier to strike, say, a thousand golden guineas than 504,000 copper halfpence (24 x 21 x 1,000). The less-than-overworked denizens of Tower Hill cheered the discovery… But even had the Royal Mint been more co-operative, more inclined to rise to the challenge presented by the new wage earners, it would have been hard-put to assist. It still relied on antiquated machinery inherited from an earlier epoch….
The private sector responded, if the public sector would not.
To meet this shortage, Birmingham button makers started to coin tokens which circulated widely as money. Counterfeits and forgeries were common, however. Frustrated with the shortage of good money, Matthew Boulton, James Watt’s business partner, hit on the idea of using Watt’s steam engine to create steam presses. The new presses could apply more force thereby creating precise edging that would be difficult to forge or clip and they could do so on a mass scale. You can read the fascinating story in Selgin’s Good Money but suffice it to say that Boulton was eventually successful in producing the best coinage the world had ever seen not only for Great Britain but also for India, Singapore, Bermuda and elsewhere. Nor was Boulton’s the only example of private coinage. See Selgin’s post at Free Banking for U.S., Japanese and other examples.
Here are some of the coins from Boulton’s Soho Mint.
*Restless Empire*
The author is Odd Arne Westad and the subtitle is China and the World Since 1750. Excerpt:
…the Chinese on Cuba joined others in rebellion. Two thousand fought in the Cuban forces in the first war of independence in the 1870s. Some of the Chinese soldiers must have had battle experience, probably from the Taiping Rebellion, and they played a substantial role in the struggle for Cuban freedom up to 1902. A monument to the fallen Chinese in Havana has the following inscription: “There was not one Cuban Chinese deserter, not one Cuban Chinese traitor.”
I found this to be an excellent book and a very good starting place for unraveling the current foreign policy crises in Asia. It does a very good job explaining the sore spots from the past.
As you may know, one of my views is that most people underrate the chance of a (non-trivial) war in Asia in the next twenty years. I regard this chance as at least p = .05, and I do not think it is priced into securities markets at nearly that high a level. Historically, wars are not always easily predicted in advance. They tend to be correlated with the rise of major powers and with regional disruptions. In many countries nationalism and regional rivalries run rampant. It is not obvious to me that the United States is in a position to hold the whole region together.
In any case, this book will make my “one of the best of the year” list.
Assorted links
Assorted links
1. A decentralist defense of the minimum wage?
2. MIE: restaurants that will serve your dog (as customer).
3. Progress in athletic performance.
4. Can poor teachers learn to become good ones?
5. New Fuchsia Dunlop cookbook due February 2013, pre-order here.
I wonder if this is actually true
Researchers who have scanned books published over the past 50 years report an increasing use of words and phrases that reflect an ethos of self-absorption and self-satisfaction.
“Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960,” a research team led by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge writes in the online journal PLoS One. “We believe these data provide further evidence that American culture has become increasingly focused on individualistic concerns.”
Their results are consistent with those of a 2011 study which found that lyrics of best-selling pop songs have grown increasingly narcissistic since 1980. Twenge’s study encompasses a longer period of time—1960 through 2008—and a much larger set of data.
Here is more.
Libertarianism and the Workplace II
Over at Crooked Timber Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch are upset about what they call lack of freedom in the workplace. (Tyler offers his excellent comments immediately below.) They give a grab bag of peculiar examples such as workers can be fired for donating a kidney to their boss, carrying on extramarital affairs, participating in group sex at home, cross-dressing, and more. They seem especially incensed that workers can be commanded to pee or be forbidden to pee. (I will put aside that mandatory drug tests are greatly encouraged by the war on drugs.)
In other words, the CTrs have discovered that the most basic US employment law is at-will employment which means that workers can be fired for just about any reason, outside of a few protected categories such as race, sex, and age. Simply put, an employer can fire you if she doesn’t like you. This is a surprise? No one has a right to a job, a job is an agreement to exchange services for cash and compensation and both parties must agree to the exchange to make it legitimate.
The CTrs do not adequately acknowledge that workers have the same rights as employers. Workers can quit for any reason and they can refuse to work for any employer. If you don’t like the politics of Monsanto, or the NRA or Georgia-Pacific you don’t have to work or even apply for those jobs. Indeed, workers have more rights than employers since workers are not subject to anti-discrimination law; that is, employers are prohibited from discriminating against African American workers but workers are not prohibited from discriminating against African American employers.
If you think that the freedom to quit is without value bear in mind that under feudalism and into the early 19th century in the U.S. and a bit later in Britain employers and even potential employers could prevent workers from quitting and from moving. The freedom to quit was hard won. We should not disparage the liberation brought by a free market in labor.
Turning to the economics, the CTrs are so outraged by an employer’s legal possibilities that they fail to notice that most employers do not in fact fire their workers for having extra-marital affairs. Why not? The reason is that these rights are often more valuable to the employee than to the employer and thus both employee and employer can be made better off if the employee keeps the rights. If the employer values the right more than employee then the employer buys the right with a higher wage. If the employee values the right more than the employer then the employee retains the right at an otherwise lower wage. The employer gets the right only when the employer pays. The same thing is true of control rights, residual rights not explicitly noted in the contract (because of complexity and unforeseen events). The employer buys these rights from the worker when doing so maximizes the total value of the exchange. This is not to say that abuses do not occur, they do, as in all relationships and on both sides, but the CTrs lump abuses and mutually profitable exchanges together–that’s dangerous because in regulating abuses it is very easy to do away with mutually profitable exchanges.
The greater the productivity of workers and the higher their incomes the less workers will be willing to sell rights for higher wages (i.e. the more willing they will be to pay for better working conditions with lower wages). Workers gain more autonomy as they and their society become more productive. Thus, the best protector of worker autonomy is high productivity and economic growth. (The best protector not the only protector, unions can also serve a useful purpose in this regard as can shareholders and human resource departments.)
If the CTrs were merely arguing for greater economic growth there would be little with which to argue –who doesn’t want bigger televisions and better working conditions? The CTrs, however, confuse wealth and political freedom. Bigger televisions don’t make you more free and neither do better working conditions, even though both goods are desirable.
A job is an exchange with mutual consent and benefits on both sides of the bargain. The freedom is in the right to exchange not in the price at which the exchange occurs. A worker who is paid for 8 hours of work is not a serf 1/3rd of the day. We all sell our labor and we would all like to sell at a higher price but that does not make any of us serfs. From the minimum wage waiter to the highly-paid sports superstar there is dignity in work freely chosen.
To understand freedom and true coercion let us remember that American workers have the freedom to bargain and exchange with American employers, a freedom that gun, barbed wire and electrified fence deny to many millions of less fortunate workers from around the world.