Results for “best book”
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Kindle and DRM and Netflix too

After reading this post, I realize I don't understand my status quo DRM rights with Kindle.  That's not a good sign.  I did notice this sentence, which I didn't feel the need to parse any further:

Here is the major problem with this scenario.

As a reader, I find it good policy to keep the number of books on my Kindle to below twenty.  That forces me to read the ones I order and it also protects me from "stranded" consumer durables.  Uncertainty and confusion about my rights only strengthens my desire to keep that policy. 

As a writer, I expect the Kindle is temporarily in my financial self-interest, as it gets more "influentials" reading my work and perhaps talking it up.  In the longer run I suspect it means a lower equilibrium price for books.  One question is whether publishers use "sticky" or inconvenient DRM practices as an implicit collusive method for limiting the spread of Kindle.

Today I was struck by this passage about the origins of Netflix:

Netflix's selection of more than 100,000 DVD rental titles is made possible by the "first-sale doctrine" of U.S. copyright law, which permits buyers of DVDs to lend them out without studios' consent.

In Netflix's early days, its buying team would sometimes purchase DVDs at local Wal-Marts or Best Buys if it couldn't get copies through studios, says Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer.

In contrast, to deliver movies and television shows over the Internet, Netflix has to license them from studios. So far, it has gotten only about 12,000 titles, a hodgepodge of older films such as "Diehard," episodes of popular TV shows including "30 Rock" and a smattering of new releases.

That's right, we had more innovation because some of the usual copyright strictures about negotiating rights did not apply.  I am pro-copyright, but once again the default settings make it too hard for successful negotiations to occur.

Zotero

Zotero is a free program for citations management and bibliography generation designed to be competitive with Endnote and similar products.  I've been using it for a couple of weeks.  Zotero lives as a Firefox extension and it's best feature is the ease with which you can import citations from the web.  If you are looking at a paper on JSTOR, for example, you can "one-click import" the citation.  One-click import is also available from Amazon, Cite-Seer, ABI-Inform, the Library of Congress, many university library catalogs, Medline, Google books and many others.

Thus it's very easy to generate a citations list in Zotero by visiting a handful of large databases – this is especially easy for books and not too hard for recent articles but it's more difficult to find older articles in online databases.  Zotero's interface is somewhat clunky so entering citations by hand is not as convenient as I would like.  In addition to grabbing the citation, Zotero can grab entire PDFs so you can keep articles and citations in one database.  Exporting of the citations in a variety of bibliographic format is clean and well done.

Zotero is only available as a Firefox extension (the developers take a perverse pride in this fact).  The developers are at GMU, although I don't know the team at all.  Zotero will import citations from another citations management program so switching is low cost.  Worth checking out.

The Singularity is Near

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the excellent Traffic, has a very good piece in the latest NYTimes Magazine on data centers.   

The specter of infinitesimal delay is why, when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s oldest, upgraded its trading platform in 2006, it decided to locate the bulk of its trading engines 80 miles – and three milliseconds – from Philadelphia, and into NJ2, where, as Thomas notes, the time to communicate between servers is down to a millionth of a second. (Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.)

…It seemed heretical to think of Karl Marx. But looking at the roomful of computers running automated trading models that themselves scan custom-formatted machine-readable financial news stories to help make decisions, you didn’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate his observation that industry will strive to “produce machines by means of machines” – as well as his prediction that the “more developed the capital,” the more it would seek the “annihilation of space by time.”

I like the quote but doubt that Marx is the best guide to this new world. try Charlie Stross instead.

My talk on economics for university administrators

Thank you all for the advice; in my talk I promoted the following ideas:

1. Many mid-level schools do not yet apply rigorous quantitative analysis in reviewing their fundraising techniques; this should change.

2. Norms will shift toward a greater inequality of rewards for lower-level staff.  Yet any single administrator who tries to bulldoze through a business-like, highly-incentivized solution does so at his or her peril.  The shift of norms will take a long time.

3. Community colleges are in many cases turning out to be stronger competitors than are for-profits.

4. The higher education bubble has burst.  The expiration of stimulus funds in 2011 will be a crushing event for many public sector universities.

5. Faculty governance is essential for tenure and curriculum decisions.  But faculty governance for setting university priorities is a big mistake.

6. The value of face-to-face classroom time (discussed in Create Your Own Economy, by the way) will prove robust.  But the very best teachers of the future will take on an increasing role as editors, collage creators, and DJs.  A brilliant scientist who doesn't understand YouTube will be crippled as a teacher.  Adjuncts may lead the wave of innovation here.

7. The way to be fiscally responsible is to refuse luxury projects in good times.  If bad times have come it is already too late.

8. Current administrators are using stimulus funds to buy off the old interest groups, under the view that these are temporary bad times.  Relative to what will come, these are "good times," and much of that surplus ought to be put in reserve funds.  That is not happening.

9. Many mid-level schools underinvest in making incremental improvements to their strong, core departments, because nobody gets much credit for that.

10. Being a good university administrator requires the right mix of idealism and cynicism and that is hard to come by.

What I’ve been reading

1. From London to Elista: The Inside Story of the Three Matches that Vladimir Kramnik Played for the World Chess Title, by Eugeny Bareev and Ilya Levitov.  Via John Nye, the quality and drama of this book stunned me.  Chess aside, the use of the dialogic form works remarkably well.

2. The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany.  Fun, philosophical, erotic, and a bestseller in the Arab world.  Many Americans don't know this book but it is worth picking up.

3. Lanark, by Alasdair Gray,  This book is as good as I remember it; I was surprised to see it has only four reviews on U.S. Amazon.  Many critics consider it the best and most creative Scottish novel of the twentieth century and of course it has tinges of science fiction and fantasy.

4. Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.  If you are drawing inferences, keep in mind this means I had not read this book to date.  It is a source for Roissy and also has some early anticipations of behavioral economics.  Sporadically interesting, I would say.

5. Time Out Barcelona. The Time Out series is the most useful resource for urban travel, including for food.  No other guide book comes close.

The new Gabriel García Márquez biography

One day [Alvaro] Mutis climbed the seven flights of stairs, carried two books into the apartment without saying hello, slapped them down on the table, and roared: "Stop fucking about and read that vaina, so you'll learn how to write!"  Whether all García Márquez's friends really swore all the time during these years we will never know — but in his anecdotes they do.  The two slim books were a novel entitled Pedro Páramo, which had been published in 1955, and a collection of stories entitled The Burning Plain (El llano en llamas), published in 1953.  The writer was the Mexican Juan Rulfo.  García Márquez read Pedro Páramo twice the first day, and The Burning Plain the next day.  He claims that he had never been so impressed by anything since he had first read Kafka; that he learned Pedro Páramo, literally, by heart; and that he read nothing else for the rest of the year because everything else seemed so inferior.

That is from the new and noteworthy Gerald Martin biography of García Márquez.  This very impressive (and enjoyable) book was seventeen years in the making.  It's also not a bad way to learn about the political and economic history of northern Colombia.  This should make any short list of either the best non-fiction books this year or the best literary biographies.  The reader also learns the probable origins of the famed spat with Mario Vargas Llosa (p.375); it had to do with a woman, namely Vargas Llosa's wife.

The decline of chewing

According to Gail Civille, in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as twenty-five times before it was ready to be swallowed; now the average American chews only ten times.

That is from David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.  This is a good book even if you've already read seven prior books on exactly the same topic.  It's the best applied study in behavioral economics to date.  I do object, however, to how the author aggregates fat, salt, and sugar, as if they were equally bad for you.

Via John Nye, here is a good article on how French baguettes are succumbing to the global trend for softer foods:

Bakers say that they are merely responding to market forces,
determined by the growing proportion of customers who demand a baguette
pas trop cuite (not too cooked). They argue that they cannot
impose a crunchy surface on a society that has grown accustomed to the
notion that food should melt in the mouth .

Mr Kaplan is appalled. “The question is: do the French care any
more, do they care about taste? When you eat their tomatoes, their
carrots and their merlotised wine, you start to wonder. Are they not
collaborating in their own cultural demise?”

…According to Kaplan, bakers are cutting cooking time – usually
between 18 and 22 minutes at 250C to 260C – by 60 seconds or more in
search of a less crusty crust.

The upshot is the loss of the Maillard reaction, a chemical process
occurring at high temperatures and leading to browning and crispiness,
that Kaplan says is vital to the production of a good loaf.

Here is Alex's earlier post on the declining quality of French bread.

Keynes’s *General Theory*, chapter 12

In practice we have tacitly agreed, as a rule, to fall back on what is, in truth, a convention. The
essence of this convention — though it does not, of course, work out
quite so simply — lies in assuming that the existing state of affairs
will continue indefinitely, except in so far as we have specific
reasons to expect a change. This does not mean that we really believe
that the existing state of affairs will continue indefinitely. We know
from extensive experience that this is most unlikely. The actual
results of an investment over a long term of years very seldom agree
with the initial expectation. Nor can we rationalise our behaviour by
arguing that to a man in a state of ignorance errors in either
direction are equally probable, so that there remains a mean actuarial
expectation based on equi-probabilities. For it can easily be shown
that the assumption of arithmetically equal probabilities based on a
state of ignorance leads to absurdities. We are assuming, in effect,
that the existing market valuation, however arrived at, is uniquely correct in
relation to our existing knowledge of the facts which will influence
the yield of the investment, and that it will only change in proportion
to changes in this knowledge; though, philosophically speaking it
cannot be uniquely correct, since our existing knowledge does not
provide a sufficient basis for a calculated mathematical expectation.
In point of fact, all sorts of considerations enter into the market
valuation which are in no way relevant to the prospective yield.

Nevertheless the above conventional method of calculation will be
compatible with a considerable measure of continuity and stability in
our affairs, so long as we can rely on the maintenance of the convention.

For if there exist organised investment markets and if we can rely
on the maintenance of the convention, an investor can legitimately
encourage himself with the idea that the only risk he runs is that of a
genuine change in the news over the near future, as to the
likelihood of which he can attempt to form his own judgment, and which
is unlikely to be very large. For, assuming that the convention holds
good, it is only these changes which can affect the value of his
investment, and he need not lose his sleep merely because he has not
any notion what his investment will be worth ten years hence. Thus
investment becomes reasonably “safe” for the individual investor over
short periods, and hence over a succession of short periods however
many, if he can fairly rely on there being no breakdown in the
convention and on his therefore having an opportunity to revise his
judgment and change his investment, before there has been time for much
to happen. Investments which are “fixed” for the community are thus
made “liquid” for the individual.

It has been, I am sure, on the basis of some such procedure as this
that our leading investment markets have been developed. But it is not
surprising that a convention, in an absolute view of things so
arbitrary, should have its weak points. It is its precariousness which
creates no small part of our contemporary problem of securing
sufficient investment.

The insights here have yet to be fully mined.

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

That's the new book by Geoffrey Miller, of The Mating Mind fame.  The exposition is a bit of a sprawling mess but the best pages of content are fascinating.  I recommend it and I am glad that I started reading it the moment I got my hands on it.

The core thesis is the Veblenesque point that marketing plays upon our weaknesses as evolved, biological creatures, obsessed with signaling:

From my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist, this is how consumerist capitalism really works: it makes us forget our natural adaptations for showing off desirable fitness-related traits.  It deludes us into thinking that artificial products work much better than they really do for showing off these traits.  It confuses us about the traits we are trying to display by harping on vague terms at the wrong levels of description (wealth, status, taste), and by obfuscating the most stable, heritable, and predictive traits discovered by individual differences research.  It hints coyly at the possible status and sexual payoffs for buying and displaying premium products, but refuses to make such claims explicit, lest consumer watchdogs find those claims empirically false, and lest significant others get upset by the personal motives they reveal.  The net result could be called the fundamental consumerist delusion — that other people care more about the artificial products you display through consumerist spending than about the natural traits you display through normal conversation, cooperation, and cuddling.

I very much agree.  Miller also tells us that we can do better and offers us some (non-regulatory) proposals for lowering the cost of our signaling.  (Don't buy a luxury car!)  Would it be cheaper and more effective to wear credible, verifiable tattoos of our personality types from the six-factor model?

I'll be considering more from this book soon.

Is it wrong to buy sex?

The Intelligence Squared debate is now on YouTube.  If you will recall, Lionel Tiger and the Mayflower Madam were on my side, against Wendy Shalit, Catherine Mackinnon, and Melissa Farley.  They won and you will find Alex's interpretation here.  A few observations:

1. Catherine Mackinnon's closer was I thought the single best speech in the debate.

2. I was very pleased to have met and chatted with Wendy Shalit, as we hit it off very well; you'll find her books here.

3. I believed throughout that it would hurt my side of the debate to suggest that men would enjoy the experience of buying sex; the sociology of that fact is itself interesting.

4. During Q&A I was asked whether a woman raped at a very young age can later be said to have exercised autonomous choice in her decision to become a prostitute.  The premise of the question was "obviously not" but is it so simple?  Does everyone who was once a helpless victim, in a terrible way, lose autonomy?  The implications of that world view frighten me.

5. Legalization advocates still could use a better account of why this market, even when it is legal or quasi-legal, seems so prone to abuse.

New Deal Revisionism

The NYTimes has a short piece in the arts section on "new deal revisionism."  Rich Vedder gets the best line:

Mr. Vedder playfully offered another analogy: the recession of 1920. Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said.

Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health – or obliviousness – on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.

By the way, I am looking forward to hearing Bob Higgs on C-Span this weekend.  Higgs is a top-rate economic historian from whom I learn something new everytime I hear him.

Wars, Guns, and Votes

The subtitle is Democracy in Dangerous Places and the author is Paul Collier.  Here are three bits:

Anke and I have estimated the proportion of Africa's private wealth that is held outside the region.  By 2004 it had reached the astounding figure of 36 percent: more than a third of Africa's own wealth is outside the region.

And:

Collectively, the countries of the bottom billion are spending around $9 billion on the military, of which up to 40 percent is being financed by donors.

And:

The history of Britain post-403 makes the post-colonial history of Africa look like a staggering success.

The key point of the book is how and why democracy doesn't work so well for the bottom billion.  The early discussion of the incentives facing quasi-democratic governments is dysfunctional societies is brilliant.  It's the best discussion I've seen of why "produce better government" is not the prevailing incentive in such societies.  You can learn why ethnic diversity lowers the value of public sector activity but raises private sector productivity, why skills for construction are often a binding constraint in very poor societies, why the social returns to peacekeeping are so high, why Kalashnikovs are cheaper in Africa, why there are fewer civil wars in larger countries, and how the Ivory Coast went from development model to disaster.

One main policy recommendation that the West should promise "coup-proof" defensive interventions to any African government which abides by real democratic elections.  Can this work?

The claimed takeaway is that African nations have too much sovereignty, not too little. 

It's not a perfect book.  Collier describes his work frequently, and fairly (he doesn't overclaim), but often I would have liked to hear more about the broader literature as well.

Paul Collier has done it again.  This will be one of the "must buy" books of this year.  Buy it here.

Should chess moves be subject to copyright?

There has been a controversy:

Last week, ChessBase was apparently ‘forced to cease Internet broadcasting of the Topalov-Kamsky match’. As we noted
in our report on the first match game, live broadcasting of the chess
moves in this match without permission was prohibited by the Bulgarian
Chess Federation (although they didn’t seem to have a problem with
Chessdom’s, Crestbook’s, ICC’s and TWIC’s live coverage). This has led
to heated discussions on this site. The key question here is: can you copyright a chess move at all?

Plus this is transmission over the internet, so which law applies?  As I understand U.S. law, you can put chess moves into a book and the players have no rights to residual income from that book.  Which is how it should be.  Transferring income to chess players is not a goal per se.  Useful chess books usually contain many games, and requiring rights permission would make the volume harder to assemble.

Maybe grandmasters would play more games, or play better games, if they could charge for rights of reproduction.  When it comes to playing more games, I suspect there is already an ample supply of games and easy reproduction will do more to increase real consumption than spurring more contests over the board.  If anything is underproduced, it is the salience of the games which have been played (take a game between two 2550 players and call it "Clash of the Titans" and produce more excitement; most chess players won't know the difference between that and a game between the two best players at 2770.) 

And better chess?  I believe the effort elasticity is low with respect to residual rights income from reporting of the games.

Comparable debates have been held over residual rights to reporting real time stock prices and NBA scores.

Scott Sumner’s open letter to Paul Krugman

Here is the excellent Scott Sumner: an open letter to Paul Krugman.  It's also the best recovery plan I've seen so far, by far.  It's too good to excerpt, so you'll have to click through and read the whole thing.  From my point of view, right now the whole world should be beating a path to Scott Sumner's door.

He has two unpublished book manuscripts and he probably would be free to meet with President Obama as well.