Results for “best book” 1835 found
The worst case scenario?
My take on the B of A buyout is that Hank is piling up all the ****
into one huge **** on B of A’s books so that when they go under it is
clearly too big to fail and can be handled in one fell swoop.
That’s from a comment at calculatedrisk.blogspot.com. That view is an outlier, but it’s always worth knowing the worst case scenario. At least it explains why B of A is interested in such a hasty deal with a losing business partner. Here is Paul Krugman’s column. Here is Felix Salmon on the unlucky Damien Hirst. Arnold Kling outlines the best case scenario, which is right now a better forecast than the worst case scenario. On another front, maybe Lehman bonuses will be clawed back.
Magnus #1?
17 year old Magnus Carlsen won a chess game today and is probably now, unofficially, ranked #1 in the world. (World champion Anand lost and fell behind in rating points.) Here is an illuminating recent profile of Magnus. I believe Paul Samuelson is the closest to an economics prodigy we have had. He was thirty-two when his Foundations of Economic Analysis was published but I have heard that he wrote the book at a much earlier age (does anyone know the exact age?). He was probably one of the best economists in the world when he received his undergraduate degree at Chicago at the age of 20. Frank Ramsey is another example of an economics prodigy although he didn’t even think of himself as an economist per se. Can you think of other prodigies in mathematical economics? I attribute their scarcity to the relative aesthetic poverty of mathematical economics (for most people it’s not that fun or beautiful) rather than the need for complementary experience-acquired wisdom. Do you agree?
Addendum: Andrew Gelman considers statistics.
My Favorite Things Alaska
All this attention is being devoted to Alaska, so I thought I should do my own evaluation. Note in advance that politicians don’t usually make these lists, they’re not "favorite" enough for me. And enough about her for now anyway (though I’ll note in passing, in response to Andrew Sullivan and others, that if voters want to like her, they’ll simply refuse to see McCain in the properly cynical light); but no more comments on this issue for now as I want the blogosphere back!
1. Novel, set in: Jack London’s Call of the Wild or White Fang are the obvious choices. Did you know that London’s fiction was very widely read in the former Soviet Union?
2. Music: There’s Jewel and Bette Midler and maybe you’re all wondering which one I will pick. But the excellent Kevin Johansen, also associated with Buenos Aires I might add, is the proverbial rabbit from the hat. Ha!
3. Movie, set in: Both Never Cry Wolf and Grizzly Man are very good; the former had a lead character named Tyler before the name became fashionable. And isn’t Nanook of the North set in Alaska? Into the Wild is another pick and I doubt if I have exhausted the list.
4. Basketball player: Carlos Boozer is from Juneau.
5. Sculpture: Alaska is probably #1 in the entire United States once you consider the indigenous peoples. The best works are from the 1950s and 60s and they are not always attributable. My personal favorite is Thomassie Annanok but of course that is a matter of taste. Ingo Hessel’s book on Inuit Art is a favorite of mine, noting that it focuses more on Canada than Alaska.
6. Other arts: The Tlingit (some of whom live in Canada) have excellent totem poles, boxes, and carvings. The Haida are another rich artistic tradition.
7. Novel, set in: Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is the obvious pick plus I hear The Cloud Atlas (The Liam Callanan book, not the David Mitchell one, which is very good but not connected to Alaska) is good.
8. Travel book, set in: Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings is lovely. I’ve never read John Muir’s Travels in Alaska but it is likely a contender.
9. Blogger: Hail Ben Muse of Alaska, advocate of free trade!
The bottom line: It relies too much on "set in," but overall the list is better than I had been expecting. Sadly, Alaska is the one American state I have yet to visit.
Assorted links
1. Why don’t all peoples form neat, orderly lines?
2. Japan will label carbon footprints for many items
3. Charles Mann, on our eroding supply of dirt and the economics of soil. I am a big fan of Mann (he wrote the superb 1491) and this is one of the best magazine pieces of this year if not the best. On top of all the good economics in this piece, learn how the "black revolution" — putting carbon in the soil — may solve agricultural problems and alleviate global warming at the same time. Hat tip to Kottke.
4. The latest: "Chile’s lower house of congress has suspended plans to boost a $1,626 gasoline subsidy for each of its members."
My favorite things Chile
1. Fiction: I’ve already covered Roberto Bolaño plenty on MR; The Savage Detectives is his masterpiece but it’s all worth reading. The massive 2666 is due out later this year. José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night, while hardly read in the U.S., seems to me one of the most gripping novels of the 20th century. If you read the Amazon reviews you’ll that others who have read it agree. This is one of the least read first-rate novels I know. It’s not easy going, however, and it’s taking me a long time to read through a mish-mash of the English and Spanish-language texts. To top it all off, Isabel Allende has many fun books, most notably The House of the Spirits, which almost everyone will enjoy. Chile is much stronger in literature than most people think.
2. Popular music: Ricardo Villalobos is the lead figure of Chilean techno, which is now I hear quite a vibrant genre; Taka Taka is quite a good mix album. What else can you point me to?
3. Poetry: My favorite Neruda is Canto General, his retelling of Whitman’s America but covering the entire hemisphere. A masterpiece. Estravagario is excellent and while I haven’t read Residencia de la Tierra, it is considered another one of his classics. The love poems are very nice though perhaps not his best material. In any case he is one of the three or four best poets of the twentieth century. Gabriela Mistral is talented but I cannot say I love her work.
4. Playwright: Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden is good.
5. Favorite small town: There are so many, but how about Villarica, Punta Arenas, or that small port place next to La Serena whose name I cannot remember? Chile is one of the world’s best countries for lovely small towns.
6. Movie, set in or made in: Sorry folks, but I can’t think of a single one. What am I missing?
7. Seafood dish: Curantos.
8. Pianist: It’s hard not to pick Claudio Arrau, but, despite his musical intelligence, I don’t actually enjoy most of his (to me) lugubrious recordings. I have heard he was much better live in concert.
9. Painter: Roberto Matta is the obvious choice.
The bottom line: Writing, writing, and more writing. More generally, Chile is one of the very nicest countries on Earth. The key is to get around to those small towns.
Against Intellectual Monopoly
Against Intellectual Monopoly is a relentless, pounding, take no prisoners attack on patent and copyright law. It joins Lessig’s Free Culture and Heller’s The Gridlock Economy as an instant classic and a must-read on these issues.
Many people argue that the patent system has gone wrong in recent years, Boldrin and Levine argue that the patent system was rotten from the start. James Watt they say was a "scoundrel" who with his politically-connected partner Matthew Boulton used the patent system to crush their innovative opposition and delay the industrial revolution.
During the period of Watt’s patents, the United Kingdom added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt’s patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Watt’s patent; however between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five.
Will books be published without copyright? Boldrin and Levine point out that the 9-11 Commission Report was profitably published by Norton despite being available free for download. Not to mention the fact that most of the great works of literature were published without copyright. Boldrin and Levine are top-notch theorists but AIM is widely accessible and it succeeds best with its many historical discussions and contemporary anecdotes.
AIM does suffer in places from a lack of a lack of nuance and a surprising ability to ignore trade-offs. Boldrin and Levine argue, for example, that among the reasons we don’t need patents are a) because ideas aren’t copied immediately, they take time to diffuse, b) first movers have significant advantages and c) trade secrecy is often a more effective "means of appropriating returns" than patents.
Quite right on all three counts but each of these reasons also explains why patents are less costly than one might at first imagine. After all, what Boldrin and Levine are really saying is that intellectual monopoly would exist even without intellectual property law.
A standard model used to explain why patents might be useful implicitly
assumes that ideas are transmitted instantly at zero cost. Boldrin
and Levine smash the premise of this argument but the premise is sufficient for the conclusion not
necessary. Indeed, once you acknowledge that the slow diffusion of ideas helps entrepreneurs to appropriate the returns to their innovations it becomes an open question of how slow is best? When is the appropriability of returns strong and when is it weak? Doesn’t it differ for different goods? Shouldn’t intellectual property law recognize these differences? It’s clear, for example, that ideas are diffusing more quickly than ever before. On Boldrin and Levine’s argument, faster diffusion of ideas implies lower appropriability and thus a stronger argument for intellectual property law. Needless to say Boldrin and Levine are too busy using
a "mallet to smash shiny myths" to make this argument. (To be fair, they are more nuanced in
the conclusion.).
Similarly, Boldrin and Levine argue that the larger the market the less patent protection is needed, hence globalization implies less patent protection. Again, quite right (see also my paper, Patent Theory versus Patent Law, on this point). But you won’t see Boldrin and Levine drawing the corollary conclusion that more intellectual property rights are optimal the smaller the market, despite the fact that we have a very successful example where increased patent rights for smaller markets generated considerably more innovation, namely the Orphan Drug Act.
For economists, it’s also surprising how little marginal analysis you find in AIM. For example, Boldrin and Levine ask, Did Rowling really need a billion dollars to write Harry Potter? Surely, a few million would have been enough. But that’s like saying that taxing lottery winnings won’t reduce the number of buyers because the winner will still get a huge return on her dollar of investment.
The bottom line is that that there is a Laffer curve for innovation – more appropriability increases innovation at first but innovation declines when appropriability extends too far. I agree with Boldrin and Levine that rent-seeking has put us on the wrong side of the Laffer curve for innovation. We need to reduce intellectual monopoly with patent reform, less copyright protection, and a greater use of patent substitutes like prizes. But unfortunately, when it comes to innovation there is no invisible hand theorem which moves us automatically to the top of the curve.
Good quotations about India
This one comes from Borges:
India is larger than the world.
It’s also cited in the new Paul Theroux book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, which is occasionally entertaining but not up to his best material.
The Street Porter and the Philosopher
That’s the new book edited by David Levy and Sandra Peart; the subtitle is Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism, an issue which arises frequently on this blog. The book offers an excellent dialogue between Buchanan and Warren Samuels, the best essay on Adam Smith’s theory of usury, Deirdre McCloskey on "Sacred Economics," my essay on "Is a Novel a Model?", Crampton and Farrant reinterpreting the socialist calculation debate, and the Rawls-Buchanan correspondence, among other treats. If you live in the world of "interesting economics," this is definitely a book to pick up.
By the way, Larry Mason wrote a novel which he claims is a model; I haven’t had time to read it yet. Plus the new novel by Russ Roberts, which illustrates economic concepts, seems to be out now.
Group Theory in the Bedroom
I had never thought of this:
In a sense, base 3 is the best of the integer bases because 3 is the integer closest to e…Suppose you are creating one of those dreaded telephone menu systems — press 1 to be inconvenienced, press 2 to be condescended to, and so forth. If there are many choices, what is the best way to organize them? Should you build a deep hierarchy with lots of little menus that each offer just a few options? Or is it better to flatten teh structure into a few long menus? In this situation a reasonable goal is to minimize the number of options that the wretched caller must listen to before finally reaching his or her destination. The problem is analogous to that of representing an integer in positional notation: the number of items per menu corresponds to the radix r, and the number of menus is analogous to the width w. The average number of choices to be endured is minimized when there are three items per menu.
I have no idea if it is correct. It is from the often quite interesting Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions, by Brian Hayes.
Grand New Party
The authors, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, invited me to their book party at Borders — and I wanted to meet them — but no I must stay home and read and blog their book! (I wrote this post last night.) If there was rush hour road pricing, as indeed they propose, I would have been there in a flash but no I am munching on cherries on my sofa.
The subtitle is "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" and the Amazon link is here. Their favored policies include the following (with varying degrees of enthusiasm/utopianism on their part):
1. Family-friendly tax reform.
2. Sprawl is OK or at least it could be with rational traffic management policies.
3. Government reinsurance for catastrophic health care expenses, plus they consider the Brad DeLong health care plan.
4. Abolition of the payroll tax for many lower-income earners.
5. Allocate money to public schools on a student-weighted basis, as is done in San Francisco.
6. Reallocate funding toward lower-tier state universities and away from flagship schools.
7. Don’t expect old-style unions to come back.
That is only a sampling. The broader vision is that the Republicans can and must find a way to be more friendly to the non-rich. Personally I don’t see any reason to tie all of this to the Republican Party but I agree with most of their proposals. There’s a great deal of common sense here and it stands as one best general policy books in a long time.
The deep question is why something like this hasn’t already happened. You’ll find the superficial "Republicans are just pro-corporate crooks" answer from bloggers like Kathy G. Another possibility is that Republicans don’t get much electoral credit for pro-poor initiatives (just as many voters simply won’t believe that "Democrats can be tough"). The more competitive political messaging becomes, the more this constraint binds and so the policies of upward redistribution are more likely to be enacted by Republicans in the resulting political equilibrium. If the authors are to get their way somehow this dynamic must be reversed.
Addendum: I’ve met Reihan only in passing and I have not had substantive correspondence with either of the authors. Nonetheless the authors thank me in the conclusion for having saved them from "all manner of errors"; maybe this is another instance of the influence of blogs.
Second Addendum: You’ll find links to video and audio on the book at Ross’s blog.
W.H. Auden on banking
Auden wrote the following praise to Cyril Connolly about his recently published book:
As both Eliot and Edmund Wilson are Americans, I think Enemies of Promise is the best English book of criticism since the war, and more than Eliot or Wilson you really write about writing in the only way which is interesting to anyone except academics, as a real occupation like banking or fucking, with all its attendant boredom, excitement, and terror.
That is from Stefan Collini’s often quite interesting Common Reading: Critics, Historians, and Public.
The Price of Everything
Here is Ezra Pound’s Usura Canto, here is a link to Russell Roberts’s The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity, available for pre-order. Can you guess which one has the better economics? In fact Russ’s book is the best attempt to teach economics through fiction that the world has seen to date.
Here is Russ’s summary of the book. Here is Arnold Kling on the book.
The decay of gratitude
[Francis] Flynn asserts that immediately after one person performs a favor for another, the recipient of the favor places more value on the favor than does the favor-doer. However, as time passes, the value of the favor decreases in the recipient’s eyes, whereas for the favor-doer, it actually increases. Although there are several potential reasons for this discrepancy, one possibility is that, as time goes by, the memory of the favor-doing event gets distorted, and since people have the desire to see themselves in the best possible light, receivers may think they didn’t need all that much help at the time, while givers may think they really went out of their way for the receiver.
That is from Robert B. Cialdini’s fascinating Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive. Cialdini’s earlier Influence remains one of my favorite social science books. Here is a link to Flynn’s paper and related work.
Bottomfeeder
The author is Taras Grescoe and the subtitle is "How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood," buy it here. Yes this is one of the best non-fiction books this year so far and yes I say that after having read (and mostly liked) the last five books on the exact same topic. I hope it does well because this book is an object lesson in how to best your competitors and we’ll see whether or not that matters.
Did you know that the average cell membrane of an American is now only 20 percent omega-3-based fats? In Japan it is 40 percent.
Or did you know that American sushi restaurants promising you "red snapper" are usually serving tilapia or perhaps sea bream.
The book has a superb explanation of how "frozen at sea" fish are now better, safer and tastier than "fresh fish," including for sushi.
English fish and chips was originated by Jewish merchants in Soho, drawing upon the same Portuguese traditions that led to tempura in Japan.
The Japanese are experimenting with acupuncture to keep fish alive and "relaxed" on their way from the ocean to being eaten.
Two of the practical takeaways from the book are a) if only for selfish reasons, do not eat most Asian-farmed shrimp, and b) eat more sardines. They are, by the way, very good with butter on sourdough bread.
This is one of the best single topic food books of the last five years. It is historical, practical, ethical, and philosophical, all at once.
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
And the subtitle is "(and What It Says About Us)". The author is Tom Vanderbilt and here is the Amazon link. I wrote the following blurb for it:
"Everyone who drives–and many people who don’t–should read this book. It is a psychology book, a popular science book, and a how-to-save-your-life manual, all rolled into one. I found it gripping and fascinating from the very beginning to the very end."
It’s out in July and so far it is one of the best popular social science books of the year.
I also liked the article on traffic — John Staddon’s "Distracting Miss Daisy" — in the latest Atlantic Monthly. It had these two good sentences:
Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.