Results for “best book” 2009 found
My *Stubborn Attachments* essay for Cato Unbound
Here it is, here is one excerpt:
The classics of political philosophy deal with wealth and economic growth awkwardly at best. John Rawls, in his Theory of Justice and elsewhere, was suspicious of economic growth outright. Rawls feared that the savings rate of the first generation would lead to deprivation, and a diminishment of the well-being of the worst-off group (that first generation), and so he toyed with John Stuart Mill’s idea of the stationary state. Robert Nozick evinced a good understanding of markets in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but still he focused on individual libertarian rights as an underpinning for a free society. Like Nozick, I believe in individual rights, but I don’t think they settle most questions, and I don’t find modest levels of taxation under democratic conditions to be morally problematic.
In part I wrote Stubborn Attachments to respond to Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, first published in 1984. In that wonderful book, Parfit wondered whether consequentialist reasoning could in fact produce coherent recommendations, for either individuals or societies. Yet there is no talk in Reasons and Persons of economic growth, or how a much better future might help resolve aggregation problems. Nonetheless Parfit did produce an important appendix on why the social discount rate should be zero, and you can think of Stubborn Attachments as trying to think through the broader implications of that argument.
And:
You should always ask what are the weakest points of any book, including this one. For me, it is the fear that progress has a mean-reverting character and that improvements end up as temporary rather than sustainable. In that case, the idea of enduring benefits would be an illusion, and even if pursuing such benefits were a good recommendation we might end up with the empty set in terms of policy recommendations. Historical pessimism would trump my recommendations, and we would be devoting our energies to the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Furthermore, Stubborn Attachments gives little guidance on how to offset the claims of humans versus the claims of nature. The benefits of economic growth are specified for human beings, and it is less clear that such economic growth is good for the animal kingdom as a whole, given the encroachments of humans and also the tortures of factory farming. If it is any consolation, however, I don’t think other philosophers have solved that problem either. Utilitarians, for instance, offer no plausible guidelines for weighting the well-being of non-human animals versus the well-being of humans, nor have they shown how it might be feasible to follow such guidelines.
Philosophical critiques will be forthcoming, so stay tuned!
What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit
I am tempted to call this long piece on a boring subject the best I have read in 2019, but you know I think that might remain true by the end of the year. Here is an excerpt from the Belgium section:
I was in Brussels recently, taking my son to watch Anderlecht play, when I heard some English people in a café asking the waiter why no one liked the English. They were nice people asking a genuine question, but often it’s the wrong people who ask the right questions. The waiter replied, politely and in perfect English: ‘We can read your newspapers and watch your television; we hear what your politicians and your journalists say about us.’ That summed it up: all this time we Brits thought we were talking to ourselves, and we were, but everyone else was listening in. Belgians are not surprised by Brexit: it’s just the coagulation as policy of what’s been flowing as attitude for decades.
Or Denmark:
The leftish Information provides the most useful articles. One has a headline in English, though anchored in the land of Elsinore: ‘To Be or Not to Be, That Is Not the Question’. The real ‘question’ doesn’t concern the merits of Leave or Remain, but the complexities of a twin crisis, in both the UK and the EU. Another piece, published shortly after the referendum, describes the division of a nation into Leavers and Remainers as afgrundsdyb. Meaning ‘abyssal’, the term, I am told, hints at the unfathomable as well as the unbridgeable, while evoking something that is certainly dangerous to approach.
I enjoyed this line:
Croatia has more experience than most of entering and exiting alliances.
From the Germany section:
‘Brexit shows that the Brussels bureaucracy, that alleged monster that employs no more civil servants than a central German city administration, has done a great job. The extent of interconnectedness at all levels has to be renegotiated: supply chains, industry standards, food and pharmaceutical standards, security architectures, rural and air transport structures, fishing rights, research collaborations, student exchanges, a vast frictionlessness system is now in jeopardy’ (Gustav Seibt, Süddeutsche Zeitung).
This I had not known:
…in Norway the conservative right is overwhelmingly in favour of joining the EU.
And finally:
Being a Brit in Sweden can be embarrassing just now. We’re one of the Swedes’ favourite peoples, admired for our history and culture, and loved for Engelskt humor. Shocked they may be; but a diet of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers means that Swedes are not altogether surprised.
The authors are numerous, the whole piece was published in The London Review of Books, definitely recommended. I would note that “what group X really thinks of Y” remains an under-exploited genre in journalism, and elsewhere, and it is one of the best ways of learning about a topic.
Quito travel notes
LLapingachos are the way to go: “an Ecuadorian dish of potato patties or thick potato pancakes stuffed with cheese and cooked on a hot griddle until crispy.”
Given the landlocked nature of Quito, the seafood — and I don’t just mean lake fish — is remarkably good. Try the fried corvina at Las Corvinas de Don Jimmy, in the Mercado Central, with a drink and ceviche only $6. Zazu is one of the best restaurants in South America, and many of the dishes are below $15. I recommend La Briciola for Italian food and chocolate ice cream, noting that in Latin America the most boring-sounding pastas, such as the ravioli, are the ones to order.
The 17th century heritage of Quito makes the colonial center feel like central Mexico. Think “built up early, backwater later on, for a long time.” The mix of mestizo and indigenous. The design of the inner city and its churches. The role of crafts. The persistence of particular foodstuffs, in this case potatoes and corn and avocado and palmitos. Popcorn was invented somewhere around here.
The weather is perfect every day.
Compañía de Jesús is arguably the most beautiful church I have seen.
There is an unusually high percentage of Indian-American tourists (do any of you know why?), that said the absolute number of tourists is quite small. Most people are passing through on their way to the Galapagos, described by one skeptical pro-Trump tourist we met as “$7,000 worth of lizards.”
Following dollarization, it seems that all the Kennedy half dollars and Sacagawea dollar coins have ended up here. .
Cops dress like superheroes to make themselves more approachable by children:
The Saturday “Indian market” at Otavalo is the nicest, most hassle-free market I know. Cotacachi would be a wonderful place to retire, except I won’t.
The quechua-speaking guide for Cotopaxi volcano loves YouTube and listens to “adventures, news, music, and much more.” He is still hoping to get a phone with an internet connection, and believes that lack of good education for indigenous children is the country’s biggest problem.
“In 2010, more than 2,600 people were killed in Ecuador, a homicide rate of about 18 per 100,000, almost twice the level the World Health Organization considers an epidemic. This year, the small Andean nation is expected to record 5.6 killed per 100,000, one of Latin America’s lowest rates.” (Excellent piece, WSJ link).
On the “is now the right time to visit Quito?” scale, I give 2019 a 9.5.
Christmas assorted links
1. 99 good news stories from 2018. p.s. not all of them are good, though most of them are. But prices going to zero for normal market goods and services usually is a mistake.
2. The seasonal business cycle in camel rentals.
3. David Brooks’s Sidney Awards, part I (NYT).
4. Should credit card companies be required to monitor or limit weapons purchases? (NYT, I say no and view this as a dangerous trend).
5. Should the EU enforce content regulations on streaming services? (I say no and view this as a dangerous trend).
Friday assorted links
1. Critical claims about Amazon and the Amazon court system.
2. Ross Douthat on the problems of meritocracy (NYT).
3. The culture that is Finland: anonymized recruitment in academia. Cuts down on bias.
4. Thomas Edsall presents data (NYT).
5. My podcast with Ben Domenech, 1/3 of it about Star Wars and the Jedi.
The Museum of the Bible, Washington, D.C.
“I love bringing my kids here,” I heard from my Eritrean Uber driver, the first person I’ve met who admits to going. The lavishly funded museum is indeed a world unto itself. Here is what struck me on a recent visit:
1. The interior and the staff feel like nowhere else in D.C., like a cross between the Midwest and a Mormon temple perhaps. There is much more wood paneling than one sees around town.
2. It is unabashedly the most universalistic and cosmopolitan interior in the area. There is a large room with circular shelves, containing all the Bibles in different languages they could find. Long columns list the languages of those Bibles, and a flashing sign indicates that 977,977 different Bible chapters would need to be translated before every chapter of the Bible is available in all of the world’s languages.
3. You can see plenty of old Bibles from the centuries, and while they are attractive, none are quite good enough for an art museum like say The Walters in Baltimore.
4. There is a station playing references to the Bible from popular music. As I stopped by it was serving up “Four Horsemen” by The Clash, and then it segued into “Hard Headed Woman” by Elvis Presley.
5. Entrance costs $25.99, plus premia for special exhibits.
6. The museum bends over backwards to be non-denominational, that said the intended neutrality imposes biases of its own. The big losers are the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, because this is indeed a museum about a book, not about a church community. The connection between this book, and the communities it has spawned, is precisely the murky angle here and it seems almost deliberately obscured. The Amish also are not prominent in the displays. Imagine if people really just read and worshiped the book. This truly is a museum about a book.
7. The museum tries not to refer to “the Christian Bible” or “the Hebrew Bible,” but that intended neutrality breaks down when you encounter the two sections for “the Old Testament” and “the New Testament.” The Jews lose.
8. There is a section — entirely respectful — where a Jewish scribe writes out biblical text for viewers. There is another exhibit of ancient Biblical life where you can walk among stone houses, read panels about biblical references to water, read about the Second Temple, and employees are paid to dress in (supposed) clothing from that period and say “Shalom” to you.
9. The museum is extraordinarily literal, and if you wanted to explain to space aliens what the Bible was, you could take them here. That said, they would end up understanding the Bible far better than Christianity.
10. There is a very interesting section on bibles for slaves, and which sections of the original Bible they omitted. On a wall display, visitors are asked to write out whether they consider these “slave bibles” to be proper Bibles or not. Most say no.
11. There is a questionnaire, a bit like a Twitter quiz. It first notes that Elizabeth Cady Stanton reinterpreted the Bible in the late 19th century, so as to make it more sympathetic to the rights of women. It then asks the visitors whether reinterpretations of the Bible should be allowed today. So far 61 percent have answered “no.”
12. The gift shop is lavish. The museum restaurant Manna serves kosher food. Here is the Wikipedia page for the museum.
13. The google headline for the museum has the subtitle “One of the Ten Best Museums in DC.” It is odd they do not think it is the best.
What I’ve been reading
Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends who Shaped an Age. The same 18th century British club had as members Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Burke, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Joshua Reynolds, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and David Garrick (often considered the greatest actor of the time). I never tire of reading about them.
Andrew Arsan, Lebanon: A Country in Fragments. At first this book feels like a kind of running splat, but with a bit of patience it becomes a remarkably compelling portrait of a society on the brink, most of all a desperate love letter to Beirut. If you can get through the squirrelly early political material, this is one of the best “country books” and also “city books” of the last few years.
James Simpson, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism, feels throughout as if it is an important book. And anyone interested in religion and development should read this one. Yet I had trouble following the actual arguments. It is probably good.
Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal, stresses just how interesting a place was pre-canal Panama, contrary to what I had thought.
Vernon Smith, The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reflections on Faith, Science, and Economics. Published by the Acton Institute, this is Vernon on his conversion to Christianity, Kahlil Gibran, and why science and religion are compatible. Short, of interest to those looking to understand the man.
Joel Waldfogel, Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture. My blurb is: “Digital Renaissance makes a real contribution to the economics of the Internet and the economics of art and culture.”
*Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball* (scouting bleg)
The role of reports and bureaucracy in the quantification of baseball prospects is a story that has long been obscured by a romantic notion of what scouts do and who they are. Outside of scouting memoirs, only a handful of book-length studies of scouts exist, none of which take scouting tools and training as the central topic. Scouts actively participate in their own mischaracterization. Its possible to read entire memoirs of scouts without ever learning about the need to fill in a report, let alone how it is done.
That is from the forthcoming book — quite interesting — by Christopher J. Phillips. Not surprisingly, this book also discusses “scouting the scout.”
And so I ask you readers, what are the best things to read about scouts, scouting, and the scouting process?
Deconstructing cultural codes
As I continue to do Conversations with Tyler, more people ask me about “the Tyler Cowen production function.” Well, here is one piece of it I don’t think I’ve written about or talked about before. I’m going to bring you there in slightly long-winded fashion, long-winded for a blog post that is.
I’ve long been convinced that “matters of culture” are central for understanding economic growth, but I’m also painfully aware these theories tend to lack rigor and even trying to define culture can waste people’s time for hours, with no satisfactory resolution.
So I thought I would tackle this problem sideways. I figured the best way to understand culture was to try to understand or “crack” as many cultural codes as possible. As many styles of art. As many kinds of music. As many complex novels, and complex classic books, and of course as many economic models as well. Religions, and religious books. Anthropological understandings. I also learned two languages in my adult years, German and Spanish (the former better than the latter). A bit later I realized that figuring out how an economic sector works — if only partially — was really not so different from cracking these other cultural codes. For instance, once I spent three days on a boat (as keynote speaker), exclusively with people from a particular segment of the shipping trade. It was like entering a whole new world and every moment of it was fascinating.
Eventually it seemed to me that problems of management were themselves a kind of cultural code, each one different of course.
And travel was the most potent form of this challenge, every new place a new culture to be unraveled and partially understood, and how much time was there to do that anyway?
It is very time-consuming — years-consuming — to invest in this skill of culture code cracking. But I have found it highly useful, most of all for various practical ventures and also for dealing with people, and for trying to understand diverse points of view and also for trying to pass intellectual Turing tests.
I am not recommending this you at any particular margin, or at the margin I have invested in. But if you ask me about the Tyler Cowen production function, every now and then I will tell you.
Addendum: It occurs to me that the number and diversity of cultural codes is increasing much faster than the ability of any individual to track them, much less master them. In this regard, an understanding of matters cultural is always receding from us.
Is the age of man-machine cooperation over in chess?
Given further data on the stunning performances of AlphaZero, Charles Murray asked me that on Twitter. And for now the answer surely seems to be yes: just let AlphaZero rip, and keep the human at bay. It’s a bit like the joke about the factory: “The dog is there to keep the man away from the machines, and the man is there to guard the dog.” (Or is it the other way around?)
But here’s the thing: right now there is only one AlphaZero, and AlphaZero does not play like God (I think). At some point there will be more projects of this kind, and they will not always agree as to what is the best chess move. Re-enter the human! Imagine a human turning on AlphaZero and five other such programs, seeing where they disagree, and then querying the programs further to find a better answer. It is at least possible (though not necessary) that a human will be better at doing this than will a machine.
Keep in mind, the original role in the human in Advanced [man-machine] Chess was not to substitute human chess judgment for machine chess judgment in any kind of discretionary fashion. It was to adjudicate disagreements across programs: “Rybka has a slightly better opening book. Fritz is better in closed endgames. Houdini is tops at defense.” And so on. The human then sided with one engine over the others, or simply spent more engine time investigating some options rather than others.
It could possibly run the same way for neural net methods, once we have a general sense of the strengths and weaknesses of different projects. So yes, man-machine cooperation in chess is a loser right now, but it may well come back. And there is a broader economic lesson in that, namely that automation may eliminate jobs, but it does not necessarily eliminate them permanently.
What I’ve been reading
1. Sevket Pamuk, Uneven Centuries: Economic Development of Turkey since 1820. The best economic history of Turkey I know, it comes with strong recommendations from Daron Acemoglu and Dani Rodrik. Not an engaging read, but a useful survey.
2. Nell Dunn, Talking to Women. Interviews with British (and Irish) women, circa 1964, remarkably frank and open, “witty, anarchic, and sexually frank.” Strongly recommended, is it possible that the quality of discourse on these matters has not much advanced or even declined?
3. Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India. “I have called this book Coromandel chiefly for sentimental reasons. I first became aware of that sonorous word as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy exiled in England. Coromandel! was the title of the third in a series of Boy’s Own-style adventure stories set in India written by John Masters, an ex-Indian Army officer turned popular novelist. It was all about a West Country lad who sails to India with a map to find the legendary Coromandel and make his fortune. I reread it recently and found it not half as good as I thought it was — but the magic of that word Coromandel has always stayed with me, as the very essence of South India in all its elusiveness and allure. I’m not alone in thinking this.”
4. Sally Rooney, Normal People. A novel, they’re not, Irish, recommended.
Louise I. Shelley, Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy is Threatening Our Future, is a useful survey of varying kinds of black and dark markets.
M. Todd Henderson, Mental State, “When conservative law professor Alex Johnson is found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at his house in Chicago, everyone thinks it is suicide. Everyone except his brother, Royce, an FBI agent.”
Kimberly Clausing, Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital delivers exactly what its subtitle promises.
Jeffrey Lane, The Digital Street, is an interesting and original urban ethnography of how digitalized media, and the recording of street interactions, affect gang norms and patterns of violence.
Why is most travel writing so bad?
The most painful sections of a bookshop to have to read through would be the management books, self-help, and also the travel books. Yet management, self-help, and travel are all very important and indeed extremely interesting matters, so I am wondering why these books are so bad. Today let’s focus on travel.
My biggest complaint is that travel books seem not to discriminate between what the reader might care about or not. Here is a randomly chosen passage from a recent travel book of Jedidiah Jenkins:
We walked our bikes over one more bridge and into Tijuana. Weston was barefoot, which he noted out loud as we entered Mexico. We got on our bikes and rode into immediate chaos.
Or this:
I drank my coffee and read the news on my phone. I felt him sitting next to me.
Who cares? And who is Weston anyway? (Longer excerpts would not seduce you.) Yet this book — To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret — has 85 reviews on Amazon with an average of four and a half stars and it was a NYT bestseller.
Is travel like (some) sex, namely that you can’t write about it because it is viscerally exciting in a “you had to be there” way? Why cannot that constraint be overcome by shifting the focus to matters more factual?
Too many travel books seem like an inefficient blending of memoir, novel, and travel narration, and they are throughout too light on information. Ideally I want someone with a background in geography, natural history, or maybe urban studies to serve up a semi-rigorous account of what they are doing and seeing.
Here is one mood-affiliated blurb for the Jenkins book:
“A thrilling, tender, utterly absorbing book. With winning candor, Jedidiah Jenkins takes us with him as he bicycles across two continents and delves deeply into his own beautiful heart. We laugh. We cry. We feel the glory and the agony of his adventure; the monotony and the magic; the grace and the grit. Every page of this book made me ache to know what happened next. Every chapter shimmered with truth. It’s an unforgettable debut.”
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things
What do people want from travel books anyway? It seems the Jenkins work sold well because he is famous on Instagram, which may or may not correlate with book-writing skills.
Here is another randomly chosen passage:
I wait. I drink some more water. It sit in the grass and chat with the others. I have a few false starts: “Ooh, I’m feeling it…just kidding, no I’m not.” “Okay, now I am! No, that’s an ant on my ankle.”
Is the problem an absence of barriers to entry for writing travel books? That many books will sell automatically “by country” rather than because of the quality of their content, leading to an excessively segmented market? Other travel book readers seem to obsess over the mode of transportation, such as whether a particular trip was undertaken by bicycle. Are there too many celebrities and semi-celebrities trying their hand at a relatively easy-to-fudge literary genre?
What are the microfoundations for this failure in the quality of travel books?
Here are various lists of the best travel books of all time. Even there I find many overrated, noting that Elizabeth Gilbert is better than most.
If you are wondering, three of my favorite travel books are Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, David G. Campbell, The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica, and also Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, perhaps the best travel book ever written.
Somebody — fix this problem!
*Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities*
That is the new and excellent book by Alain Bertaud, so many pages have excellent food for thought. Here is one simple bit:
Cities are primarily labor markets.
Or this:
…large cities are growing at about the same rate as medium and small cities in the same countries or regions. It seems that cities’ growth rates follow Gibrat’s law of proportionate effect, which states that the size of a city is not an indicator of its future growth rate — that is, cities’ growth rates are random, with the same average expected growth rate and same variance…The population of larger cities keeps growing, but on average, so do smaller cities. This seems paradoxical, given that larger cities are more productive than smaller ones. However, larger cities do not play the same economic role as smaller ones do. They complement each other’s activities. The increase productivity of larger cities is therefore linked to the existence and growth of smaller cities. In turn, smaller cities’ economic growth is dependent on larger cities’ innovations and inventions.
How about this:
In 1830…London’s population density had reached a very high density of 325 people per hectare. By 2005, however, the density of London had decreased to only 44 people per hectare. The larger decrease in London’s density has not caused a corresponding decrease in mobility. On the contrary…
I learned a great deal from the discussion (starts p.287) of Indonesia’s “kampungs,” and how the Indonesian has managed their integration with local infrastructure relatively well. In contrast, this is the common alternative procedure:
The predictable first reaction of governments has usually been to set minimum urbanization standards to prevent the legal construction of these unsanitary urban villages. The regulations made the situation worse, as they prevented these informal settlements from obtaining normal urban services from the municipality. They also created a risk of future demolition, which discourages housing improvement that the households would have naturally done themselves. Eventually, many governments slowly regularized the older informal settlements in a piecemeal fashion, as is the practice in India, for instance. But the regularization of informal settlements usually had been conducted with a provision that after a set date, no more informal settlements would be regularized.
The outcomes of these successive policies — first ostracism, then benign neglect followed by reluctant integration — has been disastrous. A significant share of the urban labor force, otherwise gainfully employed, live in large “informal” settlements often with unsafe water supplies, deficient sanitation, and sporadic solid waste collection.
But:
What made a difference [in Indonesia] was a decision taken in 1969 by the government of Indonesia to concentrate its resources on the improvement of the kampungs’ infrastructure without trying to remove or restructure the existing housing, however small or inadequate it was…And, even more exceptional, since 1969 to this day, the Indonesian government’s support for KIP has been unwavering…The government housing policy objective consists of allowing the poor to settle in and around existing villages at the standards of their choice, while the government concentrates its efforts not on housing construction but on gradually improving residential infrastructure and services to all residential settlements. The policy has proved largely successful.
Later in the book, pp.351-352 have a fascinating discussion of how relatively good urban/suburban policy, and also the fragmentation of municipalities, contributed to the early success of the tech community in Silicon Valley.
Definitely recommended, this is now one of my favorite books on cities, and it will be joining my “best non-fiction of 2018″ list. Again, you can buy it here.
What should I ask Larissa MacFarquhar?
I will be doing a Conversations with Tyler with her, no associated public event. Here is her New Yorker bio:
Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Her Profile subjects have included John Ashbery, Barack Obama, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, Derek Parfit, David Chang, and Aaron Swartz, among many others. She is the author of “Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help” (Penguin Press, 2015). Before joining the magazine, she was a senior editor at Lingua Franca and an advisory editor at The Paris Review, and wrote for Artforum, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, and other publications. She has received two Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and the Academy Johnson & Johnson Excellence in Media Award. Her writing has appeared in “The Best American Political Writing” (2007 and 2009) and “The Best Food Writing” (2008). She is an Emerson Fellow at New America.
She also wrote famous profiles of Richard Posner and Paul Krugman.
So what should I ask her?
How to save the future of chess
Matt asks:
I saw your post about whether the 12th game draw was wise or not, but I haven’t seen this bit so far – I’m curious what you think the 12 draws mean for the future of classical chess? Have we hit the point where the very best in classical will just resign themselves to draws? Should we look to blitz or Chess960 to determine the very best?
It is now 24 world championship games in a row, spread out over two contests, with only two decisive results. Games between top grandmasters don’t end in draws nearly so often, so something is wrong with the incentives! The most common claim you hear is that in a 12-game match it is “too hard to come back from a loss,” so the players don’t take enough chances. That to me seems under-argued from a “maximize expected value backwards induction” point of view (a given move either boosts your expected value from the game or it doesn’t), but in any case there does seem to be a problem. (Too much advance preparation of openings?) On top of that, people are upset that two “classical time control” world championships in a row have been decided by the Rapid tiebreaker.
My first suggestion is to extend the matches to 24 games, but in the event of a tie at the end leave the reigning world champion with the title. That avoids the arbitrariness of any tie-breaking method, places what is to me a justified burden on the challenger, and seems to be enough games to prevent the reigning champion from simply stonewalling with a long series of draws. And there is plenty of precedent in chess history for matches that long, was it not nice when the Soviets paid for everything?
That said, I fear that venue costs are too high, the length of the match too variable (try booking a top hall under such conditions), and the drawing out of play would make the match harder to market to corporate and other sponsors, who are more interested in concentrated media attention (“In the future, every contender will be famous for fifteen chess games.”)
Chess960 games I find ugly, counterintuitive, and hard to follow.
So how about this? Have the openings in each game — say the first eight to ten moves — be chosen randomly, but out of a set of high quality but somewhat riskier than average alternatives (no Petroff!). This would limit the ability of players to choose intrinsically drawish lines with Black. It also would steer the games away from paths where both players know the main lines thirty moves deep or more, which of course is boring and also conducive to lots of draws.
I would note that many computer vs. computer matches already are played with such a method, and it does seem to make those games more dynamic.
I don’t doubt this method might cause top players to invest all the more time in preparing openings, to avoid being caught entirely off guard (everyone would end up knowing at least something about the Poisoned Pawn Sicilian). Still, there are limits to total prep, and the games would end up as more exciting, and probably more decisive, whether the players like it or not.
Let’s do it, and limit the impact of this insane arms race in opening preparation.