Results for “best book” 1841 found
Distilling famous thinkers
Following up on a discussion, Arnold Kling asks:
Should we approach famous thinkers by digesting distilled versions, or should we study them in the original?
I'm for distilling, for reasons Arnold offers, but I'm also for reading the originals. Here are a few reasons why, drawn from a number of longer sources I have read and digested:
1. Secondary sources are unreliable and they do not capture or understand many of the original insights. To remove it from the distant past, what I get from John Rawls or Robert Nozick is quite distinct from what I get from their distillers.
2. Truly great thinkers require numerous distillers. Can you read just one book on Keynes? No. So you have to read a few. Shouldn't one of these then be Keynes himself? Yes.
3. The errors of top thinkers are often more interesting and instructive than their successes. Distillers have a hard time capturing these errors and their fruitfulness.
4. We often read great thinkers not to learn what they understood but also to set our minds racing and to find interesting new questions. Great thinkers are usually better at supplying this service than are their distillers.
5. Sometimes the value is in having read common sources and benefiting from the commonality per se. Great thinkers are usually more focal than any of their distillers and thus reading them is a good input for discussions with others.
6. Original sources often help you challenge or reexamine your world view or intellectual ethos. Distillers very often pander to that world view, while pretending to challenge you.
7. Consider a simple comparison. You can read either Adam Smith's two major books or any ten or even twenty books on him, toss in articles if you wish. It's a no-brainer which you should choose.
8. The best distillers often are original sources in their own right (and in part unreliable expositors), such as in Charles Taylor's excellent book on Hegel.
9. Distillation works best in very exact sciences, such as physics and mathematics. If you rely on distillation for an inexact science, you will do best at capturing its exact parts. You will be left with a systematic bias, and knowledge gap, regarding its inexact parts.
I could say more, but I fear this post is already too long.
*What Works in Development?*
The subtitle is Thinking Big and Thinking Small and the editors are Jessica Cohen and William Easterly. Usually essay collections are of low value but this is the single best introduction (I know of) to where development economics is at today. Contributors include Dani Rodrik, Simon Johnson, Michael Kremer, Lant Pritchett, Ricardo Haussmann, and Abhijit Banerjee, among others. Even better, there are two published (short) comments on each essay, a practice which should be universal in every collection, if only to establish context. My favorite piece was Banerjee's on why development economics should "think small" rather than just doing macro issues. Recommended.
Assorted links
1. Strange China video of the day.
2. Do men live longer if they marry smarter women? (No, I haven't checked if the original paper deals with the identification problem in a reasonable way.)
3. Another review of *The Big Questions*.
4. Daron Acemoglu in Esquire on economic growth.
5. How to get wealthy from your own life insurance (hint: Hansonian).
What should we do instead of the Obama health reform bill?
A lot of people think you have no right to criticize a bill unless you propose a better bill. I don't agree (if the aforementioned bill is bad on net), but in any case I will give this a try. These are not my first best reforms or even my second best reforms. They're my "attempt to work with some of the same moving pieces which are currently on the table" set of reforms. I would trade away the Obama bill for these in a heart beat. Keep in mind people, with a "no insurance" penalty of only $750, the current bill isn't going to work (and that's ignoring the massive implicit marginal tax rates on many individuals and families, or the "crowding out" of current low-reimbursement-rate Medicaid patients), so we do need to look for alternatives.
Here goes:
1. Construct a path for federalizing Medicaid and put it on a sounder financial footing; call that the "second stimulus" while you're at it. It's better and more incentive-compatible than bailing out state governments directly and the program never should have been done at the state level in the first place.
2. Take some of the money spent on subsidizing the mandate and put it in Medicaid, to produce a greater net increase in Medicaid than the current bill will do, while still saving money on net. Do you people like the idea of a public plan? We already have one!
2b. Make any "Medicare to Medicaid" $$ trade-offs you can, while recognizing this may end up being zero for political reasons.
3. Boost subsidies to medical R&D by more than the Obama plan will do. Establish lucrative prizes for major breakthroughs and if need be consider patent auctions to liberate beneficial ideas from P > MC.
4. Make an all-out attempt to limit deaths by hospital infection and the simple failure of doctors to wash their hands and perform other medically obvious procedures.
5. Make an all-out attempt, working with state and local governments (recall, since the Feds are picking up the Medicaid tab they have temporary leverage here), to ease the spread of low-cost, walk-in health care clinics, run on a WalMart sort of basis. Stepping into the realm of the less feasible, weaken medical licensing and greatly expand the roles of nurses, paramedics, and pharmacists.
6. Make an all-out attempt, comparable to the moon landing effort if need be, to introduce price transparency for medical services. This can be done.
7. Preserve current HSAs. The Obama plan will tank them, yet HSAs, while sometimes overrated, do boost spending discipline. They also keep open some path of getting to the Singapore system in the future.
8. Invest more in pandemic preparation. By now it should be obvious how critical this is. It's fine to say "Obama is already working on this issue" but the fiscal constraint apparently binds and at the margin this should get more attention than jerry rigging all the subsidies and mandates and the like.
9. Establish the principle that future extensions of coverage, as done through government, will be for catastrophic care only.
10. Enforce current laws against fraudulent rescission. If these cases are so clear cut and so obviously in the wrong, let's act on it. We can strengthen the legal penalties if need be.
11. Realize that you cannot tack "universal coverage" (which by the way it isn't) onto the current sprawling mess of a system, so look for all other means of saving lives in other, more cost-effective ways. If you wish, as a kind of default position, opt for universal coverage if the elderly agree to give up Medicare, moving us to a version of the Swiss system and a truly unified method of coverage. But don't bet on that ever happening.
Separate issues:
12. If you can tax health insurance benefits and cut a Pareto-improving deal overall, fine, but I am considering this to be too politically utopian and it's not clear what the rest of that deal looks like. The original tax break makes no economic sense but you don't want to end up with a big tax increase and a lot more people on the public books with little in return.
13. If the current bill were voted down, you can imagine some version of the above happening, although not necessarily all at once in one big bill.
14. Commission a study of how much the Obama plan is spending per QALY saved. I agree that more health insurance saves lives, but a) the study should adjust appropriately for the superior demographics of those who hold or buy insurance, and b) the study should adjust for the income that would be lost through mandates and the safety that income would purchase. I worry greatly that we have never, ever seen this number presented and that if we did it would not be pretty. In any case, do the study, scream the number from the rooftops, and reread points 1-11. Enact.
That's my recipe. It's better than what we are doing now. You don't have to adhere to any extreme form of economistic or free market ideology to buy it. It might even be politically easier than the current path, as it "sounds less socialistic."
Political vs economic competition, or why a two-party system can be OK
Max Kaehn, an occasional MR commentator, expressed a common sentiment when he wrote:
You think a voting system that sticks us with a two-party cartel instead of a diverse market in political representatives isn’t a major problem? Are you sure you’re an economist?
Here are a few reasons why political competition isn't the same as economic competition:
1. Economic competition lowers costs. For the average worker, it cost a month's wages to buy a book in eighteenth century England and today it might cost well under an hour's wage. The competitive incentive to use and introduce new technologies drove that change. Political competition may support cost-reduction enterprises in an indirect manner, by providing good policy and spurring the private sector, but the mere ability to supply candidates and parties at lower cost is no great gain.
2. Having lots of parties means you get coalition government. This works fine in many countries but again it is not to be confused with economic competition. Coalition government means that say 39 percent of the electorate gets its way on many issues, while 13 percent of the electorate — as represented by the minor partner in the coalition — gets its way on a small number of issues. Whatever benefits that arrangement may have, they do not especially resemble the virtues of economic competition.
3. Many people think that greater inter-party competition, and/or more political parties, will help their favored proposals. Usually they are wrong and they would do better to realize that their ideas simply aren't very popular or persuasive.
4. Often the U.S. system is best understood as a "no-party" system, albeit not at the current moment, not yet at least. The bigger a party gets, often the less disciplined it will be.
5. Stronger electoral competition, in many cases, brings outcomes closer to "the median voter or whatever else is your theory of political equilibrium." That's better than autocracy, but again there are limits on how beneficial that process can be. It's not like economic competition where you get ongoing cost reductions in a manner which saves lives, brings fun, and enriches millions.
The bottom line: Political competition is better than autocracy, but its benefits are not well understood by a comparison with economic competition.
*The Art of Not Being Governed*
The subtitle is An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and the author is James C. Scott of Yale University. Here is a summary from the Preface:
…I argue that the [Southeast Asian] hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. Most of the areas in which they reside may be aptly called shatter zones or zones of refuge.
Virtually everything about these people's livelihoods, social organizations, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm's length. Their physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structure, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders effectively serve to avoid incorporations into states and to prevent states from springing up among them. The particular state that most of them have been evading has been the precocious Han-Chinese state.
Highly recommended, this is a book Gordon Tullock would love. So far it has received surprisingly little publicity but it strikes me as essential reading about Afghanistan as well. Here is a much earlier Crooked Timber post on Scott.
Assorted links
1. The vote to defund political science: how it went.
2. Jason Kottke doesn't read books anymore.
3. "Food rewards obsessiveness," the best eater in the United States. The full article is gated (the link offers only an excerpt), so buy the 9 November New Yorker. I don't usually link to gated material of this kind, but this was one of the three or four best magazine pieces I'll read in a year.
4. Why Buffett bought that railroad.
5. Weird stuff McDonald's sells around the world. In the Philippines it is "spaghetti soaked in sugar."
6. Fruitless endeavors, or not?: translating works of literature into games of chess against each other, using a computer program.
7. Were the Neanderthals just unlucky?
8. Françoise Sagan: an appreciation.
How well with the public option work?
Austin Frakt has a good post on this topic, excerpt:
I wonder how optimistic we can be about the degree of variation in
spending predicted by risk adjustment models. I think the answer is
“not very.” From the literature on health care risk adjustment (via this post):
Statistical models developed by scholars have relatively
low predictive power. Predicting ten percent of the variation in
[health] expenditure is considered good (e.g., Medicare Advantage’s risk adjustment model).
That means ninety percent of the variation is unexplained by the model
or chalked up to random error. An individual ought to be a better
predictor of his or her health expenditures than a model that cannot
include measures unobservable to the researcher. (How much better? I
don’t know.)Expenses for some specific services are more predictable. Drug
expenses, for example, are persistent because individuals tend to use
the same medications year after year. The best statistical models of drug spending can predict about 55% of the variation in next year’s drug expenses, leaving 45% to random error.That puts a reasonable cap at 55%, but only for very persistent
services, like drugs. Expect the best overall risk adjustment to be no
worse than 10% and no where near as good as 55%.Private insurers should not be so worried but taxpayers should. The public plan looks game-able.
The middle, double-indented quotation is also from Frakt.
I also view the public plan as game-able, though through a slightly different mechanism. I don't think individuals are such good judges of their future health expenditures (self-deception) and in this regard the adverse selection model has been over-promoted. That said, private insurance companies can and will find ways of keeping these people off their books — poor service anyone? — and many of them will end up in the public plan. The CBO confirms that the public plan will not be a major force for cost reduction. And if you think we will succeed in using taxes and fees to get the private insurance companies to take on their share of these people, as they do in the Netherlands, well…I believe that is a battle they will win, after the fact, when the public is no longer watching the implementation of the details of the legislation. It's one easy way of buying them off as a lobby.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy, by Bill Simmons. Could this be the best 736 pp. book on the diversity of human talent ever written? It starts slow but eventually picks up steam. It's also devastatingly funny. That said, if you don't know a lot about the NBA, it is incomprehensible. (I could not, for instance, understand the section of Dolph Schayes because that was not the NBA I know.) In the historical pantheon, he picks David Thompson, Bernard King, and Allen Iverson as underrated. The 1986 Boston Celtics are the best team ever, he argues. And so on. I found this more riveting than almost anything else I read and yes I think it is very much a work of social science, albeit in hermetic form.
2. Paul Auster, Invisible. Auster is back in top form. The French, of course, think of him as a deeper writer than do most of his American critics and readers. Is he more like Hitchcock (also appreciated early on by the French) or more like Starsky and Hutch? Read this book and decide. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between.
3. Delirious New Orleans: Manifesto for an Extraordinary American City, by Steven Verderber. An excellent photo-essay on all the marvelous signs and small architectural wonders trashed by Hurricane Katrina. This book goes micro, not macro, and it catalogs a now-disappearing America from the age which I find most precious in our history.
4. Derrida, an Egyptian, by Peter Sloterdijk. I'm spending some of next summer in Berlin so I've been trying to catch up on what they're reading over there. (Any recommendations?) On every page it feels as if Sloterdijk is intelligent, yet I came away empty-handed and feeling like a frustrated Robin Hanson ("why doesn't he just come right out and say what he means?). No way should you buy the hardcover for $45.00, in return for 73 pp. of actual text. Ultimately he's writing about the boxes, not writing about the world. Yet at least three Germans loved it.
My review of Joel Waldfogel’s *Scroogenomics*
It's locked away in Books and Culture, A Christian Review and I don't know if it will show up on-line. Anyway, here is a bit from that review:
…For all his polemic, Waldfogel never recognizes that the instrumental nature of gift-giving can alienate us from the true meaning of Christmas and other holidays and celebrations, not to mention alienating us from the true virtue of giving.
Nor, on the other hand, does Waldfogel consider the best available defense of gift-giving — namely, that it is a useful form of social theater. His economist biases reveal themselves when he considers only the value of the gift and not how the gift may enhance (or damage) the associated relationships. Don't we all use gifts to judge who really understands us and thus who is worthy of our time? To put it bluntly,I wouldn't marry or even continue to date a woman who gave me The Da Vinci Code for my birthday. But if I receive the book, maybe that's for the best: then I know the relationship doesn't have a future. In a world where we are looking at a large pool of people for the potential of closer ties, poorly chosen gifts in fact may be the greatest gift we can receive. Using economic terminology, a lot of gifts are about sorting and signaling. A world of perfect gifts is also a world where I don't meet many new people or take many chances in relationships.
I should note that I liked the book more than that excerpt, taken alone, indicates. As is often the case, the parts where I praise the work are simply less interesting. You can order the book here. In case you don't remember, he's the guy who did the first work on the "deadweight loss of Christmas." The book has come out just in time for…the Christmas season.
*From Eternity to Here*
The author is Sean Carroll and the subtitle is The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. This book-to-appear offers a very good summary of the paradoxes of time. The new contribution (new to me, at least) is to offer an integrated discussion of the multiverse, the law of entropy, de Sitter space, and the foundations of the so-called "arrow of time."
Carroll argues that the invocation of baby universes clears up a lot of apparent puzzles:
The prospect of baby universes makes all the difference in the world to the question of the arrow of time. Remember the basic dilemma: The most natural universe to live in is de Sitter space, empty space with a positive vacuum energy…most observers will find themselves alone in the universe, having arisen as random arrangements of molecules out of the surrounding high-entropy gas of particles…
Baby universes change this picture in a crucial way. Now it's no longer true that the only thing that can happen is a thermal fluctuation away from equilibrium and then back again. A baby universe is a kind of fluctuation, but it's one that never comes back — it grows and cools off, but it doesn't rejoin the original spacetime.
What we've done is given the universe a way that it can increase its entropy without limit.
…[pages later] In this scenario, the multiverse on ultra-large scales is symmetric about the middle moment, statistically, at least, the far future and the far past are indistinguishable…[yet] The moment of "lowest" entropy is not actually a moment of "low" entropy. That middle moment was not finely tuned to some special very-low-entropy initial condition, as in typical bouncing models. It was as high as we could get, for a single connected universe in the presence of a positive vacuum energy. That's the trick: allowing entropy to continue to rise in both directions of time, even though it started out large to begin with. There isn't any state we could possibly have chosen that would have prevented this kind of evolution from happening. An arrow of time is inevitable.
Is it all true? Beats me. But if you read this book you will come away more hopeful about the prospects of a relatively simple "theory of everything."
Here is the author's home page; he teaches at Cal Tech. Here is his personal page. Best of all, here are his talks. His Twitter feed is here.
Thomas Pynchon
One of the recent reader requests is to give my opinion of him. It's pretty simple. The first half or so of Gravity's Rainbow is extraordinary. V is a superb novel, his most consistent work, and it is best read by not trying to make much sense of it. The Crying of Lot 49 feels like an excellent novella but over time it slips away from you and is probably a minor work. The rest of it I cannot finish — or even get far in — and my best guess is that it is wheel-spinning and it will not last. I haven't tried the latest book and it is not high on my list. He's certainly an important figure and worth reading and indeed rereading. But I view him as belonging to the somewhat distant past.
Here is the Twitter stream on Thomas Pynchon, as good a place to start as any.
The request by the way comes from this blog. Here is a post on Vincent Ostrom, husband of Elinor, and an oddly neglected figure in recent times.
*Too Big To Fail*
That's the new book by Andrew Ross Sorkin and the subtitle is The Inside Story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves. Last night I read through to p.132. So far it seems to be the single best narrative of the crash and its aftermath. I haven't seen anything theoretical or on root causes, etc. I chuckled at reading this sentence, which starts with Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers picking up the phone:
"I know this call may be a little unusual," [Treasury Secretary] Paulson began. "You and I have been trying to kill each other for years."
I'll let you know if my judgment changes, but so far this falls into the "recommended" category, noting again that it is narrative not theory.
Addendum: Here is Yves Smith on the book, very good post. See also Felix Salmon.
Assorted links
1. Larry Lessig: Against transparency.
2. "Moscow will blast clouds from the sky this winter to save money on snow removal"…
3. Problems with Arab education.
4. Which books are they burning in North Carolina? (Hint: it includes the Bible, and they're serving barbecued chicken.)
*Replenishing the Earth*, by James Belich
How is this for a real estate bubble?
At peak in 1888, over 80 per cent of Victorian private investment went into Melbourne buildings. Expenditure on housing was even greater than that on rail, and many houses were built without people to live in them, or without jobs for those who did.
In the 1890s Melbourne was an impressive place. With 500,000 people, it was eighty percent bigger than San Francisco and nine hundred percent bigger than Los Angeles. Three hundred trains a day serviced the suburbs. The city had three hundred buildings with elevators and Melbourne was reputed to have more large public buildings than any British city outside of London. There were plans to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower.
That is all from James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939. I'll discuss this book more soon, but I'll tip my hand and say it is one of the very best non-fiction books of the year. Imagine Jared Diamond or Greg Clark (albeit more measured, in each case) but applied to the settlement of the colonies rather than to Europe itself. This book also has perhaps the best explanation as to why the Argentina growth miracle fell apart.