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Random rants about books
1. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, by Chris Anderson. The ideas have already appeared in the blogosphere, but this is the definitive statement.
2. Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America, 1931-1971, by Stephen Walsh. One of the best musical biographies; here is a Terry Teachout review.
3. George Simenon, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By. It reads as if it was written by a man who visited 20,000 prostitutes and yes that can be meant as a compliment.
4. Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, due August 29 or sooner abroad.
5. Physical: An American Check-Up, by James McManus. What it is like to get a three-day intensive probing of every body part, inside and out? Full of humor and middle-aged meditations on impending mortality; one of the best trade books of the year.
6. Burglars on the Job, by Richard Wright and Scott Decker. One of Steve Levitt's favorites. A fascinating look at the motives of petty burglars, with lessons for behavioral economics and the roots of poverty.
7. Geoffrey Hosking, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union. Good background for understanding Putin and the reversion of Russia to tyranny. One of the best non-fiction books of the year, but not as good as the author's earlier Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, which remains one of the best non-fiction books period. (Every sentence "counts," and there is a wonderful integration of history and social science mechanisms.) Just don't try to tell my wife that.
8. Bjorn Lomborg, editor, How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place. Or, do you really know where to shop? Cost-benefit analysis makes it easy to imagine money as the relevant control variable, but I am increasing convinced this is not the way to go. We can't reshuffle money at will, any more than we can reshuffle, say, social norms. The problem is, we have yet to figure out the right question for this sort of exercise. And this is why the answers are not yet convincing.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 2, 2006 at 05:21 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
I was taught by Hosking at SSEES in 1988 and he was one of the best historians to write about the tragicomedy of Russia - the only person who could translate Pasternak's sentiments into history.
A gentle spoken bearded professor: he was a reflection of the best that English universities had to offer; and encouraged his students.
His histories deserve greater general publicity.
Posted by: Philip Chaston at Jul 2, 2006 10:28:39 AM
Wait a minute, I thought the whole point of money was that unlike social norms, we CAN reshuffle it at will.
Posted by: Ryan Cousineau at Jul 2, 2006 1:37:55 PM
Well, the Gates foundation faces almost exactly the isue posed in Lomborg's title. And, per Ryan Cousineau, we CAN reshuffle money at will -- if we choose to. Of course, for most of us it involves shuffling much less than billions, but all those individual decisions are small steps toward a much better world....
Posted by: Brent Buckner at Jul 3, 2006 9:35:00 AM
We don't know the best way to spend money to make the world better. I would spend it trying to find out how to do that. You could get all the best ideas, and perform really good controlled experiments to get the answer. That knowledge is worth $50 billion because it would cause the rest of the money being spent on charity to be spent effectively.
Posted by: still working it out at Jul 3, 2006 9:20:15 PM
Well, still_working_it_out, once you've spent the $50 billion, you'll then have to convince others to pony up and spend money the way you think (with the support of evidence) that they should. I think that you'd face Tyler Cowen's material point: "We can't reshuffle money at will, any more than we can reshuffle, say, social norms."
Posted by: Brent Buckner at Jul 4, 2006 9:03:23 AM
Lomborg's book came from the debate over global warming. It is currently quite fashionable, among those policy-makers who consider themselves progressive, to theorize on the best ways to "stop and/or reverse global warming." Lomborg believes stopping and/or reversing global warming is an admirable goal, but is not worth the money it would take, and further, that the amount of money it would take to "fix" global warming could be put to other uses. He is quite widely on record with these views. So his challenge in this book is, if you really want to spend public money on something, if you're really looking for something to fix, here are your best bets.
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