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What I've been reading
1. John Derbyshire, We are Doomed. He complains because most Western culture today does not live up to the standards of Carol Burnett and Saturday Night Fever. Really. If there's one thing that can be said, it is that yesterday's cultural pessimists were more interesting than the pessimists of today.
2. Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. I ended up enjoying this more than I do his trendy fiction. This supposed paean to family life collapses quickly into narcissism, but that's in fact what makes it work. I was surprised but not shocked by the part where he deliberately tortures his infant son.
3. Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should be Led by Top Scholars, by Amanda H. Goodall. I actually laughed when I read the subtitle. She discusses fundraising in the second to last paragraph of the book. More generally, you can take this book as a radical attack on economic reasoning: she believes that having a Ph.d. will cause a person to ignore the incentives that face non-Ph.d.-holding individuals in the same position.
4. John Keay, China: A History. The clearest and more intelligible treatment I've seen -- ever -- of all those dynasties and murky sides of Chinese history. Yet if I understand this book on early Chinese history -- and no other -- should I in fact be suspicious?
5. J.M. Coetzee, Summertime. I bought my copy up in Edmonton, where it is available for $32.99 or so. I thought it was excellent, but also that few people will appreciate the extent to which the story centers around an autistic protagonist.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 29, 2009 at 07:01 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Is 1. an optimistic statement by you?
Posted by: Carsten Valgreen at Oct 29, 2009 7:45:52 AM
I have not read Socrates in the Boardroom but
that philospher, impecunious and indomitable,
had no wish to get mixed up in worldly affairs
of any sort for at least two reasons: his
dedication to philosophy and the philosophic
habit of mind would have been compromised and
he would have been exiled or put to death well
before he was given hemlock. His pupil
Plato thought he could enable the ruler of
Syracuse to set up an ideal polity but returned
disillusioned to Athens.
Posted by: Candadai Tirumalai at Oct 29, 2009 9:24:18 AM
Most culture of the 1970s doesn't live up to the standards of Saturday Night Fever either.
Let's face it, that is one of the movies we REMEMBER.
Posted by: doctorpat at Oct 29, 2009 9:24:28 AM
Why on earth would a good university have to be "led"? You could make a case that the best university known to man was Cambridge for the fifty or sixty years when it was at the top of its game. It wasn't "led". Nor do I have any reason to think that it lost its eminence for lack of "leadership".
Posted by: dearieme at Oct 29, 2009 9:35:55 AM
Is that all Mr. Derbyshire's book is about? My, then those excerpts must have been removed before publication...
Posted by: Vernunft at Oct 29, 2009 10:17:18 AM
re 5.: Prof Cowen, I know you're on the autism spectrum, but I think you have to be very careful about what you can infer here. Analogous surfaces don't require the same precondition. Think about what writing is for the fiction writer, or for a subset of fiction writers, at least.
Posted by: K. S. N. at Oct 29, 2009 10:25:27 AM
She discusses fundraising in the second to last paragraph of the book.
Talk about living in the ivory tower.
Wow. Just wow.
Posted by: anon at Oct 29, 2009 10:34:06 AM
I remember thinking Saturday Night Fever was complete rubbish when it came out. Growing up in the 70s that moviee was one of the low points. How can anyone defend that movie? Are people going to be defending Twilight and Miley Cyrus in 30 years? Seems to me Saturday Night Fever has also been completely forgotten - at least by people in their 40s. I've haven't heard a friend or peer reference it in years. Animal House, Steve Martin and Richard Pryor - that's what we remember.
Posted by: vanya at Oct 29, 2009 10:36:46 AM
"He complains because most Western culture today does not live up to the standards of Carol Burnett and Saturday Night Fever."
How is this incorrect?
Posted by: Ed at Oct 29, 2009 10:41:50 AM
Keay's "History of India" is excellent, so I have high hopes for the "History of China". The History of India suffered from the fact that ancient and medieval Indians seem to have been simply uninterested in chronicallying things like changes and governments and borders. So anything written about India before 1500 is highly speculative.
The Chinese, by contrast, kept excellent records and had a series of historians who should be models for modern historians. So there is plenty of material for historians.
My problem with most histories of China and India I see on the bookshelves is that they contain one or two chapters on the regions, covering very broadly what happened before the Europeans showed up, then chapter after chapter on what the Europeans did in minute detail. Its typical for half the book to be about the twentieth century. Its an extreme Western-centric and modern-centric bias, and Keay's book on India at least was free from that.
Posted by: Ed at Oct 29, 2009 10:47:26 AM
You bought a book in Canada at the current exchange rate and Canadian GST levels? Ouch! ;-)
Posted by: Ryan at Oct 29, 2009 10:47:37 AM
One would imagine that Goodall would be of the opinion that fundraising is so barbaric that governments should be providing all the funding asked for anyway.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Oct 29, 2009 1:12:50 PM
Its an extreme Western-centric and modern-centric bias, and Keay's book on India at least was free from that.
Keay had already written a book covering, in minute detail, what Westerners did when they came to India. It was about the English East India Company (not solely their actions in India, but trade with China, the establishment of Singapore, etc.), and tracked their slow conversion into the British Raj. Quite fun and readable too.
Posted by: Taeyoung at Oct 29, 2009 1:17:49 PM
Carol Burnett and Saturday Night Fever were both pretty good.
Posted by: lemmy caution at Oct 29, 2009 1:56:49 PM
I have not read any of these books. However regarding the Socrates one, it is a fact that in the past
it was much more common for presidents of leading universities to be both major scholars and to remain
in office for extended periods of time, often for many decades. There is no question that it is the
pressure to raise external funds that has led to the disappearance of both of these patterns, for better
or worse.
Regarding history of China, there is a deeply and widely held view in China itself that is recognized
in the US only in a scattered way, although most scholars know it well. It is that they view their
own history from the standpoint of the history of the dynasties, with their even being a theory of
"dynasty cycles," roughly that most of them, certainly all that lasted for more than a century (and
most of the major ones lasted about three centuries, the Han getting to four), started out as vigorous
and competent and practical, and degenerated into corruption and inefficiency and so on, leading to
the emperor "losing the Mandate of Heavan" and thus being ripe for an overthrow by whomever (sometimes
an outsider group like the Mongols or the Manchus, who would then be quickly assimilated to Chinese
culture). If this book does not tell this story, or basically stick pretty closely to it, it is
probably a piece of crap.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Oct 29, 2009 2:01:02 PM
I'm reading We Are Doomed too, and your offhand dismissal is unfair. There is a great deal in the book about the broad ranging debasing of current culture, the blind eyes our cultural leaders turn, the delusion or outright frauds of researchers into such topics as educational failures, and the general dim outlook for whatever institutions we used to value.
The book presents mostly overviews of his points--it is just a single book after all--and there is much to disagree with. But his Carol Burnett point is probably true, for what it is worth.
Posted by: JohnF at Oct 29, 2009 2:49:01 PM
"the blind eyes our cultural leaders turn"
...ahem.
Posted by: josh at Oct 29, 2009 3:29:40 PM
"More generally, you can take this book as a radical attack on economic reasoning: she believes that having a Ph.d. will cause a person to ignore the incentives that face non-Ph.d.-holding individuals in the same position."
What? Of course incentives may be valued differently.
My Ph.D. work focused on retinal circuitry. Although I no longer work on the topic, I would much rather have an hour discussion with an expert on this topic than, say, Lady Gaga.
Which option do you think Perez Hilton would choose?
So, wow... my Ph.D. training affects my perception of incentives... am I crazy?
Please explain.
Posted by: Mark at Oct 29, 2009 8:42:00 PM
Josh--
Point well taken!
Posted by: JohnF at Oct 29, 2009 11:14:32 PM
That's a silly example Mark:
Anyone would prefer to talk about retinal circuitry than about whatever Lady Gaga had to say.
Unless she turned out to be an expert on microfluidics or something interesting. But that's to be expected.
Posted by: doctorpat at Oct 29, 2009 11:33:04 PM
Question: How does Tyler seem to able to read almost 4-5 books a week? Speed reader? You skim through them?
Genuinely curious and impressed.
Posted by: dataman at Oct 30, 2009 1:42:44 AM
dearieme, I agree with dearieme.
Posted by: tom s at Oct 30, 2009 8:02:00 AM
On 1, does this not make the earlier cultural pessimists point?
Posted by: cerebus at Oct 30, 2009 9:46:01 AM
Hi
Thanks for mentioning my book (Socrates in the Boardroom) in your blog. I thought it might be helpful to let you know that it has nothing to do with fundraising; instead, it is a book about leaders of research universities.
Hope that is helpful
Posted by: Amanda Goodall at Oct 30, 2009 12:47:43 PM
Yes I was a bit puzzled about that too - having read the book. Now I come to think of it, it isn't an attack on economic reasoning either. Has anybody out there actually read this thing?
Posted by: Richard Baggaley at Oct 30, 2009 1:11:53 PM
