Marginal Revolution

The Snowball

The subtitle is Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.  Is it massive?  Yes.  Does it contain numerous revelations about his childhood, his "slight obsession" with trains, his love of collecting, and his sex life?  Yes.  Is it well written and well researched?  Yes.  Does it cover many financial episodes (most of all Salomon Brothers) and famous characters?  Yes.  Is it number one on Amazon?  Yes.  Does it contain analytic depth?  No.  Did I like it?  Yes, but for a return which is mostly biographical in nature, it's a lot of detail to wade through.

Markets in everything, literary world edition

Part of this new policing mentality is that publishers are becoming more   risk-averse – children's book authors, for example, are being asked to sign   contracts agreeing to 'appropriate conduct' in their private lives.

Here is much more, mostly a discussion of how digitalization is changing the literary world.

Anathem, by Neil Stephenson

Here are a few reviews and a few more and more.  Here is the Amazon listing.  A partial read and a browse put me in (temporary?) agreement with this Amazon review:

The story, when it gets going, is exciting and relatively fast-paced and all that. But it takes some 600-700 pages to get there, during which time you are immersed in the world of Arbre and its native culture. The first few pages are chock-full of in-world jargon à la A Clockwork Orange, and it will be difficult to read. (Not to worry-- there is a glossary, and selections from the Arbran dictionary appear throughout the text)...Anathem takes eight thousand years of fictional history and makes it as relevant and meaningful as anything from the Cycle.

In case you've been living under a rock, Cryptonomicon is the place to start.  It's one of my favorite popular fictions from the last twenty years and you don't even need to like "that sort of thing."

What I've been reading

1. The Future of the Internet -- and How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain.  The main claim is that everything will be sterile, tethered appliances.  The opening up of the iPhone would seem to bely this message plus competition usually works in giving consumers what they want.  A smart book (that is rare for internet books, oddly) but I suspect it will prove to be wrong.

2. Paul Auster, Man in the Dark.  Reviews for this work have a bimodal distribution.  I like most of Auster's books but I vote no.

3. The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson.  So far this is excellent junk reading.

4. Epilogue, by Anne Roiphe.  Ideally this book deserves its own post but it is difficult to excerpt.  It's about why the author, now a widow, finds it hard to fall in love again.  Definitely recommended.

5. The Boy with Two Belly Buttons, by Stephen Dubner.  It's a children's book.  I haven't read so many of these since Mr. Pines Paints a Purple House -- my favorite as a tot -- but to me it seemed very good.  Ages 4-8.

You first

In Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? Bauman, a former communist, argues that we would be better off altogether if we could control our need for “stuff”.

The longer book review is of interest.  The longer book is not.  In other words, Bauman has helped me control my need for "stuff."

What is the classic book of the 80s and 90s?

That's Ryan Holiday's query.  This is not about quality, this is about "representing a literary era" or perhaps just representing the era itself.  I'll cite Bonfire of the Vanities and Fight Club as the obvious picks.  Loyal MR reader Jeff Ritze is thinking of Easton Ellis ("though not American Psycho").  How about you?  Dare I mention John Grisham's The Firm as embodying the blockbuster trend of King, Steele, Clancy and others?  There's always Harry Potter and graphic novels.

The Anglo Files

Upper-class pronunciations are all over the place.  The Cholmondeleys are pronounced the CHUM-leys.  The Earl of Harewood is the Earl of HAR-wood.  The Beaulieux are the BEW-leys.  In accordance with the convention that French words should be pronounced as far away from the actual French style as humanly possible, just to show those French people who's boss, Beauchamp Place, a street in Knightsbridge, BEACH-um Place.  Jacques, in Shakespeare: JAKE-weeze.  Your valet is your VAL-let.  Madame Tussaud's wax museum?  To some Brits it's MA-dam TOO-sod's).

That is from Sarah Lyall's not fully analytical but often quite amusing The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British.

Here is a picture of Thomas Cholmondeley [CHUM-ley], and with this caption: "The trial has opened in Nairobi of an aristocrat accused of murdering a black Kenyan man he suspected of poaching on his family's 100,000-acre estate."  The case, the second of its kind brought against Thomas, remains pending.  Here is more information.  Here is his girlfriend.

What is your dream book?

I want you to tell me.  It's a book that doesn't currently exist.  It is a work of non-fiction.  The author must be living.  It must be a work the author could plausibly write.  It doesn't have to be a close cousin of a book the author has already written.

So you could request "Jared Diamond on sexual selection" but not "Joseph Stiglitz on the early history of Ghenghis Khan."

Do please tell us your pick.  Comments are open...

Mean and Lowly Things

The two Pygmies persuaded to work for me have reputations as the worst guides in the village.  Their cooking often includes rotting fish, which they serve cold for breakfast if I don't finish it at dinner.  They are supposed to do my laundry, but they find women's underwear too embarrassing to contemplate.  They won't go out after dark, and they consider wading in the swamp to be absolute folly.  So I'm almost late one night when I fall over a log and scrape my left leg, on my way back from the swamp with a bag of treefrogs.

I think nothing of the scrape until 5 days later, when my temperature shoots to 104F and my leg swells and turns red.  Some microbe from the swamp has entered through the scrape and spread to infect my whole body.  Perhaps the Pygmies had some sense in refusing to wade in the swamp.

That is from Kate Jackson's Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science and Survival in the Congo.  It is an excellent and very fun book on fieldwork and on the topics mentioned in its subtitle.  I think of this as "a Chris Blattman book" and yes you should be reading Chris's blog.

The roots of Beatlemania -- egomania?

The Beatles even cultivated this sort of personal connection to their audience.  In their early songs, Paul McCartney says, he and John intentionally -- somewhat calculatingly -- tried to inject personal pronouns into as many of the early lyrics as they could.  They took seriously the task of forging a relationship with their fans in a very personal way.  "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "P.S. I Love You," "Love Me Do," "Please Please Me," "From Me to You."

Don't forget "And I Love Her," among a bunch of others.  And by egomania I am referring to the audience not (only) the performers.  This passage is from Daniel J. Levitin's new and quite interesting The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.

The Case for Big Government

That's the title of the forthcoming Jeff Madrick book.  "Don't we already have big government?" was my first reaction.  This book is a good summary of one point of view, but if you're already familiar with the basic arguments it won't extend your understanding of the debates.  There's not much on the public choice arguments (e.g., self-serving special interests and irrational and underinformed voters) against growing state power, only a general sense that we "should" do good things with government.  Nor is there much realization that Americans are skeptical about government, in large part, because of their daily experiences with it.  We're also told that many of the proposed progressive measures will nearly pay for themselves.

Yana's reaction was: "Why didn't he publish it with a government press?"

Walter Benjamin's tips for writing

An occasional MR reader sent me these:

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.        

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion. 

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds. 

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.    

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.   

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.   

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.   

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.   

IX. Nulla dies sine linea -- but there may well be weeks.   

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.   

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.   

XII. Stages of composition: idea -- style -- writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.   

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

Library fines, part II

A US woman has been arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay fines for two overdue library books.

Heidi Dalibor, of Grafton, Wisconsin, is the first to admit that she ignored calls and letters from her local library.

She also admits that she ignored a notice to appear in municipal court or pay the fine, reports the News Graphic.

But the last thing she expected was a knock on her door by Grafton police.

Here is more.  Here is my previous post on library fines.  By the way, she paid the fine and kept the books.

Do self-help books make us happier?

Ad Bergsma says yes:

Advice for a happier life is found in so-called ‘self-help books’, which are
widely sold in modern countries these days. These books popularize insights from psychological science and draw in particular on the newly developing ‘positive psychology’. An analysis of 57 best-selling psychology books in the Netherlands makes clear that the primary aim is not to alleviate the symptoms of psychological disorders, but to enhance personal strengths and functioning. Common themes are: personal growth, personal relations, coping with stress and identity. There is a lot of skepticism about these self-help books. Some claim that they provide false hope or even do harm. Yet there are also reasons to expect positive effects from reading such books. One reason is that the messages fit fairly well with observed conditions for happiness and another reason is that such books may encourage active coping. There is also evidence for the effectiveness of bibliotherapy in the treatment of psychological disorders. The positive and negative consequences of self-help are a neglected subject in academic psychology. This is regrettable, because self-help books may be the most important—although not the most reliable—channel through which psychological insights find their way to the general audience.

Here is the full issue, of the Journal of Happiness Research, and I thank whichever web site led me to this, sorry I forget.

I like that word: bibliotherapy.

The power of competition, or should there by library fines?

From the UK:

"Libraries are facing competition from television, magazines, the internet, e-books, yet they have this archaic and mad idea of charging people money for being slightly late," said library consultant Frances Hendrix - a loud voice in the debate which has been taking place on an online forum for librarians. "It's all so negative, unprofessional and unbusinesslike; like any business, libraries need not to alienate their customers." Liz Dubber, director of programmes at reading charity The Reading Agency, agreed. "My personal view [is that] they're past their sell-by date because they do sustain a very old-fashioned image of libraries which is out of sync with today's modern library environment and the image libraries are trying to project - tolerant, responsive, flexible, stimulating," she said.

Some critics have described the fines as "alienating."  But are there alternatives?:

One librarian suggested adopting the ancient practice of some monasteries, in which monks who offended in the handling of books were publicly cursed. Another pointed to Soviet Russia, where they said that offenders' names were published in newspapers to shame them into returning their books. In New Zealand town Palmerston North next week, library users returning late books are being challenged to beat librarians on Guitar Hero to have their fines waived.

In any case this economist will suggest higher fines for very new and popular books and also commonly used reference manuals, combined with lower fines for everything else.

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.

Sentence of the Day

And for someone so hostile to speculation, Phillips sure engages in a lot of it.

Daniel Gross reviewing Kevin Phillips' new book, Bad Money.

How many Kindles has Amazon sold?

240,000.  I thought this sentence was intriguing:

And if a new Kindle comes out targeted at the textbook/school market, sales could ramp up higher.

I still recall Yana having to lug all those heavy textbooks around.

What I Haven't Been Reading

1. Red State Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, by the consistently impressive Andrew Gelman.

2. Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic; so many smart, virile young men, all writing about destruction.

3. Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust, by Elena Panaritis.  An update on the debates on Hernando de Soto and the associated land and property issues.

4. The Mirrored Heavens, by David J. Williams.  A science fiction story for people who take the idea of space elevators for granted.

5. The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth, by the noted law and economics scholar Robert C. Ellickson.

If I'm not reading them, it's because I've been spending my time with Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Norris's McTeague, both for my Liberty Fund conference in Cleveland.

Are books overwritten?

...having said that, spending a lot of time on the internet, as I have since 2002, has rubbed my nose in something that hadn't really bothered me before then: namely just how overwritten so many books and magazine articles are. Seymour Hersh? He's great. You could also cut every one of his pieces by at least 50% and lose exactly nothing. And I'm not picking on Hersh. At a guess, I'd say that two-thirds of the magazine pieces I read could be sliced by nearly a third or more without losing much. That's true of a lot of books too.

Here is the full piece, by Kevin Drum.  My view is that many readers want overwritten books to tranquillize themselves, just as they enjoy dull, soothing voices on the radio.

Readers, do you agree that most books are overwritten?  Please write your opinion of Kevin Drum's point in the comments and feel free to refer to specific books.  My favorite rock star, the extraordinary Hillel, would like to again create a song from your opinions.  I will link to the song once it is ready.  Hillel assures me that the quality of his song will reflect the quality of your input.  Be poetic!  Think music!  Overwrite, if you wish!

Who first predicted the mortgage crisis?

The Mortgager and Mortgagee differ the one from the other not more in length of purse, than the Jester and Jestee do in that of memory.  But in this the comparison between runs, as the scholiasts call it, upon all four; which, by the bye, is upon one or two legs more than some of the best of Homer's can pretend to; -- namely, That the one raises a sum and the other a laugh at your expense, and think no more about it.  Interest, however, still runs on in both cases; -- the periodical or accidental payments of it just serving to keep the memory of the affair alive; till, at length, in some evil hour, -- pop comes the creditor upon each, and by demanding principal upon the spot, together with full interest to the very day, makes them both feel the full extent of their obligations.

That is Laurence Sterne, from Tristram Shandy, chapter XII.

C, a sampling

Charientism (n.) A rhetorical term to describe saying a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way

Compotation (n.) An episode of drinking or carousing together

Constult (v.) To act stupidly together

Again, that is from Ammon Shea's excellent book.

Reading the OED

atechny (n.) A lack of skill; a lack of knowledge of art.

Reading through the dictionary, I am struck again and again by the fact that many words that describe common things are obscure, while many words that describe obscure things are widely known.  For example, everyone knows that word dinosaur, even though no one has ever seen or met one.  Yet, even though we are faced each and every day with artistic ignorance and lack of skill, very few of us know the word atechny.

That's from Ammon Shea's superb Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. 

Astorgy is the lack of natural affection when it would normally be present.

Accismus is an insincere refusal of a thing that is desired.

Agathokakological means made up of both good and evil.

And those are just some of the A words.

What I've Been Reading

1. Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life and Legacy of the Byrds' Gene Clark, by John Einarson.  I loved this book though partly for idiosyncratic reasons.  Failed creative wonders make for memorable stories plus of course I saw Clark perform many times.  There are many ways to kill yourself and this book outlines one of them.

2. Alvin Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America.  I'm not actually reading it, it's just sitting here, intimidating me with its length.  It looks very good but you're reading a blogger long fixated upon Gene Clark.

3. Irish Food & Cooking, by Biddy White Lennon [a great name to write a book like this, no?] and Georgina Campbell.  Don't laugh, this book is a revelation.  It's selling on Amazon for $49.95 and in the front of my Borders for $5.99.  If you need to start taking Irish cooking seriously, this is step #1.

4. Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations, by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel.  This is a very good summary of what is known about corruption.

The best books with the worst titles

Richard Squire writes to me:

Some friends and I last night came up with a parlor game, Best Books with Worst Titles.  Here were our finalists:

Freakonomics

The Audacity of Hope

The Beautiful and Damned

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Moby Dick (winner)

I agree with the middle three picks but think that Freakonomics and Moby Dick are both very good titles.  I've never actually liked the title Ulysses, as used by James Joyce.  I know all about the structural parallels with Homer's Odyssey but to me they are superfluous to enjoying the work.  The title stresses those parallels and so it irritates me.  What nominations do you all have?

Stuffed Shark review -- the link

Sorry for the mix-up, for my review here is the missing link, so to speak!  The book was excellent.

The Gridlock Economy

How many popular economics books offer a message which is (mostly) true, non-trivial, and understandable?  Michael Heller's The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives satisfies that troika.  The key message is that the "tragedy of the anti-commons" is often a bigger problem than the better-known tragedy of the commons.  The tragedy of the anti-commons arises when too many veto rights are exercised.  Here is one simple example:

Tarnation, a spunky documentary on growing up with a schizophrenic mother, originally cost $218 to make at home on the director's laptop.  It required an additional $230,000 for music clearances before it could be distributed.

Or try tracking down orphaned copyrights or proceeding without explicit permission.  Furthermore many new drugs are more costly to market, or end up not being marketed, because there are so many possible patent infringement issues.  By the way about half of the patents litigated to judgment are not upheld.  Too many interest groups have veto power over infrastructure development, such as wind power or a new oil refinery (my examples).  The U.S. allocates its spectrum far less efficiently than either Japan or South Korea.  Holdouts lower the rate of property redevelopment; I learned that The New York Times used eminent domain to build its new headquarters because otherwise assembling such a large parcel of land in midtown Manhattan was very difficult.  It all boils down to the story of too many tolls on the medieval Rhine.

Yes, the author does give full credit to Buchanan and Yoon for their work on the anti-commons.

Heller does not cover the deeper question of whether a society can respect minority rights to the desired degree without encountering too strong a problem of the anti-commons.  Most of us are for the right to appeal, for the right to a fair trial, for various courses of redress, for the right to sue, for basic rights of intellectual property, and so on.  Some set of interest groups has to support those regimes.  Can those interest groups be so empowered without the excesses outlined in this book?  Would we still want to abolish the anti-commons problems if it led to a more general weakening of minority rights?

The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics

An overview is here, the list of contributors is very prestigious (disclaimer: I wrote the article on the social discount rate), and the Palgrave name is golden.  The old Palgrave Dictionary of Political Economy still makes for fascinating browsing.  Yet the price tag for the new edition is over $2000, $2500 on Amazon.

Not everyone is good at using Google and Wikipedia.

What I've Been Reading

1. Government and the American Economy: A New History, no editor but the book is dedicated to Bob Higgs by Price Fishback.  Imagine essays by economic history luminaries, mostly classical liberals, covering many different eras of American economic history.  For some this is a gold mine.

2. The Third Domain, by Tim Friend.  An overview of archaea, those odd life forms that survive where nothing else can.  A fascinating look at a still mysterious topic.  It's not as well written as the top-drawer popular science books but since you probably know little or nothing about the topic the amount you will learn is high.

3. Empires of Trust: How Rome Built -- and America is Building -- a New World, by Thomas F. Madden.  This book is avowed pro-Roman, pro-American, and sees strong parallels across the two regimes; part of the thesis is that neither wanted to build an empire but had to.

4. The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America, by Maury Klein.  This is a big, clunky book with lots of poor exposition.  It also covers a vital era -- the real Industrial Revolution -- which has remained oddly neglected by too many economic historians.

5. The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz.  This is the most important book on modern U.S. inequality to date; here is my previous coverage of their ideas.  I'm still waiting for Paul Krugman to write a critique but right now their core hypothesis is looking strong.

Which books to take to Africa?

Niall writes me:

I have an optimization problem that I thought you and other loyal MR
readers, like myself, could help me with.

The Question: How should I go about selecting books to bring with me for
a year of field research in rural Africa?

Conditions:
1. I have a limited amount of weight I can carry on the flight
2. There is little or no access to additional books where I will be
3. I only expect to return to the US once during that year

Thanks for continuing the to make MR the most educational blog on the web.

Sadly I do not know this fine gentleman.  But I'll suggest the following five books: Moby Dick, The Bible (but it must be a serious translation), Plato's Dialogues, Homer's Odyssey, and a long, fun book of science fiction or fantasy that you haven't already read.  LOTR would be a fine first choice if it fits that bill, otherwise ask around.  The basic principles are that the works should be long, deep, divisible into smaller parts, capable of sustaining rereadings, culturally central in some way, and last of all you need one piece of pure fun.  Readers, can you improve upon these tips?

I'll add that if you read some language other than English, and thus read more slowly in that language, pick a book or two there as well.

The best sentence I read yesterday

Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.

That is from Adam Phillips, in the new book Intimacies.

Why you should throw books out

I'm guest-blogging for Penguin just a bit, to promote the paperback edition of Discover Your Inner Economist.  Here is my post on why you should throw books out.  Natasha, alas, does not agree and sometimes she pulls them out of the trash and scolds me.  But here is an excerpt in my defense:

Here's the problem. If you donate the otherwise-thrashed book somewhere, someone might read it. OK, maybe that person will read one more book in life but more likely that book will substitute for that person reading some other book instead.

So you have to ask yourself -- this book -- is it better on average than what an attracted reader might otherwise spend time with? No I'm not encouraging "censorship" of any particular point of view, but even within any particular point of view most books simply aren't that good. These books are traps for the unwary. A lot of books don't make the cut of "above average to those readers they will attract" and of course since you've spent some time with the volume you ought to be in a position to know. (But note the calculation is tricky. Sometimes a very bad book can be useful because it might appeal to "bad" readers and lure them away from even worse books. Please make all the appropriate calculations here.)

Note that the smarter and more discriminating are your friends, the higher the standard your book donations to them must meet.  Toss it!

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.

First Stop in the New World

The subtitle is Mexico City, The Capital of the 21st Century.  If you are familiar with this charming metropolis, it is a superb book.  Excerpt:

Apart from the obvious problems of traffic and transportation, the growth created other confusing complications.  Today, out of the city's eighty-five thousand streets, there are about eight hundred fifty called Juárez, seven hundred fifty named Hidalgo, and seven hundred known as Morelos.  Two hundred are called 16 de Septiembre, while a hundred more are called 16 de Septiembre Avenue, Alley, Mews, or Extension.  Nine separate neighborhoods are called La Palma, four are called Las Palmas, and there are numerous mutations: La Palmita, Las Palmitas, Palmas Inn, La Palmas Condominio, Palmas Avenida, La Palma I y Palma I-II Unidad Habitacional.

Here is the Amazon link.  Here is the author's home page and blog, which has an excellent Raymond Chandler quotation.

Atmospheric Disturbances

It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation...The beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us...that must be deciphered.

That is Gilles Deleuze and it is the front quotation in the new novel Atmospheric Disturbances, by the very beautiful Rivka Galchen.  The key premise of this novel is that a 51-year-old psychiatrist suddenly believes that his wife has been replaced with an exact look-alike; he refers to her as the Simulacrum.  I read it straight through.  Here is an interview with the author.

Review of Stephen Marglin on economics and community

Wow, is this scathing (or try this version).  It's by E. Roy Weintraub.  I found the pointer on the Oxonomics blog.

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.

O Economista Que Há Em Si

That's the Portuguese-language version of Discover Your Inner Economist, the Amazon link is here.  Here are various Portuguese-language web sites about the book.  I am pleased to be represented in the Lusaphone world, as Portuguese is a very beautiful language, even when the topic is economics.  Oddly Natasha insists that, heard at a distance, Portuguese sounds a great deal like Russian.

And of course the English language paperback edition of Inner Economist, just out and only $10 on Amazon, can be found here.

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.

What I've been reading

1. The Book of Love: The Story of the Kama Sutra, by James McConnachie.  A serious book about...another serious book.  It's good.

2. Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, by Elizabeth Royte.  This is a subtler than expected treatment of the economics of bottled water.

3. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, by Grant McCracken, our leading practitioner of anthropology and marketing; he is always interesting so far I am just browsing this one.

4. Paul A. Offit, Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure.  This superb book details how pseudo-science can attain such a grip on the human mind.  It is a level better than the other books on the same topic and it is one of my favorite non-fiction books so far this year.

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.

What I've Been Reading

1. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, by Jill Bolte Taylor.  What's it like to lose half your brain in a stroke, be aware of the entire process, be unable to reason coherently, and then recover your faculties over the course of years?  This first person account is written by a Harvard neuroscientist.

2. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill.  Many critics are claiming this is the first great 9-11 novel.  It grips your attention immediately and has a strong craft but philosophically does it have anywhere to go?  It is rare that I put a book down after the halfway mark but that was the case here.  Some of you will like this but I look for something more exotic from my fiction.

3. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others, by Marco Iacoboni.  This is now the go-to popular science book on mirror neutrons.  I especially liked the discussion of why we find conversation easier than giving monologues (well, not everyone does), even though a priori you might expect the opposite.

4. Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II, by Brendan I. Koerner.  The story of a black WWII GI who goes AWOL and marries into a Burmese hill tribe.  This could have been a great book but as it stands it is a "good enough to read" book.  The digressions are often more interesting than the main story.

5. Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective, by Andrew Lo.  Finally a serious book on hedge funds based on real data, written by a leading financial economist, and covering August 2007.  I've only browsed the book but it is a must for anyone who follows this area.

6. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels.  I read this (yet again) on the flight back from Japan, it is still one of the best books and one of the most important books for aspiring social scientists.  A must-read if you don't already know it.

The dumbing down of Borders

You leave the country for a few weeks and you come back to ruin.  I've visited two Borders stores since my return and both have done away with their new books tables.  In one case the table is still there but has about one-quarter as many books on it if that.  The very best-selling books now get four to six piles on the table -- or more -- rather than leaving space for a greater number of titles with one stack a piece.  The front of the store offers many more paperback books and many more bestsellers that have been doing well for months.  Many bookshelves are gone altogether and replaced with non-book, non-CD, non-DVD items, such as expensive writing journals and gift cards.  It's much more like a Barnes and Noble.

In sum, the front of a Borders store no longer produces much information about the new titles on the market and it is no longer a good place for the well-informed to browse.  I've yet to compare what's stocked on the shelves but I am not hopeful about the trend.  It's hard to believe that the front of the store is the only site of ruin.

On the brighter side, maybe Borders Magic Shelf will prove of use.  But check it out here -- so far it doesn't compare to browsing a well-stocked new books table nor for that matter Amazon. 

What I've Been Reading

1. Henning Mankel, Depths.  I loved this story.  Have I mentioned that Mankell is one of my favorite contemporary writers?

2. Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life.  One of the best popular science books I've read in the last few years.  Among other matters he explains why curing aging isn't so easy, why eukaryotes seem to have evolved only once, and why it often should be "The Selfish Cell" and not always "The Selfish Gene."  His book Oxygen is excellent as well.

eBook sales are way up

Penguin has reported that e-book sales from the first four months of 2008 have surpassed the house's total e-book sales for all of last year. According to the publisher, the spike is "more than five times the overall growth in sales, year-on-year, through April 2008." Penguin Group CEO David Shanks said he attributed the jump, in large part, to the growing popularity of e-book readers. 

Here is the link and right here you can buy Discover Your Inner Economist in Kindle form (it's also available as a Sony eBook) and paperback as well, here is the Amazon link.

Addendum: Here is more on the economics of Kindle.

Who should be bounced from The Great Books series?

Before leaving for Japan, I'd been pawing through these volumes lately -- you know, the U. Chicago fat tomes with two columns on each page?  The obvious question is which books belong and which do not; overall I'm surprised at how well the 1952 picks have held up and yes that is tribute to the University of Chicago or at least its influence.

I'm sad that Hume doesn't get his own volume, including many of his shorter essays.  Plus I'd like to add Dickens's Bleak House and at least the first two books of Proust.  And who to bounce?  I nominate Plotinus as the obvious choice, noting that he has only about 24,000 cites on scholar.google.com, not even as many as Joseph Stiglitz.

In 1990 they dropped four books: Apollonius' On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier's Analytical Theory of Heat.  The loss of Sterne is regretted but the others we can do without.  You'll find a list of the added books in 1990 at the first link, about halfway down and yes they did include Swann's Way.  Little Dorrit is not the best or even the second best Dickens selection.  Most are good picks though I would have left the Bergson, the Dewey (unreadable), and tossed out some of the shorter works in favor of Ulysses.  More William James is never a bad idea; how about The Varieties of Religious Experience?  None of the science books will age well.  And how about a wee bit of Mises and Hayek to reflect the failures of socialism?  Absalom, Absalom would help cover race and maybe Mill on The Subjection of Women should be there too.

Discover Your Inner Economist, paperback edition

It's now out in stores or buy it here on Amazon for $10.20.  If you order the paperback (or the Kindle edition!) within the next week, just drop me an email and I'll send you the site address of my secret blog.  It has over fifty posts.  We work on the honor system, so if you told me you have bought the book I will believe you.

My favorite things Japan, literature edition

I do not know Japanese literature well but nonetheless I recommend the following:

1. Out: A Novel, by Natsuo Kirino.  Vicious fun.  Dark, violent, etc.

2. Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes.  He has been called the Japanese Stanislaw Lem.  Why do I never hear about this book?  The movie by the same name is good too.

3. Yasunari Kawabata, both The Go Master and The Snow Country.

4. Mishima, Spring Snow, others.

5. Haruki Murakami.  My favorite is Hard-Boiled Wonderland (one of my favorite books period) and then Underground, a modern classic of social science (really).  I like most of them but I feel he is repeating himself as of late.

6. Shusaku Endo, Silence.  Very powerful and I remain fascinated by Japan's so-called "Christian century."

7. Kenzaburo Oe: I like Teach us to Outgrow Our Madness.

Question: Is Tale of Genji actually fun to read?  I would say about half of it, so yes it is worth the time.  The best parts are very beautiful and mysterious and unlike anything else in literature.  Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is fun and is a good introduction to the period.

The bottom line: There is lots and lots more that I have never heard of, not to mention manga.

Why Popcorn Costs So Much at The Movies

That's the title of the new microeconomics book by Richard McKenzie.  Here is a book trailer on YouTube.  The subtitle is: "And Other Pricing Puzzles."

I am a fan of this book and I wrote a blurb for it.  It is popular economics but it is more extended microeconomic reasoning than most of the other popular economics books.

How to find new books to read

TLV, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I've always been curious about how Tyler goes about choosing new books to read. Most people rely on recommendations from others, but Tyler seems like someone who generates a lot of recommendations rather than relying on them. What is your process?

Children, do not try this at home, but here goes: visit Borders every Tuesday to look for new books, go to a local public library every other day and scan the new books section, subscribe to TLS, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, noting that you should spend more time with the ads than the book reviews, read the blogs Bookslut and Literary Saloon, read the new magazine BookMark (recommended), read the NYT, FT, and Guardian and their books sections, review lots of books on your blog and peruse the numerous review copies you get in the mail (thanks, you mailers and yes I do look at each and every one; keep them coming!). 

It's rare that I rely on recommendations from other people.

Oh, yes, you should get free shipping on Amazon.com.

Why are books so outrageously expensive in Brazil?

That's from a reader request.  I'm no expert on Brazil, but here are a few possibilities:

1. Most Brazilians do not read.  I don't mean they can't read, I mean they don't read for leisure so much.  I was stuck at the Sao Paulo airport for seven hours and did not see a single person reading a book, not once.

Taking that as given, low demand means high prices.  That's why Stephen King paperbacks are cheap and Edward Elgar (the name of an academic publisher) tomes go for $100 and up.

2. Brazilian retailing is not in every way efficient.  Efficient retailing in the traditional sense is, by the way, bad for the quality of your food because it means it is easy to serve large numbers.  And Brazil has some of the world's best food, and so inefficient retailing for its books.

3. No other supply source is right nearby and the Portuguese language does not produce an extremely thick market.  Note that the Portuguese of Portugal is very different from the Portuguese of Brazil.

4. The Brazilian currency may be overvalued at the moment, at least in purchasing power parity terms, due to Brazil's commodity exports.

Outliers

The new Malcolm Gladwell book.

And now for something not completely different: Here is Robert Mundell's hypothesis about Taxi Driver.  And yes it is that Robert Mundell.

Spot the Contradiction

Daniel Gross's review of Sachs' Common Wealth was bizarre.  Consider this:

Even congenital optimists have good reason to suspect that this time the prophets of economic doom may be on point, with the advent of seemingly unstoppable developments like....the explosive growth of China and India.

Huh?  What kind of upside down logic makes high growth rates proof of economic doom?  Proving this was no idle slip Gross goes on to say:

Things are different today, [Sachs] writes, because of four trends: human pressure on the earth, a dangerous rise in population, extreme poverty and a political climate characterized by “cynicism, defeatism and outdated institutions.” These pressures will increase as the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world. (emphasis added)

Silly me, I thought rising life expectancy, increasing wealth, and lower world inequality, which is what it means to say that the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world, was a good thing.  And then there is this:

The combination of climate change and a rapidly growing population clustering in coastal urban zones will set the stage for many Katrinas, not to mention “a global epidemic of obesity, cardiovascular disease and adult-onset diabetes.”

Ok, climate change will create problems but how clueless do you have to be not to understand that a large fraction of the world's people would love to live long enough to die from obesity and other diseases of wealth?

Don't misunderstand, I know that growth brings problems.  My dispute with Gross is not that he thinks the glass is half-empty and I think it is half-full; my dispute is that Gross thinks the fuller the glass gets the more empty it becomes.

Addendum: Dan Gross writes to say that he was summarizing Sachs' argument.  Point noted.

Network Power

Indeed, while this convergence in ways of thinking and living may extend to influence cultural forms like music or food, it need not necessarily do so.  It is striking that in this moment of global integration producing massive convergence in economic, linguistic, and institutional standards, we should be so worried about restaurant chains and pop music, neglecting much more significant issues.  Famously, Sigmund Freud argued that nationalist rivalries between neighboring countries reflected the "narcissism of minor differences," a pathological focus on relatively trivial distinctions driven by the desire to keep at bay an anxiety-provoking recognition of fundamental sameness.

That is from David Singh Grewal's Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, one of the most interesting books on cultural globalization in recent years.  He uses the ideas of social networks and peer effects to argue that widespread cultural convergence is occurring, most of all in ways of life.  Here is the book's home page.

There is much wrong in the central thesis.  "Ways of thinking" may be less diverse across countries (France is more like Germany than it used to be) but ways of thinking are now much more diverse within countries and in fact within the world as a whole.  What's so special about having diversity distributed according to geographic or political criteria?  Once you get over the geography fetish, many of the author's main mechanisms don't hold up as accounts of growing sameness of ways of life and thinking.  Has the author spent much time poking around Second Life?

Nor is he capable of simply coming out and saying that lots of countries in the world *ought* to be doing more to emulate Anglo-American ways of thinking.

The following claim is also questionable:

To reshape or reduce the power that the social structures we create have over us, we can only summon the organized power of politics.  The large-scale voluntarism of sociability, by contrast, has always delivered the most varied and elaborate forms of individual subjugation.

Cranky Tyler is about to come out of his shell, so maybe it is time to end this post.  It's still a book worth reading and thinking about.

On a not totally unrelated topic, here is a good post on babies and globalization.

Wuthering Heights

When Dante Gabriel Rossetti read the novel Wuthering Heights, he wrote to a friend: "The action takes place in Hell, but the places, I don't know why, have English names.

That is from Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions.

The Post-American World

The American political system has lost the ability for large-scale compromise, and it has lost the ability to accept some pain now for much gain later on.

That is from Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, a book remarkably full of common sense.  It's #7 on Amazon and a good overall guide to globalization and why it matters that America no longer dominates the world, either economically or culturally.

Ezra Klein on Kindle

At the end of the day, the true advances won'€™t come in the Kindle, but in the content. Just as the capabilities of the device will shape what authors decide to do with it, so too will the decisions of authors shape the evolution of the device. The Kindle a€™s homepage already features videotaped testimonials from such literary luminaries as Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis, James Patterson, and Neil Gaiman. But what the Kindle, and Amazon, need is not their kind words, but more of their written words, composed with an eye toward the possibilities offered by electronic text. Just as the early television shows were really radio programs with moving images, the early electronic books are simply printed text uploaded to a computer. Amazon could use its unique position to change that.

Here is more.  Here is Megan McArdle on Kindle: "Best thing since sliced bread."  Here is me on Kindle, before and after trying it.

The best sentence I read today, circa 6:36 a.m.

Nixon, who became vice president at age 40, was well described as “an old man’s idea of a young man.”

That is from this review of Nixonland, a book which is rapidly approaching the top of my pile. 

The Man Who Loved China

That's the new Simon Winchester book and it concerns Joseph Needham, who wrote the famous series on the history of science in China and focused the attention of the scholarly world on the question: why no capitalism in China?  This books offers a love story, a story of a quest, a story of science, a tale of politics, and did you know that Needham (unwittingly) was the guy who taught the Unabomber to use explosives?

Here is one short bit from the book:

In 1989, more than half a century after they first met, Needham and Lu Gwei-djen were married in Cambridge.  She died two years later, whereupon Needham invited three other women to marry him.  All politely declined.

Definitely recommended.  The subtitle is "The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom."  Here is one review.

I hate perfume

I really, really do.  All perfume, and yes that means yours too.  But I loved the book Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.  If you are rating this book along the single dimension of how skillfully it informs the reader, it is one of the best non-fiction books I have read, ever.

Plus it has good sentences like:

Nobody ever died from wearing Mitsouko, but lots of babies were born as a result of it.

And:

Fragrances for men are mostly identical crap, designed to trap you and give you away as a lout.

Recommended.

What I've Been Reading

1. Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, by Bill Ivey.  The concrete discussions of cultural issues are consistently interesting and thoughtful; the overall talk of cultural rights which frames the book is not even well-developed enough to be called absurd.  The book is best on copyright and least interesting on the NEA, which Ivey once ran.  Most of all the book reflects a creeping horror that the internet will make its entire series of debates irrelevant.

2. Apples are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared, by Christopher Robbins.  A substantive travel book about you-know-where; it is both fun and full of substance.  Recommended.

3. The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History, by Robert L. Hetzel.  This is a very serious treatment of what is, from a historical point of view, an understudied topic.  Recommended; note that while the monetarist point of view is not heavy-handed, it may not appeal to everybody.

4. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century.  A lengthy and thoughtful volume on how WMD are *the* problem of the future, though I found it didn't get me further to thinking through my views.  A good start, however, for those who don't buy the premise.

5. 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die.  One of the best books for browsing I have seen, though don't expect much from the index.  I was most surprised by the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, have any of you been there?