I like to read books by my friends. But Cass writes more quickly than I can read. I confess that I only read this one out of guilt because he handed mI like to read books by my friends. But Cass writes more quickly than I can read. I confess that I only read this one out of guilt because he handed me a copy that he had just purchased for me at full price in a bookstore. But I'm really glad I did.
In lieu of a review I'm pasting the email I sent to Cass after reading it (with a few names of friends and former classmates redacted to XX's, sorry you won't know the other great actors in Harvard's Class of 1992):
---- From: Jason Furman To: Cass Sunstein Subject: A few comments on your book Date: June 13, 2024 9:41am
1. It is outstanding. A lovely combination of social science, speculative thinking, literary appreciation, and being inside your strange mind.
2. In the paperback you should fix the only error in the book: deleting the words “still is” after talking about the importance of Scientific American. At least on gender issues it is deeply unscientific and an embarrassment.
3. You are reasonably objective about the Yesterday thought experiment, even managing to be objective about the role of chance in such world historical geniuses as The Beatles and Bob Dylan. But I found you lost all objectivity and reason in discussing Star Wars which came across as something that surpassed and transcended all contingency to be pure, unadulterated timeless fame.
4. You don’t appear to read enough foreign language fiction, just about the only foreign reference was to Tolstoy and you didn’t provide any evidence that you read past the first sentence of Anna Karenina. In my book about how to become famous there will be an entire chapter on Cervantes and the only element of luck will be that the bullet that hit him in the Battle of Lepanto missed his head/heart by a foot. Other than that his fame was inevitable and based on the fact that Don Quixote is even better than Star Wars. I would also have Pushkin, Gogol and Kafka. And more Dickens, but I was glad to see the enthusiasm for Great Expectations even if it is not as good as Bleak House.
5. I often do the “run history 100 times” thought experiment with various things. Like Obama’s effort to pass an immigration bill (it passed in 25 of the times), XX being successful (80 of the times, part of the evidence is the “independent draws” of his success in different context that were not just the Matthew Principle), or fame.
6. I’ve had this idea, possibly infeasible, that we might be able to get at some of the issues about “objectivity” vs. information cascade/polarization/chance with LLMs. The idea would be to train a model only on data through, say, 1860. And then give it all the books published in 1861 without telling it the authors and ask it to rank them. Would Great Expectations be first? If you’re worried that it already formed its views about what greatness was based on earlier Dickens novels and their reception then cut the training off in 1836.
7. I wish you had more on scientific genius and fame. You mostly deal with “subjective” greatness but there is something objective about how much more Newton got new and right than anyone else in his time. The big issue raised by scientific fame (and possibly is related to artistic fame, although a bit less obvious), is the issue of “inevitability’ and “simultaneous discovery”. If there was no Newton we would have had calculus (in fact was simultaneously discovered), would we have had everything else and in short order? Darwin is enormously famous but mostly because he accelerated publication and wrote a bit better, we would have basically had the same theory even without him. Most of quantum mechanics seems like simultaneous discovery where if this person didn’t do it then would that person. Is Einstein different? Special relativity comes straight out of Michelson-Morley, the Lorenz Transformations, etc., hard to believe it wouldn’t have been found soon after 1905. But general relativity? Is it possible that absent Einstein we still would not have it? I’ve had the same fantasy about the LLM experiment, but might need better AI, but train it on data through 1910 and see if it figures out general relativity.
8. Next time we’re together I have to tell you about my family’s friendship with the Dylan family when I was young. It is related to fame.
9. The example I use with people on fame, chance, hard work and ability is my freshman year roommate (and still friend) Matt Damon. Matt was one of the 4 best actors in my class (along with XX, XX and XX), I’m reasonably confident in the objectiveness of that assessment, ability to do different voices, characters, etc. He was one of the 2 most focused on being a movie star in my class (our first conversation was about how he would be a movie star), tied with XX. So relative to Harvard he was a 1 in 800 talent. Harvard recruits based on exceptional talent so I’m willing to stipulate, guessing here, he was a 1 in 4,000 talent for people born in 1970. But that means there were 1,000 people who were just as good at acting born in that year and luck was the reason he did better than the other 1,000 of them (including Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Rachel Weisz).
10. I’ve always meant to read Joyce Carol Oates. But I’m a bit of a completist which would be rather dangerous in her case (or yours for that matter).
11. I enjoyed the Houdini chapter but wasn’t sure I understood the point of it.
What’s your address, I want to reciprocate by sending you a great novel about how to become famous—and reversals of fame. [NOTE - Cass will be getting a copy of [book:The Fraud|66086834] which, in part, illustrates some of the reversals in fame that he discusses in the book--with William Harrison Ainsworth getting massively eclipsed by Charles Dickens over time, a reversal from their contemporaneous positions.]...more
This comparative study at the intersection of history, sociology and politics seeks to understand why unions workers, specifically Steelworkers in WesThis comparative study at the intersection of history, sociology and politics seeks to understand why unions workers, specifically Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, have shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party over the last seventy years, with most of the shift concentrated in the last two decades. Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol tell a rich and nuanced story while bringing lots of new data to the fore, including systematic cataloging of changes in union newsletters/newspapers over time, tallies of bumper stickers in a Steelworkers parking lot, extensive interviews, as well as synthesizing other scholarship.
Their argument in part rests on the familiar story of deindustrialization and the effects it had on employment and communities. The novel twist, which they develop and emphasize, is that this ended up shifting unions from being at the center of a rich social network that fostered social events and ties to unions being simply about collective bargaining. For example, when everyone lived in one town the local could organize bbqs, sporting events and the like--but with sparser employment people started commuting much longer distances to their jobs and were less likely to have social ties to co-workers or through the union. This vacuum ended up being filled by other associations, like the National Rifle Association, that often connected people to the Republican Party, particularly the ascendant populist strain under Trump.
Some of their argument is bolstered by an interesting contrast between the United Steelworkers (USW) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). People in the building trades move from job to job so the union plays an important role in allocating the jobs but also is more active in fostering ties because of what would otherwise be a very lonely way to operate.
A lot of social scientists are content with just documenting and explain but Newman and Skocpol seek to provide advice to labor leaders (who still support Democrats) about how to bring their rank and file along, most notably through trying to resuscitate some of the richer social ties. They also have a plea to Democrats not to give up on this group and instead more actively court and engage it.
Overall, this was a really enjoyable and enlightening read that brought a lot of new data into the world. Ultimately, however, it documents a series of associations and sequences of events so cannot settle questions of causation. The atomization of workers is a consequence of deindustrialization but is it itself a cause of shifting party affiliations? Or is the deindustrialization also the cause of that? And the advice to union leaders is worth a try but there are, as they document, very good reasons unions no longer serve the social functions they used to and so it may be fruitless to try to bring that back....more
Tyler Cowen’s writes what he calls a “love letter to an American anti-hero”. But it is more honest and balanced than most love letters. This is embodiTyler Cowen’s writes what he calls a “love letter to an American anti-hero”. But it is more honest and balanced than most love letters. This is embodied by his discussion of a book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. Cowen says he agrees with just about everything the book documents about, for example, kickbacks to doctors, overprescribing, and keeping trial results secret. His cheeky objection, however, was that the book was titled Not Nearly as Good as It Could Be Pharma: How Corruption Is Diminishing One of Our Great Benefactors and did not include all the good that prescription drugs have done for us.
Similarly his chapter on competition has a lot in common with Thomas Philippon’s book The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, which was an argument about the problems stemming from increased concentration in the US economy. He identifies much the same areas where competition is insufficient and consumers are hurt, including health care, cellular and cable. But he also spends much more space on the parts of the economy where competition has increased, especially retail, and the many ways in which we have more choices and better ability to compare than ever before.
Other topics get similar treatment: Cowen documents the evidence that larger corporations tend to be more honest because they have reputations at stake while also discussing cases of dishonesty as well as industries built on it and he describes the wonders of the tech industry while expressing substantial concerns about privacy (some of which go well beyond my own personal tastes for privacy0. He is much more unqualified in his defense of CEO pay (it is linked to firm size and the scarce pool of talent) and finance (critical not just for economic development but also global power).
Cowen’s most creative but perhaps least convincing chapter was his speculation that the reason people hate businesses is that they anthropomorphize them. This has the advantage of making them more relatable but the disadvantage that we judge them by the same standards we judge people, something they can never live up to because they are not in fact our cuddly friends.
At the root of some of the book is an alternative theory of the firm to the Coase-Williamson minimize transaction costs view, instead it is businesses as social capital bundling trust, relationships and culture. This leads him to criticize Milton Friedman’s view that corporations should just maximize profits and instead argue that they need to imbue their workers with a sense of mission and purpose that goes beyond profit maximization.
Overall I found myself largely in agreement with the book. It is a good reminder that the average contribution of corporations is enormously beneficial—they make the goods and services we rely on and love (including the Kindle I read the book on and the MacBook I’m typing this review on) and they also employ most of us (not me, I work for a nonprofit and previously worked for the government). The book does not shy away from the many negative marginal contributions corporations make, and in fact endorses holding them to account and making them better, it just does include them to the exclusion of everything else....more
The Journey of Humanity by economist Oded Galor is a relatively short book covering the broad sweep of human economic history (it is also very readablThe Journey of Humanity by economist Oded Galor is a relatively short book covering the broad sweep of human economic history (it is also very readable and does not require any economics background). It seeks to explain two huge mysteries: (1) the mystery of growth whereby for ten thousand years following the invention of agriculture innovation led to larger populations but not higher per capita incomes—until growth took off exponentially in the Industrial Revolution and (2) the mystery of inequality whereby massive differences emerged between countries (he barely addresses inequality within countries, which is a smaller factor in global inequality).
Galor tells this big story while drawing on a range of recent academic research, much of it is his own but also Daron Acemoglu, Melissa Dell, and many other economists who are using modern empirical methods to exploit quasi natural experiments to study how (possibly) random differences in the past cast a shadow centuries or even millennia later. This thorough grounding in research sets it apart from some other more speculative big think books—although some of the research ends up confirming, or at least corroborating, various speculations.
For example, Thomas Malthus had a big idea in 1798 when he argued that innovation would increase the population but not per capita incomes because population would adjust up or down to keep people at subsistence. Galor, in this case drawing on his own peer-reviewed research, looks at quasi natural experiments like the correlation between millennia old “technology” (defined as the timing of the neolithic revolution or natural variety of crops) and data for 1500 (it’s highly correlated with population density but not at all correlated with per capita incomes, which themselves barely vary across places).
The explanation of the takeoff into sustained growth is a little bit less satisfying, but that’s partly what happens when you only have one first sustained takeoff—and it happens at a time when the world is globally connected so you don’t have the (somewhat) independent data points you have for studying other issues. Galor argues was a situation where small changes can lead to a large change—which he analogizes to “bifurcation theory” in mathematics.
An important part of Galor’s story for the takeoff is human capital. Child labor became less valuable because of machines and was abolished. Women’s labor became more valuable and they were paid more. All of this created more of an incentive to invest in children which ultimately led to a Demographic Transition where birth rates plummeted. (This section too has a lot of quasi natural experiments, like using distance from the village where the steam engine was invented to measure technology and its impact on subsequent demand for education.)
The second half of the book is about the rise of inequality between countries. He eschews any discussion of the growth theory of Solow, Lucas, Romer and the like and goes—which he briefly dismisses as “proximate”—and instead instead goes to the deeper, underlying theories: (1) institutions, (2) culture, (3) geography, and (4) population diversity.
The institutional discussion largely draws on work by Daron Acemoglu and co-authors on the importance of “inclusive” institutions instead of “extractive” institutions (describing their quasi natural experiment around settler mortality, leading to different types of colonization, different institutions, and income levels today.
The cultural discussion, together with Joseph Henrich’s excellent The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, has made me take culture more seriously. He presents some quasi natural experimental evidence for the Max Weber’s thesis in the Protestant Ethic (including things like distance from Wittenberg as a random treatment for Protestantism) and an argument that better agricultural land has led people to have lower discount rates (again, similar types of evidence).
Geography tells the familiar story of the tsetse fly leading to no livestock in much of Africa, malaria degrading work, and the difference in native crops in Eurasia (possibly because of its East-West orientation) and the Americas (because of its North-South orientation). He also has some interesting links between culture and geography, for example linking societal views on gender equity to the type of soil they have which determined whether they used plows (handled by strong men) or hoes (handled by men or women).
Finally, the fourth underlying story is the one that Galor’s own research has advanced and the idea that is the most intriguing but frankly also feels the most speculative to me. Specifically he points out that migratory distance from Africa is closely related to population diversity—which is very high in Ethiopia but very low in Bolivia because of the “serial founder effect”. He argues that diversity has a plus (lots of ideas from combining different perspectives) and a minus (clashing) and that this leads to an inverted U-shaped relationship between population diversity and various economic outcomes like per capita income.
In many ways the evidence the book presents, drawing on a lot of peer-reviewed research, is much better than what we had even twenty years ago in thinking about economic growth. In other ways, however, a lot of the relationships between ancient variables and present ones (e.g., when was maize first introduced in Chinese areas and what was there economic status much later) could easily have alternative explanations or miss big points.
A book of this nature relies on fortuitous reversals that might make sense ex post but how sure are we? For example, Europe’s geography led to many competition states and China’s to a single unified state, the later was better for the economy through 1500 but the former was better after. Yes, there’s a decent story. But am I sure? Of course not.
Moreover there is a lot that it does not explain, that probably depends on the more mundane issues covered by more proximate theories of growth and some of the standard economic policy issues like the importance of avoiding and resolving crises. For example, why is the United States so much richer than Argentina? Or why did China take off when it did but Brazil did not? Or even just variations in income within regions.
Galor concludes with a short and relatively superficial discussion of the public policy implications of these ideas. From my perspective the fact that the book does not explain issues like the United States vs. Argentina also is related to its overly facile dismissal of the “Washington consensus”. Of course it ignored culture, institutions, population diversity and geography—but by the way most of those are not changeable and there is enormous variation within regions that are similar in those regards. Nothing about the deep roots of incomes is a reason why a country, for example, should run large budget deficits financed with short-term foreign borrowing or have a budget devoted to subsidies while neglecting primary education or have weak property rights.
Galor’s policy argument instead is that “As the great cogs that have governed the journey of humanity continue to turn, measures that enhance future orientation, education and innovation, along with gender equality, pluralism and respect for difference, hold the key for universal prosperity.” It’s hard to argue with this—and most of these are good in their own right even if they’re not key to growth. Moreover most of them are actually emphasized by international institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (at least today).
Ultimately, however, what I liked about the book is the way that it draws on a rich set of research that is attempting to turn history into social science. And in the process coming up with some surprising and interesting answers that even if they do not help us change the world can help us understand some of the most fascinating economic developments humanity has faced....more
A spectacular book that synthesizes a range of research in economics, education, psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology and public policy in ordeA spectacular book that synthesizes a range of research in economics, education, psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology and public policy in order to document, explain and propose remedies to the problems facing boys and men in modern society.
Richard Reeves does not set out to gratuitously shock with a polemic He is at pains to say nothing in his book is about diminishing challenges facing women and girls. He works hard to bring both progressives and conservatives along with a sympathetic account of how their approaches could contribute—while also criticizing the errors they made. Nevertheless, the book is truly shocking.
Yes, I knew many of the main points: girls are increasingly successful in school and a growing majority in higher education. Male employment rates have been falling for decades (in fact, Reeves draws on some work we did at the Council of Economic Advisers on this topic). Men are increasingly lonely and often feeling without purpose. All of this is especially bad for Black men and poor men. Most randomized trials and natural experiments find that most public policies that help girls do not also help boys (e.g., preschool, mentoring, college scholarships, work subsidies, training, etc.) But I learned a number of new ones and reading them all together in such stark terms was still eye opening.
Reeves then goes on to explain these points, grounding his explanation in a combination of nature and nurture. He explains some of the evolutionary biology of masculinity and the way in which it co-developed with culture. The evidence is overwhelming that there is something different about men including risk taking (possibly the biological result of their lower rates of evolutionary success), violence, sexual drive, and more. Reeves notes that there is a lot of overlap between men and women on most of these but that men also have greater variance and thus more extremes.
This account allows Reeves to situate his analysis in a political context. He chides progressives for alienating men with their belief that all masculinity is toxic and their mistaken insistence on a “blank slate” that denies the role of biology. Conservatives have the opposite problem, over-emphasizing biology and treating feminism as itself toxic. Much of the conservative response styles itself as a response to the liberal one, in which discussions of male problems are de-emphasized so it becomes a forbidden discussion that quickly turns dark and ugly.
Finally, Reeves concludes with a set of very detailed and specific policy recommendations. The biggest one is to redshirt boys, setting the default of starting school a year later to make up for their slower biological development. This is a big idea and deserves serious thought—but I’m not sure the evidence is good enough yet that I would want to see the entire country adopt it. More modest is the suggestion of an effort to enlist more male teachers, something the evidence shows matters a lot for boys learning reading—and now only 11 percent of elementary school teachers are male. In addition he has ideas on attracting more men to HEAL professions, non-transferrable paid leave that could be used for children up to age 18, and much more.
Overall the problem Reeves is documenting is not exactly a secret, after all he cites and draws heavily on work by leading economists, sociologists, and other social scientists and biologists who have all done scholarship in the area. Then again, you wouldn’t read a book on inequality and dismiss it because it is not a newly discovered problem. Reeves puts it together nicely, tying together all of the different steps of the argument and aspects of the problem. He also shows how much it was neglected in public policy discussions (e.g., he highlights several examples of a focus on a problem for girls/men when the exact same problem, like suicide or COVID or whatever, is worse for boys/men). I don’t think he has all the solutions—no one person does—but I hope the book motivates more people to look for them....more
Rather than a familiar polemic for a perspective on globalization (e.g., it's good or it's bad), the Six Faces of Globalization is a polemic for simulRather than a familiar polemic for a perspective on globalization (e.g., it's good or it's bad), the Six Faces of Globalization is a polemic for simultaneously and sympathetically incorporating multiple perspectives on globalization. I would love to read books that take a similar approach to a range of other economic and non-economic issues.
The "Six Faces of Globalization" recounted in the book are:
1. The Establishment Narrative: Trade is good
2. The Left-wing Populist Narrative: Trade helps the rich at the expense of the working class
3. The Right-wing Populist Narrative: Trade helps poor countries (and immigrants) at the expense of the working class
4. The Corporate Power Narrative: Trade helps translational corporations at the expense of people
5. The Geoeconomic Narrative: Trade helps some countries at the expense of other countries
6. The Global Threats Narrative: Trade imperils us all through climate change or pandemics
(They also talk about non-Western perspectives like dependency where globalization hurts poor countries, the Asian narrative of globalization helping, the desire of China and Russia to set up alternative rules, etc.)
The authors do a good job of showing how different globalization policies are motivated by different perspectives, in some cases overlapping, but in other cases contradictory. For example, US policy towards China has elements of all of the above, even some of the tariffs were simultaneously motivated by the Establishment Narrative (opening up China to trade) and the protectionist narratives.
The authors do not choose between these perspectives but instead urge us to take a kaleidoscopic perspective that tries to make some alliances between the different perspectives.
In some ways the strength of the book is its sympathy for different perspectives. But at times it was frustrating. The left-wing narrative (trade helps the rich at the expense of the poor), for example, was stronger on facts about inequality increasing than it was on analysis linking this in any qualitatively important way to trade. Some of the zero sum perspectives in the different faces are clearly based on fallacies and misconnections that should be dispelled and not sympathized with.
But, overall the multiple perspectives is a strength. National security concerns (Narrative 5) can sometimes be a thinly veiled excuse for protectionism but can also be legitimate. There are good reasons to worry that corporations are overly influential in the way that "free trade" agreements are crafted (Narrative 4). Etc.
Finally I should say that this book is unusually well written. It is very well structured and organized. It takes a few metaphors (e.g., the Rubik's cube) and uses them really well. It organizes the arguments and sub-arguments in a way that is both logical and readable. All in all, both enjoyable and enlightening....more
An enjoyable, reliable and wide-ranging guide to how to scale ideas. The book includes a lot of economic lessons applied to questions like how to scalAn enjoyable, reliable and wide-ranging guide to how to scale ideas. The book includes a lot of economic lessons applied to questions like how to scale a business, a nonprofit, or a policy response. Most of these are familiar to students of economics and psychology but it is their application that is most interesting, including ideas like the dangers of false positives, generalizing from non-representative samples, lack of spillovers and economies of scale, and the importance of thinking on the margin.
What sets the book apart, like John Lists's work, is that it is relentlessly empirical throughout. It takes the economic and psychological concepts but brings them to the data in ways that often end up surprising List including questions like do equal opportunity job advertisements help recruit underrepresented minorities, does paying a higher wage necessarily elicit more effort, and will Lyft membership plan's increase its profits.
In addition, there are a wide range of practical examples, many of which List was directly involved in, including setting up a preschool, working for Uber and Lyft, consulting with governments on tax evasion, with Chrysler on wellness, etc. In almost all of them theory helps to guide the thinking but it is really experiments and feedback that are most critical.
I also enjoyed getting to know List a little through the book. It begins with a dedication to his eight! children (talk about scale). It discusses how he got into economics (he came from a family of truckers, got into college on a golf scholarship, did his PhD and Wyoming, and got one job offer out of the 150 he applied for--but then eventually ended up at the University of Chicago), and a lot of the ways he integrates empiricism into the issues he also cares about (like charity and public policy).
An impressive tour of everything from the response to COVID to macro issues (monetary and fiscal policy), macro finance, inequality, climate change, gAn impressive tour of everything from the response to COVID to macro issues (monetary and fiscal policy), macro finance, inequality, climate change, globalization and more. Markus Brunnermeir uses "resilience" as the overarching concept (as in a reed that blows in the wind but is fine after the hurricane), in contrast to robustness (the oak that is strong but can get knocked down) or risk reduction (which he worries inhibits the risk taking needed for growth). Brunnermeir is in part marveling at some of the resilience that the global economies showed in the wake of COVID and speculating about what it teaches us about resilience in normal times. I found myself in agreement with almost everything he argued....more
This was exactly the book I wanted and needed on Fintech, cryptocurrencies and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). It is comprehensive, balanced,This was exactly the book I wanted and needed on Fintech, cryptocurrencies and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). It is comprehensive, balanced, and covers most every aspect from the range of Fintech companies to how cryptocurrencies work and their pros and cons, to how CBDCs work to their macroeconomic, international financial and regulatory implications. Ultimately the book is a very optimistic take on the general area of not many of the specific technologies (like Bitcoin) with Prasad concluding, “Financial technologies are opening up a wide vista of possibilities for improving the economic condition of humanity, especially that of the poor and economically marginalized.”
Prasad, however, does a lot more listing of pros and cons than he does of making a strong argument. I mostly appreciated that because it is a hard topic without obvious answers, it gave me a lot of the points I needed to understand better to make up my own mind (and I still have not, at least not fully), and also the answer varies so much from country to country: “A cost-benefit analysis of CBDC introduction involves a complicated calculus that hinges on a country’s particular circumstances—including the quality of its macroeconomic policies and institutions, its level of development, and the structure of its financial markets.”
Broadly Prasad's sensibilities and concerns are similar to mine although he offers more of a defense of cash on privacy grounds and more criticism of digital money and especially CBDCs on those grounds than resonated with me. He also is detailed about the downsides of Bitcoin including fluctuating value, crummy medium of exchange, vulnerability to hacking/losing/locking, mirage of anonymity, environmental transactions and illegal transactions. But he seems insufficiently alarmed about the bubble and that many of its victims could end up being the less sophisticated, potentially those with lower incomes, and those who financial inclusion was supposed to help. Also at times he talks about products that are still quite tiny but talks about millions or billions of dollars without giving the denominator against which they should be judged.
Perhaps the book's greatest strength is its discussion of the many different ways that country's are approaching CBDC's, what has been learned from them so far, and the considerations going forward. This account is exhaustive but rarely exhausting (OK, maybe I didn't need to know about the Marshall Islands' CBDC). He lays out the different types of CBDC (like Venmo, a Central Bank bank account and an official cryptocurrency that does not trade at par), the advantages they have (financial inclusion and payments system--plus reducing money laundering and other illegal activities) and also the disadvantages (draining money from banking system and potentially contributing to instability, stifling innovation, and reductions in privacy). Prasad has a lot of thoughtful ideas on how they can be structured.
Ultimately he makes a strong argument that CBDCs are only as strong as a country's institutions. Where they are not trusted (like Ecuador) they fail, where they are (like Uruguay). But overall Prasad, probably correctly, finds the most promise for CBDCs in emerging market economies: “The Fintech revolution provides an opportunity for [Emerging Market Economies] and other developing economies to leapfrog wealthier economies by rapidly adopting new and more efficient ways of conducting banking and financial transactions. It is sometimes easier for new technologies to take shape on a tabula rasa—a blank slate—rather than in a context where they must overcome resistance from vendors and end users of older technologies.”
Perhaps the only thing I missed in this book was the antitrust/competition angle. How much of a role should big tech play? Should big finance play? Does the government have a role in leveling the playing field to enable competition? Are open standards needed? Or is this all about startups and there is lots of vigorous competition already? I admit I am particularly interested in these issues, would have loved to read more.
Prasad does not have a bottom line. I don't think I have complete conviction about one either except that for the United States would do more to prevent cryptocurrencies and other DeFi products from benefiting from regulatory and tax arbitrage and would do more for consumer protection. On a CBDC, I think the Fed can afford to move slowly and carefully, see what happens in other countries, but ultimately it should probably be more in the business of improving its wholesale backbone so that different digital retail solutions can be built on top of it.
Overall, very grateful for this careful, detailed, up to the minute book and the wide range of thinking and topics that went into it--mostly I just wanted a little more....more
An amazing synthesis and extension of a career’s work on disparities in women’s experience in the workforce, how it has changed over time, and could cAn amazing synthesis and extension of a career’s work on disparities in women’s experience in the workforce, how it has changed over time, and could change in the future. I was familiar with much of the argument from a number of Claudia Goldin’s papers and talks but really enjoyed seeing all of it tied together and framed so nicely around a set of women over the last century and they way they handled their constraints and tradeoffs around work and family. The book is very accessible to a general reader, it has a number of clear data plots but nothing remotely technical (in fact personally I would have liked a little more technical material, but I understand why it was omitted and know where to find it).
The most important argument in Goldin’s book is “true pay and employment discrimination, while they matter, are relatively small.” Instead the biggest obstacle to college educated women earning higher wages is institutional: the way that work is organized to reward “greedy jobs” that demand lots of your time at unpredictable hours (e.g., the investment banker that has to be available for a deal at any hour because the clients want them and they are not interchangeable with others). Her research has shown that women and men generally earn similar amounts initially but diverge dramatically after the birth of a child when women tend to drop out, shift to part time, or even just take jobs with more predictable hours—that generally come with lower pay per hour and less prospect for advancement. While Goldin is supportive of paid leave and other policy changes in her analysis it does not rectify this problem, what does is changing the way jobs are organized. Some of Goldin’s examples are veterinarians, pharmacists and doctors all of which shifted from always on jobs dominated by men to more scheduled and predictable jobs that are majority women.
“In a world of greedy jobs couple equity is expensive” Goldin writes, noting that many couples with children end up specializing with one having a higher-paid “greedy job” while the other is more available at anytime for children (who, although she does not use the word, can be quite greedy too with their need for unpredictable and unscheduleable attention).
The above paragraphs are about the present. But as an economic historian and labor economist, Goldin grounds all of it in a century’s history of women in the workplace and family. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Goldin’s analysis/narrative is how nonlinear the changes of women and work have been. I’m accustomed to looking at graphs of the steady increase in female labor force participation through 2000 (when it stalled out) and thinking of it as a monotonic progression. But Goldin looks much more carefully at the economic behavior by cohort (so not just everyone in 1960 but distinguishing 30 year olds born in 1930 from 60 year olds born in 1900) and organizes her story around five “groups”. She also looks at a wide range of data, including age at first marriage, age at first child, and whether ever had child by middle age.
Normally I’m skeptical of analysis that groups generations and implies discontinuous changes but Goldin’s data bears it out. Moreover, a lot of it is shaped by some actual discontinuities in circumstances: the Depression (which made it hard to get jobs, putting pressure on women not to work), World War II (the opposite), the Pill (at first largely available to married women but then for younger unmarried women). These groups are: (1 born 1878-1897) career or family; (2 born 1898-1923) job then family; (3 born 1924-43) family then job; (4 born 1944-57) family then career; and (5 born 1958-78) career and family. Thinking about these groups helped me to better understand women in my own life, like my mother, and contextualize them in their generations.
Some of the striking nonlinearities on the family side (all of these for college-graduate women):
—For the generation born from 1878-97 32% were never married by age 50. For the most recent generation that has fallen to 12%.
—For ever married women in the first generation only 30 percent were working at age 45-49 but it was up to 84 percent in the latest generation. Thus the shift from “career or family” to “career and family”.
—In the middle generation (born 1924-43) women had children very young: nearly 60 percent of women age 25-29 had a child as compared to about 25 percent now. But, technology has extended the ability to have children so looking at an older age the percentage with children is as high/higher than ever.
—Jobs have always been “greedy” (in the sense of rewarding people willing to be available anytime) but as inequality has increased the consequences of the gender disparities associated with greedy jobs have grown.
—The Pill, which enabled a generation of women to delay marriage and childbearing, opening up professional schools and career advancement.
—The increased availability of no fault divorce led women to invest more in themselves in ways that would outlast their marriage, including in terms of education and career.
Goldin’s history documents regulations and discrimination that prevented women from working in certain careers or barred married women from working, as well as documenting the way those rules evolved and were generally dropped over time.
Goldin’s solution is “we must change how work is structured. We have to make flexible positions more abundant and more productive.” A quibble with the almost uniformly excellent book is that she doesn’t exactly spell out the obstacles to this aspiration, specify exactly who the “we” is, or what exactly could bring this about. In many professions, as she notes, there is a high value to the same person having a wide scope of knowledge and engagement or being face-to-face with clients. It may be possible to make some changes (and she talks about some of the changes being made in, for example, finance) but they may be limited. Are companies leaving dollar bills on the table by overpaying for unpleasant hours and not having access to as many talented women? Are there limits to their change? Is there any role for public policy? How much would childcare help?
Overall, I loved the book and felt myself wanting even more....more
I have never met the author, Pedro Gomes, but a mutual friend asked for my address so he could send me an advance copy of a book advocating a shift toI have never met the author, Pedro Gomes, but a mutual friend asked for my address so he could send me an advance copy of a book advocating a shift to a four day work week (at the time of writing this review it has still not been published). I wrote back that I only wanted it if it did not commit the “lump of labor fallacy” that shortening the workweek would keep GDP unchanged but lead to more jobs and a lower unemployment rate (a fallacious idea because there is no empirical evidence for it and a theoretical presumption against it). Gomes and my mutual friend assured me it did not commit the fallacy and with that assurance in hand I was happy to get a copy. I often just read a chapter or two of books that are sent to me but in this case I kept wanting to read more—both because of the importance of the idea, the nice manner in which it was presented, and the way in which the author’s genial and enthusiastic persona radiated through so clearly. I uncertain by sympathetic to the argument for a four day work week before reading the book, after reading it I’m a little less uncertain, a little more sympathetic, and will definitely pay more attention to it going forward because its importance as an idea is very high relative to the amount of attention it gets (the later being virtually none).
In the 1920s there were two economic predictions that fared dismally. The first was Irving Fischer’s October 1929 pronouncement that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau,” a prediction that was falsified two weeks later. The second was John Maynard Keynes’ 1930 prediction that a century later we would all be working 15 hour weeks. While there are a four more years to go I don’t think I’m going out very far on a limb when I predict that the typical worker will be working more than 15 hours a week nine years from now.
The problem with Keynes’ prediction wasn’t the economy, it has performed towards the upper end of Keynes prediction that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day” (as of 2019 it was seven times higher and should be nearly eight times higher by 2030). The prediction went wrong in that we increased our material consumption by this amount while the consumption of leisure has grown much less than Keynes expected. For a while before and after Keynes hours worked fell sharply as people shifted from a dawn to dusk schedule to a more regulated six day workweek to (in 1938 in the United States) a five day workweek. Since then hours have still generally trended down but in recent decades they have stabilized and for higher-wage workers have trended up.
In general economists have a predisposition to trust consumer choices. Since Keynes wrote people are spending less on three-piece tweed suits and more on blue jeans, a choice that few would judge. But hours worked is not exactly a choice. For a given worker it is hard to get a job and advance in the job without working full-time and in some cases even more, with full time defined as five days a week and eight hours a day. For a business it is also not exactly a choice because it cannot just shutdown one day a week without disrupting relationships with suppliers, customers, and others. The only way to make the choice is more collectively by shifting laws or norms so that, as the title of the book says, Friday is the new Saturday.
Gomes points out that *no one* is advocating re-standardizing the workweek at something more than 40 hours a week or 5 days a week and a number of people argue that it should be decreased. That leads him to suspect that the current number could not be an optimum (in contrast many other numbers, like tax rates, have at least a shot at being optimal given that there are arguments for both raising and for lowering them—albeit I would fall on the side of raising them). In his book he advocates very specifically for a new standard four-day workweek from Monday through Thursday which he views as vastly superior to a flexible four days a week because of the positive leisure spillovers and also reducing the productivity issues associated with job sharing. He is more agnostic on what would happen to total hours and other policy design decisions.
Gomes’ book is very strong on the pros for a four day workweek but mostly dismissive of the cons. He presents the pros nicely through the eyes of different economists (Keynes, Schumpeter, Marx and Hayek—as well as a host Nobel prize winners) arguing that if they were alive today they would virtually all support a four day week, albeit for different reasons. The presentation is pleasant to read, has a lot of easily digestible history of economic thought, and makes some points I didn’t know before.
Gomes is not worried about wages and non-leisure consumption falling when hours fall, but his rebuttal is at times weak (one of his argument is that there need not be a cliff in the year it was implemented because nominal wage freezes in the years before would accomplish the adjustment, but this is simply a wage cut, another argument is that firms could reduce their profits but while that might be nice unless the conditions that generated excessive rents changed they would not actually charge them). I wish there was a little bit more admission that something good is worth paying for.
Gomes did raise some arguments I had not thought of or had dismissed too hastily. While the lump of labor fallacy version of job creation is wrong, Gomes semi-convinced me that in industries with declining employment (e.g., manufacturing) the decline could be less severe if hours/days were being reduced so more workers would be retained. Particularly interestingly, he pointed out that a lot of innovation was done by people in their spare time—and that if people had more of it we might have more creativity and innovation in different spheres.
Gomes devotes a few pages to the ways that a four day school week would not worsen education or might even improve it. This would be the area that would make me the most nervous and that I could imagine being a major unforced error. I would not be overly judgmental of other people’s leisure choices (I’m very open minded and like people whose idea of leisure is reading economics books, classics, science fiction and even fantasy books), but I would not trust children to make particularly good use of the extra time—let alone parents to structure good uses for them.
People have been talking about a four day week for decades. Paul Samuelson supported one in 1970 arguing that it would be a major social invention. It is potentially a much bigger deal to a much bigger group of people than just about any economic idea currently under discussion, it deserves much more discussion, debate, and possibly even it is time to consume some of our prosperity by ratcheting down the rat race a notch....more
A convincing, enjoyable and insightful account of the "illusion of knowledge" by two of the researchers that developed the idea. Steven Sloman and PhiA convincing, enjoyable and insightful account of the "illusion of knowledge" by two of the researchers that developed the idea. Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that knowledge is social, that humans have unparalleled ability to learn from each other, cooperate, and take advantage of the division of labor (an argument that was fleshed out in somewhat more detail and different directions in the outstanding The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich).
This all works because we also suffer from the "illusion of knowledge" where we think we know more about how things work than we do. Sloman and Fernbach go through a set of experiments they have run asking people how much they understand about zippers, toilets, bicycles and the like. Then asking them to explain in detail how they worked. And finally asking again how well they understood. As you might guess, they barely knew how any of them worked (and it turns out I have a lot to learn too!), and only realized that after having to try to explain them.
In fact, we can only understand the world because we grossly simplify (he uses the Borges story of "Funes the the Memorious" to illustrate, someone who can remember everything but can't classify the same dog as the same dog because he sees it at different angles at different times). We also do this to understand history (e.g., reducing scientific discoveries and historical moments to individual great people, like Albert Einstein or Martin Luther King, rather than understanding the social nature of their knowledge and their impact).
Sloman and Fernbach also have a useful and interesting discussion of the differences between AI and humans centering on human thought being about understanding causation and intentions.
The last chapters of the book are various degrees of successful as they attempt to apply the ideas in the book to domains like politics, education, financial literacy and more, pointing out how understanding our ignorance can help us. The problem is that we all need to trust experts (and they have a strong argument for that which appealed to me, no surprise) but also need to know which experts to trust and how to ask hard questions without being overconfident in our knowledge etc. There is no one simple recipe for that and they basically admit that. But some of the ideas are good, like the research showing that in politics people will be better able to moderate their positions if they are forced to explain the causal logic of their idea not just come up with ideas to defend it. And how making more debates consequentialist instead of moral will help elucidate and bridge gaps.
Ultimately, Sloman and Fernbach is another excellent entry in a set of books that increasingly emphasize humans as socially conscious, hive minds, who form their political and other beliefs based largely on their social groups, and that rational maximization is not really possible when the maximization problems are way beyond the ability of just about anyone to do on their own--plus you don't have an incentive to do them....more
I've read a number of the papers that this book is based on but was thrilled to finally read it from beginning to end, Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz'sI've read a number of the papers that this book is based on but was thrilled to finally read it from beginning to end, Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz's book is truly a tour de force that has aged reasonably well since its publication twelve years ago, albeit it has aged some.
The core argument is that wage inequality over the last century and a half is the result of a tug of war between education and technology. The technological part is skill-biased technological change which they view as a largely constant, monotonic process of new technologies increasing the demand for more skilled workers (e.g., advanced manufacturing processes a century ago and computers in recent decades). By itself this would be a force that should always drive up inequality. The other half of the equation is the supply of skilled workers, which they argue was increasing rapidly in the first three quarters of the twentieth century because of the High School movement, the GI bill and more but then slowed. When the supply of skilled workers outpaced the demand for them inequality rose, and vice versa when it failed to keep pace.
In their view this incredibly parsimonious explanation with basically one measured variable (education, actually is three groups), one assumed time trend (skill-biased technological change), and one outcome (relative wages), measured through only a few data points in the beginning of the century and annually since then, can explain almost everything about wage inequality in the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century. In their view it is "almost everything" because they also accord a role for institutions which explain the more-rapid-than-predicted decline in inequality in the 1940s and 1970s. But in their telling institutions only get a few paragraphs and only explain some of the timing, the overall beginning to end pattern is not affected by these institutions.
Goldin and Katz are never explicit that they are trying to explain the wages of the bottom ~95 or ~99 percent, they make it sound like it is inequality as a whole but their work does not have anything to say about the top end, changes in the labor share of income, or changes in capital income inequality. They do not claim otherwise and I suspect with the increased attention to tax-based measures of overall inequality these days a current version of the book would be more explicit about what they do and do not explain--and their model does attempt to explain a lot. They also only briefly discuss how much inequality is driven by the education premiums they study and how the fraction of inequality explained by those premiums has changed over time, and in particular might have been fallen. Finally, assuming a constant exogenous rate of skill-biased technological change somewhat begs the question, and maybe the pace has decreased as productivity slows.
All of these questions, and more, might take away some of the nearly complete explanatory power of their story which is grounded in a competitive model of labor markets, but would still leave a lot of explanatory power for it. The residuals in that explanation would then be filled, in part, by institutional explanations which place more weight on factors like the falling value of the minimum wage, decline in labor unions, and reduced bargaining power overall--all of which get only brief cameos in the book, a ratio that might be different if written today.
The above concentrates on the core argument. But about half of the book is a fascinating history of education in the United States with a lot of contrast to education in Europe. Much more of this was new to me and really interesting reading. The core argument is that from its founding the United States had a more egalitarian educational system that was grounded in six virtues: (1) public provision; (2) numerous independent districts; (3) public funding/free education; (4) nonsectarian; (5) gender neutrality; and (6) open and forgiving. The result was many more Americans getting much more education than Europeans in the 19th century and first half of the twentieth century. In fact, many Europeans preferred their more efficient tracked systems and looked down on the wastefulness of America spending money on education for the masses who did not need it and did not have to meet high standards to get it. This worked out well not just for inequality (as discussed above) but also growth because even manufacturing line workers benefited a lot from an education as they were better able to take advantage of and implement technologies that increasingly relied on flexible skills. Of course, all of this changed as Europe caught up with and in many cases surpassed the United States.
Goldin and Katz talk about bringing back / living up to the American virtues in education with more financing, equalization, support for college, etc. In keeping with the focus of their book, and their explanation of the rise in wage inequality, their policy recommendations dwell less on the minimum wage, labor unions and a more progressive fiscal system, but that is mostly because of the scope of the book, partly because of what they view as the causes of inequality, and possibly also a bit of a lag because the real value of the minimum wage, for example, has declined substantially since it was published. Overall we would be a better country if we did everything they say without any updating at all....more
Most polemics don’t persuade anyone of anything, they just provide comfort and occasionally a new argument for those who already believe. Matthew YgleMost polemics don’t persuade anyone of anything, they just provide comfort and occasionally a new argument for those who already believe. Matthew Yglesias’s brilliant book could be an exception that genuinely change some minds. I don’t mean persuade anyone that the United States should have more immigration or invest more in children, my guess is most of his readers already thought that. Instead, Yglesias might persuade his readers of the greatness of the American project, the importance of the United States continuing to be the leading country in the world, and the fact that it is currently under threat from a growing China. The book’s strong opening chapters eloquently make the case for America’s role in the world, why it is better than the alternatives, how we won World War II, and why that spirit matters in the future, a sentiment that is sometimes missing from the publication he founded which has been known to publish July 4th pieces regretting the very existence of an independent United States.
If a Council of Foreign Relations type read the book (and I hope they do but fear they won’t), they would get a new argument for high levels of immigration: “What the various diplomats and admirals and trade negotiators and Asia hands who think about the China question don’t want to admit is that all the diplomacy and aircraft carriers and shrewd trade tactics in the world aren’t going to make a whit of difference if China is just a much bigger and more important country than we are. The original Thirteen Colonies, by the same token, could have made for a nice, quiet, prosperous agricultural nation—like a giant New Zealand. But no number of smart generals could have helped a country like that intervene decisively in World War II.”
If a nativist politician read the book (and I know they won’t) they would have to either change their mind, dismiss it without cause (the most likely), or retreat to an argument that they supported a smaller, weaker, poor United States because they did not want to see further changes in its racial/ethnic composition which they value enough to outweigh these other concerns.
Personally, I was a convert on both of the causes above but I got a lot of new arguments, an organizing principle for those arguments, and some nifty data. The nationalistic argument may be more persuasive than the more moral and narrowly economic appeal that Bryan Caplan made in the also excellent Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. (Caplan’s case resonates a bit more with me, but I suspect Yglesias nationalistic arguments and rejection of open borders is the wiser approach politically.)
If you had asked me before this book I would have said 1 billion Americans was a lot. But Yglesias marshals a lot of data about how it would still leave us much less dense than most of Europe and resource abundant relative to population as compared to many countries. He never seriously (or even at all) addresses adjustment costs, but given that it is more about an ambitious goal than the likelihood that we will get there anytime soon that is an understandable omission.
Yglesias focuses on immigration and having children. On immigration he has the heterodox-for-a-progressive view that we should care about what types of immigrants we get, if it is more politically possible to expand for some groups we should, and that a differential tax rate for immigrants to reflect the benefits America creates for them would be tolerable. On having children Yglesias makes a heterodox pro-natalist argument for a relatively conventional but worthy progressive list of child allowances, preschool and the like—with an emphasis on genuine universality and the addition of marriage penalties to the list of public policy problems, something often omitted from progressive lists.
He also focuses on what would need to be done to make it work with an outstanding capsule discussion of trends in American economic geography and advocacy of reducing land use restrictions, a cause he has been a leading advocate of.
Overall, the book is intelligent, insightful, often heterodox, and persuaded me of the case for focusing on and making arguments for issues that are first order important and expanding the Overton window rather than just staying within the current and more limited paradigms....more
The WEIRDest People in the World is among the best books I have read in the last five to ten years. In his earlier book, The Secret of Our Success: HoThe WEIRDest People in the World is among the best books I have read in the last five to ten years. In his earlier book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (also an outstanding book), Joseph Henrich chronicled the success of the human species, grounding it in our ability to learn from each other and the co-evolution of culture and genes, a story that takes place over hundreds of thousands of years. The WEIRDest People in the World is effectively a sequel (but you need not read The Secret of Our Success first as the ideas are repeated/summarized in the new book) that zooms in on the last roughly 1,500 years to understand why the West was so successful in its rapid growth and conquest of much of the rest of the world. Henrich’s explanation over-simplified: the Catholic Church banned cousin marriage which broke up kinship networks, then Protestant churches emphasized reading and individual interpretation. The combination led to a new “WEIRD (i.e., Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic)” psychology that helped lay the foundation for individual rights, democracy, markets, innovation, and the success the West enjoys today. Aspects of this have been imitated elsewhere helping to spread prosperity.
Some big think grand explanations for everything books take wild and creative stabs backed up by intuition but not much evidence. This book is creative (although maybe not “wild”) but is grounded in meticulous research, much of it done by Henrich and his team but also drawing on a wide range of other research by economists, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and others. Henrich can do page after page after page of evidence, scatterplots, descriptions of natural experiments and regressions, etc. It also has both fox-like qualities (summarizing everything around a single theory) but also hedgehog-like qualities (lots of causal arrows pointing every which way and bringing a lot of different explanations together). It also draws on such a wide range of material, criss-crosses so many places, that it shows Henrich as an impressive polymath, but not one who is out to impress but to prove, often with a list of eight arguments to make his proof.
The core point and the one that I found completely persuasive in the book is that psychology varies across cultures and that for years Western psychologists made the mistake of studying WEIRD university students and thinking their psychology was universal. Instead, Henrich argues that there are lots of psychologies but broadly speaking they can be grouped into two sets of characteristics. WEIRD people are individualistic, self-obsessed, analytical, and see ourselves as unique beings that try to stick to impartial rules that are enforced by an internal feeling of guilt. In contrast, in many other cultures people are more focused on the group (often a kinship group), do not focus on their self realization, and try to do right by the people around them—a feeling enforced by shame in front of others more than internal guilt. Many other traits vary across these two types including patience, timeliness, whether morality is judged by intentions or outcomes, and much more.
Henrich advances a wide range of evidence for this core point including laboratory experiments played across countries, within countries, and with different immigrant groups within countries, data on actual behavior like parking tickets and blood donations, observational studies, and more. Any given study by itself might not be completely persuasive but the large mass of them, many extremely careful, leaves relatively little doubt in my mind about this argument.
Next comes Henrich’s explanation of the rise of WEIRD psychology as the consequence of the breakup of kin networks by the Catholic Church and the rise of protestantism and reading. I found this very plausible but far from a certainty, which is not Henrich’s fault but the difficulty of being completely certain about any aspects of historic causation, especially when everything moves together and causes everything else. Henrich, however, is not just making an assertion, he has a lot of evidence in the form of the history of banning cousin marriages, the correlation between the degree of cousin marriage and various psychological traits, and a number of different natural experiments that involve comparing areas that historically were under different religious rules.
Finally, Henrich links all of this to the rise of western Democratic and market institutions, something I found highly plausible—and was completely persuaded that we over-emphasize the individual thinkers we credit with the modern world (Locke, Hume, Smith, Montesquieu) and underemphasize the deeper and more slowly evolving cultural and psychological roots of these institutions.
I do have my worries about the argument. Psychological explanations of differences in growth have a long and sorry history, often fitting an explanation after-the-fact that was invalidated subsequently (e.g., the idea that Korean culture is incapable of generating growth which was dramatically disproven after 1950). Some of the “natural experiments” are so remote it is hard to know what to make about them, like some Swiss lord that died around 1,200 and then differences centuries later. This raises another issue with the timing of the psychological changes, which are sometimes portrayed as very deep and the result of factors centuries before and in other cases seem to change very quickly (see, again Korea). Some of the functionalist explanations for why different cultures/institutions evolved beg the question of why in some places but not others and the role of contingency. All that said, these are all sources of my uneasiness with unqualifiedly embracing the argument in the book and none of them really find fault with any of the empirical evidence or claims--all of which moved me a lot in Henrich's direction.
The WEIRDest People in the World is definitely a long book. But it is really worthwhile. It does not just provide a new and compelling explanation of the rise of the West, it also makes one think about how many aspects of psychology that seem universal are really contingent and how these can change and adapt over time. Ultimately, the book left me with a profound awe for the human species that can understand so much about itself both by working collaboratively with a wide variety of intellectual tools and also by single individuals with enormous creativity and ability to synthesize evidence....more
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