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
I was very familiar with most of the ideas in Nudge from reading many of the underlying papers that Cass Sunstein and Dick Thaler draw on and that theI was very familiar with most of the ideas in Nudge from reading many of the underlying papers that Cass Sunstein and Dick Thaler draw on and that they themselves wrote plus from working in public policy and lots of conversations. But I had never read the actual book and thought I should finally get around to it.
I can see why it was such a hit. It is a true joy to read. The authors enthusiasm, humor, good intentions, and personalities show through, including the many anecdotes about both of them that are used to illustrate their points. It also does a delightful job of wearing its erudition lightly while breezily covering a wide range of behavioral economics, public policy and deeper dives into a few discrete public policy areas (including retirement savings, organ donations and climate change). Aficionados of this area will not learn a huge amount new but that is partly because of the success of the authors in conveying the ideas in so many ways.
As a matter of public policy or company behavior there is little downside to the Nudge approach. The authors are very clear that Nudges can and are used both for good and for bad, they’re not automatically good. Sure libertarians worry about a slippery slope to something more like a shove while liberals worry that it will turn into a substitute for times when shoving is truly necessary. But choice architecture is unavoidable, it should be done intentionally.
The bigger issue is how large the upside is. The authors are very enthusiastic about the upside and cite specific research and examples to back that up. I remain somewhat less convinced. The only truly large intervention in the economic space is automatic enrollment (and sometimes escalation and investment) in 401(k)s. Of the major economic policy developments in the last decades, including the Affordable Care Act, various fiscal plans, evolution in antitrust, etc. etc., Nudging takes a backseat to mandates, subsidies, and taxes. This is not a criticism of the approach, see the previous paragraph, just a sizing of its consequences.
Finally, I wished the book did more to explore some of the difficult cases and delineate where nudges are appropriate and where other remedies are needed. Some of this comes through, particularly in the very subtle, thoughtful and persuasive discussion of organ donation (they’re in favor of “prompted choice” that encourages and makes it easy for people to opt in rather than “presumed consent” that people can opt out of) and climate change. But it never systematically enunciates the principles that tell policymakers when to use what tool. And it only addresses issues where the behavioral mistake people are making is consistent with social goals (e.g., people eat more than they want to, nudging them can help save them money while helping society) but does not address the harder cases where they are not aligned (e.g., how to do automatic enrollment in health plans for young healthy people when they might want to select a plan that is good for them but society would rather they default into pooling with sicker people).
The book is labelled “Final Edition,” which the authors describe as a commitment device to avoid doing another edition. But whether or not they do they both have many, many more contribution in lots of other forms—so maybe we’ll even get more medium- and large-sized interventions. Until then it is well worth being intentional about getting even the smaller ones right....more
I have learned more about health economics from Amy Finkelstein than from anyone else in my generation (or younger). I learned some more from this booI have learned more about health economics from Amy Finkelstein than from anyone else in my generation (or younger). I learned some more from this book--and a lot of what I thought I knew was challenged as well. Overall, this was a very enjoyable read that is written in a broadly accessible and even chatty and informal style which is not burdened by all the learning underlying it.
Both Liran Einav and Finkelstein have largely confined themselves to research and not policy, which makes it exciting that they are drawing on their own work and their command of the literature to ask why we have health insurance and what that means about how we design it.
Any such undertaking is necessarily normative, being grounded in our values. They argue that in the case of health insurance that relatively minimal and widely shared values can be the basis for designing policy, specifically the idea that people should get treatment regardless of their ability to afford it. If someone is extremely ill hospitals are required to treat them whether or not they have insurance--and the recourse to collecting medical debt is considerably less onerous than, say, student debt or taxes.
Using this as their normative staring point they diagnosis the problems in the current system, many of which afflict the insured as much as the uninsured. Thus they argue that health reform should be about everyone not just filling in the gaps for the uninsured. (I agree with their normative frame and am impressed by how far it takes them, but also have a hard time separating my own views that health reform should be used as a way to achieve what I view as a more fair distribution of resources.)
For insurance to work on the terms they describe it needs to be automatic (because we automatically cover everyone in some way regardless). It can't be automatic without being free. And finally, for this to be affordable they argue it should be basic.
They do not define the "basic" and this is where I'm most worried in practice. "Basic" could easily end up being just about everything plus dental and vision--which would end up being extremely expensive. Absent a mechanism to link people's choices about what health insurance should cover to their own costs it is hard to understand how "basic" would be limited.
A way to partially do that is more cost sharing. The evidence (much of it from Finkelstein and co-authors) is that copays, deductibles and coinsurance can reduce spending and not necessarily worsen health outcomes. The authors argue that having thought about it more, and looked at the experience in other countries, that cost sharing is not viable when not everyone can afford it. They have a lot of compelling arguments but I'm also nervous that this interacts with the "basic" issue, that if you could really do basic you could avoid cost sharing but if not then you might need it. Also, it is hard to understand how a system is optimal that has cost sharing of either 0% or 100% (the later for everything not covered by the basic insurance) instead of intermediate values.
Finally, the book is really radical. It does not start from where we are now but instead tears down the entire system to rebuild a new one. That, of course, would make it harder to do in practice given all the vested interests. But it also increases the risks that what works on paper may not work in practice when compared to the many ways our system has evolved to address issues. As such, the book is not about next week's health debates but instead a marker for a longer-term debate and discussion. And that is a very productive and needed thing given the sorry state of much of American health insurance....more
I got this graphic novel at the Stasi Museum in Berlin and it was a pleasant surprise. A memoir (I think) of the last days before the Berlin Wall cameI got this graphic novel at the Stasi Museum in Berlin and it was a pleasant surprise. A memoir (I think) of the last days before the Berlin Wall came down from the perspective of a 13 (?) year old boy. The vast bulk of the book has the politics deep in the background--it is mostly him going to school, dealing with bullies, organizing a ping pong tournament, and other "normal" things about life in the East Berlin in the time before the wall came down. It is really well drawn, has a childlike feeling and energy to it, and has engaging characters. Then just as he is being punished by his parents they hear the wall came down and everything changed, but he is too wrapped up in his own life to want to go with it.
A concise, informative, insightful, and readable introduction to the Second Reich. The book begins with the fallout of the Napoleonic wars and the defA concise, informative, insightful, and readable introduction to the Second Reich. The book begins with the fallout of the Napoleonic wars and the defensive nationalism it helped to created in the German-speaking peoples who had been weak, divided, and conquered by Napoleon. It then charts the next decades, eventually zooming in on Bismarck, as continued external threats--real and trumped up--are used to unify the German states under the reluctant Prussian Kaiser. Then it gives the development of this state, its debates over a constitution and liberalism, the rise of Kaiser Wilhem II, how it handled the rising threat of socialism by adopting a generous welfare state, and its increased militarization culminating in a disastrous war (which Katja Hoyer argues was an accident waiting to happen not a deliberate German plan). The writer is a British-German historian who grew up in East Germany and has a generally nuanced perspective on the issues she covers....more
My daughter and I listened to about the first third of this while driving from the former West Germany to Berlin. It was riveting. The opening and theMy daughter and I listened to about the first third of this while driving from the former West Germany to Berlin. It was riveting. The opening and then the first story of a couple who was being harassed by the Stasi, the husband's mysterious death in prison, the surveillance of the funeral, and all the lies surrounding it. We listened to the rest of the book on-and-off when we got back to the United States and none of it matched that first section. I don't know if that was our situation and mindset or the fact that the book (understandably) front-loaded the best material. Don't get me wrong, the rest of the stories were all pretty amazing in their own right, including many accounts by Stasi officers, an international love story, a couple that was forced to divorce, a sick baby and an escape attempt through tunnels to save it, a rock musician, the "puzzle women" (actually many men too) putting together the shredded files, and a decent amount of historical and practical background in the process.
Overall I'm very, very positive on the book--while I knew the general outlines of the Stasi reading some of the details was revealing. And it is important to chronicle for the sake of history as many of these stories as a possible. But as a literary matter, I think too many of the stories were too disconnected--or connected only by the author's first person narrative as she met the people and learned the story. And as a historical matter I worry that some of the stories were told because they were particularly extreme (e.g., in one case someone has their freedom bought by the West but the East renegs, which the author tells us happened in only 8 of the 50,000 times this happened)....more
I normally avoid books like this: a non-scholarly author, a publisher I haven't heard of, and a lurid title. But I was pleasantly surprised (although I normally avoid books like this: a non-scholarly author, a publisher I haven't heard of, and a lurid title. But I was pleasantly surprised (although some of the previous showed up, like the plethora of typos). There were a number of more scholarly books on the vikings but all of them were much longer and I wanted something about 200 pages long. I appreciated that The Sea Wolves put the vikings in the context of European and Byzantine history, both how they were affected by it and how they affected it. It also never missed the opportunity to tell lurid and possibly apocryphal stories but usually labelled them as such. And it gave some of the context that most of the vikings were not actually spending all their time on raids but instead were farming, fishing, and having a culture that was more orderly and possibly even more feminist than many of the others at the time. But mostly I liked the book because I always encountered the vikings in history books as coming from outside but this presented them from the inside and put their remarkable and discrete period in history in context....more
An excellent and (apparently) very reliable biography of Stalin. It is by a Russian historian based on the then recently opened archives and is well tAn excellent and (apparently) very reliable biography of Stalin. It is by a Russian historian based on the then recently opened archives and is well translated into English. He occasionally has an agenda--which is portraying Stalin (accurately) as the terrible person he was, against the increasingly positive portrayals and apologia in Russia. But that barely gets in the way of a very well told story that is based on careful parsing of the sources. I particularly loved the structure which was an alternation of more conventional historical/biographical chapters in chronological order with short chapters set in the last days of Stalin's life--each one of which used a moment in the present to focus on a specific theme across Stalin's life (e.g., his relationship to his securities services, his doctors, his family, etc.). It's also a nice length.
This covers much of the same ground as the also excellent Stalin, with slightly less narrative flair and slightly more careful sourcing. For Stalin's early life Young Stalin is also excellent....more
This book is a dramatically recounted narrative history of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. I appreciated the way the book provided context includiThis book is a dramatically recounted narrative history of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. I appreciated the way the book provided context including the role of Byzantium, its withering away, the rise of the Ottomans and, at the end, consequences describing the fallout over the years and centuries of the fall of Constantinople. The bulk of the book is military history: how artillery changed siege warfare, how the navy operated at the time, and the most novel and interesting, the dueling war of sappers digging tunnels into Constantinople and counter-sappers trying to deduct those tunnels and destroy them, ideally killing the sappers in the process. It also has a certain amount of political history and context, especially on the Christian side with the role--or lack thereof--of Venice, Genoa, the Pope, and other Christian states. All of which moves along in a brisk and entertaining manner.
Like narrative histories the author often speculates--without being clear that he is doing so--about the mindset of various characters and lends drama wherever he can to an, admittedly, rather dramatic event. At times he seems happy to pass along anything that is too-good-to-check but at other times he is very careful about the sources, applying a discount based on the biases and distance from the event of some of the chroniclers.
The book is well served by the many quotes from contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous accounts that give you a fuller understanding of the perspectives of those involved, although most of this is on the Byzantine side (an author's note states that primary sources from the Ottoman perspective are few and far between).
I also appreciated the the book emphasized the multiculturalism of both sides, did not paper over the brutality, but also understood the role that propaganda has played in some accounts of it.
Overall, highly recommended if this topic interests you--and you want a slice of world history with particularly vivid details about the moment-by-moment events of a few months of military preparations and battle in that history....more
I'm a fan of biographies of scientists and this one had been on my TBR since it was published. For obvious reasons it finally got off my TBR. And it iI'm a fan of biographies of scientists and this one had been on my TBR since it was published. For obvious reasons it finally got off my TBR. And it is an amazing piece of writing but is not really a scientific biography. Which might be fair because if all Robert Oppenheimer did was science I probably would not be reading a biography of him (when I still have not gotten around to The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, among others). But still I really wished the authors explained Oppenheimer's early scientific papers and their consequences. And discussed more of the science and engineering of the bomb and the role that Oppenheimer played in resolving them. I am left feeling that I'm soon going to need to take another book off my TBR shelf, one that has been there even longer, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
The book does have everything a standard biography would have: A little about Oppenheimer's parents, his early life at the Ethical Culture School, college, grad school, early science, all the way through his last years and death. But the overwhelming focus is on his "trial" over revoking his security clearance. It is the not that the trial section itself is quite long (but riveting, like all courtroom dramas, even when you know how it will end). It is that much of what came earlier in the book was planting seeds that the authors come back to in the trial scene. Seeds like Oppenheimer's relationships to communists, his wife's communist first husband, and especially the "Chevalier incident" where someone asked him to spy which is told in gory detail multiple times throughout the book in a way that makes sense for a courtroom drama but in some sense does not for a biography, and certainly not for a scientific biography.
The biography is strong on nuance (for Oppenheimer, not for his tormentor Lewis Strauss who probably does not deserve any nuance). The ways in which Oppenheimer changed. The ways in which he was not the simple hero that the left subsequently wanted to make him (e.g., when he was opposing the H bomb he was supporting tactical nuclear weapons which he thought could actually be used in wars). A number of his political views at all stages were clearly naive and wrong in retrospect. Ultimately, however, he is a great character--fewer flashy anecdotes (and brilliant scientific contributions) than Richard Feynman but a complex and tragic tale that makes for great reading....more
An indispensable guide to China's economy: the reforms that made it what it is today, the challenges it still faces, and defenses against the many criAn indispensable guide to China's economy: the reforms that made it what it is today, the challenges it still faces, and defenses against the many criticisms the Chinese economy has gotten from abroad. Keyu Jin writes with one foot in two worlds. She is Chinese but educated as a visiting student in the United States and currently divides her time between London where she teaches at the London School of Economics and Beijing. These two worlds, plus a deep grounding in economic research, help convey her enthusiasm and sympathy of the Chinese economy in a way that is maximally designed to be understood and convey the sympathy to a Western audience. Jin has lots of criticisms of the economic model--mostly in the "more reform needed" mode--but on some fundamental issues proximate to politics you get the sense that she would not deviate from the party line, so to speak.
The first part of the book is a good summary of how China emerged as a global power. Jin gives some credit to China pre-1978 which greatly expanded literacy and reduced child mortality. But the story is really about a series of reforms that were based on the notion of gradualism (Deng's phrase, "crossing the river by groping for the stepping stones."), going from agriculture to Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to increasing competition and accountability for State Owned Enterprises and finally opening up to trade. Later in the book she describes the current set of reforms, including greater openness to capital.
Jin argues that the heavy role of the state worked well in China because, "it purposefully seeks to offset the rigidities of a central authority and its institutional deficiencies by giving tremendous economic authority and autonomy to local governments." So competition by local governments with leaders measured by GDP (and broader criteria now) and promoted accordingly helped ensure that national strategies were being effectively implemented.
Jin has a lengthy and interesting discussion of the financial system, including the puzzle of the very low return and high volatility to Chinese-listed equities, the underdevelopment of capital markets and financial institutions, and the concerning rise of shadow banking, including Wealth Management Products and Local Government Financing Vehicles. All of this built atop a system in which property is a disproportionately large share of GDP, source of revenue for local government, and a potential bubble, at least in first tier cities. Although she is relatively critical and points to the need for reforms, she also is defensive (likely rightly so) about the government's assets and capacity to defend against a financial crisis.
The technological discussion is interesting too and also at times critical, including of the share of Chinese going to college, the overemphasis on rote memorization and quantity over quality, and the lack of openness--all of which is getting in the way of progress.
In one of the places where I query whether was are getting the full story she presents the Chinese attack on big tech as entirely principled, "After numerous cases of data abuse, the government made a dramatic move in 2021 by introducing new restrictions on certain big tech, education, and gaming companies. These include fines for the most well-known internet companies in China: the e-commerce giant Alibaba, delivery and shopping platform Meituan, and ride-sharing company Didi."
Finally, Jin's conclusion is optimistic but tempered by some concern, "does China have the soft power—the transparency, predictable policies and reliable mechanisms, and trust from the international system?"
Overall, would strongly recommend this book both to better understand the Chinese economy (and to a lesser extent Chinese society, particularly the more affluents parts of it in the major cities) and also to understand China's perspective on what it is doing both internally and globally. I particularly appreciated the ways in which it was grounded in a combination of personal experience and rigorous economic research, all conveyed in a highly accessible and engaging manner....more
This was a reliable and helpful guide to Ulysses, complete with timetables and maps and context like the value of money then and now. It was one of twThis was a reliable and helpful guide to Ulysses, complete with timetables and maps and context like the value of money then and now. It was one of two guides I read (the other was Ulysses: A Reader's Odyssey). What guide and whether to use a guide at all depends on your taste. If I had to choose one it would be Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey for reasons I described in my review for that one. But this was really helpful too, just a bit too exhaustive at times in covering seemingly every aspect of every episode in the book. (I realize “exhaustive” is a relative term and there are guides that are much, much longer that go into every word, sentence and allusion in Ulysses.) On the other hand, this is a bit more grounded in scholarship—although that is a matter of degree not a dichotomous difference....more
This was a sweeping world history that covers roughly from 500 BC to the present. It puts attempts to put the “center” of Asia (which he sometimes calThis was a sweeping world history that covers roughly from 500 BC to the present. It puts attempts to put the “center” of Asia (which he sometimes calls the center of the world) at the center of the story, with the plurality of this “center” being about Persia but also Turkey, the Arabian peninsula, Afghanistan, the former USSR stans, and a bit of China as well. I say “attempts” because most of the events it covers are the same that a standard history of the world would cover (the Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity, its collapse, the “dark ages”, European discovery and conquest of the Americas, the renaissance, World War I, World War II, etc.) but it covers all of them from a slightly different angle, with the role of or impact on Central Asia being an important part of the story. But rarely does it tell much of the history of Central Asia beyond the way in which it is affected by or affects the more standard histories.
The different angle can be fascinating, from the ways in which Christianity was really defined and developed in the East not the West to a better understanding of the role that places like Crimea and Afghanistan have played in the global game from the 19th century through today.
Overall I quite liked the book and am glad I read it. But I found a number of aspects irritating, all of which are getting more space in this review than is representative of my feeling about the book.
Naturally, I read the last part of the book last so I will dive in there. The conclusion is all about the rise of Central Asia with the assertion, “We are seeing the signs of the world’s centre of gravity shifting—back to where it lay for millennia.” He then treats us to a whirlwind tour of the huge monuments, museums, airport, luxury hotels and mines of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and more. (He includes a dig at economists who he believes have focused insufficiently on these countries and instead been distracted by overstating the importance of emerging markets like Brazil, China, and India.)
This conclusion bizarrely asserts that China’s belt and road is the equivalent of the British Empire (“As late as the middle of the twentieth century, it was possible to sail from Southampton, London or Liverpool to the other side of the world without leaving British territory, putting in at Gibraltar and then Malta before Port Said; from there to Aden, Bombay and Colombo, pausing in the Malay peninsula and finally reaching Hong Kong. Today, it is the Chinese who can do something similar.”). Also that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the equivalent of the European Union (“Originally set up to facilitate political, economic and military collaboration between Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and China, the Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation (SCO) is becoming increasingly influential and gradually turning into a viable alternative to the European Union.”)
But what was particularly jarring, and I think emblematic of one of the issues with the book, was that after the concluding chapter which stated “New intellectual centres of excellence are also emerging in a region that at one time produced the world’s most outstanding scholars. Campuses have been springing up across the Persian Gulf that have been endowed by local rulers and magnates” the acknowledgments begin with "There is no finer place in the world for a historian to work than Oxford” and go on to also thank the British government archives, Cambridge University and the U.S. National Security Archives—with the only reference to anything global being “travels across Britain, Europe, Asia and Africa have helped refine good ideas, and sometimes prompted bad ones to be discarded.”
This was emblematic of three of the issues I had with the book:
1. It is dripping with contempt for the West (e.g., “Rome had long cast a greedy eye over Egypt”). The loaded, pejorative terms for anything the Romans do, describing its ruthless expropriation with language that is not repeated even in describing the vast conquests of the rise of Islam—which are treated as a benign force for standardizing rules, Ghenghis Khan or any other empire or conquerers that came from Central Asia.
2. Although the book ostensibly is trying to center the history around Central Asia, it often feels as if the author is denying their agency, at least in the last 500 years or so. The Romans, the Europeans, the United States all have agency—they make decisions and execute on them. The Central Asians just react, and anything bad they do is because they were reacting to whatever the West did (e.g., bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center was not his agency but just his reacting to the way the United States treated him). In that way it really does seem more like the view from Oxford than the view from Baku.
3. The allocation of attention in the history is very unbalanced. The rise of the empires in Central Asia to Alexander in 336 BC gets 3 pages. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars get 19 pages. Not only is that overly chronocentric and US centric, it was also a little disappointing because it meant more pages on something I already knew a lot about it.
Overall I’m glad I read the book. Most of the issues I had with it were about the last quarter of so of the book, although those issues showed through—both as I read and in retrospect—in the earlier parts as well. I would recommend you read it, just not uncriticially....more
In the introduction to Limitless Jeanna Smialek writes, “I should offer a word of warning before you get started. Many people who write about the Fed In the introduction to Limitless Jeanna Smialek writes, “I should offer a word of warning before you get started. Many people who write about the Fed (a) suggest that its officials have saved the world, (b) suggest that they have ruined the world, or (c) suggest that they’re some sort of secret cult trying to take over the world. If that is what you’re looking for, this is not the book for you.”
She is too modest to add: “If you want a deeply reported book that combines history, economics and colorful stories about colorful personalities into a compulsively readable argument that the Fed’s power’s have greatly expanded over time, that this may have been necessary for the sake of the economy, but that it also necessitates greater transparency and scrutiny, then this is the book for you.”
If you are new to these issues you will learn a lot about the origins of the Fed, how its role evolved over time, and a spotlight especially on its response to COVID and the inflation that followed. Smialek is also focused on the way that the Fed has navigated the changing political and cultural context, including issues of race that rose to national prominence with the murder of George Floyd, climate change, and broadened notions of the employment mandate—all of which led to a situation in which “Fed officials often talk about ‘staying in their lane,’ but that lane has been expanding into an avenue.”
I’m not new to these issues but still learned a lot, both about the history, the present, some of the people that have made these changes, as well as a dilemmas and challenges of balancing a powerful and technocratic agency with desire for democratic oversight while avoiding politicization.
Of course the book is coming out while the story is still unfinished. The Fed has not brought down inflation. It has also still not had to grapple seriously with tensions in its mandate—the unemployment rate is still low while inflation is high and many still hold out hope for a soft landing that would obviate the need to choose between inflation and unemployment. We will have to see if any of this brings new limits back to way the Fed conducts itself or the mandate that Congress assigns to it.
For now, read Smialek’s excellent book—while we all anxiously await the sequel.
——————
Disclosure: I read and provided comments on much of an earlier draft of the book and after it was released I read/re-read the opening and closing chapters....more
This was a delightful guide to Ulysses. The author is an Irish diplomat (including the former Ambassador to the United States). Normally this would maThis was a delightful guide to Ulysses. The author is an Irish diplomat (including the former Ambassador to the United States). Normally this would make me concerned, I would rather read a book by a scholar or at least someone who was truly focused on Ulysses not someone who got attention and publication by virtue of their position. But that would wrong in this case. Daniel Mulhall begins with a discussion of the role that Ulysses has played in his cultural diplomacy that sets the stage for his perspective on the book—a certain unpretentious enthusiasm that it speaks to everyone, is grounded in a notion of what Ireland and the Irish are like, and also in Irish history and politics.
The bulk of the book is a chapter-by-chapter guide (or as people call them in Ulysses, “Episodes,” there are 18 of them) that gives you a combination of description, hand-holding and interpretation—many with some light and diverting/motivating descriptions of the roles that the episode played in Mulhall’s own life and the cultural aspects of his diplomacy.
This was one of two guides I read together with Ulysses, the other being The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses. I liked them both but if I had to choose one it would be this one, it is a little less detailed and nitty gritty and bit more Irish in its wild enthusiasm. But it is also less literary and aesthetic and more introductory.
By the end it helped me to love both Ulysses and also the author of this guide, who himself felt to me a little like Leopold Bloom....more
I listened to the audiobook of this short biography of James Joyce. I did not know much about Joyce's life before but this presented a relatively compI listened to the audiobook of this short biography of James Joyce. I did not know much about Joyce's life before but this presented a relatively comprehensive portrait from birth to death, with a lot of detail about both the writing and publication of Ulysses and a summary/literary criticism of it with less space devoted to Joyce's other books. A lot of the focus is on Joyce's relationships to women, including Nora Barnacle (the women he spent his life with) and a series of mostly nameless prostitutes. Although Edna O'Brien asserts that all of this is complex and multifaceted overall Joyce comes across as mostly a self-obsessed jerk--albeit one who produced towering masterworks.
The biography itself is beautifully written with some almost poetic turns of phrase. The audiobook is narrated well with an Irish voice....more
An extraordinary work of scholarship combining economic modeling with primary documents and an enormous synthesis, The Chosen Few seeks to explain JewAn extraordinary work of scholarship combining economic modeling with primary documents and an enormous synthesis, The Chosen Few seeks to explain Jewish economic and demographic history from 70 to 1492. Specifically it attempts to explain several facts including: (1) the decline in Jewish population through about 700, (2) the huge shift of Jews into urban living and trades, ultimately moneylending, from 700 to 1200, (3) the stabilization of population over that period, (4) the spread of Jews to Europe and their dispersion across a wide range of cities, and (5) the decline of the Jewish population from about 1250 through at least 1492.
The authors persuasively demolish a few popular theses including the Jews were banned from agriculture so moved to cities, that Christians were banned from moneylending so Jews filled the vacuum, that Jews were not permitted in guilds and that Jews were afraid of being forced to move so they invested in human capital instead of physical capital. The problem with all of these arguments is that many of the restrictions that they are premised on were instituted well after Jews became a highly urban population. Moreover they were only instituted in some places but Jews became urbanized everywhere. The thesis has lots of other problems, including the majority of moneylending was still Christians and moneylenders worked better if they were rooted in a place so knew all the people.
Instead the authors argue that a cultural development was central and it interacted with global events. Specifically, the destruction of the temple in the year 70 resulted in the primacy of the Jewish sects centering around reading and learning Torah for oneself rather than centralized worship through ritual sacrifices. Universal male literacy with universal primary school started early. Initially this did not confer any economic advantages for Jews because they were still farmers. As a result the population fell as families converted rather than bear the "useless" cost of all the learning to no economic aim. But with Arab conquests an urban world centered around trade emerged and the "random mutation" of literacy all of a sudden became economically favored. The result was a rapid shift of Jews away from agriculture and towards urban occupations.
This eventually evolved into moneylending because literacy/numeracy combined with other cultural/institutional factors including access to capital, networks and institutions to enforce contracts.
As for some of the other facts, the Jewish population started to decline after the Mongol invasion was a setback for urbanization and reduced the benefits of the education that Jews invested in. And Jewish populations were dispersed because they were highly specialized so hard to have too many in one area--and benefits of spreading out.
The book ends in 1492 and I am curious about how some of the explanations fit the next 500 years, particularly the large concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe--a group that was not especially prosperous. Was literacy more widespread so the returns to it fell? Or discrimination/exclusion took an economic toll? Something else? And does this "out of sample" test of their hypotheses fail and if so what does that mean of their explanations in sample?
Overall, the book has enormous erudition, going deeply into cultural, institutional, religious and economic developments across a wide range of territory and time, at times going very deep (e.g., into moneylending in Italy). This can make for exciting reading at times, but in other places it can be repetitive and have the feel of stapling together different papers into a book rather than something that was conceived as a single work. That said, is never boring and highly persuasive....more
I came for Dickens but stayed for Prince. "Dickens and Prince" is an extended essay that is overflowing with enthusiasm and worship for two very diffeI came for Dickens but stayed for Prince. "Dickens and Prince" is an extended essay that is overflowing with enthusiasm and worship for two very different artists, modesty about his own role, and a paen to the genius that emerges from a combination of protean talent and relentless obsessive drive. I listened to the Audible version which is 2.5 hours (at 1.3X).
I'm a huge Dickens fan and have enjoyed the movie versions of Nick Hornby's books (have not read the books themselves). I know the most famous Prince songs and once saw him in a truly stunning concert, a late night jam session in the East Room of the White House, at one point joined by Stevie Wonder. But beyond that I knew absolutely nothing about Prince and was not particularly intrigued.
The Dickens parts of the books were very familiar, most of them coming from the excellent Claire Tomalin biography Charles Dickens. But they were still enjoyable, one professional craftsman admiring another.
But the Prince parts blew me away, mostly because of my own previous ignorance. Learning about how young he started, how sure of himself he was, performing all the instruments and backup vocals on his first five albums, his prolific recording and performing career, and the perhaps thousands of unreleased songs he left behind in his vault. All of this is presumably just as familiar to Prince fans as the Dickens parts were to me but also the way in which Hornby expresses his enthusiasm and appreciation is infectiously exciting.
The book alternates between the two, going through their youth, their twenties, thematic issues (e.g., women) and their deaths. There are a surprising number of parallels but Hornby does not push them in any sort of forced of awkward way. Instead his book is ultimately a meditation on what he sees as the most important parallel between them: "This book is about work. And nobody ever worked harder than these two or at a higher standard while connecting with so many people for so long."...more
“T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Divides and Dominates Us” is a superb piece of science writing about the role that testosterone, or T,“T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Divides and Dominates Us” is a superb piece of science writing about the role that testosterone, or T, plays in the development of sex differences and their expression throughout life. Carole Hooven consistently acknowledges and highlights the importance of culture and conscious choices as shaping the way in which T is expressed but is scathing about those who deny a role for T at all. In telling this story Hooven draws mostly on endocrinology (a subject I have never really read about before) but also some more familiar ground in human evolutionary biology and other disciplines as well. She also includes some fascinating history of science from the 19th century discovery that T operated through the vascular system by transplanting testes into the wrong place in young male chickens through many more recent large-scale experiments.
Just reading about how animals have two systems that interact internally to shape development, behavior, and more—the neural system which sends targeted electrical signals and the hormonal system which sends broad communications that can only be received and interpreted by some cells—was very basic biology but still fascinating to me because it was explored with such detail and nuance in this one specific case.
Human males have three major surges of T: one around 20 weeks gestational, one a few months after birth, and one starting around age 12 and lasting for the rest of life. Hooven explains in detail how these surges play a role in the differentiation of primary sex characteristics (the first one) and secondary sex characteristics (the third one, which brings about puberty). She also acknowledges that scientists do not understand that second surge in babies, one of a handful of places throughout the book where she acknowledges and highlights what scientists do not (yet?) understand—which is also part of the never-ending excitement of science because it is a process of discovery not a full truth.
Hooven then has chapters that focus on issues like the role of sexual selection, different performance in sports, vastly different levels of violence, also differences in willingness to risk one’s life for a stranger (a trait heavily skewed towards males), and more. She also discusses the role of T in people transitioning, a very well done chapter that largely tells a set of stories through extended quotes from interviews with a number of people that have transitioned.
Hooven draws on animal studies to illustrate the continuity with humans but also the variety of evolutionary strategies. For example, part of a chapter is devoted to the extraordinary set of studies of red deer in the Isle of Rum off Scotland and the way in which some males maintain harems, fighting off the solitary males who are mateless. She then explains that red deer differ from human babies in that they can fend for themselves almost from birth and so require almost no parental input while paternal input—not just fathering lots of children—is a key input to evolutionary success in humans.
I had mixed feelings about how much of the T was devoted to arguing against a recent set of popular and in some cases scientific writings denying that T matters in humans, instead arguing that humans are a blank slate and that gender differences are entirely socially constructed. I sympathized with how frustrating the reach of these writings given the mountain of evidence against them: animal studies, human studies, examples of humans who had their T cut off (eunuchs and castrati), humans with different types of genes (e.g., XY’s that cannot process T), humans who have transitioned, and other evidence. You can sense Hooven’s frustration about some of the pseudo-science that gets amplified in the press, even on basic factual questions like one person arguing that T levels are not hugely different in men and women when in fact even the highest T women are below the lowest T men. But I did not always like it as a foil.
Hooven, however, is interesting in speculating about why there is this tendency to deny nature--arguing that for some it has become a proxy in the fight for feminism and equality. She is scathing about this view, arguing (correctly in my view—although she does not actually develop and prove the case) that if we downplay or ignore biology we will miss opportunities to improve women’s safety and equality. She also argues that the difference-deniers are making the mistake of implicitly accepting that what is “natural” is good and that instead it is better to argue that people and cultures can change and reshape the way people behave—while acknowledging there are natural differences and these differences themselves are often grounded in one particular chemical and the role it plays throughout our lives, T.
Overall, I learned a lot from this book and found the writing very engaging—highly recommended....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
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