A beautiful, moving memoir about a woman coming to terms with her memory of her mother--her mother's murder, the violent abusive relationship with herA beautiful, moving memoir about a woman coming to terms with her memory of her mother--her mother's murder, the violent abusive relationship with her step father and growing up in Mississippi with a Black mother and white father. It is so painful to watch her mother trapped in a violently abusive relationship, trying to escape and protect her children, and fearing for her life--with the system ultimately being unwilling to protect her. Natasha Trethewey had blocked out this entire period of her life only returning to it decades later and writes poetically (no surprise) interspersed with some of the original court records, including a first person account by her mother (without the unhappy ending) and transcripts of phone calls between her mother and step father.
I listened to the excellent Audible recording read by Trethewey....more
A short book by a Nobel Prize winning biologist that examines five facets of life: cells, genes, evolution, chemistry and information. The chapters arA short book by a Nobel Prize winning biologist that examines five facets of life: cells, genes, evolution, chemistry and information. The chapters are a combination of going through fairly standard accounts (Mendel's discovery of genes, the double helix, a few pages on how epigenetics mostly does not change anything, Darwin, etc.) but gets a little more speculative and conceptual when it comes to chemistry and especially life as information. That last, of course, was the centerpiece of a book also called What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrödinger (I've also read a third book with the same title, What Is Life?: Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology that was quite interesting albeit journalistic).
There are a lot more pop science books by Nobel Prize winning physicists than biologists. This book was perfectly good entry to the genre but most of it was not profoundly original. In some ways the parts that were the most interesting were describing his own research on yeast, how he pieced together various discoveries and the excitement and serendipity. I wish there had been more of that....more
Jerald Walker is a powerful essayist who writes in a strong, funny, memorable way about race and racism. Most of his essays are depictions of scenes aJerald Walker is a powerful essayist who writes in a strong, funny, memorable way about race and racism. Most of his essays are depictions of scenes and happenings from his life, often with a little twist in perspective at the end, none of them completely neat and orderly in its message or implications. The essays themselves are very short and I read them occasionally over the course of a month, my main complaint being that they can get a little repetitive....more
The first two-thirds of this book is an extraordinary biography of John Maynard Keynes that is the basis of my five star review. It is well written, nThe first two-thirds of this book is an extraordinary biography of John Maynard Keynes that is the basis of my five star review. It is well written, nuanced, comprehensive, and does an excellent job explaining the complicated international finance of the period in which he lived. Zachary Carter makes compelling links between the many phases and facets of Keynes’ life: someone helping the Treasury finance to the Great War vs. returning the critical roots of the Bloomsbury group; a truth teller who wants to shout his views from the rooftops vs. a man who wants to be engaged at the highest levels; a columnist writing for the moment vs. a timeless theoretician; an avid speculator in markets who was generally hostile to speculation; etc. The life and the work fit together, which for a life and work this extraordinary is a challenge.
Carter places Keynes squarely in the tradition of a broader political philosophy, situating his work as a commentary on social and political power and the ways in which the market can only exist as a function of the state, pulling him out of the technocratic economic interpretation. He argues that Keynes’ masterwork, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is one of the great works of Western letters, a masterpiece of social and political thought that belongs with the monuments left by Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, and Karl Marx. It is a theory of democracy and power, of psychology and historical change, a love letter to the power of ideas.” But Carter also argues, in some tension with this claim, that Keynes had pretty much worked out his ideas before the General Theory and was just using it as a rhetorical device to persuade in the present and influence posterity.
My only quibble about the first two-thirds of the book is that it overplays Keynes as columnist a bit and underplays Keynes as intellectual. His relationships with Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his early writing on probability are all mentioned but not emphasized as much as I might have liked.
But then Keynes dies on page 367 and the next 166 pages at times read like they were written by someone who had never read or absorbed the first 367 pages. These pages are a partial and polemical account of economic ideas and economic policy in the postwar United States, basically a long indictment of how Keynes was mathematicalized and marginalized within economics and how policymaking abandoned his ideas too. This part makes some interesting points and I learned from it, but the closer it got the present the more tendentious and polemical it got.
Let me list a few concerns:
SHOULD WE CARE WHAT KEYNES WOULD HAVE THOUGHT? The justification for including the last third was a biography of the afterlife of Keynes ideas. Carter is constantly telling us what Keynes would have thought of, say, various compromises made by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. For some reason biographers of Charles Dickens rarely feel compelled to provide his reviews of 20th century literature, biographers of Isaac Newton don’t speculate about what he would have thought of quasars, and I don’t find myself seeking out articles about what Charles Darwin would have thought of COVID. Maybe a philosopher is aspiring to timeless truths so it might make sense to ask what Kant or Mill would think of an ethical question, but the Keynes portrayed in the first two-thirds of this book is a man of the moment, someone whose ideas are pragmatic, and constantly changing. If someone changes their mind once a decade—and often holds contradictory opinions at the same time—how exactly can we extrapolate their views into the future? Carter thinks Keynes would have been opposed to the WTO and Long-term Capital Management, I would have bet he would have been pro the former and on both sides of the later, but who cares.
THE NARROW FOCUS ON THE UNITED STATES IS OVERLY PAROCHIAL. Carter’s story shifts entirely to the United States after World War II. This makes the story very specific to US debates and miss out on broader themes. For example, the divergence of German and US thought on fiscal policy is large and important in putting some perspective on where Keynes’ legacy has persisted and where it has been absent. And Carter does a lot of criticism of NAFTA, the WTO and China’s accession to the WTO as evidence of the ascent of neoliberalism and the betrayal of Keynes (see previous point for why I do’t know where Keynes would have stood on those, especially when he held multiple positions on tariffs over the course of his career). But if Carter had looked at the attitudes of social democratic countries in Europe towards trade, including trade with China, it would have seen less of an exemplar of neoliberalism.
“NEOLIBERALISM” AS AN OVERLY BROAD EPITHET FOR EVERYTHING CARTER DOES NOT LIKE. Carter is critical of Kennedy for cutting the top tax rate from 91 to 70 percent and Carter for his deregulation. You can think the top rate should be much higher than it is or that environmental regulation should be much tougher while also thinking those were moves in the right direction. And then there is my least favorite sentence in the book: "Improving education, for instance, probably helped at the margins by creating more jobs for teachers. But the ultimate result was a better-educated underclass just as poor as the one that preceded it."
A ONE-SIDED NEGATIVE VIEW OF ECONOMIC HISTORY AND PROGRESS. In “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” Keynes famously predicted that productivity increases would enable future generations to work fifteen hour weeks while maintaining a good standard of living. Carter explains the failure of this prediction: “The tremendous expansion of output and productivity over the past ninety years has been harvested for the most part by a very small section of society. For everyone else, economic prospects are roughly where they were in the mid-1920s.” The problems with this explanation: (1) hours have stayed high and risen more for the highest-income workers; (2) inequality has not increased since Keynes wrote it in 1930 and moreover you see people working 40+ hour weeks in countries with much lower inequality; and (3) economic prospects are vastly better than where they were in the 1930s. The same argumentation shows up again in multiple places (e.g., misleadingly missing the *percentage* decline in absolute poverty in the 1990s because he focuses on the level and then belittling the subsequent decline because many are still living in near poverty).
OVERLY ATTRIBUTES THE DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS TO MATERIAL INTERESTS AND FUNDING. There is no doubt that funding of ideas, organized groups like the Mont Pelerin society, and the like, have had an impact. But a lot of the development of ideas over the last 70 years has been based on what could explain more, what had evidence, what theories failed. Milton Friedman’s expectations-augmented Philips curve came out of a failure of the traditional Philips curve. Paul Samuelson’s textbook was successful in large part because it effectively unified a set of ideas. Not all math is obfuscation and, in fact, as Carter himself acknowledges, “Without those luminaries [Samuelson et al], The General Theory would today be an intellectual curiosity, the brilliant and confusing work of an influential Englishman that had briefly animated the Roosevelt administration.”
A NARROW VIEW OF ECONOMICS. In Carter's telling Keynesianism was largely dead when Jimmy Carter embraced deregulation. He writes, "Without a patron in Washington, up-and-coming economists pursued other ideas. The dwindling few who continued to hold out against the storm—Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz—were Samuelson disciples from MIT who treated Galbraith with professional disdain." A few of the issues: (1) Krugman and Stiglitz, at the time, were primarily microeconomists and not overly engaged in the macroeconomic debate around Keynes; (2) much of the trajectory of economic research has nothing to do with patrons in Washington (see the previous point); and (3) there was a huge growth in the economics of imperfect information, behavioral economics, the shift to empirical study of issues like the impact of the minimum wage on employment, all of which were moving much of economics in a direction with a richer understanding of market failures, human behavior, and in many cases a greater agnosticism on these issues as empirical research replaced theory. But in Carter's version of economics there are only a few celebrity economists and the notion of market failures and behavior is highly limited.
This is a partial list of my concerns with the last third of the book. Even in that part I learned a lot, especially the debates with John Kenneth Galbraith, Joan Robinson, the intersection of Macarthyism and economics, and more. I just wish it had ended up being a standalone book that had the sensitivity, nuance and thoughtfulness that pervaded every page of their spectacular biography of John Maynard Keynes....more
Illiberal Reformers was very interesting presenting what was (to me) a combination of new evidence and interoperation about the founding of American pIlliberal Reformers was very interesting presenting what was (to me) a combination of new evidence and interoperation about the founding of American professional economics in the late nineteenth century, the establishment and growth of the administrative state over the period and into the early twentieth century, and their relationship to the widespread enthusiasm for eugenics and other racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise exclusionary thought. The flaw of the book, however, is that while it is very carefully researched it also often lapses into the overly polemical, one-sided, and simplified that mar the telling of an interesting history and perspective.
Thomas Leonard’s history argues that in the late nineteenth American economics, influenced by German economics, became oriented towards making itself of use to the state in employing “science” in the service of “progress,” where progress was measured in collective terms, mostly that of the nation. America set up various expert panels, many run by or staffed by economists, to study social problems and then often created agencies, again run by or staffed by economists, to solve them. This shift of the economy away from laissez faire or state and local control to federal control and administrative agencies happened simultaneously with the rise of the prestige of science in general and economics in particular.
The dark side of this, Leonard argues, is that these progressive economists all embraced eugenics. He argues that this was related to their belief in scientific social control and a moral worldview that privileged the collective over the individuals. He is semi-successful in making that link, but it is weakened considerably by (in his own admission) the widespread support for eugenics, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc., across the political and ideological spectrum at the time.
As an intellectual history, Leonard is fascinating and I’m glad I now know more about this slice of time. But he does not live up to some of his own claims. For example, he writes that “Ideology is a useful tool of taxonomy, but when it is reduced to one dimension, it is the enemy of nuance” but then most of the discussion in his book replaces the traditional one dimension (progressive vs. conservative) with a different one dimension (liberal vs. illiberal, the later seemingly expanded to cover everything from supporters of a flat tax to supporters of a wealth tax. I was particularly surprised when in the conclusion he wrote “Progressivism is too important to be left to hagiography and obloquy” when the book itself was mostly obloquy.
Ultimately the most interesting question is “so what” and I’m not sure I know the answer to this. Leonard shows that one hundred years ago some people argued that it was a good thing that it would increase unemployment for Blacks and immigrants. This may be the intellectual history of the minimum wage, but for today’s purpose the relevant question is the empirical one of whether the minimum wage, for example, raises the wages of Black people or causes large increases in Black unemployment. Moreover, Leonard’s book is dripping with disdain for all sorts of things like antitrust, basic labor rules, and the income tax, all of which are widely accepted today and clearly compatible with a range of political philosophies.
That said, understanding how widespread scientific fallacies were at the time should give us some pause about our understanding today and without any breaks in the form of taking individual liberty and spontaneous order seriously we could recreate some of the problems caused by the hubris of eugenicists one hundred years ago. In that sense, the dictum that those that do not understand history are doomed to repeat it may be relevant for economic thought as well....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
David French's book contains an analysis a political polarization that shares a lot in common with Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, a speculative depDavid French's book contains an analysis a political polarization that shares a lot in common with Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, a speculative depiction of the United States breaking up in "Calexit" and "Texit", and a proposed solution which is maximum federalism limited only by States not having the right to override the Constitution and especially the First Amendment. This solution is motivated by "toleration," not for those what we celebrate and love but for those that we disagree with in a system with a greater degree of pluralism, viewpoint diversity, and to the degree collective choices are needed they are done closer to the level where people agree on them.
Much of the polarization story in this book has been told before but French tells it well and does it with almost complete even-handed sympathy for both sides in the culture and broader wars. One could debate whether both sides deserve even hands (e.g., French rightly says that both sides pick the worst of the other side and claim it is an exemplar, but a progressive picking Donald Trump as an exemplar of conservatives is not exactly cherry picking). But French is good at serving up some of his own's sides hypocrisies and inconsistencies too, for example pointing that while conservatives love to talk about the importance of free speech in the face of cancel culture it was a Republican President and the NFL that cancelled Colin Kaepernick. What makes French's analysis so distinctive--and also potentially a bit off--is how much he emphasizes geographical sorting, something that is also a key to motivating his analysis of the problem and the solution. Of course there is substantial sorting into "red" and "blue" America but it is not all along regional lines. Most everywhere cities are blue, even in the reddest states. And most everywhere rural areas are red, even in the bluest states. People with a graduate degree tend to be blue regardless of where they live and the converse for a high school degree or less. French is right that you can live in Brooklyn and never meet a Republican, but you don't have to travel to North Carolina to remedy this deficiency--you just need to go two counties over to Orange County which voted for Trump in 2016.
The regional divides lead to three enjoyable chapters imaging what a dissolution of the United States might look like. The first scenario is a gun massacre in California, they pass unconstitutional legislation, a series of conflicts between federal and state authorities lead them to want to succeed, and an embattled Republican President realizes he can cement his party's power if he lets them go. All is peaceful and relatively happy domestically. The second scenario is a clash over abortion that leads to a virtual economic embargo of the South by major corporations, a packing of the Supreme Court, and them leaving the union--enabled by the many military bases and assets they control, devolving in a Cold War situation as the competing nations face off. French follows these two chapters with one that follows from both depicting what a world with a U.S. power vacuum could look like, with an emboldened China trying to take over Taiwan, Russia expanding out, Germany and Japan remilitarizing, etc., all of which is a chilling reminder of what might happen if U.S. power wanes (see Matthew Yglesias's One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger).
In the final part of the book French makes an eloquent plea for "tolerance" which he defines as living with those you find disagreeable and repugnant, which is very different from the current liberal approach to "tolerance" of different groups that you actually like and celebrate (which is why, in fact, progressives have generally moved away from the word "tolerance"). Because he argues most differences are geographic he thinks that federalism is a solution. Let California take the money it currently channels to the federal government to set up a single payer health system. Let other states limit abortions. Keep things closer to what local people want and making national elections less important and Presidents much less important. French is very consistent in his advocacy (and in fact remarkably consistent throughout the book), he clearly is not using the "federalism" label to achieve whatever more fundamental goals he has. But I was not fully persuaded by this as a solution since there is still a lot of polarization within states, I have less of a belief in the limitations of the federal government, and a sneaking suspicion that as even handed as French is trying to be the limits on federal power are putting a thumb on the scale of more conservative solutions. That said, he made me take the idea more seriously and is better than the opportunists on both sides who inconsistently invoke their support or opposition to federalism as it best suits in the moment.
Overall, the U.S. political debate is lucky to have French's voice giving a sympathetic rendering to a large group of Americans that are ignored or marginalized in much progressive political analysis but without doing it in the combative and incoherent manner one too often sees in Fox News commentators and their ilk....more
As I was reading this book I couldn’t help but think I was reading an excellent narrative journalistic account of the paper Hsieh et al published in EAs I was reading this book I couldn’t help but think I was reading an excellent narrative journalistic account of the paper Hsieh et al published in Econometrica in 2019 finding that 20 to 40 percent of productivity growth in the half century following 1960 was due to “improved allocation of talent” as barriers to women, people of color and others were reduced—although not eliminated. Then halfway through the book Jim Tankersley takes a brief hiatus from narrative journalism to do an economics literature review—and begins it with this Hsieh et al paper. Which is to say, there his a lot of cutting edge economics and research underlying the moving and powerful stories Tankersley tells in the book.
Tankersley argues provocatively but persuasively that journalists have not neglected the white men that voted for Trump but in fact lavished attention on them, including the workers that Tankersley himself had quoted in his news stories. Instead it is women, minorities and immigrants who Tankersley argues have not been heard from enough—and who played a critical role in building the middle class and fueling American economic growth. Tankersley tells the story largely by drawing on his own reporting over the last fifteen years which takes places all across the country: New York, Chicago, Ohio, Winston-Salem, and Western Massachusetts among other places. He is interested in the jobs that have disappeared, the hollowing out of manufacturing and the middle class, and way obstacles were reduced in the 1950s and 1960s but then inequality emerged and grew as a major obstacle in recent decades.
I mostly agree with Tankersley’s arguments. I appreciated that for a book that focuses on inclusion and distribution, he appreciates and clearly shows the importance of aggregate productivity growth and the sources of that growth—both the obvious ones and the less obvious ones. At times Tankersley takes all of the most negative perspectives on his data without qualification/nuance (e.g., he’ll use statistics about record low job growth without pointing out how different today’s demographics are and does not mention that the negative growth of median income in various periods he cites was not true if you adjust for household size). I also think the book emphasized institutional explanations for inequality more but did not take the race between education and technology nearly as seriously—reducing it more to skill-biased technological change without the educational component. Finally, and this is more tone than anything, I didn’t love the identification of every economist by their race/gender, even on multi-authored papers and often Tankersley refers to the “economy” as if it had agency and its own villainy as opposed to be composed of all of us. Finally, I would have loved to hear more about the relationship between “economic” and “cultural” explanations of populism and Tankersley’s views, in particular, on the cultural debates around immigration.
All in all, however, the book demonstrates what happens when an intelligent, sympathetic journalist goes out and talks to both human beings and economists and does an excellent combination of the two in forging a powerful and important narrative about what went right and now wrong with the American economy and the real human consequences of these aggregates....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
I saw this in the bookstore and thought it was essentially going to be "how Shakespeare shows us how terrible Donald Trump is" and since I already kneI saw this in the bookstore and thought it was essentially going to be "how Shakespeare shows us how terrible Donald Trump is" and since I already knew the terrible part I thought I didn't really need Shakespeare's help on the topic so I passed on reading the book. Then I was given it as a present and I generally try to read books given to me as presents and was happy to learn that the words "Trump" and 2016 were no where to be found in the book itself--although in the acknowledgments Stephen Greenblatt says it was (at least part) of what motivated him to write the book. Instead the book is a look at the many tyrants portrayed by Shakespeare (including Richard III, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, the King in Winter's Tale, and also King Lear--who I would not have classified in the group before reading this book) and the ways that Shakespeare used them to shine a light on questions ranging from the politics of Elizabethan England, how enablers help a tyrant, how people turn bad over time, or how their badness undoes them, etc. All of this in a series of chapters the cover different aspects, use different plays, and are generous in the quotations. All an enjoyable and insightful read, appropriately on the short and slightly breezy side. ...more
The second book I have read (or in the case of the other one, listened to) this year with the title "The Mystery of Charles Dickens." Like the audioboThe second book I have read (or in the case of the other one, listened to) this year with the title "The Mystery of Charles Dickens." Like the audiobook of the Peter Ackroyd play The Mystery Of Charles Dickens, A.N. Wilson extensively uses the words and works of Charles Dickens to tell elements of his life story and character and how they fused with his writing. And like the other Mystery, A.N. Wilson's enthusiasm for a writer he has clearly loved, read and re-read since childhood comes through on every page. It is not a chronological life but instead seven chapters each organized around a different mystery including Dickens' cruelty to his wife, his charity, his public readings, The Mystery of Edwin Drood itself, etc. As such, it seems better suited to someone who has read most of Dickens and has a basic familiarity with his life.
Occasionally the tendentious speculation that evidently (according to the reviews) has marred some of A.N. Wilson's other books shows up here. For example, he effectively asserts that Dickens' suffered his fatal stroke while having sex on a surreptitious visit to his mistress Ellen Ternan, who then put his unconscious body in a cab and brought it back to Dickens' house with all of it covered up by Dickens' family and household staff. Wilson doesn't name his source for this but it appears to be Claire Tomalin, perhaps the biggest authority on Dickens and especially Ternan, who in her biography Charles Dickens has both the conventional story but this one (minus the sex) with the major caveat: "It seems a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one, given what we know of Dickens’s habits." He also speculates that difficulty plotting out The Mystery of Edwin Drood killed Dickens. But, fortunately, there is relatively little of this.
Wilson is particularly strong on writing about Dickens' many ways of thinking about and presenting himself, his double character, the genuineness of his charity while depicting charitable hypocrites, his social commentary that often outdated, missed genuine solutions, but was powerful in its own rights, the role that public readings played etc. Ultimately Wilson argues that Dickens' grounding in pantomime and fairy tales made his books more real than the more "realistic" and journalistic fiction of his contemporaries and that it is his characters--not his plots--that have become immortal and inimitable....more
An inspired triad, Imraan Coovadia presents a hybrid of history, biography and literary analysis of Tolstoy, Gandhi and Mandela (plus a bit of Coetze An inspired triad, Imraan Coovadia presents a hybrid of history, biography and literary analysis of Tolstoy, Gandhi and Mandela (plus a bit of Coetze in the epilogue), the ways they learned from each other, built on each other, and brought about moral and practical change with a combination of radical philosophies and each of their unique life paths involving some combination of violence and peaceful non-resistance. Throughout the book Coovadia brilliantly draws on many strands of thoughts, combining and recombining them in novel ways, all of which help support a passionate argument about the present and future particularly of South Africa but also of the world more generally.
Tolstoy lurks a bit more in the background than the foreground of this book, existing more as an influence on Gandhi than a fully fledged character in his own right. Moreover, it is not just the late Tolstoy one might have expected in thinking about non-violence and moral influences, but War and Peace in particular that shows up again and again, particular the model of Field Marshal Kutuzov as a model for a combination of violence but also minimizing violence and doing it all while achieving victory.
Gandhi gets the most attention, particularly his time in South Africa, his interactions with Tolstoy, the formation of his philosophy, and how it worked in practice. Coovadia makes something of Gandhi’s role in organizing military units for the British, likening it to Tolstoy’s start in the military and Mandela’s role in the armed wing of the ANC. It seemed like a bit of a stretch but I could be wrong about that.
Mandela gets the most creative and sympathetic treatment of the trio, a robust defense of his vision and legacy against what Coovadia sees as the alternative presented by Winnie Mandela, a corrupt/criminal approach that justifies itself in language that rejects the nonviolence and accommodation of Mandela.
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
What a dream. A one man play about the life of Charles Dickens, written by Peter Ackroyd in collaboration with Simon Callow and performed by Simon CalWhat a dream. A one man play about the life of Charles Dickens, written by Peter Ackroyd in collaboration with Simon Callow and performed by Simon Callow. It tells the story of Dickens' life from beginning to end, including his personal life and literary evolution, largely through the relevant readings from Dickens' fiction but interspersed with some expository connective tissue. Spellbinding from beginning to end, I'll be listening to this again....more
I read a bit more than half of this book several years ago but set it aside. I originally read the parts about Henrietta Lacks, her disease, death, anI read a bit more than half of this book several years ago but set it aside. I originally read the parts about Henrietta Lacks, her disease, death, and the immortality of her cells. But I got a bit bogged down in the period after and her family's growing understanding of what had happened and participation in the story. I restarted it (on Audible) and ended up loving the second half, which could have been termed "The Mortal Life of Deborah Lacks" since it is about the author's teaming up with Henrietta's daughter Deborah to learn Henrietta's story and ultimately, through the author, tell it to the world. The portrayal of Deborah and other families members at times seems to have genuine depth and sympathy but at other times seems a little cartoonish and exploitative. Rebecca Skloot never engages with that tension, but she does engage very subtly with other tensions: research done without consent, whether tissues count as a person and should be subject to consent, the ways that Henrietta Lacks was abused by the system but also the tremendous gains in lives saved as a result of the research. At the end of the day, Skloot is also very sympathetic towards the scientists and does not minimize the scientific accomplishments.
An important book to have been written, a nice combination of science (although less than I personally would have wanted), family chronicle, discussion of medical ethics, and more. With some amazing characters and dramas--even more so for being real--to drive it all along....more
Although uneven (what else would one expect from a story collection and unfinished novel by a 15 year old in hiding), the best of these pieces are excAlthough uneven (what else would one expect from a story collection and unfinished novel by a 15 year old in hiding), the best of these pieces are excellent and provide an interesting complement to Anne Frank's Diary.
This collection has four types of pieces: (1) additional sketches about life in hiding that were included in the The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition published in 1995 but not in the The Diary of a Young Girl that was the original version edited by her father Otto Frank and is about 25 percent shorter; (2) realistic short stories generally set in Holland; (3) fables and fairy tales, many of which she referred to the writing of in her diary; and (4) fragments from an unfinished novel "Cady's Life." I will address each of these in turn.
The additional sketches are almost all excellent and should ideally be read in the context of the diary itself, they are each wonderfully written and observed, succinctly written, and both witty and insightful observations on every day life in hiding, including "The Dentist" about Dussel, "Sausage Day" about the making of sausages, and "Sundays" which describes each of the inhabitants lives on that day.
If you read the "Definitive" edition of the Diary already then the most exciting new writing in this collection is the realistic short stories (although some are less than fully realistic, including my favorite "Paula's Dream" about a German girl who hides in an Air Force plane during World War I, ends up flying on a bombing mission to Russia, gets shot down, is raised by Russians, and after the war has to make her way back to Germany). Like the sketches, they are well observed but they are also more the product of imagination than experience and often, like a short story, center around a particular incident and psychological shift, mostly in the manner of a Chekhov story. In addition to "Paula's Dream" I would also recommend "Roomers or Renters," "Happiness," and "Fear."
Then there are the fairy tales and fables. I wish these had been included in the Diary itself on the dates they were written because I think interspersing them with her day-to-day recollections would have more accurately captured her writing and given you the texts of the stories along with her references to writing them. In this context, however, they are mildly interesting but can also be a bit tedious and a little overly saccharine.
Finally there is "Cady's Life," an unfinished novel about a girl who has a terrible accident and ends up in a sanatorium forming a relationship with a nurse and having intense discussions about subjects like the existence of God while the beginnings of World War II are rumbling in the background. The unfinished novel is about 50 pages with a sustained opening stretch and then several fragments of unclear order. What is there was actually interesting and engaging reading and read like an actual novel, but it is all so unfinished that it leaves one both marveling at her writing but also sad that it will never been finished or fully realized....more
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