Books finished in December:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Wildavsky Forum Series), by Robert Frank. Good short version of Frank’s ideas about positional goods, inequality, expenditure cascases, taxes, etc.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson. Did the US military have a program that tried to teach soldiers how to stare animals to death? This and related questions are explored in Ronson’s book about supernatural methods and the military. It is funny but does raise real questions about knowledge, on part of both the protagonists and the reader.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. The classic story of the good, but boring Dr Jekyll who transforms himself into the vital and evil Mr Hyde. Jekyll comes to loath him, but has become addicted. I enjoyed it.

Reports from Nuremberg, by Harold Burson. Radio reports from the Nuremberg trial. We hear the formal indictment, which consisted of four charges:
1. Conspiracy
2. Crimes against the peace, planning, preparing , initiating and waging a war of aggression in violation of int treaties.
3. War crimes. Wanton destruction of towns, villages and cities not justified by mil necessity.
4. Crimes against humanity. Extermination, enslavement and deportation of peoples, persecution on political, racial and religious grounds.
Will try to prove in open court.
24 names. 20 present. 12 sentenced to death, 7 to prison terms, 3 acquitted, 2 trials did not proceed. Get to know the courtroom and the people involved through the radio report. The apparent normality of the accused is mentioned explicitly.
Interesting.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not sure what to say that this story was about, but an entertaining, absurd plot. Very short.

Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age, by Steven Johnson. Peer networks to save the world! The book lacks a discussion of possible trade-offs (like “Everything bad is good for you” had). Not Johnson’s best.

All of These People: A Memoir, by Fergal Keane. Journalist Fergal Keane’s stories of trouble in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and personal life. Fitting to read now, as Nelson Mandela just passed away. I did not know that the apartheid regime in South Africa was engaged in torture. Keane makes a point of always being understanding of his subjects. I do not know Keane as a journalist, but the book was ok.

The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris. Tim has to walk. Why or where to he does not know, despite his efforts to find out. Existentialism.

Then We Came to the End: A Novel, by Joshua Ferris. Office life. Read about half of it. Some funny bits.

Ratings and additional books are in the library.

Books finished in November:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson.

Recommended. Everything bad is good for you is something as unorthodox as a passionate argument about the cognitive benefits of popular culture. Johnson claims that popular culture today is so challenging and stimulating that we get heavy mental exercise by consuming it. Much of the book focuses on games, which is where I believe Johnson has the strongest case: Popular video games demand thinking and well thought strategies and plans, chores sometimes have to be performed, gratification is delayed, patience is required. Some lament how games are not like books, but like Johnson, says, the novelistic parts of games are their least interesting aspects. In games the content is not the primary benefit, but rather the mental exercise they provide. Reward and exploration are also essential parts: Players have to probe the game, explain it, figure out its rules and find its weak spots. To put it another way, they have to think about the system and what are the limits of the simulation. In this aspect – that ambiguity is essential – video games are different from board games and other traditional games. This is a highly entertaining account of games, and one that concurs very well with my own experience.

Johnson also defends other parts of popular culture, such as television shows and films, that contain many more subplots and where action is expressed with much more subtlety than in previous times. Even reality shows and tv debates get a positive rap, since they require strategy and emotional intelligence and adaption as rule change, in the case of the former, and we are good at judging people by face. To some extent all this seems right, but the question is how much of popular culture it holds for. Though it must be said that at least in the case of tv shows, Johnson argues at length that it is not only niche high brow shows that now have a bigger market to cater to, but that also middle or low brow culture have been lifted.

Johnson sees in all this an explanation of the Flynn effect, i.e. the sustained increase in measured intelligence test scores in many countries throughout most of the 20th century. That is a fascinating thought, but one that would demand more large-scale evidence than hitherto provided to be accepted. Hopefully some researchers out there are on the case.

Naked, by David Sedaris. Very funny.

Reagan In His Own Voice. Ronald Reagan’s daily radio broadcasts from the late 1975-79. In 1976 Reagan launched a failed bid to become the Republican party’s presidential candidate (against the incumbent Gerald Ford). His small radio speeches were probably a way to continue to be in the public sphere. The editors claimed that Reagan wrote most of the material himself. That is impressive if true, although he did not seem to have a formal job until he became president in 1981. Some of the addresses seem quite idiosyncratic, so that supports the claim. I disagree with many of the views expressed, but it is too bad that politicians today seem to be less free to express their personal views, with political communication having become wholly professionalized.

Ratings and additional books are in the library.

Books finished in October:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. Reviewed before.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank. Recommended.

Robert Frank contends that in a hundred years from now, economists will have recognized Charles Darwin as the most important economic thinker. Darwin was influenced by Adam Smith, but had a wider conception of competition. A key distinction is between traits that are beneficial for an individual and the species, and traits that are beneficial for an individual but not the species. An example of the latter is the horns of the bull elk, featured on the cover. The horns are an asset when fighting for females, but not when trying to escape predators. Frank believes that had the elks had the opportunity to vote to downsize all the horns, they would have done so unanimously, like hockey players when considering the mandatory use of helmets.

Frank believes such head to head competition is important for humans as well, as much of what we care about is “graded on the curve”. He starts with the example of competing to have the best/most expensive suit. This may seem trivial, but he follows up with more important cases, most importantly of how people overinvest in houses, both because of trying to keep abreast of one’s neighbors and because school quality is related to certain areas. Cars and parties are other goods that make people try to outcompete each other, to the detriment of the common good. As people compare themselves with those slightly higher on the curve, “expenditure cascades” result.

Since we have these strong positional concerns, one’s consumption imposes a negative externality on others, and should be taxed like other externalities. The way to do this is by way of a progressive consumption tax – take income minus savings, and tax that at a progressive rate. This avoids the negative effects of income and payroll taxes (on saving and job creation). And in the long run, everyone will be richer as a result of the increases investments. This seems like a good idea regardless of what one believes about expediture cascades.

I find Frank’s thoughts very appealing. One difficulty is that many types of expenditure can be seen as investments. If I pay for education rather than saving, should that be treated as consumption? I am not sure how one would deal with that and other similar issues. But the book is definitely recommended.

Hits to both the left (tax rather than regulate; there is no conspiracy among capitalists) and right (public spending is too low, we should increase it by taxing harmful activities).

The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. Recommended.

Popular, yet rigorous, science. The care the authors take not to overstate their claims or their generality stands out in this book by experimental psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The book is organized around six common cognitive illusions: 1) Attention (just because we are paying attention does not mean we notice everything); 2) Memory (memories are fragile, impacted by beliefs, perception and other things, and may be misleading); 3) Confidence (confidence is not necessarily related to skill, feedback is essential for improvement); 4) Knowledge (we believe we know more than we do, e.g. do not really know how things, machines, markets, etc work); 5) Cause (correlation is not, we see patterns and make predictions); 6) Potential (not everything have a quick and easy fix).

A very good book, though times it goes through things in too much detail, and the authors sometimes assume too little sophistication about how “we” interpret things, at least when writing about how we infer causal relationships. They also say that we have no way to know about cause-effect in the absence of an experiment, however there are other ways of identifying causal effects.

The purported cognitive benefits of su-doku, crossword puzzles etc, classical music have not shown up in rigorous studies. Research on the benefits of more advanced games have so far produced ambiguous results.

Fluency can be misleading. The book ends with a plea for thinking things through and being way about intuitions. But do look for the gorilla, it may be that we do not see one because of the illusions.

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwawe Anthony Appiah. Appiah tells the stories of three once-pervasive but now abandoned customs – the duel in aristocratic England, foot-binding in China, and slavery – and one that is still alive – honor killings of women in Pakistan. He notes that the abandonment of these practices did not result from moral arguments alone, as they were always put forward long before. At the same time, it is not simply legislation that caused the revolutions. Collective action among families apparently was important in ending foot binding. The account the working class supporting the abolition of slavery because it degraded manual labor is very nice, but I wonder what historians think. At the end of the book I am not too much wiser on how they do happen, as the stories are quite different for the different cases, although it has to do with shifting codes of honor. I reviewed a couple of Appiahs book last month, I liked those better.

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullaainathan and Eldar Shafir. In contrast to other popular science books, here for once is one that acknowledges that there are trade-offs in the world-more of everything is not necessarily better. Much is quite standard for an economist used to thinking about scarce resources, here attention. The novel point is that scarcity itself is costly. Scarcity reduces “bandwith”, like a computer overloaded with running programs. An experiment with random assignment of rich and poor show how scarcity itself can be stressful and thus important beyond having fewer resources. Planning ahead is important for success-is there a difference between long-term thinkers and others? Maybe not, since find many who do not think ahead among students at good universities and other resourceful people. But there really are differences among, I would object, the question is what trait or combination of traits is more fundamental. Everyone tunnels, but it is a good idea to structure incentives well inside the tunnel. The authors recognize that we need to prioritize what to incentivize the poor to do, since every activity taxes bandwith. Effects on bandwith are important to consider and also to see as an outcome. E.g. helping a poor mother with full-day child care so she does not have to juggle so many arrangements. Allocated bandwith more important than number of hours, ref Ford and efficiency wages.

Mathletics: A Scientist Explains 100 Amazing Things About the World of Sports by John Barrow. Ok. In most cases too many simplifications or not too illumating.

Ratings and additional books are in the library.

Books finished in September:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty by Nina Munk. Recommended. 

The story of Jeffrey Sachs’ rise (and fall?). Sachs became a celebrity as an economic shock therapist in Bolivia in the late 1980’s and then in Poland and Russia. He then turned his considerable attention to poverty and in particular Africa, wanting to jump-start economic development there. He often argued on the basis of cost-effectiveness, as with the case for controlling malaria, but seems to have been consistently overoptimistic about how to obtain and keep up funding. In addition to disregarding advice on how to implement his changes, in particular on creating local ownership, controlling corruption and creating accountability. Add to this a lack of any strategy for measuring results, it is no surprise that the debate about the impact of Sachs’ highly advertised Millennium Villages have become heated. A piece (by Michael Clemence and Gabriel Demombynes, both involved in the debate) about what can be learned about the need for transparency from that controversy can be found here.

In the book, Sachs comes off as motivated and engaging, but also as righteous, preachy, and someone not tackling criticism or dealing with real-world constraints. Sachs drew much criticism for the effects of his shock therapies, but I believe his approach there was the right one: Acknowledging that there are trade-offs and costs that must be incurred, but that the alternative is worse. When trying to do too much, one may easily end up getting done nothing.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time) by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah traces the history of cosmopolitan ethics to try to stake a course between cultural relativism and value fundamentalism. He does not present clear-cut answers, but believes mutual understanding will ensue if both (or all) sides participate in conversation – both in its original meaning of living together and of the current meaning of discussing – and get used to each other. Then we may actually learn from our differences. And presumably also extend our moral circle. Perhaps this is naive, but perhaps not. I particularly liked the part where he reminds us that people with different beliefs often appeal to evidence the same way, e.g. by employing explanations that they cannot account for in detail, invoking authorities, and bringing up new facts that needs explaining. He is perfectly clear that modern science most often provides better explanations, thanks to its institutional structure that has been built and has persisted for a long time.

Experiments in Ethics (Mary Flexner Lecture Series of Bryn Mawr College) Kwame Anthony Appiah. Experimental philosophy is a rapidly growing new discipline, in which philosophical concepts and intuitions are investigated empirically. Appiah begins his book with an exposition of the well known fact that today’s narrow conception of philosophy is a very recent phenomenon, philosophers from antiquity to the 18th century worked in what is today known as science, and all this work fell under the label of philosophy. For example, the “natural philosophies” of Copernicus and Kepler were included a survey of “Philosophies.”

Appiah uses this to show that philosophers were no strangers of experiments, and draws the line to today’s experimental philosophers by stating that experimental thinking was also part of their repertoire. David Hume explicitly claimed to be engaged in “experiments” in his works. Although it is not altogether clear what exactly Hume intended with his use of the word, he was always committed to data.

I was not aware that Thomas Schelling was an early investigator of modern “behavioral economics” topics like the reference point and the win-loss distinction.

I like that Appiah discusses the uncertainty present in “trolley” scenarios, too few people consider that, in my opinion essential, element in these cases. Although he loses me after that.

Jonathan Haidt has become famous arguing that people reason from intuitions and emotions to moral judgment. Appiah cleverly suggests that Haidt himself may be doing the same in some of his cases of whether a particular act is a moral offense (such as having sex with a dead chicken, and then cooking and eating it). People’s reasons for why these things constitute a moral offense are not very informative, but are other reasons?

Ratings and additional books are in the library.