Optimizing Freakonomics (and Other)

The good folks at The Browser favor me with a link to a Wall Street Journal  clip to the new Levitt/Dubner "Freako" book.  I read the excerpt with interest and a sort-of profit (see infra) but as to the book--I think I'll add it to the "pass" pile, bringing to three the number of L/D books that I have chosen not to read in full.

Nothing personal, guys, really.  As I suggest, I have read snippets, and I've certainly read a fair amount about them. I even heard Levitt do a faculty seminar presentation a few years back, this on the business model of drug gangs.  It was fascinating an instructive and he was a fine presenter,

Why the allergy to the book(s) then?  Hah, glad you asked.   Thing is, vita is still brevis (and getting moreso) while bibliphilia remains unyieldingly longa.  In plain English, there's just too much to read.  And here is Buce's principle of  bibliographic parsimony: there are some books that just do not need to be read.

By which I mean?  By which I do not mean "bad" books or "wrong" books or paltry, trivial books of any stripe. Of course they do not need to be read, but you knew that.  I'm talking about good books that don't need to be read--or at least, good-enough books that don't need to be read--and which do not need to be read precisely because everybody else is reading them.

L/D are a splendid example.  As I suggest, they seem by all accounts to be nice people with interesting stories to tell.  Although just for the record, I had heard of King Solomon before.  I had even heard of the brown M&Ms, although I thought that one had been discredited as a canard.  But forget all that--the point is that whether or not I have read it, I can assume that somebody else will have read it and will want to tell me about it--perhaps ignoring my too-tactful hint that I already know (because I heard it from the last guy).

L/D almost define the category but there are others who fit.  Nassim Taleb is a good example.  Although I'm actually not totally convinced that Taleb is a nice man, nor that his book is important.  But I am willing to assume arguendo.  Still, I haven't read any Taleb and I don't plan on it, and yet I strongly suspect I could ace any conceivable Taleb question on Jeopardy.  I've also read some of G.L.S. Shackle's Epistemics and Economics which, from he sound of things, must have been a major source.  In any event, the number of times I've been told about Taleb and what he says are sufficient to make me suspect I wouldn't gain a lot from tackling the whole thing.

Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail is in a slightly different category.   It's Sorkin's account of the Great Meltdown and I bet he tells the story well.  But Sorkin had been covering the Meltdown for the NYT for months before he did the book, and it is hard for me to believe there is much of anything in the book that hadn't already made it into the Times.  At any rate, not one person has ever suggested to me that there was new stuff in the book: I suppose if I ran into his publicist, I might have to respond differently.

Michael Lewis is a more troublesome character. I actually did read Liar's Poker, and enjoyed it immensely, and still recommend it to students as offering a hint at to what (I suppose) life is like in a big-bank trading room.  The more recent Lewis books--well, I might actually read one or more of them at some point, but if so it would have more to do with the fact that he's an awfully good story teller than with the expectation that I would actually learn much that is new for them.

You get the drift.  I could go on.  Indeed, I suppose the list of "books I have not read" grows every year, just like the list of "languages I do not know."  For the moment, perhaps I would be better served if I pull down my copy of Joanot Martorell's Tirant lo Blanc, in the original Catalan (yes, I do!)--anticipating that there, for once I will find something something that I (somewhat paradoxically?) did not anticipate. Will I really?  No, probably not.  But it would likely be a good use of my time.

Update: A well-wisher asks: what about Kahneman and Piketty, surely the two hottest social science books in the century so far?  Well now, that is a good question.  It happens I have read each. and I'd say that each can be not-unconscionably boiled down to a single-page executive summary (but then, so can War and Peace). And with each, there's no shortage of people who are willing to tell you what the book is about.  Yet I'd say that neither passes the "don't need it" test.  Kahneman is easy enough to understand in general, but the book is a dense thicket of particular examples, quite beyond, I think, the capacity of any individual reader to grasp on his own.   Piketty is a little different.   Forget executive summary: you can probably get his main point down as a sound byte. Still, what makes Piketty so forceful is the sheer heft of his database, which he exhibits like a loving, if somewhat obsessive, curator.  You need to feel the pileup of the examples to get the sense of just how well-rooted his sound byte is.

Wrong-footed Harvard

It struck me the other day that Harvard University Press appears to have been caught off guard by the runaway success of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century.   They moved up the publication date, apparently once they woke up to the fact that the great and good were already reading it (and in French too, not so?).  They let it go out with dreadful, amateurish, high school graphics--the kind of thing you would expect from an academic on a tight research budget, not from the nation's leading purveyor of learning.*  And now this, from today's email:

They did not add: none of which we expect to find anywhere within shouting distance of the Amazon best seller list, but hey, we never ever expected that of Piketty, either.

Afterthought: shouldn't it be "piqueté?

*But Joel suggests that the lousy graphics have more to do with the economics of publishing.  I.e., ten years ago they might have sprung for better, no budget for that any more.

Jeff Bezos must be Smarter than I Am

There are  no arbitrage opportunities, but here is an arbitrage opportunity:  Rick Perlstein's Nixonland is available on Amazon Kindle for $9.99 (or "with audio/video" for $11.92).  It is available as Audible audio for $27.97.  But buy the Kindle version and you can then download the audio for $4.49.

So it never makes sense to by the audio alone, right? Because you get it audio and Kindle together are cheaper than the audio alone, right?

Isn't this an arbitrage opportunity?  What does Jeff Bezos know that I don't know?

[And it's not just Perlstein.  On casual scan, this anomaly seems to occur with a whole bunch of audio offerings.]

In Which I Go Over the Edge

Two lovely posts this morning with the common theme of reading.  One, by Ian Crouch about remembering, or more particularly about forgetting what you read--how sometimes you carry away just the tang,the flavor of the environment of a book. I can relate: I still remember the day when as a small child I was reading Proust and mother served me those little cakes of Madelaine in tea.  More sedately I can remember the book I read in upstairs in the boathouse while I was a kitchen boy on Lake Winnipesaukee (Homer, Odyssey) or the one I read in the back of an Army duece-and-a-half at Fort Leonard Wood (Trevelyan, History of England) or the one on the delayed flight back from Russia (Dostoevsky of course, The Devils, my first outing with the Big D).

None of this gainsays the fact that I sometimes--often, anymore--open a book, read 50 pages  with pleasure and profit and then to my dismay, find--whoa,  what's  this?  My  own underlining!  Obviously I have read it before and was so impressed that I wanted to leave my pheromones--yet I do not now have the slightest notion of when and under what circumstances, nor why it impressed me so.  So this is what Hegel meant when he talked about aufhaben (spring of 1990, sitting in on Bill Bossart's  intro class--thanks,Bill!).

Meanwhile  over at American Prospect, here's Anne Trubek gazing on her Kindle and finding it good. Once again, here's someone who is talking to me.  I think this is the very week when it dawned on me that I've gone over the edge--that I actually prefer e-reading (in my case, to my continuing  bewilderment, a tiny IPhone) to the clutter of musty paper.  The main reason in my case is night time.  It pleases fate to wake me up along about 2 am on many mornings and I want some distraction to beguile me back to sleep.  I used to try hard to keep the goose neck lamp bent low so as to limit the risk of disturbing Mrs. B (thanks, Mrs. B).  Then I found realized that with the e-reader I didn't even need to bother with the lamp.  At first I thought I was doing her a favor.  Then just the other night it dawned on me: no, bozo, you are doing yourself favor. You like being tucked down here i the dark with the little yellow light that carries you off to the universe of universes, known and unknown.  Oh, when will it stop?

Footnote on the sidebar: you noticed: I've put up an Amazon display ad, thinly disguised as a book list. Actually, it is not new: I had a version up a couple of years ago and it got lost in some kind of transition.  I stumbled just lately and retweaked it and reinstalled it for--well, really, I have not the slightest notion for why.  I'm certainly not looking forward to the big bucks.    And while these are favorites of mine, still I know that nobody ever follows other people's book recommendations, or at least not mine.  I think the thing with the display ad is the same as the thing with the walls of floor to ceiling dead-tree bookcases on either side of me as I write.  I feel comfy with the stuff around, all along in the traditional format, now in the new digital avatar as well.

Recommendation?

One of the grandkids is discovering our common past.  He's saying it is a pity he wasn't in Paris in 1968, so as to have a part in the making of a better world.  He adds that he understands the opportunity carried an uncountable risk of death, but those are the breaks (an older cuz, with the wisdom of years, says he may get his chance yet).

I can grok.  As I told him, I  have often thought it ungracious of my parents that they did not birth me 15 years earlier so I could have had a chance my ass shot off for Stalin in Spain in 1937.  But always ready to encumber with help, it occurred to me to offer up a short list of background reading.  I suggested:

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914-1991
Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the 20s to the 90s
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

 So, one red, one pink, one deep blue, maybe flaming purple. We report, you decide.    But then I got to thinking: all three of these guys are Eurocentric.  Forget about the subtitles, yes, I mean Hobsbawm and Johnson just as much as Judt.    And I wondered what, exactly, would you offer that provided the same focus on the United States?

I really can't answer that question.  I can think of a lot of good books about the US in the late 20th Century but they're mostly specialized, single topic.  I hardly think he is primed yet for, say, Murray Kempton's Part of Our Time.   Or Rick Perlstein's  Before the Storm.  Or Richard Ben Cramer's What it Takes.  Or--but like I say, I'm too blinkered.  I want big picture.  And no, despite your entreaties, I will not be the one to serve up Howard Zinn.  Kid should  be able to find some things for himself, like Story of O or Fanny Hill.

Any suggestions?

From My Existentialist Phase

I seem to have gone through some kind of existentialist phase around 1976.  Here's an item from the card file:

In the long run...what is really chosen is oneself.  It is out of decisions that the self emerges.  A self is not given ready-made at the beginning.  What is given is a field of possibility, and as the existent projects himself into this possibility rather than that one, he begins to determine who he shall be.  It is in this context that the question of permanence versus provisionality must be considered.  A unitary self, as distinct from a series of unconnected acts can emerge only if there is a constancy of policies and commitments.

So John Macquarrie.  Existentialism 185-6 (1973).  On the next card, I find an echo, from someone who didn't think of himself as in any way an existentialist:

The sentiment of being is the sentiment of being strong.  Which is not to say powerful: Rousseau, Schiller, and Wordsworth are not concerned with energy directed outward upon the world in aggression and dominance, but, rather, with such energy as co9ntrives that the centre shall hold, that the circumference of the self keep unbroken, that the person be an integer, impenetrable, predurable, and autonomous in  being if not in action.

That's Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), a book I remember reading with great pleasure and I think profit, though I could never quite get straight which was Sincerity and which Authenticity.  With both of the above, compare the bit on the next card from a near-forgotten early novel by a man who became famous later:

I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city.  It is one of those saying which, because they deal with the particular and the concrete, like the instructions on a bottle of patent medicine, can appear flippant, except to those who have experienced their truth. To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born in disorder.  From an early age, almost from my first lesson at school about the weight of the king's crown, I had sensed this.  Now I was to discover that disorder has its own logic and permanence: the Greek was wise.

That is VS Naipaul, The Mimic Men 118 (1969).  From Palookaville, second hand and barbarous, that's all for tonight.

All Change

Larry tells you most of what you need to know about the new world of publishing.  Great stuff; and note that he knew it last year.

Mr. Truman, Mr. Pendergast and Mr. Bridge

Still reading the massive McCullough biography of Harry Truman.  Not the least of its merits is the leisurely and richly-textured account of the soil that he sprang from--the Scots-Irish small farmers (and slaveowners) who in a sense may embody better than any Jeffersonian dream that we build our network on a panoply of self-sufficient proprietors.  Also its quaintly ironic foil: the Pendergast machine that dominated Kansas City for much of Truman's life, recognized in its time as perhaps the most successful and effective of all the big-city political machines.  Ironic in the sense that though the Pendergasts launched Harry, and though he remained loyal friends with the Pendergasts till the end, still he was always more "of" than "in"--specifically, never even remotely on the take for the graft that drove the engine and finally brought it down.   For god knows we'd know about it if he had been, considering the number of challengers who had the incentive to destroy him if they could find any way to do it.

And here in my Saturday NYT is one more layer of nuance: the death (at 88) of Evan S.Connell--indefatigable writer whose best work may be his paired novels, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, about the sheltered and stifling life in KC's (but it could have been any city's) upper-middle-class suburbia (you may remember it from the only really convincing movie Paul Newman ever made).   It's been a long time since I read the book (or saw the movie) but here's the thing: I can't remember a single snippet of either that would put you in mind of either the hardscrabble farmers in the countryside or the gambling and boozing ward bosses down in the river bottoms.  No moral here, except: complicated world.  Like I say, richly textured.

Afterthought: But if there is a connection, maybe it is here.

Liveblogging Caro on Moses: the Long Slog

I'm still trudging through Robert A. Caro's biography of Robert Moses and I'm willing to sign on to the view that it is a monument--though like so many monuments, sometimes stunning and soporific.  It gets particularly heavy as we move through the early Post-World-War-II years though this is more the fault of the subject than the author.  Reading about the 20s and 30s, we could admire Moses' energy and his determination and for the most part we can see him on the side of the angels --who could not love Jones Beach?

But Moses comes out of the war years armed and invulnerable, with the means empowered and disposed to mow down anyone who stands in his way--sometimes because it serves his purposes to do so, sometimes for the sheer hell of it,    In the implementation of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, he destroys a functioning lower-middle-class neighborhood for no visible reason except personal pique.  In the fight over Title One housing, he disrupts whole swaths of the most vulnerable because it just wasn't all that hard.

'One thing that becomes clear over time is that, whatever may have been the case earlier, by the 50s Moses has come to harbor a settled contempt for The Little People--the great unwashed and even the moderately well-washed, so long as they weren't scrubbing down with imported designer soap.  Many times it is indifference or pique but eventually you come to realize that he positively wants to make life difficult for what he sees as the underclass, so as to make life more attractive for what he sees as the Better Sort.  Indeed, the very concept of "better sort" gets more and more evanescent as the book nears its end, to the point where sometimes you suspect it is a class that it includes no one but the New York Times grandee, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger.

Moses died in 1981 although I suppose it is natural to say that he will be with us through next ice age via has (over time, increasingly private) vision of what a great city should look like. He did suffer some highly public defeats in his late years and  I admit my own memory is faulty here: the way I remembered it, his comeuppance came in his highly public faceoff with Jane Jacobs over his plan to run an expressway through Washington Square (gasp!).  Caro shows me that the story is far more complicated: before Jacobs, there was a another public confrontation (over a plan to put a parking lot in Central Park) and a lot of high-quality critical journalism.  But I suspect the only real defeat he suffered his death at the age of 92.

Caro doesn't spell it out but I think it is possible to see the Moses story as part of a larger tectonic shift in American politics.  I still haven't sorted it out in my own mind, partly because I haven't finished the book and partly because I'm just confused.  Maybe later, or maybe not st all.

Heller on Rushdie

Scanning the literary horizon for the "hatchet job of the year," Stephen Moss has pre-awarded the prize to  Zoë Heller for her savaging of Salman Rushdie's palace of self-regard, Joseph Anton--her review, that is, published in The New York Review of Books.

I wouldn't be so sure she'll win.  The savaging is good fun, certainly, and rarely has there been a target so richly deserving.  But the tone is austere and severe, not nearly so rollicking as  Pete Wells takedown of Guy Fieri's new restaurant.  Here, for example, is Wells on Fieri:

How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable? Why augment tortilla chips with fried lasagna noodles that taste like nothing except oil? Why not bury those chips under a properly hot and filling layer of melted cheese and jalapeños instead of dribbling them with thin needles of pepperoni and cold gray clots of ground turkey? 

And Heller on Rushdie:

A man living under threat of death for nine years is not to be blamed for occasionally characterizing his plight in grandiloquent terms. But one would hope that when recollecting his emotions in freedom and safety, he might bring some ironic detachment to bear on his own bombast. Hindsight, alas, has had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s magisterial amour propre. An unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting pervades his book.

 I mean face it, the latter has a kind of   majesty about it but it's not the kind of punishment that is going to score the victim a moment on Leno (question for eager UB intern--has Rushdie ever been on Leno?  I suppose so, but a desultory search does not confirm it).

Meanwhile, say what you like about Heller's handiwork, the NYRB cannot have been surprised.  Best I can tell, Heller has written only one other review for the journal; it was the piece last fall   dismssing Naomi Wolf's Vagina as " a shoddy piece of work, full of childlike generalizations and dreary, feminist auto-think." Heller is also the lady who said of her own work   “I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters."  She adds:  “if you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.” Fine, but if she and Salman Rushdie are there at the same time, I dearly hope I can be on hand to observe.

Best Books of the Year

It's time to name the best books of the year so naturally, serious people are asking, what will Buce name as the best books of the year?

Happy to oblige, at least with a shortlist of five.  But first, some groundwork.  One, I can kick out a lot of  (seemingly) not-very-good books because I just didn't finish them.  I'm sure I cost myself something that way, but I've finally  come to terms with the fact that it's not a moral judgment on me if I simply cast the book aside.  I do, however, stick to some books that drive me nuts, where the driving-me-nuts factor is aggravated by the intuition that they nonetheless seem to have something to offer.  See, e.g., this one.  I'm also setting aside narrative accounts of the financial crisis.  I think I've read about 40 of those so far since aught-eight and I'm not at all sure it is anything to be proud of.   At this point, they are too easy: they overlap and they tend to blur.  I suspect I have already forgotten the particular identities of several.  I'm also setting aside  David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 years, because I still can't make up my mind whether it is a really original piece of work or an overrated con job--maybe in ten years it will be easier to judge (but not for me, heh).  More perversely, I'm setting aside Daniel  Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, as just too popular: among other things, it is the only book read this year by both Mr. and Mrs. Buce.  And I guess Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise:  it's too soon (I read it just a couple of weeks ago), and much as I liked it, still it might turn out to be a flash in the pan.

With some hesitancy, then, I open the envelope and find that the first nominee is Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites.  This too is a choice I might regret once the hype wears off but it does seem to be one of the rare left-critique books of contemporary society that really seems to have something new to say, something eyond the usual talking points.  Second, Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower:  a wonderful biography by almost any measure, with a personal resonance for me because it parallels so much of my own life, but also fascinating study in the nature--the mystery--of leadership--what works and what doesn't, and how do you know?   Third, I'll have to make room for The Emperor of All Maladies  Siddartha Mukherjee's great history of cancer.  It sprawls, and a fair amount of it is a bit beyond me but it is at least a tour de force and probably bears intrinsic merit to match.  The experience was matched, I think, by the fact that at more or less the same time I was listening to Frank Snowden's marvellous lecture course on epidemics, from Yale.  That's another one, FWIW, on which Mr. and Mrs. Buce agree: we'd both rank it as the best audio/video learning we did all year.  

Number four is a tougher sell: Kent Flannery and  Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality.  I've inflicted it on at least two friends who seem to wonder why the hell I bothered.  I can take their point: it is sprawling; it is diffuse, and the authors are maddeningly unwilling to draw conclusions or even to offer summaries.  I suspect their response would be: look, what we have shown is that the world is a complicated place and evolves in mysterious ways.  We've shown it to you in all its richness and diversity and we don't apologie for not trying to trick it up with facile soundbytes.

Which leaves room for one more, and I'm going to go with  The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner's unmatchable history of Bell Labs.  Like the Ike biography, it is fascinating for its intrinsic merits but also as a vehicle for further thought: what kind of society, what kind of leadership does it take to produce so successful an institution--or must we write it all off to good luck?

 Perhaps gratuitously, I'll note at least one big book that I did not read last year.  That would be  Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power  the umpteenth installment of Robert Caro's biography of the great drawler.   Johnson certainly deserves the full treatment and I guess nobody can fault Caro's diligence in research.  I read some of Caro's earlier Johnson stuff, but I kind of got off the train with Caro's account of the infamous 1948 primary.  I don't doubt, as Caro argues, that Johnson probably stole that election; I just can't come to terms with Caro's efforts to sanctify his opponent, Coke Stevenson. By everything I've ever heard  or read, Texas politics was a nest of scoundrels in those days and Stevenson was no better than par for the course.  I mention Caro now, however, partly to remind myself that there is one Caro book I really do want to go back and read: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which I've heard described as one of the best studies of public administration ever written, right up there with James Q. Wilson's   Bureaucracy.

And here's a book I did not read and probably should: Katherine Boo's, Beyond the Beautiful Forever.  That one might be Mrs. Buce's favorite of the year, and from all I hear, it deserves every bit of the credit she gives it. 

And one final item.  Oddly enough, the book that I may have given most thought to over the past few months is Timothy Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.  I say "oddly" because I don't think I realized how impressed I was with it at the time I read it: I liked it but since then it has been coming back and back. Might be partly because it dovetails so well with Gertner's Bell Labs book of which I wrote above.  But in fact, I didn't read Wu this year: I finished it back in the fall of 2011.  As time passes, it really looks like a keeper..

Sagas of Decline

Mr.and Mrs. Buce have been idling away their evenings with a viewing of a multipart German video version of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, the saga of the Hanseatic merchant family (actually, I gather, his own) and its long decline.  It's impeccably put together: slow-paced, a little drowsy and boring, yet still compulsively watchable--exactly like the society it seeks to represent.

The viewing gave me occasion to remember how much I enjoyed the novel a few years back and indeed, how much I enjoy this entire genre of familial decline.  I'm a big Faulkner guy and my favorite Faulkner is probably Sound and the Fury, about the decay of the Compsons.  And there is no funnier story (novella?) in all of literature than Spotted Horses, about the advent of Flem Snopes who will do so much to set the old ways on their head.  Shelve that next to my more recent fave, I. J. Singer's Brothers Ashkenazi, where the young girl meets a rather different fate.

This kind of story is a natural for the novel, so it is remarkable to find also that it is  never so well  set forth than in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard and its British cousin, Heartbreak House.  It extends to stuff that you might not think of at first as a "social change" novel.  Like Proust, which you might not think of as such until you get to the end and discover that the Prince de Guermantes has married  Mme. Verdurin and you realize it has been a social change novel all along.

You can keep going into stuff that begins to sound a tad derivative, but has its own charms.  Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, whose TV incarnation probably inspired the TV incarnation of Buddenbrooks that we're watching just now.  Naguib Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy.  I gather Mahfouz makes a breakthtough in the use of Arabic in literature but I wouldn't know; he is a good read.

I say "I could go on," although at the moment I guess I can't.  I'm sure there are others I have read and forgotten; others I've heard of and not read and others I never even heard of.  I do notice one unsettling fact: a dismayingly large number of these guys seem to have won the Nobel Prize.  I know I shouldn't hold that against them but it isn't easy.

Thanks, I Think I'll Pass

Robert Gottlieb, reviewing John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists:

I’m grateful to him for resuscitating Florence Barclay, who, although she hasn’t lasted, gave us, in her tremendous 1909 best seller The Rosary , one of my favorite heroines. The Honorable Jane Champion, after rejecting the man she loves because she is far too plain for this lover of beauty, rushes to his side after he is blinded, pretends to be a nurse, is recognized by him through her glorious singing of Ethelbert Nevin’s famous song “The Rosary,” and helps him morph from England’s greatest portrait painter (a hard act to keep up when you’re blind) to England’s greatest composer

Fun fact: Nevin in 1940 was commemorated on a 10-cent postage stamp.  No word on whether it effected any cures. 

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Hello, Marketing?

My friend Toni is author of a book called How to Be Sick, aka "A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers." Kudos to Toni: she now has Korean translation. But the Google translate Englishing of the Korean title reads "What Hurts the Living."


One may hope that something is lost in translation.

Booklist: Public Policy

Man, I am a sucker for booklists--my own, or anyone else's.  Maybe the digital substitute for browsing in bookstores.  I'm a paid-up subscriber to The Browser, mainly for my daily fix of Fivebooks.  So when Mark Kleiman put up this bleg this morning, it was like dancicng a woolly bugger past a trout:

The current graduating class of UCLA Master of Public Policy students – a spectacular bunch, in case any reader is looking to hire smart, serious people – has asked the faculty for a “third-year curriculum”: a reading list of books, articles, and (I would add) blogs that will allow them to continue to learn and grow professionally as they hit the workplace.

Hoo boy.  It was easy to run through whole catalogs of stuff you'd want young wonks to read, from Thucydides through to James Q. Wilson.  But wait, it's a trick question.  This is the graduating class we are talking about--so isn't it reasonable to assume they have already read everything about everything?  

Uh oh.  My first thought thereafter was to try to come up with recherché classics that might have eluded even massively learned young people such as themselves. Burkhardt on Constantine, for example, or Clarendon on the English Civil War. Or the Adams-Jefferson letters. Or Erasmus' Education of a Christian Prince.

Yeh, right. That is the kind of stuff you read in school, not while you are at the bottom of the employment ladder, under the Sysiphian mountain of student debt.  So I tried a different tack: new stuff, directly addressed to the kind of problems they might face in the world, sufficiently instructive to be worth their while and sufficiently current to be accessible.  I decided to narrow in particularly in "execution,"--and in particular, the point of how difficult or elusive may be the goal of actually getting something done, no  matter how worthy the project.  Recall the Hollywood canard that it is just as hard to produce a bad movie as a good one.  Anyway, in this frame, here is my list:

One, Michael Hiltzik, Colossus, on the building of the Hoover Dam.

Two, Earl Swift, the Big Roads on the highway system.

Three, Steve Coll, Private Empire, on Exxon, worth it for the Valdez Chapter alone, but lots more good stuff on the desperate and unending search for energy. Link.

Four, John Gertner, The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs. The feel-good book of the year. Never quite delivers on its promise to explain why it all worked, but still fascinating and thought provoking. Link.   

Five, Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge, on industrial mobilization for WWII. Not as good as it should be, too much AEI claptrap about the evils of commies and unions and commie/unions. But some good stuff under the slime. Link.

And maybe the best, although the chances are [the students] have already read it:

Siddartha Muckerjee, The Emperor of All Maladies, on the History of the (War Against) Cancer. A bit sprawling, almost too many stories to tell. Modern part starts about 1983, when scientists get serious about monkeying around with genes. Link.

 That  for starters.  There are thousand others.  What are the obvious omissions?

Simon Johnson Can't Contain his Enthusiasm (But He Would Say That, Wouldn't He?)

Simon Johnson excoriates Jamie Dimon for hanging onto his seat on the board of the Federal Reserve of New York.  No dissent from me on that one; Dimon's dual role sounds like a massivee case of double self dealing and richly deserves Johnson's rhetorical fusillade.


But he's got an odd way of going about it.  Johnson builds his argument on Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson,  the much-touted new meghistory of more or less everything.  In this we differ.  I was not overimpressed by Why Nations Fail.  Johnson, by contrast, can't contain his enthusiasm."Brilliant and sometimes breathtakin," he gushes.  "Tour de force."

Well, he's entitled to his opinion and I suppose he might even be right.  But the premise of the Dimon screed is the evil of self-dealing.   In a  paper about self-dealing, you'd think that Johnson might wanted to mention that he is a frequent co-author with Acemoglu and Robinson--a serial collaborator, almost to the point where you wonder why he isn't a co-author on the book. In a quick skim through his resume, I find 20 citations to co-authorship with Acemoglu, 15 with Robinson. Evidently Acemoglu and Robinson see it the same way I do.  Here's the lead paragraph in their acknowledgments:

THIS BOOK IS the culmination of fifteen years of collaborative research, and along the way we have accumulated a great deal of practical and intellectual debts. Our greatest debt is to our long-term collaborator Simon Johnson, who coauthored many of the key scientific papers that shaped our understanding

Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James (2012-03-20). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty . Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 


Look, I don't suppose this is a big deal.  But isn't this an odd place to make yourself the judge of your own case?  There certainly was another way to make his (perfecctly legitimate) point about Jamie Dimon.  Underbelly calls "self-dealer, heal thyself."

Acemoglu and Robinson on Failure

As they got ready to publish Why Nations Fail, I suspect that Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson saw themselves as shooting at the big targets: Jared Diamond, or maybe Francis Fukayama. On that standard, I'd say they have reason to be disappointed. I think they've put together an interesting book, readable, and plausible in its argument, though not by any means the game-changer they might have thought it to be. Yet perhaps surprisingly, in a certain way they may have ended up with a book that is better than what they expected or wanted. 

First things first: it's hard to come to terms with a book entitled Why Nations Fail when you can't pin down a precise definition of “nations” or “fail,” or in particular, “why.” Given its pretensions, we have here, then, a remarkably casual book. The authors say they offer large a “theory,” although they concede that their “theory” is no great shakes at prediction. In particular, while they obviously harbor strong views as to what counts as failure, illustrated with examples, they really don't offer any insight into the process that brings it about.  We might better characterize  it as a “description,” a sketch of things that they like and don't like in large social organizations. Judged by this standard, it's affable, even convincing except insofar as it sketches a picture that you've been convinced by already.

They prefer, to be more precise, societies in which the worker is worthy of his hire; in which there are incentives for the production of new ideas; where there is flexibility and even fluidity as the polity responds to changing times—in short, to use their word, “inclusive.”  They're also hot for the old Schumpeterian show-stopper, "creative destruction"--my searcher says the phrase occurs 64 times--but again, it isn't really clear what they mean by it.  The people who "created" Venice, for example, weren't really "destroying" prior society; they were just a bunch of swamp rats who learned how to turn some coins through trade/piracy.  And the Europeans who introduced mass slavery in the New Wotrld may well have been "destroying" what went before but it would be odd to think of them as "creative.

On the negative side, A and R  don't like societies where elites entrench themselves and try to gobble up all the rewards, no matter who may have produced them, The catch-name here is “extractive.” You might think that “extractive"  had something to do with the pillaging of nonrenewable resources and in some cases here perhaps it does, although far more often it seems they are talking about the extraction of wealth from anyone else who might have a claim on it. Since “elites” in this context seems to mean “whoever wins the competition for the levers of power,” the proposition comes pretty close to definitional--an elite is by definition a person who excludes others from their just reward.   [As what is perhaps an aside: A and R never seem to make clear just why they are so down on the “extraction” of wealth from others—is is it because they are Kantians who want to treat people as ends, not means?  Or perhaps Utilitarians who believe that more entrepreneurship will get down if entrepreneurs enjoy a good payday? It is possible that A and R simply did not notice the distinction.]

Anyway, “inclusive” societies that institutionalize innovation and exterminate “extraction.” Against this “framework,” A and R discuss a great variety (40? 80?) of instances from the prehistoric Nafutians to the present-day (I hope not “posthistoric") Somalis. Some of these stories are familiar, some quite new (at least to me). It isn't always obvious why a particular story is in s particular chapter although if you go with the flow, this isn't a problem. At any rate,  the authors are at least insistent on what their theory is not: not merely geography and not just culture.  Hmph, maybe.  . It'll be a long time before you persuade me that the differences between Venice (say) and Chad have nothing to do with geography; nor that the differences between Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent have nothing to do with culture (nor, come to think of it, Persians and Arabs in the Middle Eastern heartland, nor Muslims and Europeans in the Mediterranean). But the difference may not be obvious to A and R either: they seem to abandon the not-stuff whenever convenient as, for example, when compare/contrasting the experience of Spaniards in South America with that of the English in the North.

At this point, one might be tempted to say that one has read a lot of this before—in, for example, the seminal work of Douglass North. The authors will have none of it. They salute North as a distinguished forebear but they say that what they have added is “politics.” But once again, we are up against a problem of definition. Having pored conscientiously over the entire text, I haven't the least idea what precisely they mean by “politics,” unless it be “leadership,” or perhaps “the accident of leadership,” or perhaps more generally “accident.”

From their endnotes, it is clear that A and R have absorbed and (mostly successfully) repackaged a formidable amount of material, yet the general theoretic anemia helps to remind the reader of what they  have left out.  Unless I missed it, there is no mention of Richard Pipes and his superb account of "patrimonial" social order in Russia; nor of Kenneth Pomerantz and his searching comparison of China and the West, nor Martin van Otswald and his work on the social order of the military in Modern Europe.  Perhaps most important, they seem not to have considered what I would count as the runaway best book on modern nationhood--Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital and European States.  As authors who want to include "politics" in their account of nationhood, it is hard to think of a better place to begin.


With limitations like these, how can one still count the book a success.  I'd put it this way: we're dealing with authors who come from a milieu where theory dominates.  As political/social historians in the academy, they come from a world where theory dominates: if you don't have a theory you are a mere popularizer, doomed to spend your weekends on C-Span with the likes of Doris Kearns and  Goodwin and Douglas Brinkley.  No self-respecting Ivy League professor wants. Better to propound any theory than to suffer obloquy such as that.  So now you've got two choices: either postulate a theory that is too rigid and formal to capture experience; or settle for one that is too weak to offer any new insight at all.  Given the choices, I'd say they are much luckier to have fallen (intentionally or not) into the second error.  At least it leaves them open to telling a bunch of really good stories.


Footnote:  The authors now have a blog, in which they answer some criticisms and offer some extensions of remarks.  It bids fair to become more interesting than the book itself.

Banfield's Moral Basis of a Backward Society

Late in life when he was already well-known (if not always well  loved), Ed Banfield offered a credo:

A political system is an accident. It is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstance. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident—the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society, for all of the institutions of the society, and thus its entire character and that of the human types formed within it, depend ultimately upon the government and the political order.

Link.   Or more pithily (same source): “I am a vintage Burkean,   I am convinced that “society exists on the basis of habits and beliefs.” 

 It was not always so.   Banfield began his life as a bureaucrat and long persisted in his commitment to the model of rational planning.   His Damascene moment was his the nine months (in 1954-5) he spent with his family in "Montegrano," a peasant village under the arch of the boot of Italy.  That was the inquiry that led to perhaps his most important and enduring work, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958) another of those short books I will not throw away.  

At the beginning   of his account, Banfield (always a superb analyst) itemizes six commonly held explanations for the kind of poverty he found in the village:

1.  Most people in Montegrano are desperately poor. ...

2.  The peasant is as ignorant as his donkey and the artisan hardley less so. ...

3.  Political behavior reflects class interests and antagonisms. ...

4.  Workers who have a plot of land, however small, want to maintain the status quo. ...

5.  Centuries of oppression have left thepeasant with a pathological distrust of the state and all authority. ... 

6.  The southern Italian is a despairing fatalist.

"There is an element of truth in each of the theories," Banfield wrote, "but none of them is fully consistent with the facts."  Instead, proposed that "the Montegrenesi act as if they were following this rule:

Maximize the material short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all otheers will do likewise."

Banfield coined a name for his hypothesis: "amoral familiasm."  He conceded from the start that the name was inexact: an "amoral familist" might be deeply moral in his commitment to his family, but with little or none to the larger community.  Still, he offered seventeen (!!) implications, of which a sampling may capture the flavor:

9.  In a society of amoral familists, the claim of any person or institution to be inspired by zeal for public rather than privae advantage will be regarded as a fraud. ...

15.  In a society of amoral familists it will be assumed that whatever group is in power is self-serving and corrupt. ...

 Banfield ends with a short chapter of suggestions for reform, but it's a damp squib: as a habitual skeptic, he is not one well armed to  take us up to the mountaintop and show us the broad vistas.  It prefigures the man who would later describe political success as a "lucky accident."   But it also discloses a man of great compassion who can see what is in front of his eyes without blinking.

Reality bitchslap:  I may have thought this book was a keeper, but in my preparation of this timeless commentary, it pretty much fell apart.

Fun Fact:  Evidently  Banfield told his friends that the person he got his ideas from at Chicago was--Frank Knight.

Frank Knight's Economic Organization

I wouldn't say that Frank Knight's Economic Organization is his most important  work, or his most interesting.  Those accolades would apply to Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (most important) and The Ethics of Competition (most interesting).  But EO is fascinating both in its context and history and as also as an exemplar of Knight at his best--his parsimony, his precision, his fair-mindedness and his flat-footed Midwestern elegance.  In respects like this, I'd place him squarely in the tradition of British Clear Thinkers, along with Mill and Hume (I might throw in Schopenhauer, if I thought I could persuade you he was really British).   So, EO a keeper in my stack of short books not to be thrown away.

There are actually three parts to the backstory (all summarized in an admirable "genealogy" posted at SSRN by one Ross B. Emmett).   One is the semi-official version of Knight in samizdat--how his paper became a favorite of economics professors, the kind of thing you hide in your top drawer to reread before you face the students.  Two is the remarkable account of the paper and Knight himself--how it was first published and copyrighted without his knowledge and, as it appears, against his will (are there any other cases of involuntary copyright?)--pretty good evidence, if we needed any, of Knight's utter lack of personal vanity (and perhaps also, of a streak of orneriness).

Third and perhaps most intriguing is the relationship between two discontinuous parts of the essay--the first chapter (called "Social Economic Organization") in which Knight lays out a sketch of the nature and purpose of economics; and the remaining chapters in which he undertakes to lay out the ways in which an economy does its work.   Focusing on the first chapter naturally raises the question of how this paper relates to other papers (notably "Ethics of Competition") in which Knight offers so trenchant a critique of the market mechanism.  The short answer is that Knight rather pulls his punches; other papers are more challenging (a longer answer would be more complicated; see Emmett, supra).  But even in the restrained version, you can find stuff like this:

Social costs of Specialization. All the gains from specialization are summed up  in the one word, efficiency; it enables us to get more goods, or better; its advantages are instrumental. On the other hand, specialization in itself, is an evil, measured by generally accepted human ideals.   It gives us more products, but in its effects on human beings as such it is certainly bad in some respects and in others questionable.  In the nature of the case it means a narrowing of the personality; we like o see people of all-around, well-developed powers and capacities.  In extreme instances, such as the monotonous work of machine tending, or repetitive movements at a machine-forced pace, it may be ruinous to health and maddening to the spirit. In this connection it is especially significant that the most important source of gain also involves the most important human cost.  The specialization of leadership means that the masses of the people work under conditions which tend to suppress initiative and independence, to develop servility as well as narrowness and in general to dehumanize them.

From the spiritual progenitor of fresh-water economics, these are strong words indeed.

Douglas' Purity and Danger

The Holy Roman Empire, reasoned the great Pufendorf, fits in none of the Aristotelean categories: it is neither monarchy, nor aristocracy, nor democracy,.  Therefore, he concludes, it is a monster. Pufendorf thus anticipates what must be one of the most influential social-science books of the 20th Century: Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger, first published in 1966 and another of those short books that I am not going to throw away.

It's hard to remember now just how revolutionary Douglas' book seemed in its time, so thoroughly has it reconceptualized the culture.  The jacket of my old hardcover offers the subtitle "an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo."  That's as good a description as any, although necessarily it doesn't begin to catch the richness and subtlety of the argument.  But the point is that most of the chatterers weren't even accustomed to think in categories of that sort at that time.

Well, qualify that. Douglas did not spring forth full bloom.  In a sense, she carries on and develops insights she learned from her mentor, E. E. Evans-Pritchard.  And if you were French, you would say that she isn't a patch on the efflorescent excesses of her great French contemporary,  Claude Lévi-Strauss. But that's the point: Lévi-Strauss carried structuralist anthropology off to the backside of beyond where almost nobody could keep up with him. Douglas combined the tradition of anthropology with a British empiricist's tone of earthy common sense.

And more thing more: Douglas was an earnest and unapologetic Catholic--more an Anglo-Catholic, which is to say, one who lived in the kind of take-no-prisoners milieu that you would need if you were to survive as a saving remnant. It's not that she was particularly belligerent about it, but any work of Douglas' is informed by a sense of ritual and a feel for the sacred that you wouldn't have expected in the secularist common rooms of 1960s academia.

People speak of Purity and Danger as a book about the Codes and taboos in the (Jewish) Bible, specifically the Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.  It is that,  although the specific discussion of the Biblical texts is only 16 pages--scant, even within the limits of a short book.  The rest is a more discursive essay--discursive enough that some complain of its disorder.  It's probably a fair cop, unless you keep in mind that she is always exploring and expanding on her basic theme.  

After her, our sense of purity, ritual and taboo cannot possibly  be the same.  This kind of descralization may not be a Good Thing: if you are a traditionalist, she's one of many culprits in vaporizing the standards (e.g., not eating shrimp) on which civilization depends--one who, in short helped to make it possible for an American president to make jokes like this.