Tyler on Politicians on Politics

Tyler Cowen asks:

Are politicians so drunk with self-deception that they cannot write insightful books?

Link. Maybe, but there is a more benign explanation. That is: people who are good at what they do are often not good explaining why/how they do what they do. No surprise when you stop to think about it: if they are good at it, they have no need for self-reflection. By corollary, recall that some of the best political/historical writing comes from people who have been kicked out of power, and thus necessarily have the impetus to try to figure out the license number of the truck that just hit them. Think Thucydides, Machiavelli, Trotsky.

Satantango

If Susan Sontag says she has seen a particular movie 15 times, the chances are this is not a critical judgment so much as an act of dominance, a project of power. It is correspondingly likely that the movie is in some way distasteful, repellent, or at least unpleasant and generally hard to watch.

But it is equally likely that the movie is not quite possible to ignore: that it is original, challenging in some way arresting—even (dare one say it) worthy of our attention.

You clever devil, you are way ahead of me here: I'm talking about Satantango. Béla Tarr's glepic* of despair on and off a Hungarian (collective?) farm. Il Teatro Buce has now completed 1/15 of a Sontag-sized viewing of Satantango. The conclusion: it is distasteful, repellent or at least unpleasant and generally hard to watch. But it is not quite possible to ignore: original, challenging and (dare one say it--oh, forget it). I won't go so far as to say I "enjoyed" it; perhaps it belongs in the same class as the Battle of Guadalcanal: good do have been there, even though the experience of actually being there is one you wouldn't wish on an unsuspecting friend.

Wiki declares that there is a complex and subtle fabric to all this, drawn from the underlying novel, but I'd take that with a grain of salt. What is arresting here is not the subtle undercurrents but the raw simplicity. They say there are two plots: a boy leaves home and a stranger comes to town. You can bet your poop-covered farm boots that nobody leaves home in this one (forgetting the throngs who must have left town before the cameras started running). There is a "stranger" of sorts, although everyone in town seems to know him. He can't get his identity papers straight, it isn't clear why. So the man behind the desk tells him he'll have to spy on the villagers, it isn't clear what for. And he undertakes to flimflam them out of all there money, it isn't--well, okay, I suppose it is clear that he just wants the money.

With all earnestness, I have to concede that the stark despair of it all was a sight to behold--a bit like Beckett, if not nearly so funny. And I think you have to take on the terms of its own sheer pointlessness. I wouldn't go so far as to say (some have) that it is a searing indictment of capitalism. I don't really think it is a searing indictment of communism either--indeed, not a searing indictment at all: searing indictments take too much energy, and focus, and vision.

The next thing you notice, aside from the bare structure of the piece, is the rhythm, and this is where seven hours (sadly) probably matters. Tarr can set up a shot like nobody else I know: he sets his camera at a distance; he waits, watches, patiently, while something (or maybe nothing) happens. It certainly isn't the only way to look at something, and there's no reason to think it is the best way, but it certainly is a way and I can't think of anyone else who does it so well. I'd grant what I take to be his point. Maybe you just have to see it all stretched out like this to get his particular feel for this corner of life.

We did, I confess, stretch it over three evenings. And more than once I thought: thank heavens I'm not hunched down in the theatre. So, only 14 more to go.

Afterthought: Tyler Cowen is another who speaks highly of Satantango. I'll bet he was multitasking.

*Short for "great, gluey, epic."

Tyler on Unemployment

Still cannot understand why Tyler Cowan does not include "unemployment" on his list of "reasons why we are in a depression" (link). (actually, I think he means signs that we are in a depression, but that's picky). I mean--okay, granted, there are serious questions as to exactly how much unemployment we have and how long it will last. But then again, there are people who deny that there is a credit crisis. But is unemployment simply not a factor?

Pleonasms?

Tyler Cowen (endorsing Horace Kephart) thinks that "I done done it" is a pleonasm, because the second "done" repeats the meaning of the first. He is wrong: the second "done" does not repeat the first, and "I done done it" is a different statement from "I done it." "I done it" comes very close to "the deed happened." "I done done it" stresses reflexivity, self-consciousness purposiveness, responsibility, as in "that was no accident, the bear mauled me on purpose."

I'd say the same in re many (not all) of his other supposed "pleonasms." "Women-folk" are not just "women;" they are women who are part of the tribe, for whom we menfolk (sic) are responsible. So, "preacher-man" is not just a preacher; he is a preacher whose humanity is being recognized.

"You-all" is, of course, not in any sense a pleonasm; it is a welcome attempt to restore the distinction between singular and plural in the second-person pronoun. And while we-all are on the topic, need a distinction (makeable, I am told, in some other languages) between "we" (including you) and "we" (not including you).

I admit I still have no idea what to do with "onliest."

Appreciation: Martin Wolf and John Maynard Keynes

I've spent some profitable hours with Martin Wolf, Fixing Global Finance, but it is Martin's good fortune that I was struggling with him while trying also to cope with Tyler Cowen's book-club reading of Keynes' General Theory. It's an irony that Keynes, who won so much recognition as an essayist and pamphleteer, produced a "big book" that makes the finals in the all-time impenetrability sweepstakes: by comparison, Wolf is merely abstruse.

At the end of the day, I don't suppose Keynes' General Theory is quite as impossible as Hegel's Phenomenology (and, in the end, I suspect not as important). But it's fit to appear in the same company, and perhaps in part for the same reasons. Here are two: one, both Keynes and Hegel are taking part in conversations that are pretty well lost to us know--hard to guess (or to believe) that so much of that seeming jargon in Hegel was part of the parlance of his time, at least in some circles. So also with Keynes, and with Keynes there is a more insidious problem. That is: he seems to be talking the language of an economics that we recognize, but he's not, really. A lot has happened since 1937 and so much of what we think we ought to understand turns out to be obscured by subtle shifts of meaning. So we are almost as lost as we are in the swamp of German idealism.

The other is that Keynes and Hegel have a maddening habit of arguing with learned predecessors while (a) not telling you who those predecessors are; nor (b) exactly what the argument is about; nor (c) indeed, that there is an argument at all. Here's one huge reason why, with either of them, you really can't expect to do it on your own. For guidance with Hegel, there are a number of good choices (here's a favorite). For Keynes there are, surprisingly, fewer. There is some useful stuff in the Robert Skidelsky biography, particularly volume two. There stuff from his acolytes in the literature of economics itself but nothing that I know of by way of patient chapter-by-chaptere exposition. Which would be why the efforts of Tyler and his commentators are so much to be appreciated.

The Wolf book is a more puzzling item. No one claims that Martin Wolf is John Maynard Keynes, but Wolf is certainly a splendid journalist-on-economics: on big-picture macro, maybe his only current competitor is Greg Ip. Fixing Global Finance exhibits his technical skill and also his knack for explaining, but in an odd way: page by page, Wolf makes his points clearly, without jargon and with precision. But it's still a take-no-prisoners book. Wolf may do a good job of explaining the dimensions of global trade imbalances, and of assessing their possible implications. But he isn't going to lift a finger to remind you why it matters, or exactly how they happen. For a serioius economist (not me) I suspect this is pretty easy going. For a patient and attentive observer (I think that would be me), it all takes, well, patience.

Also: when all is said and done it is actually pretty anodyne. Yes, the evidence is equivocal, but yes, there are trade imbalances and no, nobody quite understands why, an[d yes, it's probably best to do something about them, and by the way, do something drastic with the International Monetary Fund. That is useful, but it's hardly enough to make you toss your hat in the air.

And there is a final problem, certianly not of Wolf's own making--the fact that he has been swamped, drowned, rendered almost voiceless by events. This isn't an old book at all--Wolf was writing after Northern Rock--but so much has swept over is since that his comp copies might as well have been swept off by the flood

Stan is Just as Right as Tyler

Stan Collander showcases a Tyler Cowen NYT piece which Stan says is "brilliant" and "so right it hurts." It is a good piece, but Stan himself nails the main point at least as well as the source:

[B]uying a home isn't the American dream; making a great deal of money from selling a home is what most people really want. The homeowner anger is not because they will be living on the street; it's because they won't earn the same profits they saw others make.

Couple with this what has become an almost undeniable entitlement mentality, that is, the very clear sentiment that a homeowner somehow is entitled to having their home appreciate by ridiculous amounts and that someone else is to blame when that doesn't happen, and it's not hard to see why the policy choices have all turned to bailouts. No one is suggesting, for example, that the government build more rental housing or provide Katrina-like trailers for homeowners who lose their homes. Instead, it's all about finding ways for them to stay in their home that they can't afford.

Aside from the NY Times, I've been giving some time today to Benjamin Friedman's Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (2005), where the takeaway point can be expressed, roughly, as:growing economies become more constructive and more tolerant; stagnating economies, more cautious and guarded; shrinking economies, downright ugly. Just sayin', that's all.

Fn.: Friedman is also in today's NYT--link.

Still Trying to Get the Bugs Out

Tyler Cowen ruminates on the Coasean dimensions of a male contraceptive pill. He doesn't think it will be popular.

Right enough. But wait till we see the male morning-after pill.

What Homer Wanted

Tyler Cowen discovers the express 7-11. He brings to mind the immortal words of Homer Simpson:

Isn't there anything faster than a microwave?

Tyler Cowen is Shocked, Shocked

I see that Tyler Cowen is back to touting his own form of “blame the victim” re the housing meltdown (link):

IT’S NOT JUST THE LENDERS There has been plenty of talk about “predatory lending,” but “predatory borrowing” may have been the bigger problem. As much as 70 percent of recent early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their original loan applications, according to one recent study. The research was done by BasePoint Analytics, which helps banks and lenders identify fraudulent transactions; the study looked at more than three million loans from 1997 to 2006, with a majority from 2005 to 2006. Applications with misrepresentations were also five times as likely to go into default.

Oh, Tyler, Tyler. I tried to explain this to you before (link). Okay, I grant you could find any number of consumer advocates who do embrace the straw man that you seek to set afire. But that’s economics, that’s advocacy. Grownups know (and have known all along) that the loan market is like any other bazaar—lots of lying on both sides. And if the lenders try to move money with a steam shovel, can they be surprised that they find some borrowers who are happy to scoop it up with a spoon?

Technically speaking, the answer is: no, they cannot complain. To make a case for fraud, you have to prove not just “misrepresentation,” but “reliance.” Granted that a lot of the paper in the loan apps file would look bad in the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction finals. But in spite—no precisely because—of that fact, the lenders cannot seriously claim that they were ever misled. If you hoik up some derelict off the street and tell him that you will fork over $1 million if only he will sign a piece of paper avowing that he knocks back $300 thou a year, why of course he’ll sign. There used to be a doctrine—maybe there still is—that a taker of negotiable warehouse receipt cannot claim to be “in good faith” if he takes from “a tramp or a professor.”

There also used to be as rule that “anyone who meets the definition of ‘good faith’…cannot be a ‘bank.’” But that takes us down a different path.

Footnote on “things we learned” in economics: I pluck my example out of Tyler’s menu of wonders that the economists have (allegedly) conferred upon us. If his other examples are as shaky as this one, I’d say he might want to go back and review his fieldnotes. But I have a particular problem with his final example—you live longer if you get out of a cold climate. As one who grew up in New Hampshire and watched the annual procession of snowbirds (and who eventually got out myself) I do not find this exactly news. But if it is news, it is economics? Tyler cites a study by two guys in an economics department. But does that make it economics? If anything, isn’t it demography, or population studies? Or is Tyler’s point that nothing is true until some economist believes it?

Update: Big Picture is a lot less kind than I am. DeLong has reservations. Paul Beard predicts: "Next up, how patients are to blame for malpractice. . ."

Mark Perry discovers that there are markets in everything.

Mortgage Default and the Fraud Fandango

Tyler Cowen has an interesting post up about the scope of mortgage fraud, although I am not sure it says what it may think it says (link):

BasePoint Analytics LLC, a recognized fraud analytics and consulting firm, analyzed over 3 million loans originated between 1997 and 2006 (the majority being 2005-2006 vintage), including 16,000 examples of non-performing loans that had evidence of fraudulent misrepresentation in the original applications. Their research found that as much as 70 of early payment default loans contained fraud misrepresentations on the application.

That is from a Fitch Ratings report (summary here, with an eventual link to buy it), the rest makes for very gory reading as well. ...

Fine as far as it goes, but old time bankruptcy lawyers will remember the “fraud fandango” as it played itself out back before some important law changes around 1970. The consumer debtor would look at the application form where it says “list all your debts;” there were only three blank spaces. “But I have more than three creditors”—“oh, not to worry, we only use that for the credit check.” So the customer would list only three and then when she defaulted, the creditor would profess to be shocked, shocked to learn that there were really 17.

Sometimes, you could persuade the judge to hear these grisly details. So, no fraud because no intent to defraud Even better, sometimes you could show him that the lender would have made the loan even if the debtor had told the whole truth. So, no fraud because no reliance.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that some version of this caper played itself out in the late mortgage uproar. In a good many of these cases it was the brokers, I suspect, who were the initiators of the fraud, rather than the victims. The interesting question is: how far up the line does this go? Wasn’t anybody auditing the brokers? Auditing the auditors? Or was it all just one big clambake where everybody knew there wasn’t enough to go around, but everybody hoped they would get theirs off the table before the bell rang.

Tyler Cowen on Blackwater: It's More than "Perception"

Tyler Cowen has tackled (or should I simply say “molested”) a favorite topic of mine—the question of when, exactly, “the market” yields a better solution than “the government.” Tyler’s opening shot is a New York Times op-ed in which he argues that if Blackwater is misbehaving in Iraq, why then blame it on the government that hired them (link).

In a blog entry today, he characterizes his own argument as saying that “perception and accountability are important enough in contemporary Iraq that we should be using contractors less in these capacities (link). I suspect the problem goes as god deal deeper than “perception.” “Accountability” is surely part of it, but I suspect there are deeper issues here that we (= at least Tyler, and I) haven’t yet begun to articulate. We’re all inured to the point of tedium with the notion that “the government,” aka “the mess in Washington,” aka “the pointy-headed bureaucrats,” aka “the commissars,” can’t get anything right. We’re not nearly so well schooled in the proposition that a lot of the problems of “the government” may be endemic to any large organization, public or private. And I suspect we haven’t done nearly well enough in identifying those vices/defects that are endemic to private (as distinct from public) enterprise.

Fifty years ago, we were all accustomed to the proposition that any evil was a problem of “capitalism,” and that come the revolution, we would all have egg in our beer. Most of us now understand the rhetorical deficiency of comparing an actual capitalism to a hypothetical socialism. We don’t seem to be so alert yet to the insight that it works the other way round: nothing to be gained by comparing an actual public entity with a hypothetical market.

Here and elsewhere, Tyler uses a quaint and affecting rhetorical strategy. Skim his piece the first time and you think you are reading the George Mason mantra—markets in tooth and claw. On second look, he says: hey, I didn’t really mean that, I know that things are complicated, and I’m wide open to exploring and discussing the complications.

Well, pin a rose on him for that. I’ll even give him an A for effort (okay, maybe a B plus). But there’s a lot more to be done and (lacking the talent and/or energy to do it myself), I look forward to his forthcoming, more ambitious and insightful forays.

Afterthought: Somewhere, perhaps tucked away in a cubical-office at Cal State Pimento, an untenured political science professor is crying—“hey, I know the answer to that question! Call on me! Call on me!" He just might be right.

Tyler Whines About Whiners

Boy, am I ever of two minds about this one. Tyler Cowen says “stop whining.” He’s talking about all those early Iphone adopters, ticked off at the Ifolks for cutting prices (link). “Get this,” snarls Tyler:

“I just felt so used as a consumer,” he said. “They hyped up the iPhone for six months and built up our expectations, and then they grabbed our extra $200 and ran.”

Here is another guy:

“I feel totally screwed,” wrote one iPhone owner on the Unofficial Apple Weblog site. “My love affair with Apple is officially over.”

Tyler responds:

OK, people, it's no more Mr. Nice Guy. I'm fed up! No more moderation, no more namby-pamby conciliations to those I disagree with, at least not today. I am plain, hopping mad. … It is you people, you who resent Coase (1972), you people who induce wage and price stickiness and widen the Okun gap. You people, who don't know what it means to sit back and enjoy your consumer surplus. You beasts!

Well—yes, of course, he’s absolutely right, six ways to the Jack. They are whiners—silly, childish, blind to their own interests and the common good. But have we ever had a more remarkable example of an economist complaining (though perhaps with his tongue just edging close to his cheek) that the rest of us don’t behave like economists? Of course he’s right, but isn’t it even a teensy bit interesting that the rest of the world just doesn’t seem to get it—231 years after Adam Smith, 150-odd years after Ricardo, etc., that people still keep persist in acting like, well like people? Which is to say either (a) just not acting like economists tell them they act; or (b) leading economists to ever-more lurid, convoluted ad hoc explanations to tell them they really were acting like economists all along?

A gold-plated cigar to the first person who points to a blog post showing that the whiners really have been acting “economically” all along. Meanwhile, we can entertain ourselves with a whole spate of books (including this one, this one, this one, this one, this one) devoted to proving that the sun really does rise (as it did in John Wayne’s Viet Nam movie) in the west.

But, as I say, Tyler was right to begin with.

For Your Dining Pleasure

From Yglesias:

Hugo Lindgren glosses Tyler Cowen's view on what makes for good cuisine: "The magic ingredient, he elaborates, is extreme income inequality, which ensures a large reservoir of cheap labor to grow and prepare the food, as well as a sufficient number of rich people who, being rich, must eat well."

I'd go a step further: I suspect a lot of NY restaurants could jack up prices an extra 15 percent if they had a supply of starving children pressing their noses against the window.

Education as Doorbreaker

Tyler Cowen goes ballistic over Jonathan Kozol. Kozol says (in the August Harper's):

[W]e may soon wake up to find that they have been replaced by wholly owned subsidiaries of McDonald's, Burger King, and Wal-Mart.

Tyler responds (link):

Note that while there are some good (though in my view not decisive) arguments against vouchers, Kozol instead focuses on reminding us that corporations are greedy profit-maximizers. Nor does he mention that in America's inner cities, "democratic access" to good french fries far exceeds democratic access to good schools. And might not Louis Vuitton join Wal-Mart in educating some of our children?

I don’t think I’m up to the task of translating this response into English (is Tyler denying that corporations are greedy profit maximizers? Or is he admitting it and saying he likes it that way?). My particular purpose is to note a marketing point that has hitherto eluded me (but not, I suspect, the folks at McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wal-Mart).

That is: why would any self-regarding entrepreneur want to run a school, anyway? The process of education itself has never looked like a source of easy profits—a lot of investment for deferred on dodgy returns. But the related business—textbooks and computers, maybe, but also mass market fashion and, yes, hamburgers. Education as a doorbreaker: a loss leader to bring the customer to the real goodies. Now, that is a marketing opportunity.

Overrated/Underrated

I figure Tyler Cowen’s search for the most overrated novel will have 200 comments before tonight, so I won’t presume to add anything direct, but rather to move the ball downfield a bit with a slightly different response. That is: reading the early returns, I would say that there are different ways of being overrated; not all overrated books are overrated in the same way.

Example: a lot of readers weigh in with their grievances about compulsory school reading, like Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. My guess is that neither of these is a “great” novel—but they are perfectly straightforward and accessible and hey, nobody is going to like what is assigned to them in high school anyway (or even read it, as I said of myself a few days ago).

I doubt that John Barth is much assigned in high school and that if he is “rated” at all, it is by a pretty small treehouse assembly—so also William Gaddis and others not yet on the Tyler list: John Hawkes, Paul Bowles, Gilbert Sorrentino and there ilk. What the share is not necessarily awfulness—there is no accounting for tastes, and readers are perfectly welcome to like them if they want— but they do lend themselves to a good deal of posturing and scoldidng. Pynchon is a special case here: people do use him to beat up on their alleged inferiors, but he does seem to have a bona fide following of serious enthusiasts.

Ayn Rand, by contrast shouldn’t be judged as a novelist at all, but rather as a social phenom: the better comparison would be the Left Behind novels, whose readers for a band (no, a multitude) of passionate devotees, convinced of and committed to a highly particular world-view. As a developmental stage, its perfectly innocuous; most Ayn Rand readers outgrow it, and it’s a shame only that the same can’t be said for the Left Behind fans (I’ll put in a good word, though, for the “other” Ayn Rand novel—We the Living, about Russia during the revolution, which would be interesting and worthwhile even if its author were named Aylyce Rundt).

The debate over “the masters” takes place on a different plane. Re Henry James, my own taste tells me (pace Tyler’s early responders) that Portrait of a Lady may be his best novel—the later “grand style” entries seem to me just over the top. Re Virginia Woolf, I tend to think she can write splendid sentences even if not a great book (maybe her best work is in her letters and journals). Re Joyce, I tend to believe Ulysses may be over the top—I suspect he never improved on the best stories in The Dead. But, hey, all three of these are forces of nature, part of an entirely different dialogue or debate.

PS to Tyler: When you say "Sartre," maybe you are thinking of everything but the novels; the novels are, I think, actually pretty good.

Your Mother Loved You But She Died: A Note on Profit

Tyler Cowen offers up an odd response to Nassim Taleb in Tyler's review of The Black Swan, Taleb’s new book about prediction and unlikely events (link). Here’s Tyler:

Taleb does insist on the originality of his work—regarding it as a black swan, of course—and refers to opposing views as the "GIF: Great Intellectual Fraud." Nonetheless, the idea of a Power Law as a deeply skewed and asymmetric distribution is well-known, and the statistical notion of "ergodicity" (roughly, the idea that the initial state of a system does not predict its end state very well) has been around for a long time. In 1921, economist Frank Knight drew a distinction between unquantifiable and radical uncertainty and the risk of flipping a coin or playing a roulette wheel. If these ideas have not always been part of the mainstream, it is because they can quickly prove intractable, not because they have been suppressed by an arrogant scientific community.

I won’t defend “GIF”—and FWIW, I am not an economist and Tyler is. But I do think he is eliding over an important point here. I am the proud owner of a cherished first edition of Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921), surely one of the classics of modern economics. Knight’s point, only slightly restated, is that an “expected profit” is a contradiction in terms—it may be a “factor return,” but in a competitive market, it will be no higher than the opportunity cost of capital, and the net present value of a project will be zero. So, consider the case I buy a share of BigCo, with a certain return at t=1 of $100. I pay $80 at t=0: that is a 25 percent return ((100/80)-1=0.25=25 percent). But suppose the market rate of return for comparable investments is 10 percent. Then I can’t really expect to get it for $80; I can expect the price to be bid up to $90.91, where the implied rate of return is the market rate ((100/90.91)-1=0.1=10 percent).

By Knight’s analysis, there is a “profit” in this deal--$10.91, being spread between the $90.91 “implied return,” or “opportunity cost return,” and the $80 you pay. But blink your eyes and it won’t be there any longer. That's the definition of a competitive market. That’s why economists say that if there is a five dollar bill on the street in your neighborhood, it isn’t there any longer. The guy who gets the profit is the guy who, by superior acumen or dumb luck, grabs the opportunity before anybody else knows what it is worth. Or more brutally, your mother loved you but she died.

Economists and others like to use models from, e.g., casino gambling, to suss out the analysis of risk. The point here is that these casino gambling returns are, over the long run, highly predictable. Indeed, I have had students argue that casino gambling isn’t even risk—that they can set aside money for it as part of their entertainment budget, just as they might put aside money for food, or rent, or tuition. My only response is—what are students doing with that kind of money anyway?

The trouble with mainstream theory is not that it denies this kind of profit, but that it doesn’t know how to model it. And if something doesn’t get modeled, it might as well be denied. This is, by the way, one point on which the “Austrians” score points against (and differ from) the mainstream—one thing that they are driving at when they rattle on about the importance of “entrepreneurship” in economic behavior (see, e.g., link). The corollary is that the Austrians disdain this kind of modeling, and without a model, you don’t get no respect.

This is, by the way, just one of many ways in which Frank Knight’s startling originality and prescience gets smoothed over in mainstream theory. Economists are human: when they squat around the campfire to drink the blood of the vanquished, they like to retell their story in linear narrative, with Knight as a precursor. So he is, but it is a shame to sacrifice his originality to the demons of linearity.

My very best wishes to Tyler’s mother, with high hopes for her good health and long life.

Why Isn't Opera As Good As It Used to Be?

Tyler Cowen weighs in on the question of why opera singing has declined (you'd noticed?) (link). I'd go with some combination of Tyler's #5 and #6--the suits don't like individuality, because they think it doesn't sell. It's the same reason every Broadway show is miked at full volume--the suits think that loud sells, even though the theatre people think it loses all individuality that way. Or the reason every Toll Brothers home has Everything you could Want in a Home and nonetheless lacks charm.

I'd offer another reason, at least for my own taste: nostalgia. I like to listen to mouldy opera disks for the same reason I read Alan Furst novels, or a lot of people watch Edwardian soapers on Mawsterpiece Theatre: a yearning for a past we never experienced (segue to Snoopy on "when this cruel war is over").

Ms. Buce suggests another possibility: it is not the moderns but the ancients that are less well trained. Nobody ever listened to Callas for technique. Less polished voices are more likely to jump off the shelf at you. I think of Bruno Walter doing Beethoven's Fifth with the Philadelphia Symphony: they sound like they are about to fall off a cliff, as if they are all saying "my God, we're playing Beethoven!" Gives the performance an urgency that you just wouldn't get in a more disciplined age (I think I got this last point from Jim Svejda (link))

Tyler Cowen's Non-Book on Colombia

I wonder if Tyler Cowen is thinking of writing a book about Columbia—pardon, Colombia. He should; no, wait, maybe he has. A Google Search for Colombia on his weblog yields 98 hits (link). I haven’t read all of them, but I have rooted around a bit, and I think I am safe in saying that in aggregate, they present a stimulating (if, ahem kaleidoscopic) picture of a country he clearly loves, and from which we can learn a lot.

The stuff doesn’t lend itself to easy summary, but let me try: by any measure, Colombia looks to be a country that barely works, what with its prominence, not to say preeminence, in the drug world. And yes, it turns out a lot of things in Colombia are a mess. But not all are, and some messes are more interesting and instructive than others.

What we have here more generally is an attempt to respond to an important question that libertarians rarely ask—namely, if you don’t like the government, then what, precisely, is the alternative? Hobbes thought it was the state of nature: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Modern libertarians imagine sometimes seem to imagine life just like now, only without the National Endowment for the Arts.

No one has ever accused Tyler of being a sentimentalist about the virtues of active government. But he’s got a keen empirical eye, and a temperamental hospitality to surprises. Follow the Colombia links and get a refreshing new perspective to turn on your life back home. Or at the very least, take a look at Tyler’s choice for the best piece on Columbia he ever read.