Category Archives: books and book reviews

Books of the year 2018

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1. Uncivil Agreement, by Lilliana Mason. My review. I had many take-aways, including that tribal loyalty sometimes drives political beliefs (it’s not just the other way around), hatred of the opposing party has gone up by more than division on issues, and cross-cutting identities seem to have gone down, and they used to ameliorate polarization.

2. Blueprint, by Robert Plomin. My main take-aways are that variation in human traits is polygenic (dozens of genes, each having small effects) and that we should not think of psychological traits in either-or terms. Thinking about myself, my guess is that if we had a “spectrum” for a tendency toward schizophrenia and bipolarity, then I would be above normal in that direction. I believe that this makes me more creative than people who are normal or below-normal on this dimension. But if I were much further along on this dimension I would be too dysfunctional too often.

3. Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou. The tale of Theranos, the biotech startup that descended into fraud. I’ve recommended this to friends with a money back guarantee. There was no risk to me in doing that–everyone who has read the book is completely satisfied.

4. Minds Make Societies, by Pascal Boyer. He talks about how we have been trained by evolution in coalition management. A sample quote: “stating that someone’s behavior is morally repugnant creates consensus more easily than claiming that the behavior results from incompetence.”

5. Tomorrow 3.0, by Mike Munger. Not as much impact on me as the top two, but a really good example of “thinking like an economist.”

6. A Crisis of Beliefs, by Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer. If you are going to write another book about the financial crisis, at least have it be something like this one, which blames incompetence rather than moral repugnance. My review.

Some notable books that didn’t make the list:

Because it is only a revised and updated edition, I deemed as ineligible The Revolt of the Public, by Martin Gurri. Otherwise, it would be at the top of the list.

Suicide of the West, by Jonah Goldberg. My review.

Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Dineen. My review.

The Virtue of Nationalism, by Yoram Hazony.

The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

Click Here to Kill Everybody, by Bruce Schneier.

After writing this post but before it went up, Tyler Cowen posted his list. He has Gurri on it. He also includes Waldrop’s book on Licklider, DARPA, and the Internet. I read a free sample, which convinced me that it is likely the best book on the topic. But I judged, perhaps wrongly, that I already have read too many other works on these events to profit much from reading this one. I made the same judgment about the Andrew Roberts biography of Churchill.

Seeing Taleb’s Skin in the Game on Tyler’s list, it probably belongs on mine, too. Taleb was very disagreeable with me on Twitter for my essay calling him disagreeable, and that may have unconsciously caused me to forget to include his book.

The three GMU books at the top of Tyler’s list also merit inclusion. I read them in previous years, so it didn’t occur to me to include them here. I browsed the books by Mann, Heyes, Reich, and Chater, and I was not motivated to buy them. The other books on Tyler’s list I have not browsed.

Mike Munger’s latest book

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I have written a review. The book, Tomorrow 3.0, speculates that we could become a society where individuals own few goods and instead rent. I conclude

Up until now, it seems to me that we have managed to become increasingly interdependent without a loss of liberty. That is, we have developed norms and institutions that facilitate interdependence while maintaining our ability to make individual choices freely. Many of the important institutions that provide this governance are in the private sector, and the norms that they develop evolve over time (think of the evolution of payment from cash to checks to credit cards to smart phone apps). Going forward, I would be optimistic that although a society of renters may require more governance and more rules, these will evolve primarily from competition and cooperation among private entities, and we need not see an increase in centralized coercion.

What I’m reading

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Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-1957, by Derek Leebaert. He writes,

Today it’s said habitually that “with the destruction at home in 1947, the British gave up trying to maintain a global empire” and that “a global political vacuum created by the collapse of the British empire” followed. . .people came to believe that some enormous transition had occurred years earlier, in 1947. It hadn’t. The events that transpired during these weeks, which surrounded the Truman Doctrine as well as the Marshall Plan, are very different from what historians believe.

His thesis seems to be that the diminution of Britain’s global role was less rapid and inevitable than we now take it to be. At the time, Britain still seemed formidable.

I think that I am well read on World War II and Vietnam. But this “in between” era is one with which I am less familiar. I believe that I am learning a lot.

My favorite elements of the book are his sketches of key officials, some well known and others less so. The story of Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, a left-wing politician who nonetheless valued Britain’s imperial prestige and came to loathe Stalin’s aggression, is new and interesting to me.

President Eisenhower made a decision not to send its forces into Vietnam (then known as Indochina) in 1954. Leebaert’s account of this decision differs somewhat from that of David Halberstam. Halberstam has Eisenhower shrewdly accessing the opinion of anti-interventionists, including Congressional leaders and General Matt Ridgway. Leebaert has Eisenhower wanting to intervene, but finding little Congressional support (one crucial opponent was Senator Lyndon Johnson!) without any help from the British. The Eisenhower Administration ardently sought British help, but the Brits declined.

There was in interesting tie-in between Vietnam and Suez. Both the Americans and the British entertained the idea of the Brits helping America in Vietnam in exchange for the Americans taking sides with the British on Suez. Had that deal materialized, events would have played out differently in both places. But in the end, neither the Americans nor the British were willing to sacrifice what it saw as its interests in one area in order to get support from the other side elsewhere.

Robert Plomin talks his book

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In the WSJ, Robert Plomin writes,

DNA is the major systematic influence making us who we are as individuals. Environmental influences are important too, but what look like systematic effects of the environment are often genetic effects in disguise: Parents respond to their children’s genetically driven traits, and children seek, modify and even create experiences correlated with their genetic propensities.

His book is Blueprint, which I just finished. His thesis:

DNA is the only thing that makes a substantial systematic difference, accounting for 50 percent of the variance in psychological traits. The rest comes down to chance environmental experiences that do not have long-term effects.

What he calls “chance environmental experiences” could be measurement error. Measurement error always holds down correlation. This raises the possibility that some traits that are measured with error are more heritable than they appear. For example, Gregory Clark found that social status is much more heritable across many generations than would be expected based on parent-child heritability estimates. I explained that this is likely due to error in measurement in social status, which lowers immediate-generation correlation more than multi-generation correlation.

Educational interventions are apparent environmental influences that wear off over time. You raise a test score but do not fundamentally alter ability. That is an element of what I call the Null Hypothesis, which Plomin strongly endorses, although of course he does not use that term. Related: Scott Alexander on pre-school.

This is one of the most important books of the year. Coincidentally, the NYT has an article on economists’ use of polygenic scores. Tyler and Alex both linked to it.

But you should know that I came away from Plomin’s book less than impressed with polygenic scoring. So much data mining. So little predictive value. Also, there is serious criticism of his view that environmental factors exhibit no systematic influence, but he does not confront it. I did a search inside the Kindle edition for “Flynn” and found no results.

The Son Also Writes

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Adam Gurri writes,

The institutions of this state stand now like the police in Charlottesville: heavily armed, well staffed, hierarchically organized, yet paralyzed in the face of the foul temper of a mutinous public.

Spoken like his father. Read the whole essay. And of course, read The Revolt of the Public, which is now available.

Coincidentally, one year when I taught at GMU, Adam was in my class on year. Had there been more students like him, I would have stuck it out there longer.

Bruce Schneier watch

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Farhad Manjoo in the NYT writes,

Mr. Schneier argues that the economic and technical incentives of the internet-of-things industry do not align with security and privacy for society generally. Putting a computer in everything turns the whole world into a computer security threat — and the hacks and bugs uncovered in just the last few weeks at Facebook and Google illustrate how difficult digital security is even for the biggest tech companies. In a roboticized world, hacks would not just affect your data but could endanger your property, your life and even national security.

. . .Mr. Schneier is painting government intervention not as a panacea but as a speed bump, a way for us humans to catch up to the technological advances. Regulation and government oversight slow down innovation — that’s one reason techies don’t like it. But when uncertain global dangers are involved, taking a minute isn’t a terrible idea.

My bet would be that when it comes to securing the Internet of Things, government will be more of a problem than a solution.

The academic bubble

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What were the most influential books of the past twenty years? The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a list provided by various academics. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Without doing an exact count, and of course I have only read some of the books myself, I think maybe, maybe one out of every four books in the list is not there because it reinforces leftist ideology. And of course there are zero books that challenge leftist ideology.

So let me try to correct the balance. I think that Haidt’s The Righteous Mind belongs on the list. Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Trilogy. Probably Richerson and Boyd Culture and the Evolutionary Process (I have not read it, but I think of Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success is a very important book and that book was influence by Richerson and Boyd, so if you’re talking about influential books, . . .). Something from Steven Pinker, probably The Blank Slate. How about Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist?

Anyway, the main point of this post is that it’s very likely that if you see a book that conforms closely to left-wing orthodoxy, it probably is dramatically over-rated in the academy. Conversely, if you see a book that departs from left-wing orthodoxy, I would be that it is dramatically under-rated in the academy. In a more balanced culture of higher education, Haidt or Pinker would be on more reading lists, while the books listed in the Chronicle would be on fewer.

Buchanan’s theory of consent

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Two essays on the econlib web site.

1. Pierre Lemieux re-examines James Buchanan’s The Limits of Liberty.

“My approach,” he writes at the beginning of the book, “is profoundly individualistic, in an ontological-methodological sense” (emphasis in original); “[e]ach man counts for one, and that is that.” It follows that individual liberty is a value and that the social system should be based on unanimous consent. Any limit to liberty must thus be consented to by each and every individual.

2. I review Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage.

Sugden proposes what he calls contractarianism, which he credits to James M. Buchanan. Instead of thinking in terms of social decisions made by benevolent autocrats, Sugden’s contractarian treats decisions as made by individuals acting voluntarily and in concert. The job of the welfare economist is to act as a mediator, making individuals aware of opportunities for mutually agreeable bargains as suggested by the economist’s research.

Senator Sasse talks his book

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Ben Sasse writes,

The same isolation we felt at the edge of the cafeteria or as the last kid picked for kickball causes everyone to yearn for a group. Even though political ideology is a thin basis for intimate connections, at least our cable news tribes offer the common experience of getting to hate people together.

His book is Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal.

It seems to me that this is the year when the observation went mainstream that political behavior is tribal. We’re all political psychologists now.

My view of why the problem is severe at the moment is that the incentive in the media is to raise the stakes. Who do you think gets more clicks, a pundit who writes as if the other side’s position regarding today’s pseudo-news is dangerously evil, or a pundit who writes as if both sides have some merit or who plays down the significance of the most-talked-about current event altogether? That won’t change until (unless?) we in the general public can build up an immunity to the inflammatory political viruses.

Senator Sasse may be on the right track. It would be helpful if we could elevate the status of people who at a local level do real work to solve real problems. And we ought to lower the status of people who express and amplify outrage on the national issue du jour.

Paul Volcker talks his book

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He writes,

No price index can capture, down to a tenth or a quarter of a percent, the real change in consumer prices. The variety of goods and services, the shifts in demand, the subtle changes in pricing and quality are too complex to calculate precisely from month to month or year to year.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. The book is co-authhored by Christine Harper, which sort of reminds me of those “as told to” sports autobiographies.

Anyway, Volcker is arguing against trying to use monetary policy to try to fine-tune the inflation rate.

I think of people as acting on the basis of habit. The expect prices tomorrow to be about where they are today. This really helps in making the countless calculations about what to buy, which job to take, which business to start, expand, or fold, etc. To get people to believe differently and to change their way of calculating takes a lot of effort. When Mr. Volcker became Fed chairman, the U.S. government had managed this trick, creating a regime where everyone felt that they had to factor general inflation into their decisions. Getting back to a low-inflation regime was not an easy process.

Another habit people have is treating government bonds as net wealth. That is, when the government borrows $100 from X to give money to Y, Y thinks he is better off by $100 and X thinks he now has a $100 bond. Neither X nor Y puts the obligation to re-pay that $100 on his personal balance sheet.

But that habit changes when something makes the X’s start to wonder whether the government is really going to pay them back, or if it is only going to pay them back in inflation-ruined currency. Then things start to get ugly.

The point is that models of simple, continuous, linear behavior do not apply to fiscal and monetary policy. Instead, there are phase changes. We shift from a regime of predictably stable overall prices to high inflation. There is not much in between those two regimes. We shift from a regime where government debt is treated as risk-free from one in which it is treated as highly risky. There is not much in between those two regimes, either.