Category Archives: books and book reviews

A sociologist’s work, condensed

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My latest essay includes this:

Regardless of whether informal authority is to be praised or condemned, it is with us. Informal authority is worth the attention of anyone interested in human conflict and cooperation. In short, sociology matters.

The essay discusses a book by David Swartz on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. You can think of the book as a condensation of Bourdieu’s life work. You can think of my essay as a condensation of the book. You can think of this blog post as a condensation of my essay.

Off-topic: marriage and grandchildren

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I do not attach any political or economic significance to what I writing about in this post. Ordinarily, that would be clear, but this blog usually deals with political economy and these days people can find a political dividing line in just about anything.

Here is the background:

1. Tyler Cowen said that both he and David Brooks enjoyed Eli J. Finkel’s The All-or-Nothing Marriage.

2. I read the book. I thought that the research methods were good (they included some controlled experiments) and the author’s synthesis of others’ research was very competent.

3. From my perspective, the book seemed off base. While I was reading it, my daughter sent an adorable video of my one-year-old grandson sitting in his high chair, taking food off his tray and reaching down to hand it to their dog. Dog and boy are clearly delighted with themselves. The video vividly illustrated what the book is missing.

4. I got around to reading the David Brooks column, and it turns out that he also rejects the thrust of the book, although perhaps less vehemently than I do.

Very briefly, Finkel views marriage as an institution that has evolved to move up the Maslow hierarchy. Prior the industrial revolution, it was about survival. Once material needs became more secure, it was about love in a highly gendered society–the man as bread-winner and the woman as home-maker. With more gender equality, marriage now is about mutual self-actualization.

I see marriage in a larger context of relationships, including the extended family and the community. Finkel is focused solely on the couple. Children only get mentioned once, when Finkel says that they are big time-sink. Grandchildren are not mentioned at all. My own informal research says that grandparent couples are happy couples. Some of that is selection bias–if you stuck it out as a couple long enough to have your grandchildren born, you are in good shape as a couple. But I think that some of it is that if you have children, then you want grandchildren, and when they arrive you feel real joy and satisfaction. Finkel’s self-realization blather is beside the point.

Phillip W. Magness on the Leonard book review

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Like me, he finds the review troubling.

Oddly enough, the 19 or so pages that follow provide very little in the way of specific examples of where Leonard allegedly committed these scholarly sins. It simply asserts them as so. The charges are rendered doubly ironic when one realizes that co-author Steinbaum has also spent the last few months as one of the most vocal and public advocates of Nancy MacLean’s evidentiary train wreck of a book, Democracy in Chains.

Thanks to a commenter for the pointer. Read Magness’ entire commentary, with which I agree. I wonder how the editorial decision of the Journal of Economic Literature can be explained.

Price Discrimination Explains Everything

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Alex Tabarrok writes,

How could Tesla increase the mileage at the flick of a switch? The answer is that owners of the Tesla 60kWh version of its Model S and Model X actually have the same battery as the 75kWh vehicles but the battery has been purposely limited or “damaged” to provide only 60KWh of mileage. But why would Tesla damage its own vehicles?

The answer to the second question is price discrimination! Tesla knows that some of its customers are willing to pay more for a Tesla than others. .. Tesla must find some characteristic of buyers that is correlated with high willingness-to-pay and charge more to customers with that characteristic.

He cites Deneckere and McAfee on damaged goods as price discrimination. I think that Varian and Shapiro would prefer to just call it “versioning,” and of course their classic Information Rules is mostly about price discrimination in a world with low variable costs. And if you think that price discrimination is a new phenomenon in the auto industry, I’ve got an early 1960s Pontiac to sell you.

A negative review of Thomas Leonard

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In the important Journal of Economic Literature, Marshall I. Steinbaum and Bernard A. Weisberger write (gated, unless you are a member of the American Economics Association),

Motivated history is not good history. And the approach the book takes is particularly unlikely to yield fruitful insight: sweeping statements about what “the progressives” believed, festooned with cherry-picked quotes and out-of-context examples, without much of a hearing for either their opponents or for debate and disagreement among themselves. The result is a powerful brief arguing that the intellectual movement of that era has a decidedly problematic legacy on eugenics, racism, gender equality, immigration, and in countless other ways that would give pause to anyone looking to elevate their legacy. But all, or at least much, of that history was known—revealed decades ago

The book to which they refer is Illiberal Reformers, which I reviewed here.

In the paragraph above, opening sentences would lead one to believe that Leonard’s account is not accurate, but then the phrase “known–revealed decades ago” would lead one to believe that it is accurate.

I wish that the authors had listed some of the “cherry-picked quotes” and “out-of-context examples.” I finished the review without seeing any.

In my review, I wrote

Leonard also point[s] out that racism was not the exclusive province of Progressives. He notes the Anglo-Saxonism of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other conservatives

The authors of the JEL review claim instead that Leonard only singles out racists on the Progressive side.

I think my review better reflects the contents of the book. But as academic economics proceeds along its road toward left-wing sociology, it hardly surprises me to see the Journal of Economic Literature publish essays that are uncharitable to those on the right.

Re-reading David Brooks

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Almost twenty years after it first appeared, I review Bobos in Paradise.

What Brooks might have foreseen, but did not, was how this Bobo project would play out as it gathered momentum. In the last two decades, we have witnessed the acceleration of the long-term trend toward expansion of the more abstract-oriented industries, such as finance and entertainment, and a decline of the more concrete-oriented industries, such as manufacturing and mining. As a result, the cultural influence of Bobos has soared. The Bobos became insistently cosmopolitan on issues of immigration and foreign relations, increasingly aggressive in their assault on traditional ideas about gender, and increasingly eager to stifle the speech on campus of those with whom they disagree.

Politics as Religion

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A commenter writes,

“Politics as religion” is such a lazy argument because nobody has a definition of religion. It’s classic case of defining the obscure in terms of the more obscure. By any reasonable definition, a religion needs a transcendent being. Where is the transcendent being of this “secular religion”? You can’t just say the passion level is so high that it has passed into religious territory. That’s not how it works; the beliefs have to actually be structured like a religion, whatever that would mean.

The term “religion” does indeed have too many connotations. So let us not start there.

Instead, let us speak of a subset of culture that defines a tribe at large scale. A broad set of norms, symbols, beliefs and practices constitutes culture. Narrow that down to a subset of norms, symbols, beliefs and practices that clearly define who is or is not a member of the tribe. Focus on that subset. For example, Jews eat gefilte fish, observe Yom Kippur, and don’t pray to Jesus. But only a subset of those (observing Yom Kippur and not praying to Jesus) are tribally definitive. The rabbis won’t question your Jewish identity if you turn down gefilte fish.

No tribe is perfectly defined by a precise list of cultural characteristics. But bear with me and think in terms of tribally defining cultural subsets.

A tribally defining cultural subset will (a) tend to empower adherents to obey, enforce, and regularly re-affirm tribal norms, and (b) lead its members to fear and despise people who are not members of the tribe.

Further comments:

1. Cosmopolitans (including progressives, libertarians, and conservative intellectuals) would say that, yes, historically, “fear and despise” was part of religion, but that is a bug, not a feature. Ironically, cosmopolitans start to look like a tribe that fears and despises people who espouse traditional religions. And yes, there does seem to be a fourth axis here: cosmopolitan vs. populist, or Bobo vs. anti-Bobo.

2. The role of a transcendent being is to help motivate members to obey tribal norms, for fear of being punished by the transcendent being (See Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods). However, belief in a transcendent being is not necessary to have a modern large-scale tribe. But it does seem necessary to have an out-group that you fear and despise.

3. Historically, major religions have usually fit my notion of a cultural subset that defines a large-scale tribe.

4. Usually, modern nation-states have fit this notion. There are those who say that nation-states were a better tribal bonding technology (so to speak) than belief in a transcendent being, and hence they made religion relatively unnecessary.

5. Finally, to the commenter’s point, I think that some political ideologies have come to fit my notion of a cultural subset that defines a large-scale tribe. The current progressive ideology seems to me to fit the notion particularly well. But the three-axis model suggests that conservatives and libertarians are tribal, also. Again, the emergence of the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo conflict has scrambled things quite a bit.

Is cosmopolitan libertarianism practical?

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William Wilson writes,

[Jason] Kuznicki himself is a representative of a currently fashionable sort of cosmopolitan libertarianism that has never existed in governmental form, and which I suspect is the least likely form of government ever to exist. What if a practical politics that took account of human frailty implied a world formed from a combination of cosmopolitan but illiberal city-states, unified but homogeneous nation-states, and sprawling empires that vacillate between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies? In fact, this is the world that has existed for most of recorded history. Perhaps the real ideological blinders are those which tell us that we have transcended this condition and can replace it with something else.

Read the whole essay. I agree with much of it, but I am not sure about this paragraph. Today, where are the city-states, other than Singapore, and is Singapore less liberal than other states? The homogeneous nation-states would include Japan and Denmark. What is the dividing line between a homogeneous nation-state and a sprawling empire? Can I assume that China, Russia, and the U.S. are all sprawling empires? What about Canada? Switzerland?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Robert Sapolsky defines culture

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Crediting Frans de Waal, Sapolsky writes in Behave.

“culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means.

I guess that is close to my preferred definition, which is “socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies.”

I am about half way through the book. I have two nits to pick.

One nit is that he says that when behavior correlates with a gene in one setting but not another, that proves gene-environment interaction. An example would be that a gene correlates with violence in people who were abused as children, but not in people who were not abused as children. In my view, this might be gene-environment interaction. But it also could be gene-gene interaction. That is, the behavior might be influenced by a gene other than the one on which you are focused, and that gene correlates with whether the person was abused as a child.

Another nit is when he talks about gender and math ability. First, he points out that the very top percentile in math is dominated by males (the fact that Larry Summers was fired for pointing out). Then, he reports on a study showing that male-female math differences are less in egalitarian cultures. However, that is only relevant to the Larry Summers issue if that study refers to the very top percentile. As I read the study, by Guiso, Zingales, and others, it is about averages, not the very top percentile.

The way I see it, a lot of academics are dogmatically insistent that genes matter little and the environment matters a lot. Sapolsky is not one of those, but these examples suggest that he is somewhat biased in the direction of the prevailing dogma.

Jean Twenge Update

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She writes,

Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

I don’t think a crusade against cyber-bullying is the answer. I am enough of a McLuhanite to say that the medium is the message. There is something about smart phones that is damaging, and I suspect it is the sheer immediacy of them. I think that this immediacy is what makes contemporary politics so stressful. You see what somebody posts online and if you like it, great, and if you don’t it really gets your fight-or-flight hormones raging.

Also, this is something I noticed and remarked on when I was teaching high school:

Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.

The book is due out in less than two weeks.