Category Archives: books and book reviews

Social Reasoning

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Julian Baggini writes,

Most neuroscientists believe we have a dedicated system for social reasoning, quite different to the one that is used for non-social thinking. What’s more, when one system is on, the other turns off. Lieberman explains how the social system fulfils three core tasks. First, it must make connections with others, which involves feeling social pains and pleasures, such as those of rejection or belonging. Second, it must develop mind-reading skills, in order to know what others are thinking, so as to predict their behaviour and act appropriately. Finally, it must use these abilities to harmonise with others, so as to thrive safely in the social world.

Read the whole essay, which reviews three books on social psychology and philosophy.

I had not heard about this dichotomy between social reasoning and non-social thinking. Where can I find out more? One possibility that leaps to my mind: in thinking about politics, do progressives and conservatives have social reasoning turned on and non-social thinking turned off, but with libertarians it is the other way around?

One of the books reviewed in the essay, Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes, looks like something that could relate to my Three Languages of Politics. However, I get the impression is that degenerates into a plea for the author’s version of utilitarianism.

My Review of Lant Pritchett

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On the economics of education. The review starts,

In The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning, development economist Lant Pritchett describes the challenges of education in underdeveloped countries. Because so many of the problems that he identifies are endemic to centralized, state-run education systems, I view the book as an instant classic in a genre that might be termed “applied libertarianism.”

I really think that the book deserves much more play. You may recall that I recommended the podcast in which Russ Roberts talked with Pritchett about the book.

Russ Roberts and Lant Pritchett

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Talking about Pritchett’s new book, which I really liked. Here is an excerpt from the podcast.

I do mention that Clay Christiansen has this idea of disruptive innovation. Which is where you actually moves to something that looks like lower quality but then rebuild a higher quality on top of that. The classic example of course is the PC (personal computer), which in computing terms when it came out in 1980 was a garage hobbyist toy that no serious computer engineer would pay any attention to. And all the firms that ignored the incipient disruptive innovation of the PC got themselves blown away by this, at the time, low-quality alternative. So I do think technology is going to change the way classrooms are managed in ways that are going to look disruptive, in the sense that they may appear to be de-skilling the classroom. But I think that in the long run there will be a disruptive innovation in the developing world that will rapidly accelerate the rate at which they can close on these higher levels of schooling. But when I hinted at this chaos–it’s going to be very chaotic. It’s going to be lots of people doing things that don’t look like finished classrooms, but produce incredible gains, and they are going to reconstitute a new way of doing education.

Keep in mind that I believe in the null hypothesis, which is that no education technique makes a big difference in terms of outcomes. Pritchett’s book actually offers a lot of support for that hypothesis, in that many results that he reports show little or no difference. However, he does offer one example, from Pakistan, in which giving parents “report cards” on school performance puts pressure on schools to improve and leads to some significant gains in the context of a controlled experiment.

My Review of Phelps

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Is now available. A brief excerpt:

Corporatism satisfies a desire for security. People want security of consumption, security of jobs, and security of their economic status. Corporatism replaces the decentralized competition of the market with political control over the economy. The forms of protection people obtain include occupational license restrictions, labor unions, and entitlement programs.

Hydraulic Modeling

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[Irving] Fisher designed a hydrostatic machine to illustrate the economic “‘exchanges’ of a great city” that revealed the ways that the values of individual goods were related to one another. When Fisher adjusted one of the levers, water flowed to affect the general price level of the range of goods. The device resembled a modern-day foosball table but with various cisterns of different shapes and heights representing individual consumers and producers….A series of levers along the side of the machine altered the flow of water, thus changing the price level not only for an individual but throughout the entire economy. The machine revealed the way in which prices, supply, and consumer demand interrelated. For example, if the price of a good fell (and the level of water rose), more consumers would purchase it, and a new equilibrium would emerge.

The quote is from Fortune Tellers, a historical work by Walter A. Friedman that I received as a review copy. He tries to recover the era of economic forecasting between 1900 and 1940, before the computer and before Keynesian economics.

The Year in Books

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Note that on December 5, I will be talking at Cato about one book that came out this year, George Gilder’s Knowledge and Power. In it, he gives credit to the widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced. Another author who credits me is Kevin Williamson in The End is Near.

This was also the year in which I e-published The Three Languages of Politics and also had a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of major events in economic history.

This year, there were three books that were widely heralded that I thought were more “eh:” Michael Huemer on political authority; Martin Hellwig and Anat Admati on banks; and Jeremy Adelman’s Hirschman bio (an admirable book, but I cannot count it as a must-read).

Books that I thought deserved more acclaim than they got include:

Lant Pritchett on education
Zvi Eckstein on The Chosen Few
Ara Norenzayan on Big Gods
Mark Weiner on Rule of the Clan
Edmund Phelps on flourishing
Hasan Comert on monetary impotence
Nick Schulz on marriage

What I’m Reading

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The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning, by Lant Pritchett. In short, it is an informed polemic against top-down, state-run school systems in underdeveloped countries, notably India. Tyler Cowen mentioned it, but otherwise it has received no play anywhere. Maybe it is just too contrary to conventional wisdom for people to grasp.

It is possibly the best book I have read this year. It immediately vaults onto the list of libertarian classics. This is in addition to being an important book about education in underdeveloped countries.

I will have to finish it and then re-read it before writing a more comprehensive review.

What I’m Reading

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1. The Nov.-Dec. issue of Technology Review is one of the best in a long time. I liked the article on the fall-off in editorial participation at Wikipedia, the article on the challenges with making driverless cars practical, and especially the business report on health care cost containment

2. The Downfall of Money, about Germany’s hyperinflation. I will say more when I am finished. At this point, I am inclined to think that the key driver of hyperinflation was the politics of reparations. It was in the interest of both Allied and German politicians to overstate what Germany was being asked to pay. The Allied leaders could boast to their home constituents and the German politicians could ask for sympathy from theirs. Had Germany cut spending or raised taxes, this would have been perceived as making ordinary Germans suffer in order to pay the hated reparations. So the political process kept seeing deficit spending as the least-bad alternative. Many Germans suffered under hyperinflation, but this was politically easier to swallow than making it easier for the Allies to extract their tribute.

The Minogue Litmus Test

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My review of The Servile Mind is available. I do not think liberaltarians or bleeding-heart libertarians will be comfortable with Minogue’s swipes at cultural decadence. My conclusion:

Overall, I would say that for libertarians Minogue’s book provides a litmus test. If you find yourself in vigorous agreement with everything he says, then you probably see no value in efforts to work with progressives to promote libertarian causes. The left is simply too dedicated to projects that Minogue argues undermine individual moral responsibility, and thus they are antithetical to liberty. On the other hand, if you believe that Minogue is too pessimistic about the outlook for freedom in today’s society and too traditional in his outlook on moral responsibility, then you would feel even more uneasy about an alliance with conservatives than about an alliance with progressives.