My full review of Mark Weiner’s book. It begins,
Mark S. Weiner’s The Rule of the Clan makes a libertarian case for a strong central state. In it, he directly challenges what many libertarians currently believe.
Category Archives: books and book reviews
What I’m Reading
1. The New Digital Age, by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Before I read it, I had modest expectations. Afterward, I regretted buying it.
2. The End of Power, by Moses Naim. So far, this is a candidate for my favorite non-fiction book of the year. Maybe you have to discount some of my enthusiasm as confirmation bias, but I cannot imagine readers of this blog experiencing disappointment with the book. Expect a longer review from me at some point.
A Very Charitable Review
From Eli Dourado:
The Three Languages of Politics is well worth the $1.99 and the one hour of your time it will cost you to read it. It is short, insightful, useful, and above all, subversive. The political-industrial complex benefits from the Babel in which we live. If we all came to see our political opponents not as nonsensical fools but as basically reasonable speakers of another language, we would not elect the demagogues we do now, or watch the same clowns on cable news. This is a goal worth pursuing, though the odds are long. In any event, I expect the book to do a brisk business as gifts for political enemies.
What I am Reading
1. The Rule of the Clan, by Mark S. Weiner. The best book I have read this year. After I re-read it, I will write a longer review. Meanwhile, a terse summary of what he has to say:
a) We have seen social orders without a centralized state.
b) However, these decentralized social orders are clan-based, with norms that are not consistent with peace, free commerce, or individual autonomy.
c) Without a strong central state, humans will revert to clan-based systems of social order.
I found his case for (b) to be very strong and interesting. I thought his case for (c) was somewhat weaker. Regardless, it is a very stimulating book, in part because it is very distinct from the economics and public choice literature.
2. Paying for the Party, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton. Remember when I linked to a story about the book? I read the introduction and the two final chapters, and I skimmed the rest. On p. 220,
The finding that regional schools facilitated mobility more than the state flagship is at odds with existing research…William G. Bowen and colleagues use longitudinal survey data to conclude that students are best served when they attend the most prestigious school they can. Our findings suggest a qualification: If the more prestigious school available is a party school, students from less privileged backgrounds may be better off going to a less prestigious school
3. The Sleepwalkers, by Christopher Clark. For me, any book by a respected historian on the origins of the first world war becomes self-recommending. Even though this topic is, as Charles Kindleberger referred to the topic of the origins Industrial Revolution, a “well-squeezed orange.” I am less than half through this one. Clark’s description of the Serbian nationalists makes them sound like today’s Muslim fanatics in Pakistan. That is, they were secretive, organized into cells, integrated with key government agencies that nonetheless denied involvement, with a grandiose ideology, believing that they are the true representatives of a great ethnic power, and eager to instigate a larger conflict.
My New Book on Kindle
It’s called The Three Languages of Politics. It’s an extended take on the three-axis model. Get it! Write a charitable review! Use this post to give me your comments!
A Book I Will Not Review
Because I contributed a chapter. The book is the Routledge Handbook of Major Events in Economic History, edited by Randall E. Parker and Robert Whaples. The handbook tends to be U.S.-centric, with some surprising exceptions, such as a brief, fascinating chapter on World War I. The chapters are predominantly about events in the twentieth century. The book is priced out of your range, unless you are a library.
My chapter is called The 1970’s: The decade the Phillips Curve died. My main point is that except for the 1970’s, the Phillips Curve has performed really well. However, because of the 1970’s, macroeconomics went through great contortions from which it has not recovered.
This is not to say that we should go back to the macroeconomic consensus as it existed in 1970 (although that is where I see Paul Krugman coming out). But I do not think that the macroeconomic consensus as it existed in 2007 was any better. Hence PSST.
There is another chapter on the 1970’s by Robert Hetzel, which covers much of the same ground as my chapter. And he got to use graphs, which makes me jealous (my chapter would have worked better with graphs).
He and I would differ in our interpretation of the 1980-1983 period. Hetzel writes,
The Volcker-Greenspan FOMCs succeeded in controlling inflation without the need to engineer periodic bouts of high unemployment.
But we had the highest spike in the unemployment rate since the Great Depression–higher than the peak unemployment rate in 2009.
Cass Sunstein’s New Book
It’s called Simple, or perhaps Simpler (the letter r appears with a cross-out). Tyler Cowen says that Sunstein is always worth reading. In this case, I am unable to agree. The book is a retrospective on Sunstein’s time in the Obama Administration as “regulatory czar.” Its message is that he and his colleagues did everything right, and their critics either did not understand or were dogmatically partisan. On p. 5, he writes,
To resolve disputes about the likely effect of rules, economists are essential.
Two pages later, he writes,
Insisting on careful analysis of costs and benefits, we issued historic rules to increase the fuel economy of cars and trucks…
I think it is fair to say that many economic studies question the value of fuel economy standards. I am not saying that fuel economy standards are utterly refuted by economic analysis, but I would have liked to see a serious discussion of the literature on fuel economy standards, or at least a mention of the fact that they are controversial with economists.
I do not disagree with his view that regulation ought to employ economically sound principles. However, I do not think he has made a persuasive case that the Obama Administration made significant strides in that direction.
[UPDATE: Sam Batkins and Ike Brannon write,
Currently, when an executive agency proposes an “economically significant” regulation (meaning that its estimated effect on the economy would be $100 million or greater), it must submit a regulatory impact analysis (RIA) to OIRA for review. The current administration’s OIRA has returned for reconsideration precisely one regulation in its first four years, which suggests a lack of interest in regulatory oversight
]
What I’m Reading
Building Home, a biography of savings and loan mogul H.F. Ahmanson, who flourished from the 1930s until his death in 1968. I had low expectations for this book, but I’m actually getting much more out of it than I did the widely-praised Hirschman bio, even though the latter is the product of prodigious skill and effort. Eric John Abrahamson, the author of Building Home, does a really good job of capturing the post-WWII political economy zeitgeist. On p. 115,
Thus the relationship that developed between regulator and regulated by the early 1950s was often collaborative and mutually supportive. Regulators believed that a major part of their job was to protect the health of the industry as well as the consumer or depositor. When changes needed to be made to the law, industry officials often drafted the new legislation, and legislators in Sacramento and Washington often accepted their recommendations with little other public input. When influential regulators retired, they often became owners, managers, or consultants to savings and loans. Meanwhile, many legislators owned shares or served on the boards of local savings and loans.
The conventional wisdom after World War II was that industry and government had collaborated to win the war, and that similar partnerships could address social needs, such as housing. Public trust in government and industry was high. Supposedly, we now live in an era in which there is much more polarization concerning the free market vs. regulation, and there is much less public trust in government and in corporate behavior. But re-reading the excerpted paragraph, how much has really changed in the last 50 years about the way financial regulation operates?
The business-regulatory collaboration extended to mortgage redlining. On p. 107,
In the 1930s, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) had institutionalized the practice of racial and economic segregation in housing development and residential lending…Social segregation continued to permeate public policy during and after the war, and the FHA explicitly perpetuated racial discrimination in mortgage lending. When the Community Homes cooperative in Reseda sought FHA approval to finance 280 single-family homes in 1947, for example, it was turned down by the government because the cooperative refused to adopt racial restrictions.
The Albert Hirschman Bio
It is The Worldly Philosopher, by Jeremy Adelman. Tyler Cowen offers praise although he is only partly into it. I finished it, which is something I am guessing few others will do, although I imagine a lot of people will make some sort of attempt. My reactions:
1. Reading about Hirschman reminded me of my father. 1920’s Berlin and 1920’s St. Louis were both cities where assimilated German Jews tried to distance themselves from the more backward/traditional Russian Jews, and neither my father nor Hirschman identified with traditional Judaism. Hirschman grew up in an assimilated family (although the family covered up his father’s Ostjuden background), whereas my father’s parents were blatantly Polish-Russian and therefore embarrassing to him. Both Hirschman and my father had sisters who were staunch Communists, and both had their career opportunities limited in the McCarthy era. Both Hirschman and my father specialized in Latin America. Both lacked mathematical tools and instead relied on a broad-based humanistic approach, including psychology and literature. My guess is that their paths would have crossed had my father not deserted research for administration just as Hirschman’s career took off. Both were skeptical of universal laws in social science. One of my father’s favorite sayings was what he called the First Iron Law of Social Science: sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.
2. Success is contingent. It is easy to imagine Hirschman with a Nobel Prize. It is also easy to imagine him never emerging from obscurity. On p. 447, Adelman quotes Gordon Tullock’s scathing (we would now say snarky) review of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.
clearly there is room in the literature for a 155-page book on the responses of customers to declining efficiency on the part of their suppliers, and on the differences between changes in quality and changes in price. Unfortunately, this is not the book.
As Adelman points out, Hirschman (unlike Tullock, I might add) left behind few disciples, much less a complete “school.”
3. Adelman develops the theme that much of Hirschman’s appeal was literary. Like a highbrow novelist, he gave the reader a sense of pride in being able to appreciate his word plays and allusions.
4. Perhaps Hirschman’s most admirable achievement was the one he liked least to discuss: his involvement in the black market in Marseilles in 1940 to extricate prominent Jews from Hitler’s Europe.
Angus Burgin on The Great Persuasion
Interviewed by Russ Roberts, Burgin says,
if you argue that you have an abstract logic that’s universally true, that you can derive wholly from thoughts within your head, if other people don’t believe that they share that logic, you are going to have an enormously difficult time convincing them that you are right. And Friedman said, in contrast, what I can do, my method, is I can say: Okay, we both share the same end; we share the end of the well-being of the poor; but I think that if you examine the data, I can show you that my way of organizing society will be more successful at achieving that than your way. And whether or not one buys into how Friedman read the data, Friedman was adamant that that mode of argumentation was much more likely to get somebody to rethink the views that they already hold than a mode that proceeds based on an abstract logic alone.
And here is a quote that’s a keeper:
this representation of ideas as being scientifically based that aren’t necessarily so can happen on the right and on the left. And the one uniform thing is that it bothers colleagues on the other side of the aisle who watch it occurring.
Toward the end, Burgin contrasts the pessimistic outlook that he associates with Hayek with the optimistic outlook that he associates with Friedman. Hayek resonated in the Depression era and again after the financial crisis. Friedman resonated in better times. I am reminded of one of my favorite Scott Sumner blog posts, and my response to it.
I may have to give Burgin’s book another chance. My first impression was that I would not like the author’s framing of the subject.