Razib Khan, a likely high-draft-choice FIT, offers a list of 15 books that influenced him. I have read five of them–which is much more than one would expect–but oddly enough, only two of them really stuck with me: Albion’s Seed and The Secret of Our Success. Those books also “left deep grooves in my mind,” to use Razib’s phrase.
FITs stars among the authors listed include Henrich, Steven Pinker (although I go with The Blank Slate), Jerry Muller (The Mind and the Market is so far my favorite of his), and Matt Ridley.
Does Jared Diamond belong on the draft board? Guns, Germs, and Steel is worth reading. But I think the market over-values him, so I am inclined to stay away from him in a FITs contest.
Thomas Sowell is nowhere on Razib’s list. For me, The Vision of the Anointed is the most influential of Sowell’s books, but if you pick another of Sowell’s works I won’t hold it against you. He’ll definitely go in the first round. Check out this recent documentary, narrated by Jason Riley.
Fantasy drafts include over-valued players all the time (in football rookies and splash free agents are almost always overvalued). Avoiding these traps is part of what increases the value of skill during the drafting process.
Re: “left deep grooves in my mind.” This criterion of influence reminds me that the FIT League scoring system rewards public performance in a season rather than deep or long-term impact.
It would be fascinating to learn what cultural products most influenced (a) AskBlog readers and (b) FIT League draft candidates.
Here is my off-the-cuff list of what left deep grooves in my mind, if I know myself. The list betrays my age. I include songs, films, novels, and works of philosophy and social science. Different genres cut deeply at different stages of life. I know that the works listed under adulthood left deep grooves in my mind because they moved me to devour every other work by the artist or author.
CHILDHOOD
Mad Magazine and Spiderman. I couldn’t wait for new issues as a child. The magazine was delightfully cynical, the comic book poignant fantasy – and both revenge of the nerds.
Ray Charles, That Lucky Old Sun. Freedom as deliverance.
Stevie Wonder, A Place in the Sun. A beautiful vision of freedom.
Bob Dylan, Chimes of Freedom. A sublime vision of freedom.
Paul McCartney, Blackbird. It’s never too late for freedom.
John Lennon, Revolution. Anti-propaganda.
John Lennon, Strawberry Fields Forever. Luckily, unlike many, I took this song as a cautionary tale. Literal meaning: “Let me take you down.” My takeaway: “Don’t let friends pull you down.”
Rolling Stones, Ruby Tuesday. Tension between freedom and commitment.
ADOLESCENCE
Dante Alighieri, Inferno. Unlike worldly criminal justice (incarceration), metaphorical punishments (a) communicate how each sin is wrong and (b) don’t harm innocent persons who depend on the wrongdoer.
Giacomo Leopardi, Canti. The life of the mind, intimately examined.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Things catch up with you.
Little Big Man. Might makes wrong; and gems of strategic interaction:
“Jack Crabb: General, you go down there.
General Custer: You’re advising me to go into the Coulee?
Jack Crabb: Yes, sir.
General Custer: There are no Indians there, I suppose.
Jack Crabb: I didn’t say that. There are thousands of Indians down there. And when they get done with you, there won’t be nothing left but a greasy spot. This ain’t the Washite River, General, and them ain’t helpless women and children waiting for you. They’re Cheyenne brave, and Sioux. You go down there if you’ve got the nerve.
General Custer: Still trying to outsmart me, aren’t you, mule-skinner? You want me to think that you don’t want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is you really don’t want me to go down there!”
The Godfather (1972 and 1974). Hard choices in high-stakes situations outside the law.
ADULTHOOD
Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (1975). Fundamental constraints.
Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978). Individualism and unintended consequences.
Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens (1979). Self-binding and its limits.
Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (1981). Moral psychology.
Tolstoy, War and Peace. Individualism.
C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (1984). The truth of empiricist history.
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (1986). Self-deception.
Robert Sugden, The Economics of Rights, Cooperation, and Welfare (1986). Behavioral economics and spontaneous order.
Robert C. Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (1991). Social norms in close-knit groups.
Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia (1992). Private protection, extortion, signaling, authenticity.
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994). The mind and society.
Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures (1996). Groups, norms, stereotypes.
Bryan Caplan, “The Economics of Szasz: Preferences, Constraints, and Mental Illness” (2006). Individual responsibility and its limits.
Arnold Kling, Crisis of Abundance (2006). The most reliable public intellectual in times of crisis.
Michael Munger, “Michael Munger on Price Gouging,” EconTalk (2007). Social puzzles.
Paul H. Robinson, Distributive Principles of Criminal Law: Who Should Be Punished How Much (2008). Legitimacy.
Gary Becker, Video, Becker and Foucault on Crime and Punishment (2013). Wow!
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom 3rd ed. (2014). The case for anarchy.
I forgot Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (1665), which I discovered c. 1995. A bottomless well of pithy insights into social psychology.
Strangely, I discovered David Friedman late, within the last ten years.
In the late 1980s, for several years I had the good fortune to teach a seminar about great books in the western tradition. It was a matter of staying a step ahead of bright students! Texts that blew my mind were Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War; Montaigne, Essays; Descartes, Discourse on Method; Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature); J.S. Mill (essays); and Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. IMO Thucydides is the most neglected, underrated author in the old canon.
I screwed up the formatting, so I reposted below.
Thank you John Alcorn for this. Very interesting. Will possibly add some of these titles to the pile.
Your observation about FIT being near term I think hits the mark. I think that I have been mentally resisting FLT a bit because what I had been hoping for was something like a hall of fame and less day-to-day action, but nevertheless, there is room for both and the near term does help focus on what is new and interesting.
Spent a decade with borrowing privileges at a world class library and tried to make the most of it. Perhaps because of that I have forgotten the names of some books that really left a mark. A book on entomology by a scholar in India that examined the differences between social and eusocial insects is one I wish I could rediscover. And a poem about a guy in a visa interview whose case officer has set her snacks and tea down on his case file is another.
Novels have generally made the deepest impressions on me. George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are favorites. As are the Russians and the Dutch. For the former, Tolstoy, especially Anna Karenina but I have read War and Peace three times and am entranced by Hadji Murad, but Dostoyevsky, and so many others. Gary Saul Morson’s essays in The New Criterion exploring the themes of these novels are wonderfully insightful.Of the Dutch, I will mention The Assault and The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch and The Tea Lords by Hella Haasse.
Political books all seem to get jumbled in my mind, but the during the last year or two I have been newly influenced by or returned to repeatedly:
Amartya Sen: Development as Freedom
F.H. Buckley: Fair Governance, Just Exchange, and The American Illness
Arend Lijphart: Patterns of Democracy
Robert A. Dahl: On Democracy
Roger Kimball: Lives of the Mind
Rachel Foxley: The Levellers
The best books are the ones I read for fun that don’t really have an argument but are full of adventure and discovery. Not sure if they have an influence other than to encourage indulgence of the desire to travel.
Edgar,
George Eliot! Yes!
Re: Roger Kimball. I grew up around commercial artists who wisely revered the Old Masters. Therefore, I especially enjoyed Kimball’s lampoon of post-modern academic art history, The Rape of the Masters.
Robin Hanson, on readings that leave deep grooves in the mind:
Interviewer: “All right, so War and Peace favorite fiction. What about your favorite non-fiction?”
Robin Hanson: “So those are going to be things that at a particular point in my life were a revelation to me. For example, Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind was a revelation to me at a particular point in my life, but I don’t know that it is some absolute thing. Herbert Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, you know, that was an insight to me at a particular point in my life; I understood that. But, you know, over time, the more you know, the less that any one book can really shock you and show you a lot of things, because you learned a lot. And that’s not the fault of the book so much, as what you’ve learned.”– The Neurological Black Pill [Interview of Robin Hanson] (13 February 2021), cue time 00:38:23.
Link to video of interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIHcQ9jv1rM
Greg Cochran had a pretty thorough takedown of GGS: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/guns-germs-and-steel-revisited/
worth reading. The takedown that is… the book is pretty silly.