James M. Cain – The Postman Always Rings Twice
This short 1934 book helped give birth to the modern detective noir genre. Much popular literature of the period was on the vanilla side; this one was downright scandalous, with murder, adultery, and drunken car crashes looming large in the plot. Think of this book as a predecessor to today’s hard-boiled, Elmore Leonard-style stories. While not entirely to my taste, the sleazy story does have its low-brow appeal, to which I am not immune.
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Posted in Books, Literature
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Complete Sherlock Holmes
The audio version, narrated by Stephen Fry, is a delight. I enjoyed the Benedict Cumberbatch BBC series a few years ago, and Fry’s radio programs on Victorian culture sparked an interest in reading some primary source material. Though lengthy—four novels and countless short stories—this collection made driving, exercising, and doing chores go by much more quickly. I also followed along on the Kindle edition, which is free.
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Posted in Books, History, Literature, Uncategorized
Most regulations are issued by the executive branch, not Congress. This limits their accountability to elected officials. Bills such as the REINS Act seek to address this by requiring Congress to vote on major new agency regulations (see my 2016 paper on REINS). One objection to REINS is that it would require an additional 40 to 50 congressional votes per year; Congress often has too much on its plate as it is. Herbert A. Simon foresaw that objection several decades ago on p. 65 of the 4th edition (1997) of 1947’s Administrative Behavior (emphasis in original):
Second, the fact that pressure of legislative work forbids the review of more than a few administrative decisions does not destroy the usefulness of sanctions that permit the legislative body to hold the administrator answerable for any of his decisions.
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Posted in Books, Economics, regulation, Transparency
Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities
Those two cities being London and Paris. Their differences in character were put in stark contrast by the French Revolution; cool London and hot France could not be more different. Dickens’ characters find themselves in the middle of all kinds of duality. Not just Revolution and ancien regime, but rich and poor, young and old, and past and future all come into play. Dickens, while occasionally sappy, conventional, and a little too PG-rated to give a truly vivid picture of the times, still manages to convey good insight about the value of keeping a level head during turbulent times, even as his characters tend to be studies of contrast rather than nuance.
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Posted in Books, History, Law, Uncategorized
Richard Thaler – Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
Part Thaler’s career autobiography, and part biography of the field of behavioral economics. Thaler is coauthor of Nudge with Cass Sunstein, and won the 2017 economics Nobel. He is also an excellent popular writer, which the profession could use more of. His tone is friendly and conversational, he uses frequent humor, and he explains concepts in an engaging way, while also giving plenty of attention to the sometimes quirky personalities behind those ideas.
While I do recommend this book, behavioral economics is not nearly as radical or subversive as Thaler sells it to be. Nor do his normative conclusions entirely hold up. Adam Smith himself rejected the Homo economicus model, and Frank Knight’s 1921 landmark Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit is essentially a sustained debunking of the standard model that runs for 375 pages. Hayek and Keynes, for all their disagreements, were united in having little use for the perfect competition model. Hayek’s spontaneous order is about flexibility, adaptation, and imperfect knowledge –all of which the perfect competition model denies. Keynes’ phrase “animal spirits” perfectly captures an important factor in economic life, and is similarly incompatible with perfect competition.
Thaler also clearly takes umbrage at the most common criticism of his nudging proposals. It runs as follows:
Thaler does not substantively address this criticism, but he does flash some temper. It clearly strikes a nerve. He also reacts precisely as he accuses his opponents of doing to his arguments—dismissing it with a “wave of the invisible hand,” as he terms it. This refusal to engage a major criticism is the book’s biggest flaw.
Economists and policymakers would do well to listen to Thaler and other behavioral economists’ insights on psychology and human behavior. They should also keep in mind that nudgers are just as fallible as the people they hope to nudge. A large top-down error is hard to undo; millions of smaller bottom-up errors by individuals tend to cancel out by dint of their large number. Even the largest on-the-ground individual error is positively benign compared to what a politician or an agency error could impose on millions of individuals.
In short: Thaler’s work is valuable for the is, but likely more harmful than helpful when it gets to the ought phase. His ideas are very much worth engaging, and this book delivers them superbly.
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Posted in Books, Economics, Uncategorized
James S. A. Corey – Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, Book 1)
The Expanse is a science fiction show I recently discovered and rather enjoy. People began colonizing the solar system a few centuries before the series begins. Earth is under a global UN government and prosperous, if corrupt. Mars declared its independence some time ago. It was not peaceful, and tension lingers. Out in the, ahem, expanse of the asteroid belt and beyond is where this book takes place.
People have colonized asteroids, several moons around Jupiter and Saturn, and built several major space stations. Roughly 100 million people live in the Belt, but is small and backwards compared to Earth’s 30 billion population. Resources such as air and water are precious, and despite incredible solar system-wide wi-fi, the Belt isn’t as prosperous as the inner planets. Life is hard and dangerous, and a lot of decent people are also kind of sketchy; they have to be. Life expectancy for Belters is just 68, compared to 123 on Earth. native-born Belters are noticeably taller and skinnier than Inners due to growing up in lower gravity, marking them apart physically as well as culturally. They have been in space long enough to develop their own distinct patois, which is one of several nice touches that describe their growing cultural distance from Earth.
The Belters do not have an independent nation, but there is an IRA-style independence movement, the Outer Planet Alliance, or OPA. It is decentralized, uncoordinated, often violent, doesn’t necessarily have a clear leader, and is prone to factions and infighting. Inner planet governments have various interests and presences throughout the Belt. Sometimes they treat Belters well, and sometimes they don’t. Same with numerous mining companies, security contractors, and other businesses.
The protagonists are a plucky four-person ship crew who have origins from across the system, plus a hard-boiled Belter ex-detective from Ceres Station. They have different personality types and different philosophies, and while they are mostly good they also have their flaws. Through no fault of their own, they find themselves right in the middle of these tricky geopolitical dynamics. They try to stop a brewing system-wide three-way war while dealing with a number of other potentially lethal plot developments.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is enough of a fan that when the SyFy channel declined to renew The Expanse for a fourth season, he brought the show over to Amazon’s Prime streaming service. I enjoyed watching the first three seasons recently, and saw that the books on which it is based were on sale. The show is not a shot-for-shot remake of the books, though some parts did read like a retread. On the plus side, books have fewer space, time, and special effects budget constraints than television, so the characters and the fictional universe are developed more fully than in the show. The science parts of the science fiction are not this series’ drawing card, but they are more thoroughly explained and are apparently quite accurate, at least by speculative fiction standards.
I enjoyed it enough that I will continue with the book series, and will carve out some time for the tv show’s new season when that comes out later this year. Highly recommended if you’re into that sort of thing.
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Posted in Books, Literature, Science
Amity Shlaes – Coolidge
Presidents are often unremarkable people. They also often make for uninteresting biographies–Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson being a notable exception. Biographers also tend to glorify presidents who are in office during wars or economic disasters; most presidential rankings reliably improve when reversed. The best presidents are the ones who do little, and thus do little harm. They help quiet and stable times stay that way. They are also often forgotten—as, frankly, presidents should be. The executive branch has long been too powerful and too glorified.
That is precisely why Coolidge makes an interesting subject, and Shlaes does a good job with the material. Lyndon Johnson had a president’s typical bad qualities almost to the point of caricature; Coolidge’s quiet and calm make him come across as the anti-LBJ. He almost comes across as though he did not want to be there. Yet he still willingly climbed the ladder: Massachusetts State Representative, Mayor, State Senator (and President of the State Senate), Lieutenant Governor, Governor, Vice President, and President. Pretensions to the contrary, he was a career politician. Part of his reputation comes from the fact that he first became President accidentally, when President Warren G. Harding died unexpectedly in 1923. Coolidge ran for and won his own full term on purpose, though he declined to run for a second.
That contradiction–that “I don’t want to be here, but I made it my life’s work to be here”–is a source of unresolved tension. Coolidge is a bit of a sphinx, and not necessarily in the Silent Cal way he was remembered. Shlaes’ biography focuses more on politics than personality, which suits her subject’s personality. But it would have benefited from more analysis of this part of Coolidge’s character.
Coolidge was also surprisingly tech-savvy. Shlaes notes that not only was Coolidge the first president to give a public address on radio, it was not a one-time experiment. He gave more than 500 radio speeches during his presidency, or roughly two per week, which is quite loquacious for a man nicknamed Silent Cal.
Coolidge was also not the free-market hero some libertarians have made him out to be in recent years. Shlaes is quite plain about this, yet has been accused of writing a free-market hagiography. This made me reluctant to pick up her book, and I’m glad I was not ultimately dissuaded. Coolidge, despite his penny-pinching reputation, did not shrink the federal government. It merely grew more slowly under his watch than under Woodrow Wilson or Herbert Hoover’s. If Coolidge was laissez-faire, it was in comparative terms, not absolute terms. He was also no free trader. He used powers granted him under the 1922 Fordney-McCumber tariff bill, which passed when he was vice president, to raise trade barriers. In proportional terms, Fordney-McCumber was an even larger tariff increase than the more famous 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff.
To Coolidge’s credit, he was progressive on racial issues by the standard of his time, intentionally declining to nominate known Ku Klux Klan members to any position in his government. Though Coolidge was not particularly vocal on racial issues, that was seen as a deliberate statement at the time.
Coolidge also gave his activist Commerce Secretary, Herbert Hoover, a long enough leash to enact a host of interventionist measures. These presaged Hoover’s doubling of real federal spending, one-third money supply contraction (and accompanying rapid deflation), and Smoot-Hawley that would follow when Hoover succeeded Coolidge.
Outside of politics, Coolidge seems to have been a decent man. This is also rare among presidents. He was a loyal husband, and did not mix very well with the philandering Harding. He was also a caring father, and he lost a son, age 11, while in office. The boy cut himself while playing outside on the White House grounds and the resulting infection, easily curable today with penicillin, was mortal. Coolidge mourned deeply, well beyond what the stoic standards of the time allowed. He never seemed quite the same after the loss. The happiest moment of his presidency seems to have been a family vacation he took out West, far removed from day-to-day affairs. His retirement was similarly slow-paced, though rather lucrative, with several board memberships and a weekly column paying for an upscale home. He would live there until his 1933 death, four years after leaving office.
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Posted in Books, History, Political Animals, Uncategorized
Nathan H. Lents – Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes
A book that can be amusing, but also points out the limitations of design without a designer. That said, organisms as they are almost certainly far better off than if they were the products of design with a designer. Well worth a read for that reason, but mostly because it’s fun to know about bodily quirks and maladies we all share for no apparent reason. Part of reading this book is taking a bit of delight in our own misfortunes.
We humans are doomed to have bad knees and back problems because the human body is not fully adapted to bipedalism. Our lack of a protruding snout (facial prognathism), such as most other animals have, dooms us to endless colds and sinus infections. We have the same piping back there as other animals, but in us it is compressed and shifted around in ways no plumber would design. This evolutionary quirk is why we get sick so often, even as our household cats and dogs rarely do.
One minor, Seinfeld-esque example I found personally relevant is that some people have the ability to voluntarily control a small muscle near the ear drum, causing a low rumbling sound kind of like muffled thunder. I am one of those people. The weird part is because it’s just a small muscle flexing inside one’s head, nobody else can hear the rumbling, even though to the hearer it can be loud enough to drown out conversation. It also has an involuntary component, in my case triggered by yawning, sneezing, and bright lights–those mouth and eye movements also work the muscle in question. I’ve silently wondered since childhood what causes this; it’s apparently just a random mutation some people have. Other readers will likely have similar “oh, that’s what that is!” moments.
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Posted in Books, Science, Uncategorized
Amity Shlaes – The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
It’s in part about FDR’s presidency, but more about the country and the times than the man himself. William Graham Sumner first coined the term “The forgotten man” in 1876 to describe people who neither voted for nor benefited from spending programs, but paid for them anyway. FDR later used the term in a very different way, to describe people who were hurting during the Depression and not getting the help they needed. This sharp change in direction is a theme of the times, and of Shlaes’ book.
FDR wasn’t particularly ideological, and as a result many New Deal policies were scattershot and worked against each other, rather than with each other. The result was absurdities such as crops being plowed under to raise food prices for farmers, even as people were hungry and cash-poor.
Despite their contradictions, many New Deal policies have common themes. They tend to increase federal power relative to state and local power; they grow government on net far more often than they shrink it; and they emphasize top-down direction rather than bottom-up adaptation. This even led to officially sanctioned cartels, after forty years of antitrust policy enforcement intended to break them up. This cartel approach was openly acknowledged to have been inspired by Mussolini.
But there is far more to the story of the Depression than FDR. Just as he gets more praise than he deserves, so too does he get more criticism than he deserved. The single biggest cause of the Depression was a one-third contraction in the money supply during the 1920s. The resulting deflation led prices to change for reasons completely unrelated to supply and demand, and led to all kinds of mistaken financial decisions and investments. The 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, passed shortly after the stock market crash, killed international trade and raised international tensions at the worst possible time. President Herbert Hoover, usually remembered as a free market supporter, doubled federal spending in real terms in just four years.
All this happened before FDR took office. He and his brain trust inherited an amazing mess, which might partially explain their general ethos of throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. They had no precedent to work from, people were scared, and nobody knew what to do.
Politics also played a role, and in the usual negative way. For example, demographers knew from the start that the 1935 Social Security Act would create a program that was not sustainable in the long run. The worker-to-retiree ratio would lower over time, and would cause massive structural deficits for future generations. FDR acknowledged this in writing, dismissing it for the same reason President Trump waves off deficit concerns today: he’ll be out of office by the time it becomes a problem.We are that future generation, and Social Security’s present value deficit is measured well into the tens of trillions of dollars—in part because a presidential election was coming up more than 80 years ago.
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Posted in Books, Economics, History, Uncategorized
Herbert Spencer – Social Statics: The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and The First of Them Developed
Spencer was only about 30 when he wrote this 1851 book. Frankly, it shows. His thoughts on land and property rights are a muddled mess, which was common in those days, though his system stands out even among that disappointing lot. Spencer’s overall thought is much better. In a nutshell, it is classical liberalism heavily influenced by the natural sciences and especially evolution. It is full of nuances and subtleties that are easy to miss or misinterpret—something many of his critics almost seem to have done intentionally.
At this early point in his career, Spencer didn’t quite have the full command of the implications of his own philosophy, nor had he developed the ability to phrase them tactfully. He also shared some sloppy intellectual tendencies common to Victorian Britain, for example thinking of many nationalities or races as groups rather than individuals. All Native Americans, for example, apparently have hot tempers, according to Spencer. Though he rightly complained about being misunderstood, there are places where Spencer dug his own grave.
Despite these cringe-worthy moments, Spencer was a very much a liberal, especially by the stuffy standards of his time. He favored equal rights for all individuals of all races (even ones with hot tempers), and for all women. This consistent liberalism was as rare as it is consistent, even in the age of John Stuart Mill.
He opposed colonization and empire, was an ardent abolitionist, and believed deeply in poverty relief, even as he thought government incapable of handling the task competently or fairly. While Spencer distinguished between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor, he still advocated helping even the people he tactlessly calls undeserving. They are individuals, and all individuals have the same rights. Spencer is nothing if not consistent and, in a weird and off-putting way, compassionate.
Despite his heavy reliance evolutionary thought, Spencer also opposed eugenics programs to improve the species. This means Spencer opposed the very thing he is most criticized for supporting. Eugenics would instead become popular among progressives a generation or so later. The idea would persist long enough that Gunnar Myrdal’s advocacy, for example, led to 60,000 of his fellow Swedes being sterilized, and he pushed for similar policies for African-Americans. Myrdal would co-win the economics Nobel—in 1974. Spencer’s reputation as a social Darwinist turns out to be untrue, something I was unsure of when I picked up the book, and was relieved to discover. Some of his ideological opponents turned out to be less innocent.
The confusion likely results in part from Spencer’s stated belief in evolutionary progress towards perfection, an idea that seems to me influenced by Condorcet’s exaggerated Enlightenment-style belief in progress leading inevitably to perfection, and a prefiguring of economic equilibrium theory along the lines of what Walras would popularize during Spencer’s lifetime. The fact that Social Statics pre-dates Darwin means that few people had a sophisticated understanding of how natural selection works, let alone the ability to apply it to social processes, such as customs and norms. Spencer would have greatly profited from having access to the works not just of Darwin and Huxley, but later thinkers such as Sagan, Dennett, or Dawkins.
Spencer also used the term “fitness” not as a positive or negative value judgment, but as a descriptor. An herbivore with flat teeth is more fit to its plant-based diet than one with sharp teeth. Regardless of one’s personal opinion on the matter, this will show in their survival rates. One type of business or person is not inherently better than another, according to Spencer. But a business with lower prices will attract more customers in world where that’s what customers prefer. A person who works hard is more fit to a society that rewards hard work, and poorly fitted to one that punishes it. This will be true regardless of whether one thinks this a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a little bit like how many people struggle to tell the difference between a fact an opinion.
Another is a confusion between thinking in terms of groups versus thinking in terms of individuals. Spencer does seem to have believed in inherent racial differences. Such groups share common characteristics. I do not share this belief, nor do most people today. Despite this group-thinking, Spencer’s entire system is based on individual rights. Regardless of what group a person comes from, an individual has the same rights as all other individuals, and deserves to have those rights respected. But even where Spencer is flat-out wrong in his group-thinking, he remains an individualist. Spencer could have avoided this trap by simply taking the modern view that every individual is different regardless of what socially constructed group they belong to. But at least he believed in everyone’s individual rights.
I’ve only read selections of Spencer’s later works. Time permitting, I look forward to finding out if his thought, ahem, evolved out of its immature aspects and Victorian conventions in Social Statics, or if I will continue to roll my eyes at some parts while being moved in others by his compassion and drive to make things better for as many people as possible, regardless of race or gender.
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Posted in Books, Economics, Philosophy
Inertia Wins! 