Category Archives: Books

Fun Fact of the Day

Posted on December 28, 2012 | Comments Off on Fun Fact of the Day

Lyndon Johnson had an Aunt Frank. She “had been given a man’s name because her parents had been hoping for a son[.]” (Robert Caro, Master of the Senate, p. 419.)

That’s just cold.

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Posted in Books

An Important Distinction

Posted on December 14, 2012 | Comments Off on An Important Distinction

Master of the Senate, the third volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, opens with a lengthy history of the world’s greatest deliberative body from America’s founding up to Johnson’s time. On page 44, describing the end of a lengthy period of Senatorial stagnation in the early 20th century, Caro writes about how leadership deliberated:

The “Senate Four” or the “Big Four,” as they were known, still met in summer at Aldrich’s great castle in Narragansett, near Newport – four aging men in stiff high white collars and dark suits (Aldrich, being at home, might occasionally unbend to wear a blazer) even on the hottest days, sitting on a colonnaded porch in rockers and wicker chairs deciding Republican policy – a policy that was still based on an unshaken belief in laissez-faire and the protective tariff.

Caro is a masterful biographer and a fine writer, but he is sometimes a little confused on economics. Protective tariffs are government interventions in the market, and therefore the precise opposite of laissez-faire. Then, as now, Republican leaders were much more pro-business than pro-market. This is an important distinction to make. Failing to make it can lead to egregious — and avoidable — errors.

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Posted in Books, Economics

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Quote of the Day

Posted on December 12, 2012 | 1 comment

lyndon johnson
Courtesy of Lyndon Johnson, from the introduction of Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate:

It’s not the job of a politician to go around saying principled things.

Indeed.

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Posted in Books, Political Animals

A Rational View of the Presidency

Posted on October 18, 2012 | 2 comments

Back in 2008, Gene Healy wrote a book called Cult of the Presidency. It was an election year, so naturally many people thought it was an anti-Bush polemic. But it wasn’t about Bush. It wasn’t about any president, really. It was about how people view the presidency itself.

Gene’s thesis is that people have unrealistically high expectations for the office. Expectations so high that no man can meet them. But in trying to meet them, that man will grab for more and more power. As he inevitably fails to make voters’ hopes and dreams come true, he will decline in popularity until a fresher face takes his place. And that fresher face will grab for still more power, and disappoint even more people. It’s a remarkably vicious cycle.

When Gene wrote the book, he had no idea Barack Obama would win the Democratic nomination. But win it Obama did, in large part by tapping into voters’ unrealistic expectations for what the office can accomplish. Now that four years have gone by, he has institutionalized and expanded Bush-era abuses of power. He is also decidedly less popular than he used to be (though this writer still expects him to win a second term).

Obama’s Republican opponents have suffered from a tiresome Obama Derangement Syndrome from the very beginning. But even Obama’s supporters have lost much of their enthusiasm. He didn’t keep all those grand promises he made. More to the point: he couldn’t possibly keep them.

It’s not in Gene’s nature to say “I told you so.” But he does have a new e-book that came out today that updates Cult of the Presidency. His thesis has only become more compelling now that enough time has come by for it to be tested. I’ve only just begun reading the book, but a passage from the introduction makes it clear just how prescient he was in 2008, well before he even knew who the candidates would be:

If the Obama presidency has driven Americans mad, perhaps that’s because we’ve embraced a demented notion of the presidency itself.

It’s childish to blame this state of affairs on the powerlust of individual presidents or the fecklessness of particular Congresses. Presidents reliably lust for power; Congress is dependably feckless. But the Pogo Principle is the soundest explanation for what the presidency has become: We the People have met the enemy, and it is us. We built this…

[O]ver the course of the 20th century, the modern president had become “our guardian angel, our shield against harm . . . . He’s America’s shrink and social worker and our national talk-show host. He’s a guide for the perplexed, a friend to the downtrodden–and he’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.”

I’ll it say for him: he told you so. You can buy the book for less than four dollars here.

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Posted in Books, Elections, Executive Power, Political Animals

Different Visions of Honesty

Posted on October 5, 2012 | Comments Off on Different Visions of Honesty

David Hume was the exemplar of Enlightenment thought. In one of philosophy’s oddest couples, he was good friends for a time with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who did much to inspire the Romantic movement that arose in reaction against the Enlightenment. Here is one way in which they differed:

Rousseau and Hume were, at one time, the best of friends. But they had a falling out that made waves throughout Europe. The way both men reacted was indicative of their very different philosophical systems:

While both writers invoked the claim of honesty, the word meant very different things to the opposing camps. For Suard and, of course, for Hume, honesty entailed scientific and empirical method – above all, a rigorous fidelity to texts and contexts. On the other hand, Rousseau measured honesty by inward feeling and the subjective criterion of sentiment. The distance between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment can be measured in this confrontation of methods.

-Robert Zaresky and John T. Scott, The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding, location 2756 in the Kindle edition.

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Posted in Books, Great Thinkers, Philosophy

The Dark Ages Weren’t so Dark, and Neither Is Modernity

Posted on August 26, 2012 | 1 comment

I’m currently reading Barbarians to Angels by Peter Wells, which is a mostly successful attempt to rehabilitate the Dark Ages’ dismal reputation. The written sources are mostly from the Roman perspective, so one understands their rampant pessimism. Wells, an archaeologist, prefers a different historiographical method: archaeology. There is more to history than mere texts.

Roman inventions such as concrete were lost, and though literacy did not disappear, it wasn’t anywhere near where it was in Roman times; there was decline. But civilization did not die. International trade stayed alive, and with it the swirling exchange of ideas, customs, religions, and inventions that accompany commerce. Artifacts from as far away as India, Sri Lanka, and China have been found in Dark Age sites in Sweden and Ireland.

The visual arts remained vibrant, even if the written arts didn’t. Of course, illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells provided their own vibrancy, even if in their illustrations and not in their actual text.

All in all, Wells has not persuaded me that early medieval Europe was the technological and cultural equal of the Roman Empire. But he has certainly vanquished the myth that the Dark Ages were as dark as the popular imagination believes.

Much as I love history, the real reason for this post is to point out just how well we moderns have it. In chapter 12, Wells writes the following about one of the 8th century’s greatest scholars:

The most prominent scholar of this period was Bede, a man of Anglo-Saxon origins who was born in northern England about 672 and died in 735. At the age of seven he entered the monastery that was based at the neighboring sites of Wearmouth and Jarrow, in Northumbria, just at the time that this monastic complex was reaching its apex of cultural achievement. The library at the monastery contained some five hundred books, making it on of the most extensive in Europe at the time.

Let’s put this in context. My Kindle e-reader, which fits in my hand, can hold more books than the finest library in all of 8th-century Europe had to offer. Just imagine what a mind of Bede’s caliber could accomplish with today’s intellectual resources.

That’s not all. Now think about today’s 7-billion-strong global population, and compare it to the fewer than one billion people alive in Bede’s time. There are at least an order of magnitude more people alive today with Bede-level intellects. And most of them have access to university libraries and the Internet. What will they accomplish?

We truly live in amazing times.

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Posted in Books, History, Innovation

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The Devil Test

Posted on July 11, 2012 | Comments Off on The Devil Test

One of my few regrets from my time at George Mason University is that I never took a class from Peter Boettke. To make up for it, I recently started reading his new book, Living Economics. His enthusiasm for economics and ideas is as contagious as ever. Even better, he shares many ways to teach those ideas; the book is for teachers as well as students.

One of those teaching ideas is the devil test. It is as good a way to explain the difference between positive and normative analysis as I’ve heard, which is why I’m sharing it here.

First, the positive-normative dichotomy. Positive is objective; normative is subjective. Positive is describing the world as it actually is; normative is describing how one would like the world to be. Think of it as the difference between is and should.

Now the devil test. As Boettke puts it on p. 28, “Using the example of minimum wage or rent control, I demonstrate to students that the analysis could be agreed upon by either an angel or a devil, but the angel and devil would differ on the normative implications.”

Clever. Now let’s put minimum wage laws to the devil test. The minimum wage gives some workers a raise, but it also prices other people out of the workplace entirely, especially younger workers. On net, minimum wage laws are a regressive wealth transfer. The absolutely poor give up their wages entirely so their slightly better-off fellows can get a raise. Those being the objective facts on the ground, angel and devil agree on the positive analysis.

But they part ways on the normative. The angel, who opposes regressive wealth transfers, opposes high minimum wage laws. The devil embraces them, and rejoices at every increase.

I’m not very far in to the book yet, but nuggets of wisdom like that abound.

 

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Posted in Books, Economics

The U.S. Biological Survey: How Species Become Endangered

Posted on July 7, 2012 | Comments Off on The U.S. Biological Survey: How Species Become Endangered

Two interesting factoids from chapter 3 of Clarence Birdseye’s biography:

The U.S. Biological Survey, founded in 1885, was a branch of the Department of Agriculture largely engaged in the wholesale extermination of wild animals considered a nuisance by farmers and ranchers. Its leading victims were wolves and coyotes, and it hired hunters and trappers to kill them… There was considerable controversy about the vicious steel traps that would hold an animal by the leg until it starved to death.

And:

In fact, one of the main missions of the 1973 Endangered Species Act was for the Department of the Interior to bring back all the animal populations it had destroyed at the beginning of the century with the U.S. Biological Survey.

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Posted in Books, The New Religion

Clarence Birdseye: An Unsung Hero Gets His Due

Posted on July 6, 2012 | Comments Off on Clarence Birdseye: An Unsung Hero Gets His Due


Modernity is amazing. We are surrounded by innovations, gadgets, and ideas that make life better. And just as a fish doesn’t notice the water he swims through, we are often oblivious to the incredible things that surround us. For example, we used to only be able to eat certain foods when they were in season. If your grandparents had a hankering for asparagus when they were young, they could only satisfy it if it was April or May. If they wanted a tomato, they’d have to wait until summertime.

Today, we can eat whatever we want, when we want. People don’t really appreciate it, but for most of human history, that just wasn’t possible. It takes all kinds of technologies to make that happen. Faster transportation is one of them. Trains, planes, automobiles, and boats with engines rather than oars make it possible to ship fresh food from all over the world to supermarkets.

Think about that for a minute. Julius Caesar and Napoleon’s armies may have lived nearly two millennia apart, but they moved at the same speed limit: no faster than a horse. Just two centuries after Napoleon – one tenth the temporal distance between him and Caesar — people can cross oceans in a matter of hours. So can their food.

Refrigeration is another key technology. By preventing food from spoiling, people need to grow less of it to stay fed, and it extends the useful life of food. The sanitary and culinary benefits are incalculable.

Which brings us to Clarence Birdseye. He’s the fellow who invented fast-freezing, and before today I hadn’t heard of him, either. Most people admire politicians or athletes, or entertainers. Many athletes and entertainers have their virtues, but more people should look up to unsung heroes like Clarence Birdseye. After all, he changed the world for the better.

Refrigerators can keep food fresh for a week or two longer than in the open air. But to enjoy fresh food out of season, it takes more than refrigeration. It even takes more than regular old freezing. It takes fast-freezing, done in a very particular way.

Birdseye spent a long time perfecting the process. But when he founded Bird’s Eye Frosted Foods in 1930, it was a revelation. Abigail Meisel writes in her review of a new Birdseye biography by Mark Kurlansky, “For the first time, June sweet peas and summer blueberries could be savored, in close-to-fresh form, in the dead of winter. By the mid-1940s, Americans were eating over 800 million pounds of fast-­frozen food a year.”

People talk a lot about helping other people and making their lives better. Clarence Birdseye actually went out and did it.

Hopefully people will pick up Kurlansky’s book and learn how remarkable are the little things are that we take for granted every day. There are a lot of people like Clarence Birdseye in the world. They deserve a round of applause.

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Posted in Books, Innovation

“America’s scorn for skills is extraordinary.”

Posted on June 26, 2012 | Comments Off on “America’s scorn for skills is extraordinary.”

The Economist aptly sums up America’s immigration policy.

Don Boudreaux, on page 32 of his wonderful new book, writes that “Free societies build bridges, not walls.”As on so many issues, one is better off siding with Don and The Economist than with nativists.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Immigration