Motley Crue – The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band
This collective autobiography unintentionally provides powerful arguments for staying in school and not doing drugs. That said, it is quite entertaining. I read the whole thing despite not being a big fan of their music.
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Posted in Books, Music, Uncategorized
Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu – The Spirit of Laws
One of the most important texts of the French Enlightenment. Interested in human progress, Montesquieu sought out larger laws of history that might explain why some countries are rich and others poor, why some have despotic governments while others use a lighter touch, and why social customs differ—and how this might affect future progress.
Montesquieu also offers a defense of free trade, which he called doux commerce, or sweet or gentle commerce. The theory is that trade and economic interdependence foster peace and prevent war, a sentiment U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull very much had in mind in attempting to rebuild post-Depression trade infrastructure and prevent World War III.
Montesquieu also offers an early version of the quantity theory of money. Finally, he in ludes lengthy narrative histories of Roman and French law.
If all that sounds a little scattershot, that’s because it is. The book almost has a stream of consciousness quality, as though Montesquieu, like Montaigne before him, simply wrote down whatever arguments and facts he had in his head as he sat at his desk.
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Posted in Books, Economics, Law, Philosophy, Uncategorized
Giles Milton – When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain: History’s Unknown Chapters
A bit like going through a museum of curiosities—Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum especially comes to mind. The book consists of short vignettes about unusual and improbable happenings, and historical oddities both great and small. While quite morbid, Milton has a sharp sense of humor and an eye for the absurd.
Milton’s When Churchill Slaughtered Sheep and Stalin Robbed a Bank: History’s Unknown Chapters is more of the same.
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Posted in Books, History, Uncategorized
John Stuart Mill – Utilitarianism
More of a defense against critics than an explanation of what utilitarianism actually is. There are some good arguments here, but Mill’s main rebuttal to utilitarianism’s shortcomings is to treat them as exceptions, and largely carry on as before.
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John McWhorter – Words on the Move: Why English Won’t – and Can’t – Sit Still (Like, Literally)
I listened to the audio version, which McWhorter narrated himself. It is at once casual, funny, factual, and led me to a number of useful and fun intellectual tangents. We all know language changes over time. To people my age (born early 1980s), it sounds odd when older people pronounce “diabetes” as “diabeetus” or “horrible” as “hahr-ibble.” At the same time, many younger people pronounce words like “bit” and “bet” and “dawn” and “Don” in rhyme. Even well-defined regional accents change over time—the classic, often-mocked Brooklyn accent of pronouncing “work” as “woik” is mostly gone now.
Text messages and Twitter are part of a whole other linguistic evolution. McWhorter argues that their innovations have a common purpose of conveying ease and informality. To describe it more fully, he uses the acronym FACE for Factuality, Acknowledgment, Counterexpectation, and Easing. Language doesn’t just communicate information, it communicates social dynamics. All the “LOLs” and emojis in text messages closely imitate in-person spoken language—listen to the cadence, not the words, of any normal spoken conversation and the amount of laughter you will hear is absurd. This is important for texting—you can’t see or hear your correspondent, so verbalizing nonverbal language with LOLs and emojis is a way of compensating for it.
McWhorter doesn’t make this connection, but the overall trend of this evolution ties into Steven Pinker’s point in Better Angels of Our Nature about decreasing violence over time. A reason people today are less formal and more at ease with each other than previous generations is because the threat of violence is low; unlike in, say, medieval times or even the mid-20th century, a social gaffe or lack of proper deference is unlikely to result in bodily harm. People today are more relaxed in dress, speech, and culture because they an be.
Finally, today’s use of “like” as a near-constant verbal tic and “literally” to mean “figuratively” can be annoying, but they also have precedents going back a long way. Teddy Roosevelt’s use of the word “bully,” for example, was that era’s equivalent of having a president who says “dude” a lot. Language changes over time. It happens, and it cannot be stopped.
Linguistic change is also an example of spontaneous order in action—a Hayekian angle that also ties into Adam Smith’s famous essay on the origins of language, which could have been another useful avenue for McWhorter to stroll down.
One can infer from the length of this ewview that McWhorter provides a lot of fodder for thought beyond language, ranging from culture to evolution to psychology. I also recommend the audio version over the print edition.
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Posted in Books, Free Speech, Uncategorized
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne – The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
Really good. Bayesian reasoning isn’t as complicated as it sounds—it’s an approach, not a standardized equation. It is a way of calculating the odds of something happening when you don’t know much about it, and learning as you go.
Bayes himself, part of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment, used the example of dropping a ball on a random spot on a flat table, and finding out blind where it is. Have a friend drop other balls at random and report whether they are to the left or right of the original ball. With each drop, you learn more and can use that to better suss out where the original ball is. For example, if every dropped ball is to the original’s left, then you know it is somewhere on the far right of the table.
This way of thinking turns out to have many applications, from population censuses to deciphering codes to finding lost airplanes and submarines, to making more accurate cancer diagnoses, to the autocorrect in your smartphone, to Google’s language translators and targeted advertisements.
It also has enormous implications for certainty in quantitative reasoning—it is often more useful to have an approximate answer to the right question than a precise answer to the wrong question. But this lack of pure certainty has led many quantitative analysts to reject Bayesian reasoning, to the point where his name has until recently been almost unmentionable in polite circles. This mindset is similar to the Nirvana Fallacy in economics.
Besides putting this old boys’ club mentality its proper place, McGrayne tells the stories of Bayes and Simon LaPlace, the French Enlightenment mathematician who independently discovered Bayesian reasoning and probably deserves most of the credit.
She also introduces and humanizes many of the other major and minor personalities involved in Bayesian reasoning’s long and treacherous history, from Alan Turing, who cracked the Enigma code during World War II, to some of the more tradition-minded scientists who preferred precision at accuracy’s expense.
But she keeps in mind that Bayesianism is one useful tool among many in the scientist’s toolkit. Bayesianism is not gospel, and there is a need for human judgment too, a point Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey make in their book The Cult of Statistical Significance.
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Posted in Books, Economics, Science, Uncategorized
Kenneth Rapoza, in a Forbes column, quotes Iain Murray and me on trade:
“Over the past two years, President Trump doubled tariffs in the United States, allies and adversaries have reciprocated, and the economic effects are already visible,” Competitive Enterprise Institute fellows Ryan Young and Iain Murray wrote in an op-ed published on the Fox Business Network website on February 3 [correction: January 3]. “The president may not reverse course on trade, but Congress should take action,” they wrote, telling the new Democratic House of Representatives to “repeal all of the new tariffs” and prevent the president from unilaterally enacting new ones.
Read the whole piece here.
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Posted in Economics, Media Appearances, Trade, Uncategorized
William Manchester – A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age
The best way to appreciate modern life is to study the past. Not to put too fine a point on it, but for most of human history, everything sucked. Most historians have traditionally focused on kings, battles, and the nobility, because they left behind the most sources. Manchester instead focuses on social history, or what daily life was like for the vast majority of people.
It was cold, hard, violent, dark, lonely, poor, and short. If you lived past 40, you were probably cragged, stooped and treated as an elder. The first thing a modern person would notice about Europe’s greatest cities back then would not be the architecture or the lack of cars and trains. It would be the smell.
The life of the mind was dark and narrow as those unlit city streets. Few people could read, and even fewer wrote. Cultural, religious, and political diversity were quite literally beaten out of people, sometimes to the death. Social order was similarly enforced; everyone in their place.
Life today has its problems, but we have much to be thankful for. This book shows why in great detail.
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Posted in Books, History, Uncategorized
The Midwest froze, but the Federal Register began to heat up. As I predicted earlier, the first three post-shutdown editions were slow. Then Thursday’s edition alone had 220 agencies notices and 447 pages, both well above normal levels. Thursday also saw the year’s first economically significant regulation, a 70-pager for H-1B visa applicants. On February 1, the Federal Register cracked 1,000 pages, which might be the latest date that has happened since 1959. See the historical table on p. 74 the current edition of Ten Thousand Commandments for more. Other new rules from the week range from Navy signals to external power supplies.
On to the data:
All of last week’s new final regulations:
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.
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Posted in regulation, Uncategorized
Mark Levinson – The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, 2nd ed.
A history of container shipping. Far more interesting than it sounds; these types of books often are. Something as simple as a standardized shipping container size revolutionized the global trading system, caused the rise and fall of cities and entire industries, caused bitter labor disputes and roiled unions, changed national economic development patterns, and even had foreign policy implications. All this happened over only about three decades.
This story also has the added benefit of a compelling and eccentric personality, Malcom McLean, playing a large role, which makes for even more interesting reading.
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Inertia Wins! 
