Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 68
December 25, 2014
Other essential books of 2014
A few weeks ago I listed the best non-fiction books of 2014, here are a few which I either forgot or were late coming to my attention or were published or shipped after the first list. These are all very, very good:
1. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of World Order, 1916-1931. This one also starts slow but after about 13% becomes fascinating, especially about the internal politics in Germany and Russia, circa 1917-1918.
2. Michael Hofmann, Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays. Excellent and informationally dense literary essays, I especially like the ones on the German-language poets and writers, such as Benn and Walser and Bernhard and Grass.
3. Henry Marsh, Do No Harm, a neurosurgeon does behavioral economics as applied to his craft.
4. Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford, Rendez-Vous, a discursive chat while looking at some classics of art
5. Clive James, Poetry Notebook 2006-2014. A superb book, one of the very best appreciations of poetry and introductions to poetry of the 20th century. This book has received raves in the UK, it is not yet out in the U.S.
In fiction, to supplement my earlier list, I recommend:
6. Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq. Short stories about the conflict in Iraq, by an Iraqi. I expected to find these widely heralded stories to be disappointing, as the premise is a little too easy for the Western critic to embrace. But they are excellent and this book is one of the year’s best fiction releases.
7. Andy Weir, The Martian. Ostensibly science fiction, but more a 21st century Robinson Crusoe story — set on Mars of course — with huge amounts of (ingenious) engineering driving the story. Lots of fun, many other people have liked it too.
8. Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies, Poems 1952-2012.
By the way, Uwe Tellkamp’s The Tower [Der Turm] is now out in English.
Iranian markets in everything
Iran has been hit so hard that its government, looking for ways to fill a widening hole in its budget, is offering young men the option of buying their way out of an obligatory two years of military service. “We are on the eve of a major crisis,” an Iranian economist, Hossein Raghfar, told the Etemaad newspaper on Sunday. “The government needs money badly.”
There is more here, mostly on how falling oil prices have affected other countries.
December 24, 2014
Ayn Rand on Christmas
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: “Merry Christmas”—not “Weep and Repent.” And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance . . . .
The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only “commercial greed” could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.
From the Ayn Rand Lexicon.
Should you lie to your children about Santa?
Should you keep your kids in the dark about Santa not being who he says he is? Who you say he is? Will Wilkinson says he will:
Well, we’re atheists. I don’t intend to proselytize atheism to my kid, because I’m not interested in getting him to believe anything in particular. What I’m interested in is teaching him how to reason in a way that maximizes his chances of hitting on the truth. Now, one of the most interesting truths about the empirical world is that there are all these powerful systems of myth that are kept afloat by a sort of mass conspiracy, and humans seem disposed to pick one from the ambient culture and take it very seriously. But it can be hard to get your head around the way it all works unless you participate in it. Santa is a perfect and relatively harmless way to introduce your child the socio-psychology of a collective delusion about the supernatural. The disillusionment that comes from the exposure to the truth about Santa breeds a general skepticism about similarly ill-founded popular beliefs in physics-defying creatures.
I say why not leave them guessing, hovering in a state of Bayesian Santa doubt? My parents never told me Santa “was real,” but they didn’t tell me he “wasn’t real” either, so I slid rather gracefully into my Santa non-belief. I don’t recall ever feeling disillusioned by a sense of loss and in fact those presents kept on coming. I even had a clearer sense of the appropriate channel for making gift requests, what’s not to like about that?
Why not teach them some Walter Benjamin early on?:
The 99-cent App “Talking Santa,” in addition to allow children to talk to an animated St.Nick, allows them to run him over with a snowball and, when the “violence” setting is turned on, slap him.
Some sociologists and child-development experts warn the technology puts the magic of Christmas in jeopardy. If children treat Santa as they would any classmate — constantly texting or calling or tweeting at him — then what makes Santa special?
Remember Smith’s diamond-water paradox, which in fact dates as far back as Galileo?
I recall sitting on Santa’s lap as a tot and being terrified by his rubber fingers (why oh why was he wearing rubber fingers? Were his real fingers scarred?). Thank goodness we have left those days behind, I would have preferred a simple text although I barely know how to do that either.
December 23, 2014
Why is there not more terrorism?
Scott Sumner asks a version of that question:
But here’s what I don’t get. If America really is this weak and cowardly, then why can’t ISIS easily defeat us? They could phone in threats against movie theaters just as easily as the North Koreans can. And there must be 100 times as many Hollywood films that offend ISIS sensibilities as there are that offend Kim. Recall that women get stoned to death in ISIS-controlled areas for things like wearing a miniskirt. Then consider Hollywood films, which often show Arab terrorists as villains. So why doesn’t ISIS copy North Korea? Why does ISIS let us insult them? I don’t get it.
There is more from the Scott on the question here. This is hardly my area, but here are a few observations:
1. The United States will permit all kinds of mini-outrages against us, provided they are not seen as precedents. If we were viewed as exploitable at this margin, our reaction, from both the government and private citizens, would be quite different. In the meantime, pretending that North Korea is a fly to the American elephant may be an optimal response/non-response. When Obama told Sony it made a mistake by pulling the film, that is exactly what he was doing, namely minimizing the significance of the event on purpose. He wasn’t trying to scold Sony or even to defend free speech.
2. Often groups such as ISIS are much more offended by what “their own” women do than by what “outsiders” do. They may even welcome the existence of a certain amount of Western and also Hollywood depravity, to aid product differentiation. Additionally, don’t forget that some of the 9-11 terrorists seemed to enjoy strip clubs and the like. Their motivations are not always strictly pious.
3. We don’t have a good understanding of why terrorists don’t attack more than they do. Perhaps terror attacks can be viewed as belonging to two groups: a) the more or less replicable (Sri Lankan and Palestinian suicide bombings), which are allocated by some set of calculating authorities, and b) the “one-off,” which are governed by a kind of multiplicative formula, under which many things have to go the right way for an attack to happen at all. 9-11 is probably an example here, but without a fixed infrastructure for providing training and motivation and coordination, most terrorists aren’t actually that well organized and they can’t pull much off. Read Diego Gambetta on 9-11. Now that U.S. troops are (mostly) out of Iraq, the replicable attacks aren’t there any more either.
4. It remains possible that the U.S. still will retaliate against North Korea, or perhaps already has retaliated in a non-public manner. It is also possible we have let news of such retaliation or pending retaliation leak to ISIS and other groups in some fashion.
And a final point: in the MR comments section Boonton wrote:
I think this illustrates a difference in perception between North Korea and, say, Al Qaeda. If Al Qaeda was offended by some movie (say the last Batman movie which featured some type of Middle Eastern prison that was nonetheless within walking distance of Gotham city), people would be up in arms about all theaters pulling the movie. Yet not so much North Korea, why?
Al Qaeda is recognized as having an actual agenda is is assumed to be a somewhat rational agent. Hence most of us will give credit to the anti-appeasement argument with them. If we pull one movie they will keep making demands.
North Korea, in contrast, is perceived as an irrational state lead by a child-man dictator. In other words, most in the west see it as essentially an entire nation that is literally mentally ill. We are willing to indulge them a bit because we are not quite sure how ill they really are and just like a deranged person may try to stab you over a napkin on the ground, this is the type of state that may start a nuclear war over a Seth Rogan movie.
Is this perception correct? Is North Korea not just mentally ill ‘on the ground’ but also at the top? Is the inner circle populated by cold rationalists cynically exploiting propaganda to control the masses or have they actually drunk the most Kool-Aid of the entire bunch?!
“Both” is a possible answer of course.
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