Patrick Julius's Blog, page 2

Blunt to the point of rudeness, but that doesn't make him wrong

JDN 2456675 EDT 23:23.

A review of Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

From his writing style, Matt Taibbi seems like he'd be fun to be around if he likes you, and absolutely insufferable if he doesn't. He is beyond blunt, and his language will make your head spin as he uses words like "fucking bullshit" and "synthetic derivative" in the same sentence—indeed he may actually say "fucking bullshit synthetic derivative" at some point. He does not hesitate to call some of our world's most powerful leaders c...

Blunt to the point of rudeness, but that doesn’t make him wrong

JDN 2456675 EDT 23:23.

A review of Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

From his writing style, Matt Taibbi seems like he’d be fun to be around if he likes you, and absolutely insufferable if he doesn’t. He is beyond blunt, and his language will make your head spin as he uses words like “fucking bullshit” and “synthetic derivative” in the same sentence—indeed he may actually say “fucking bullshit synthetic derivative” at some point. He does not hesitate to call some of our world’s most powerful leaders cri...

A much better Culture novel

JDN 2456636 PDT 16:53.

I read Player of Games on the suggestion of a friend of mine who is a big fan of the Culture novels; having been unimpressed by Consider Phlebas I was somewhat reluctant at first, but he convinced me that Player of Games would be better.

And indeed it was; the characters are more interesting, the plot is more compelling, and we see quite a bit more of what the Culture is like from the inside. I am particularly fond of the drones. The humans are a little too normal—after...

The Logic of Collective Action

JDN 2456594 PDT 15:55.

The blinders neoclassicists wear are large indeed. This book was written in 1971, and the neoclassical understanding of collective action has, as far as I can tell, not been substantially advanced since then—in over 40 years, the essential conclusions haven’t changed.

This would not be a problem, of course, if those conclusions were correct; but they aren’t. Indeed they are wrong at a fundamental level; they are almost literally reversed from the truth.

Here is the basic...

Keynes, pedantic prognosticator

JDN 2456589 PDT 15:46

A review of The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes.

The bad news: Most of the book is spectacularly boring to read, as Keynes deluges us with economic figures. I’m an aspiring economist, and even my eyes began to glaze over. Chapters IV, V, and VI can be safely skipped entirely.

One interesting thing about the figures is how small they seem; he recommends reparation funds of only $5 billion—and thinks even this may be too high—while the figures in th...

The dawn of cognitive macroeconomics

JDN 2456563 PDT 15:10.

A review of Animal Spirits by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller.

When I first came to CSULB about a month and a half ago, we had an orientation for graduate students. One of the faculty members there (Seiji Steimetz, for whom I am now a graduate assistant, and whom I have come to adore) asked us all a question: “What kind of research do you want to be involved in?” Most of the students didn’t have an answer. I had an answer I didn’t quite know how to explain, so I b...

A rallying whimper

JDN 24565554 PDT 20:54.

A review of The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs

This should have been one of the greatest books ever written. It should have been the rallying cry for a radical new approach to global development, a seminal advance in what it means to do economics—it should have been quite literally a book to save a billion lives.

And make no mistake, Jeffrey Sachs has a project that really does have the potential to have that kind of impact. But The End of Poverty doesn’t quite manage t...

Not the ideal messenger, but a necessary message

A review of The Trouble with Diversity by Walter Benn Michaels

JDN 2456543 PDT 19:54.

Walter Benn Michaels is really not the best person to be addressing the philosophical, political, and economic issues involved in identity politics: After all, his PhD is in English and he’s best known as a literary theorist. His writing style is competent, but sometimes a bit verbose and repetitive. He does not appear to have learned that brevity is the soul of wit(though to be fair, that is a lesson I’ve nev...

Some Anvils Need to be Dropped

JDN 2456534 PDT 15:58.

A review of Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?

by Steve Keen.

The basic message Keen is trying to

send is a vitally important one: Neoclassical economics is failing.

Models based around rational agents and static equilibrium simply

fail to represent the real world, and and as a result give

policymakers a false sense of security against economic crisis.

The way Keen delivers this message is

by avalanche: Page after page, chapter after chapter, he tears apart

neocla...

In desperate need of a cognitive scientist

JDB 2456527 PDT 10:52.

A review of Listening to Prozac by Peter D. Kramer.

This was a book with great potential, but it failed to live up to most of that potential. The fundamental idea is a profound one that I wish more people would think about: What does cognitive science say about human nature?

The problem is that Kramer is not a cognitive scientist, he is a practicing psychiatrist. All of his understanding of the brain and mind is filtered through that lens; he spends most of the book explai...