Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Shameless Begging: Book edition

Some of y'all have emailed me to ask for recommendations for books to read and DVDs to watch, to go with the recommendations for kitchen gear and home electronics I offered earlier. Here are the book recommendations; DVDs will hopefully come later, but I'm sick as a dog, so I make no promises.

As you may know, now is the time of year when I engage in an absolutely shameless attempt to encourage you to earn me money from my Amazon.com associates account, under the thin pretense of suggesting things you can buy your loved ones for Christmas. I am poor, and my student loan officer is hungry, and the people at the workhouse will only give me one serving of gruel a day. . . this brazen commercialization of The Birth of Our Lord is the only way that I can afford to buy myself the books with which I enrich my mind so that I can offer you keen insight and witty commentary on a quasi-daily basis.

If you're going to do your Christmas shopping on Amazon this year, just click the handy links provided by me or another of your favourite bloggers (mine's over there at the right, if you scroll down a little!), and at absolutely not cost to yourself, you can send a little commission our way. We get the commission even if you buy something other than the product we linked, though the commission is higher for direct links.

However, even if you don't order through Amazon, all the stuff I'll suggest here is stuff that I genuinely love, so do consider purchasing for yourself or your loved ones offline. And if you do buy something I recommend, please, please, please email me to let me know how it went over.

And if you don't like anything you see here, please feel free to peruse last year's selections, though there is some overlap.

Fiction

Anna Karenina Yes, I know, it's shameful, but I just got around to reading it this year. Outstanding, even in translation . . . and I generally hate translation. Tolstoy's characters breathe even though they (never) lived over 100 years ago.

Letters from Earth This is a collection of Mark Twain's unpublished writings, which was put together after his death. It lacks the polish of his published work, and some of it is unfinished, but it offers in some ways a more intimate look into his mind. Especially recommend it paired with The Autobiography of Mark Twain, which is a sampling of the autobiographical musings he dictated at the end of his life. Because he didn't mean it to be published until after his death, it is much more frank than most autobiography, and of course, Mark Twain is one of the most brilliant writers ever.

A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and a Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin, as discussed in this post I can't tell you how much I enjoyed these books . . . they really made time fly in London

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit It's a period piece--postwar 1950's "Isn't there something better than this?" literature. He doesn't do it as well as John Cheever, but that's hardly a put-down, since Cheever was one of the prose greats of the twentieth century (and if you don't own The Stories of John Cheever, then run, don't walk, down to your nearest bookstore and pick one up.) Nonetheless, it's enjoyable not merely as a period piece--though peaking into the heads of our near ancestors is in itself a pleasurable reading experience--but as a novel, even though it gets a little sappy at the end.

Past Due by William Lashner. As you can see, my reading is eclectic; I whipsaw between genre fiction and "classic literature". But only selected genre literature. William Lashner is one of the few mystery writers who made my cut. It's sort of noirish fiction set in modern-day Philadelphia, narrated by a wanna-be mob lawyer. He's no Tolstoy, but he will help you pass more than a few pleasant hours. I liked his earlier books--Hostile Witness, Bitter Truth, and Fatal Flaw even better, but I recommend them all very highly if you like mysteries.

The Stepford Wives Didn't know it was a book, did you? I confess, I was taken aback by how much I enjoyed this book, which has a lean, understated prose style that really sets off the underlying horror. I liked it so much that I bought Rosemary's Baby, which I also highly recommend.

Heart of Darkness I reread it while I was in London, and may nominate the beginning of this book for best prose ever. I actually get chills down my spine every time I read the words "And this too was among the dark places of the earth". If you haven't read this, you must, and not just because you liked Apocalypse Now.

Non-Fiction

Freakonomics Yes, you've heard about it from every economics blog in creation, including theirs. But it really is enjoyable. It won't give you a basic grounding in economics, but it will give you insight into economic problem-solving. It's just a bonus that the writing is engaging and entertaining.

In the Wake of Madness It's a popular history about a whaling boat where a couple members of the crew kill the captain. The author dissects the official story, which had native crewmen going bonkers for no particular reason, and reveals that the captain was possibly crazy, certainly cruel. I know you probably weren't expecting me to recommend a book on whaling, but I found it surprisingly engrossing. I also learned a great deal about whaling, not that I expect this to come in handy any time soon.

Where are the customer's yachts? This is a humorous book about Wall Street written in mid-century, skewering the conceits of both investors and brokers. The shocking thing is that almost all of it still applies today.

Against Depression The author of Listening to Prozac, which I read when it came out, followed up with this book, which argues against the notion that one's depressed self is somehow the authentic, natural self, and that medication is thus false comfort. He also fights those who point out that since great artists tend to be disproportionately depressed, there is danger in treating all depression, saying that we would not have left Van Gogh untreated if he'd had cancer, and depression is little different. I'm not sure I agree with this--it seems to me that depression, with its sharper insight, does spur art, and I think that there are things in life more important than being happy--at least on even-numbered days. Anyway, even if you disagree with this, it's very much worth reading if you're interested in happiness research.

The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant. The story of the Durants is lurid enough to justify reading their work just for the prurient interest: Will fell in love with Ariel while he was teaching her at the Ferrer School, an early experimental school. She was just fourteen when he resigned his post and married her. Later they collaborated on the enormous multi-volume Story of Civilization, which I'll read someday when I have a zillion dollars to spare. This book isn't so ambitious; it's just a summing up of what they've learned about people and governments from their study of history. And it turns out the prurient interest is just gravy; their work is delightful. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Into the Wild I first read Jon Krakauer because he was on Everest in 1996 when everything went to hell; his chronicle of that expedition, Into Thin Air, is brilliant. Into the Wild is less biographical, more journalistic; it's a reconstruction of a boy on the hippy fringe who breaks all ties with his family and goes off into the Alaska wilderness to test his manhood, where he dies. It all sounds rather juvenile and melodramatic, and it is, but at the heart of juvenile melodrama there is a worthy core of aspiration that Krakauer deftly extracts.

More later, if and when I think of them. For now, I'm off to bed with a Nyquil.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Superhero physics

I'm reading a fantastic book right now called The Physics of Superheroes, which I highly recommend for that special geek in your life . . . or for anyone you know like me, who managed to duck high school physics entirely.* It teaches real physics, using various superheroes to illustrate principles like acceleration, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism. The prose is clear enough that a math dunce like me can grasp it, and the superhero examples are enough, I think, to interest even someone who already knows physics. Plus, the gentle fun he drily pokes at the comics he collects makes me laugh out loud.

Max Dillon was a highly skilled but self-centered electrical utility worker. When a coworker was trapped atop a high-tension line, Max was cavalier about his fate until his foreman offered Dillon a $100 reward (in 1963 dollars, worth about $600 today) for rescuing him. Freeing the unconscious colleague and lowering him to the ground with a cable, Dillon then receives an unanticipated bonus when he is struck by lightening while grasping the high-tension lines. Just as in the case of Barry Allen (the Flash), not only did Dillon not die or suffer any burns or neurological damage from this traumatic event, but he in fact gained the ability to store electrical energy that he could discharge at will in the form of lightning bolts. (Young readers during [the 1950's and 1960's] could be forgiven if they reached the conclusion that being struck by lightening, preferably in conjunction with some other hazardous activity, was one of the best things that could happen to them, second only to being exposed to massive doses of radiation.) Dillon's accident, presented in Amazing Spider Man #9 may have changed his body but it left his antisocial attitudes intact. Realizing that he now possessed fearsome electrical powers, he designed a garish green-and-yellow disguise, with a bright yellow lightning-bolt-themed mask and embarked on a life of crime as Electro . . . Personally, if I gained mastery over such a powerful force of nature, I don't think this would necessarily be the costume that I'd choose to wear in public. Perhaps if Max Dillon had not been such a rat, his friends might have gently provided some better fashion advice. But it is exactly such a pattern of bad choices that frequently leads these superpowered miscreants to a life of crime.

*Yes, that's right, I have never taken physics. "How did you manage that?" My aghast critics demand. "You went to an excellent school?" The answer is that I was in honors science, which instead of teaching "physical science" in 9th grade, then moving onto biology and chemistry, taught biology first, and then chemistry, with the expectation that you would then move onto advanced physics in 11th grade, while you were getting the math to grasp it. But advanced physics was an elective, and I didn't elect. I took Japanese literature instead.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm looking for a few good books . . .

I spend a lot of time telling y'all what you should read. But how about you tell me? What books took your breath away, kept you up all night reading more, came back again and again to your thoughts? If they're that good, I want to read them.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

GGS blogging

Brad de Long and a few others have been doing a lot of Guns, Germs and Steel blogging. The topic: is Jared Diamond a racist? Since one of my main complaints with the book is that he spends a huge amount of time trying to conclusively disprove something that rather few people in his readership demographic believe--that the low technology level achieved by peoples outside of Eurasia by 1500 was the result of their inherent genetic inferiority--I don't think this is a debate I'll step into.

The more interesting critiques, like Timothy Burke's, fault Jared Diamond for being too much of a geographical determinist; what about culture, asks Mr Burke? I agree that he's overdeterministic, but no one has made a cause for my favourite candidate for explaining the technological difference: luck.

Having convinced me that Eurasia simply had better crop candidates than anywhere else, Mr Diamond undercut his argument when it came to a discussion of corn. Wild corn, it turns out, is a remarkably bad candidate for domestication. In it's native state, corn ears are about the size of a human fingernail. It took milennia to breed the succulent sweet corn that I enjoyed last night.

So what other food candidates are there that people didn't try to domesticate, or didn't have the patience to stick with? Or that didn't produce as good mutations at the right time? Or where there was no agricultural genius to invent, say, the rice paddy? I found other arguments, such as the point that it is easier for domesticated food crops and animals east-west than north-south, still very compelling, but the argument that Eurasia just lucked out on domestication candidates suddenly lost a lot of its lustre.

It turns out I wasn't the only one. The inimitable Brian Caplan had the same thought:

According to Diamond, the horse is just easier to domesticate and gives a bigger bang for your buck than a llama or a zebra. What made Diamond's argument especially convincing to me was his claim that since the integration of the world economy, scientists and entrepreneurs have tried mightily to domesticate non-Eurasian animals, with little success. Zebras...

were tried out as draft animals in 19th-century South Africa, and the eccentric Lord Walter Rothschild drove through the streets of London in a carriage pulled by zebras. Alas, zebras become impossibly dangerous as they grow older...Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. (Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp.171-2)

More generally:

In the 19th and 20th centuries at least six large mammals - the eland, elk, moose, musk ox, zebra, and American bison - have been the subjects of especially well-organized projects aimed at domestication, carried out by modern scientific animal breeders and geneticists... Yet these modern efforts have achieved only very limited successes. (Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp.167-8)

But doubt about this argument started to well up in me when I reflected on Diamond's history of corn:

Archaeologists are still vigorously debating how many centuries or millenia of crop development in the Americas were required for ancient corn cobs to progress from a tiny size up to the size of human thumb, but it seems clear that several thousand more years were required for them to reach modern sizes.(Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp.171-2)

Or to take a more familiar example, look at what we've done with wolves! We've turned them into everything from the noble Lassie to the irritating poodle. It really makes me start thinking, "Sure, the zebra is hard to domesticate now; but if we worked on them for a few hundred years, I bet the change would be amazing."

On reflection, it's not surprising that modern science has failed to domesticate animals like zebras. It would probably take generations, so the investment wouldn't pay a reasonable rate of return. And we've already got something better, anyway.

But if breeding useful animals takes centuries, I don't see this as a great explanation for why Eurasia did so much better than Native Americans and Africans. You'd just wind up asking, "Why were Eurasians more successful breeders?," which seems like a special case of "Why were Eurasians more economically successful overall?"

Admittedly, there is more to Diamond's argument, and it's worth reading in its entirety. He also says that the wild ancestors of the Eurasian flora and fauna were initially closer to being useful to man than the non-Eurasian flora and fauna.

Maybe he's right, but I'm worried that Diamond's suffering from hindsight bias: If the Eurasians domesticated the horse, it must have been inevitable, right? But if the Incas had shown up in Europe in 1492 with deadly llama cavalry, and mowed down backward European infantry, I suspect modern Incan historians would have declared the horse a hopeless candidate for domestication too.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What I'm reading in London

Most of my readers probably don't realise this, but in Great Britain Easter is a big holiday -- I get Friday and Monday off. Since my faithless London friends have all unexpectedly decamped for the United States just before I got here (Peter, I'm looking at you), I will be spending the weekend catching up on my web-browsing, museum-attending, computer-game playing, and, of course, my reading. I will also be attempting to construct a complete easter dinner, including hot cross buns and lemon pie, using only the cooking utensils that came with my furnished flat.

If you're in a similar predicament, what can I recommend?

Fiction

Well, for starters, the absolutely outstanding fantasy book I'm reading, George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones. I just can't recommend this book highly enough. I'm having that extremely pleasant sensation of having discovered a wonderful new author, and knowing that all of his books are ahead of you. I am also keeping an anxious eye on the rapidly disappearing pages, knowing that I have to wait until a quick stateside trip in May to get the next books in the series. The book isn't the usual sort of "swords and elves" thing; it's rather hard and bloody, but wonderfully written, and the characters are absolutely fantastic.

Incidentally, I've also just finished Orson Scott Card's Shadow of the Giant, which I heartily recommend, along with the other shadow books, Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and Shadow Puppets. They're the story of Battle School from Ender's Game, and what happened afterwords on earth, focusing on Bean rather than Ender.

Finally, I'm on an Ira Levin kick. I've always loved the original Stepford Wives movie (not the horrible travesty recently perpetrated on an unsuspecting public)--there's something so innocent and fresh about its early-seventies feminist paranoia. (I also like Lillian Hellman and early socialist boy-meets-tractor novels). So I went back and read the book, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I really, really enjoyed it--sharp, clean prose, and highly skilled suspense. So I bought Rosemary's Baby for the plane trip, and also liked it very much. (Hopelessly lowbrow, I know.) Now I'm planning to invest in A Kiss Before Dying, to see if that also hits the spot.

Non-Fiction

Having recently finished Paul Blustein's brilliant book about Argentina and the IMF, I'm digging into Sebastian Mallaby's so far equally engaging book called The World's Banker, about James Wolfensohn and the World Bank. If you liked William Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth (and if you haven't read that, shut off your computer, step smartly out to the nearest bookstore, and buy it at once--it's one of my all-time favourite books about global economics), then Mr Mallaby's book makes a nice counterpoint--it shows the actual machinations behind putting all the World Bank's theories into practice.

Non books

When I'm not reading, or taking walks, or having culturally enriching experiences, I will probably be playing Civilization III, or Railroad Tycoon III. (Good things really do come in threes!) If you have approximately a zillion free hours that you would like sucked into a blissful vortex of world-building fun, you should buy these games. If you have problems with self control, or a day job, or a tendency to forget to eat, you should probably stay away.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Books on the poor, we will always have with us

A while back I made a qualified recommendation of David Shipler's The Working Poor in the course of (unqualified-ly) telling you to go read Jason DeParle's American Dream right now. Steven Malanga has a rather harsher take on it in his review of books about the working poor.

Mr Malanga's review is pretty one sided, but it makes some important points. In particular, it scores on Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, which I thought offered occasional insight into the lives of the working poor, but found almost unreadable because of its dripping, venomous contempt for the middle class (and its paternalistic contempt for her working class co-workers, whom she repeatedly implies are too stupid or deluded to understand that THEY'RE BEING BRUTALLY EXPLOITED AND THEIR LIVES ARE WORTHLESS!). There was also too much pseudo-intellectual Freudian interpretation of perfectly ordinary practices, supposedly showing the subtle, cruel underbelly of employers. Wal-Mart's pre-employment tests aren't just an attempt to protect the store from thieves and erratic workers, or even a useless and idiotic ritual designed by managers who ought to know better; they're a plot to make the worker feel powerless and dominated by The Oppressor. Merry Maids doesn't have people scrub the floor on their hands and knees because that gets the floor cleaner (she quotes an "expert" who says it doesn't); it's because nasty middle class women like to see their house cleaners in a submissive posture.

(Here, she happens to have entered on two of my areas of expertise: floor cleaning, and women who employ house cleaners. Though Ms Ehrenreich claims to be a house cleaner of old repute, she is clearly deficient in her floor knowlege; no one who has ever scrubbed their floor on their hands and knees would seriously entertain the idea that one can do just as good a job with a mop--there's simply no serious comparison. My mother is both a knee-scrubber, and an employer of cleaning professionals. The cleaning lady does her floors with a mop. But when my mother cleans, it's with a bucket and a sponge.)

Malanga's review is justifiably scathing. I urge you to check it out right now.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

'Tis the Season: Special Books edition

Yes, that's right, I'm shameless. But really, these are books you should buy even if you don't use my amazon link. That's right, they're that good. Run down to the local Borders and pick up a couple today. You'll thank me.

What I'm Reading (or re-reading) Now:

Nonfiction

The Persian Puzzle, by Kenneth Pollack. Absolutely required reading, given the current nuclear imbroglio. Warning: enough failed American realism to make you want to side with the Iranians.

How We Got Here, by David Frum. It's a book about the 1970's, arguing that it wasn't the 1960's, but rather the 1970's, that created modern life. Yes, it sounds unbelievably dull, but it's incredibly good -- I've already re-read it several times. In the process, I've developed an enormous crush on David Frum. Also an enormous inferiority complex (see entry below for Conrad, Joseph.)

The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. Mr Surowiecki's astonishing awesomness as the New Yorker's financial columnist is on full display in this book.

Why Globalisation Works, by Martin Wolf. Free trade: Good. Mr Wolf lines up, in exhaustive detail, all the reasons why.

Parliament of Whores by PJ O'Rourke. The book that started my slow slide into libertarianism. Still unbelievably hilarious after fifteen years--I mean, milk-out-of-the-nose, collapse-into-a-heap, go-to-the-emergency-room-for-laughter-induced-muscle-cramps hilarious. If you haven't read it, you must.

Fiction

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. I can't believe he packs so much gifted prose and raw emotion into such a short little book. This, of course, makes me insanely jealous. But it's worth it. The opening is a very good candidate for Best Opening Ever.

The Tawny Man series, by Robin Hobb. Okay, it's not quite Conrad, but who is? It's still absolutely first class fantasy writing. If you haven't read the prequel trilogy, the Farseer trilogy, which starts with Assassin's Apprentice, I'm very excited for you, because you have an enormous treat in store. The books are lovely and thick, perfect for taking on vacation.

Old Home Town by Rose Wilder Lane. I was lead to these stories by my youthful obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder, among other Victoriana -- Lane is her daughter, and helped write the Little House books. But these stories are really oustanding. It's a series of interlaced stories about a gawky, too-bright girl growing up in a very small town at the turn of the century, but not in that mawkish, "turns into a swan" style that makes you gag. The stories have a raw texture that lays bare the rather bleak emotional life of her repressed, and repressive environment. Rose Wilder Lane, incidentally, was a pioneering libertarian, as well as one of the first "liberated" women. Her book "Free Land" is also rather good, especially if you've read her mother's children's books; she tells the darker, adult side of pioneering, like the couple out on the prairie who were murdering families who stopped at their houses and stealing their stuff . . . dozens and dozens of people.

Persepolis: The story of a childhood. I don't quite know where to put this: it's a semi-autobiographical graphic novel by a woman who grew up in Iran around the 1979 revolution. It's really quite stunning.

Gone with the wind, by Margaret Mitchell. It's unmistakeably racist, and it glorifies a system I am not sad to see gone. But this may have the best set of characters in any English language book, and she manages to make you sympathise with the thoroughly unsympathetic heroine, so it's not much of a leap to sympathising with their compatriots. Plus the story is utterly absorbing, and it's long enough to last for a few lazy holiday afternoons.

War and Peace. I just recently finished Anna Karenina, which I adored. It's adorable even if you don't love long, Victorian novels, but if you do, it's positively irresistable. Having so loved it, I'm embarking on a Russian binge. This will not, however, include learning Russian, or learning to eat pickled herring.

I would like, for the sake of hipness, to be able to claim that I am reading some obscure French novelist of the inter-war period, in the original French. Unfortunately, the only thing I can read in the original french is no-smoking signs, and I hate most french novels written after 1890. Instead, I'm reaquainting myself with the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, the patron saints of light verse. When I was in college, I thought I wanted to be Dorothy Parker, until I realised that no matter how hard I tried I was never going to be talented, Jewish, or short, and that dying alone only sounds romantic so long as you continue to believe yourself to be immortal.

What I'm Cooking Out Of

Julia Child's Kitchen Wisdom. I've worked my way through a number of recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Way to Cook This book is different; it's full of concepts and tips for the beginner-to-middling cook--no instructions to buy larding tools to pull strips of pork fat through your roast, or spend three days making your own duck pate to put in the beef wellingtons. It's practical everyday cooking, and some of the ideas are really cool--like cooking short-grained rice in a soup, and then pureeing it, for a low-fat cream soup.

The Original 1950 Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. This is the cookbook I do half my baking out of, and all of my jello molds. It's actually surprisingly fabulous . . . a beginner's cookbook from the era before baking mixes and salad oil became staple ingredients. The section at the end urging tired and depressed housewives to "consult a doctor and follow medical advice" (hellllooooooo, Valium) is alone worth the price.

The Perfect Pie, by Susan Purdy. I love pie. All kinds of pie: custard, lemon, any sort of fruit, chicken . . . if I had to pick one food to live on forever, it would be purple raspberry pie. (Sigh) The book doesn't just have recipes; it has the science of piecrusts, fillings, and toppings (meringues, whipped creams) laid out in excruciating detail for those of us who are still struggling to live up to our mothers.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

How the West was Begun

Guns, Germs, and Steel

by Jared Diamond

Like the Elusive Quest for Growth, this book ultimately asks the question of why some nations are better off than others. But while Easterly focuses on the economic structures that prevent or enhance prosperity, Diamond goes further back, to the dawn of agriculture, to ask how some countries ended up with Starbucks and MP3 players, while others stayed in the stone age.

The result is fascinating. Ultimately, he traces it back to how hospitable the local culture was to agriculture, but along the way he takes you on a tour of plant and animal life, geography, and even geology to explain why, no matter how smart they were, Papua New Guineans were never going to break out of the Stone Age, because natural constraints on their agriculture or technology prevented them from concentrating sufficient population densities to do so. If you haven't got a local food crop that can be domesticated into a high-yielding staple, you'll remain a hunter gatherer unless you are lucky enough to encounter someone from another region who can share theirs with you. If you haven't any domestic animals to help you till the land, your productivity will be strictly limited. And if there is no iron or copper on your island, you are not going to develop metal tools.

I have two main problems with the book. The first is that there is an element of post-hoc, ergo propter hoc, to his logic. While it makes intuitive sense to say that if local plants and animals are poor candidates for domestication, local humans will not thrive, Diamond's assertion that the local candidates are more convincing for island-nations than large regions like the United States, where the reasoning is largely: the locals did not successfully domesticate high-yielding staples or animals, therefore there were none that could have been domesticated. He constructs a fairly convincing model of what makes a successful candidate for plant domestication, but as he himself points out, these conditions are sufficient but not necessary: teosinte, the ancestor of corn, is such a poor candidate that the debate is still raging over how the hell we got from ears the size of a thumbnail to the crop that build the Americas. The argument is even weaker with animals. In some cases the ancestor is extinct; in others, such as wild boars, they do not fit the criteria he has set up. It seems to me that there is a stronger element of luck to all this than Diamond is willing to allow.

Which is probably because of my other main beef with the book: Diamond spends a great deal of time telling us that it's simply not true that primitive societies remained primitive because they are genetically inferior. I am sure he is correct, but he's rather strenuous about it considering that this argument is not seriously advanced by anyone I've ever met, and hasn't been for the last fifty years or so. It's a lot of space to take up refuting an argument no one is making. And I think it leads him to overstate the case, which is extremely strong -- but which would be even better if he allowed for the possiblity that some people simply got lucky -- or conversely, that some people just didn't figure it out before the western ships got there. We are all dependent on genius and luck; to admit it is not to imply that those who didn't have them are somehow deficient.

Nonetheless, it's a must read for anyone who wants to know how domestic civilization arose. I highly recommend it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Making Poor Countries Rich

The Elusive Quest for Growth

by William Easterly

To read this book is to exult and despair. Exult because it's a fascinating look at all the ways that we have tried to animate growth in the Third World; despair because none of them worked.

The book is terrific -- well written, interesting, and informative on a topic that most of us find pretty compelling. If it has a flaw, it is that it's a little light on data (though extensively footnoted), but I suspect that for most people, that's a feature not a bug. I raced through it over Christmas, enjoying every word.

Then I finished the book and was mightily depressed.

Easterly is an economist with the World Bank and he outlines in painstaking detail why the various theories of development aid, from closing the "investment gap" to building infrastructure, failed so miserably: incentives. No matter how much money you pour into a country, if local conditions make it unprofitable to build, trade, or invest, people will not do it. And the Third World countries that are mired in unpayable debt and abject poverty are a showcase of bad incentives. Property rights are ill-defined, so people will not build or invest; kleptocrats steal anything you do manage to make, so why bother? Short-sighted policies designed to shore up political support destroy or expropriate successful businesses -- why risk it? In those countries it's a better investment to buy a sinecure in a kleptocratic regime, or a gun to start your own free-lance kleptocracy, and that's what people do. And ship any money you make out of the country, where the locals can't inflate, tax, or steal it away.

And that's why it's so depressing. For the people currently in power in many of those countries, the incentives are to keep on with the failed structures of the past, either because they are making more money stealing than they could in private enterprise, or because the electorate is angry and desperate after years of stupid policies, and unwilling to bear further pain. Or they are mired in debt from previous kleptocratic regimes. Often all three.

The World Bank and associated organizations might be able to change those incentives, but while Easterly takes a half-hearted stab at making recommendations, it's clear even he doesn't really believe that these things will happen. The World Bank and the IMF lack the political or institutional will to simply cut off failing countries until they get their act together. And indeed, when tough love means, temporarily, more starving babies, it's hard to get enthusiastic. But unless they do, they are providing the incentive for the bad policies to continue.

One of the most interesting sections of the book discusses the question "What makes people poor", and argues that questioners have got it exactly backwards: the question should be "What makes people rich?" Poverty is freely available, and it's easy to produce; if you destroy the incentives for people to engage in wealth-building activities, such activities will cease. To make people rich, on the other hand, all sorts of things have to line up right: government, institutions, market systems. So perhaps one of the best things about this book is that in reading it, one appreciates just what a miracle our prosperity is.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson: 50th Anniversary Edition

By Henry Hazlitt

I get a fair number of emails asking me to recommend books about economics. You can't do better than this one.

One of the hardest things about learning economics is learning to look beyond your first order intuitions to second order effects. A classic example of this is supply side arguments for tax cuts. Supply siders say that tax cuts increase the incentive to work, by allowing workers to keep more of their money, and thereby grow the economy. Intuitively, this makes sense. Yet, surprisingly, there is little empirical evidence for this proposition. This starts to make sense if you add in other, slightly less obvious intuitions about our demand for work vs. leisure, a detailed explanation of which can be found here.

Hazlitt does an excellent job of puncturing common economic fallacies by leading the reader, in simple, easy-to-understand language, through the second order effects.

It's also a fascinating read for the historically minded. Some of the fallacies he punctures are no longer in common currency, but a surprising number of them are, such as the belief that tax cuts targeted at lower income brackets are magically better for the economy because, the advocates tell us, the poor spend their money, while the rich save it; or the idea that the government can grow the economy over the long term by running a deficit, which is used by both right and left to justify their pet policy boondoggles.

The book is not flawless. Hazlitt is a strict classical economist, which makes him rather more rigid on some topics than is current in economic thought. His discussion on money, in particular, leaves something to be desired; he uses a model of money that's far too simple, and this makes him an inflation hawk to put the Bundesbank to shame. On the other hand, one has to remember that Hazlitt was a practicing economist from World War II to the late seventies, the heydey of well-meaning idiots who wanted to print their way to prosperity. When inflation is in the double digits, it's better to be hawkish than lax -- but the reader would be well advised to remember that money is a very, very complex topic, and he's not necessarily giving you the whole story.

Nonetheless, the beginning amateur economist can't do better for a useful, simple primer. It's sufficiently broad to help you understand many of the policy topics of hte day, yet sufficiently simple that you can read and understand it in your spare time. Take it with you through the newspaper and see if it doesn't help you figure out what all those talking heads are blathering about.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What I’m Reading This

What I’m Reading This Week

The Vote : Bush, Gore, and the Supreme Court

Essays by law professors from both sides on the origin, justification, and ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2000 elections

The best essays in this book are very good; the worst aren’t unreadable, but they tend to state a goal of proving something, wander from minor point to minor point without much direction, and then without warning declare Quod Erat Demonstrandum! and abruptly terminate themselves. The result is that one gathers a lot of small, telling points, but it’s hard to generate an over-arching philosophy about what did happen, or should have happened, from a single reading of this book.

The best essay in the bunch, as far as I’m concerned, is Cass Sunstein’s introduction, which provides a lucid summary of the relevant events, political and legal, which led up to the decision. Sunstein does not, in this essay, attempt to divine which side is right; rather, he concentrates on the sociology of the commentators. He makes the telling observation that it is possible to predict with almost perfect accuracy someone’s opinion on The Opinion simply by finding out who he voted for; it is a welcome grain of salt with which to take essays from both sides.

The conservatives, predictably, ignore the question of just who was harmed by the “equal protection” violations, want to gloss over the possible effects this decision may have on future elections, court opinions, and the legitimacy of the Court; the liberals, with equal predictability, deny that there is anything odd about changing the election rules after the fact, and dismiss the possibility of a constitutional crisis with an airy “Oh, well, that wouldn’t have happened” but offer nothing to back up their a priori assertion. The strongest points offered by both sides, with the exception of Richard Posner’s essay on the mechanics of a recount (which has been made redundant by the newspaper count) are their criticisms of the fallacies and strained construction of the other side. I’ll have to read the book at least once more before I can use it to eke out a workable theory of what went on.

So should you buy the book? Well, it’s slow going in some spots – legal writing is its own little world. But ultimately I think it’s valuable because it gives you an overview of how lawyers think about the case, rather than one person’s extensive interpretation (Alan Dershowitz, Richard Posner). The essayists have something of a dialogue going on between them, which allows you to ask and answer questions about legal constructions within the same book. And while the writers address specific points rather than the whole megillah, this is ultimately I think valuable, both because it keeps the book from degenerating into the kind of “I’m write, you’re wrong” argument that characterized much of the debate, and because it allows a deeper perspective on key issues that shaped the decision. Ultimately, I think the book could have been better. But I think it’s probably the best book out there for understanding the ongoing debate over the Court’s decision.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What I'm Reading this Week

What I'm Reading this Week

What with everything that's been going on in the Middle East, I'm reviewing a book out of turn. (The review of The Vote will come later today). It's not a book that I'm reading; it's a book I own, and would be reading if it weren't currently buried in a box deep in the dark recesses of a storage locker in Yonkers. It's Nelson DeMille's By the Rivers of Babylon and it may be the best modern thriller about the Middle East.

The book concerns a planeload of Israelis kidnapped on their way to a peace conference and forced down near Babylon. The plot is superbly paced, and the ways in which lightly armed passengers contrive to do battle with the terrorists who have kidnapped them provide a riveting backbone to the novel, but they are not its meat.

I love this book. I rarely re-read action novels, but this one is so compelling that it's earned a permenent spot on my bookshelf; I've re-read it at least a half-a-dozen times. The characters are both deft and deep, neither sinners nor saints and certainly not the cartoon superheroes who populate so many novels of this genre; but DeMille manages to achieve this without casting away the moral dimensions, no mean feat in a novel about war. The novel explores complex issues of war, peace, and personal responsibility without turning into a sermon with a cast.

The best thing about the novel, though are its evocation of the history of the Middle East and the ways in which ancient history plays out there still. The writing of these pieces is extraordinarily fine, from the history of the Babylonian Captivity, to the return of Jews today. Possibly the most frightening thing about the novel is that it was written about twenty five years ago, yet aside from a couple of slight historical anomalies (the age of holocaust survivors; some technical details about airplanes) you would never know it. This may offer a clue as to the future of peace in the Middle East.

Anyway, HIGHLY recommend it. It gets a coveted five star rating and an order to everyone who hasn't read it to go out and buy it today.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Stephen Green, a.k.a. the Vodkapundit,

Stephen Green, a.k.a. the Vodkapundit, has a moving tribute to the smokes of yesteryear on the occasion of Hawkgirl's decision to quit.

I miss that first morning smoke with a hot cup of coffee. That Camel after a big dinner, when there's still some Cabernet left in the glass. And did I mention those after-sex cigarettes? Do you know what non-smokers do after sex? We lay there and cuddle. Let me tell you, that is not all it's cracked up to be.

I think the hardest thing about quitting smoking was not the nicotine withdrawal (no more painful than a middling tough diet) -- it's that most of the best things that ever happened to me happened when I had a cigarette in my hand. It's not any particular time of day that I miss smoking, it's the moments: the perfect evening dress, waiting on a windy evening in autumn with your coat wrapped tight around you, and most of all the end of a hot summer afternoon as day trickles into dusk . . . they have lost some of their luster without that little piece of fire cupped in your hand. It's been three years since I had a cigarette and I still can't pass a certain kind of stoop on a certain kind of street without thinking, God, I'd like to stop there and smoke awhile.

It's a hard thing to quit after ten years. When you stop, you're not just bidding farewell to contemptuous sniffs and a dry hack; you're letting go of that Dash-and-Lilly claim on immortality. So before you quit, Emily, have a smoke for us. And for all those who have reluctantly relinquished their favorite vices, or perhaps didn't give vice enough of a chance, I hereby command you to go and read this most excellent book. It's a compilation of works by a number of damn fine writers, including Mark Twain, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Spalding Gray, and Dorothy Parker, that offers tribute to the peccadilloes we regret.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What I'm Reading This Week

What I'm Reading This Week

Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News While I wait for my next infusion of books from Amazon I've been dipping into the book collection of my sister, the social conservative, who has an extensive assortment of books I would broadly label conservative polemics. I was obviously particularly interested in this one because I'd read so many reviews: Tom Shales hates it, for reasons decidedly biased. Jonathan Chait's tone is more reasonable, but his assertions that there's really no media bias were handily refuted by Jonah Goldberg. The most balanced review I saw came from Lou Cannon in the National Review, whose assessment agrees with mine: the phenomenon Goldberg is covering is real, but the book is hopelessly sloppy.

All of its evidence is anecdotal, but that's all right; I can enjoy anecdotal evidence even if I wouldn't want to use it to make policy. But there's too little even of this; the evidence offered to support the central thesis is thinner than Calista Flockhart on Slim Fast. The book certainly has its moments -- but they are widely interspersed between long plaints about how badly the network treated Bernie Goldberg, how much Bernie Goldberg was hurt by Dan Rather, how disgusted Bernie Goldberg is with modern newstrends . . . all bolstered mainly by inanely detailed recounting of petty incidents in the life of -- you guessed it -- Bernie Goldberg. I suspect this is why so many reviews have focused on the question of whether or not there is media bias -- there's just not enough meat in the book to write a good review on. Media accounts that have tried to dissect the facts in the book have ended up in the sort of exchanges

You did!

Did not!

Did too!

That's because you're a big fat [liberal] [conservative] dooty-head!

that make you wonder if the proper place to hash this all out isn't the principal's office.

That said, it's the sort of book you have to read, because everyone else is talking about it. It reminds me of The Bell Curve, which no one I know except me has read, but about which everyone I know -- except me -- has a strong opinion. Once you have read it, you'll find to your amusement that people make all sorts of wildly inflated or just downright odd assertions about it's contents, and it provides a glorious moment of superiority when you can trump someone's argument by cooly asking whether they've read the book. So go ahead: click the link and buy it. Then you can join the rest of us in wondering what all the fuss is about.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What I'm reading this Week

What I'm reading this Week

Betty Crocker's Original 1950 Picture Cookbook Whenever I'm a little stressed, I take out my Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook and get lost in 50 years ago. It's the gift I give at every bridal shower, partly because it has some downright hilarious recipes (for hors d'oeuvres, have your guests roast Vienna Sausages over candles!) and passages like these helpful hints:

Harbor pleasant thoughts while working. It will make every task lighter and pleasanter. . .

Every morning before breakfast, comb hair, apply makeup, a dash of cologne, and perhaps some simple earrings. Does wonders for your morale. . .

Notice humorous and interesting incidents to relate at dinnertime, etc. . .

If after follwoing all these rules fro proper rest, excercise, diet, you are still tired and depressed, have a medical check-up and follow doctor's orders.

Helloooo, valium.

But that's not the only reason I love it. The best reason is that it is the single best guide I know to producing comfort food, even for beginniners. I wouldn't follow the instructions for preparing roasted meats (although I did pick up a good technique for stovetop barbeque chicken), but my mother, who's studied with Craig Claiborne and Julia Child, still uses this for most of her baking, from basic bread to airy, homemade cakes. It's perfect for beginners because while most of the recipes are simple, they were written before the advent of cooking oil, margarine, mixes, and other cooking evils that make all food taste like it came out of your high-school cafeteria. From four recipes for macaroni and cheese to our family's special Christmas bread, almost everything is awfully good. How can you not love a cookbook that has a supper dish called Pink Bunny? If you like comfort food, good basic dishes, or just retro stuff, highly recommend it.