Archive for the 'Books' Category

The Tenth Time’s A Charm

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 21, 2024
in Book, Books, Economics, Personal, Recommendations and Self-Promotion
. 3 Comments

I am delighted to announce that the 10th edition of my textbook, Price Theory and Applications, is now available wherever good books are sold. There’s also a free sample chapter.

Here’s what’s special about this edition:

  • I started out by rereading large parts of the past several editions, from which I learned that not every change was an improvement. Some things were a lot clearer in edition 7 than in edition 9. (And sometimes vice-versa of course.) I worked hard to make sure that in the tenth edition, every section and subsection would be the best it could be — which sometimes meant resurrecting an old version, or, more often, combining the best of the old and the new.
  • In the past, I’ve tried to keep all of the end-of-chapter problem sets to about the same length, which sometimes meant omitting some really great problems. This time, I decided that was stupid. Whenever I had 40 or 50 really good problems, I included them all.
  • This edition benefited from the extraordinary talents, wisdom and persistence of the extraordinary Lisa Talpey, who read every draft, called out everything that seemed even slightly unclear, gave me a chance to rewrite, then read it all again, equally carefully, and took me through as many rounds of this as necessary until everything made sense to her. She also caught pretty much all the typos. I am sure that thanks to Lisa, this edition is far friendlier to the reader than any of those that came before.
  • For the first time, I designed my own cover! How do you like it?

The publisher’s webpage, and information on ordering for your classes, is here.

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The Best Books

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 20, 2021
in Books and Recommendations
. 5 Comments

Shepherd.com is a brand-new website where authors recommend the five best books on a topic of their choosing. The topic of my choosing was The Biggest Questions, and while I doubt very much that I picked the five best books ever written in this category (by any standard you care to name), I am at least confident that I picked five well worth your attention.

Feel free to do any or all of the following:

  • Tell me (and of course our readers) what you think are the most glaring omissions from my list.
  • Tell us which other lists on that site are most worth checking out.
  • Tell us what topic, and what five books, you’ll be choosing if you ever get the call for a contribution from Shepherd.

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Economic Metaphors

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 8, 2020
in Books, Economics and Quotes
. 2 Comments

People who have a lot of money very rarely give it away. Some invisible hand prevents them.

—Iris Murdoch
Henry and Cato

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The More Things Change…

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 9, 2020
in Books
. 7 Comments

Herewith an excerpt from Chapter LIV of The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope, first published in 1875.

The background:

Mr. Augustus Melmotte, reputed to be in possession of a great fortune, of which both the magnitude and the provenance are cloaked in considerable mystery, has declared his candidacy for the Parliamentary seat of Westminster. Some say he’s much less wealthy than he claims to be, others that his wealth has all been effectively stolen from stakeholders in the vast enterprises that he’s run into the ground. His supporters say he’s a financial genius, and that this is a sufficient qualification for the job. He is accompanied on the campaign trail by Lord Alfred Grendall, a member of the Conservative establishment from Indiana London who has hitched his wagon to Mr. Melmotte’s star:

There was one man who thoroughly believed that the thing at the present moment most essentially necessary to England’s glory was the return of Mr. Melmotte for Westminster. This man was undoubtedly a very ignorant man. He knew nothing of any one political question that had vexed England for the last half century, — nothing whatever of the political history which had made England what it was at the beginning of that half century. Of such names as Hampden, Somers and Pitt he had hardly ever heard. He had probably never read a book in his life. He knew nothing of the working of parliament, nothing of nationality, — had no preference whatever for one form of government over another, never having given his mind a moment’s trouble on the subject. He had not even reflected how a despotic monarch or a federal republic might affect himself, and possibly did not comprehend the meaning of those terms. But yet he was fully confident that England did demand and ought to demand that Mr. Melmotte should be returned for Westminster. This man was Mr. Melmotte himself.
Continue reading ‘The More Things Change…’

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Essential Reading

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 6, 2020
in Books and Self-Promotion
. 1 Comment

essential

The Essential Milton Friedman is now available from Amazon and other sellers, in an electronic edition priced — thanks to the generosity of the Fraser Institute— at an incredibly low 99 cents. I hope this is a subsidy that even Professor Friedman would approve. If you prefer an actual hardcopy book you can hold in your hands, you can request one (for roughly the price of shipping) by emailing publications@fraserinstitute.org . Either way, you’ll save so much money you can afford to pick up a copy of Can You Outsmart an Economist? while you’re shopping.

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Price Gouging at Its Best

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 11, 2019
in Books, Economics and Quotes
. 0 Comments

From Frank Harris‘s first-person account of the Great Chicago Fire:

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Errata

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 1, 2018
in Books, Oops and Personal
. 14 Comments

Somewhere on my shelves, there is a math book with a page very like the following:

I know this because I remember seeing it (or at least I think I do), but I can’t quite remember which book it’s in.

Fortunately, I didn’t try to steal this joke for Can You Outsmart an Economist?, because it turns out there’s an actual erratum in the main text. It comes in Chapter 16 where a series of problems leads the reader to discover the basics of option pricing. The arithmetic in those problems is all correct, except for one thing: In order to keep the math easy, I assumed an interest rate of 50%. But with an interest rate that high (and given the other assumptions in the chapter), nobody would be mucking around with buying options in the first place; we’d all just be putting our money in the bank and getting rich in a hurry.

So what I should have done is assumed an interest rate of 20%. If you’ve got a copy of the book, you should pencil in the following changes:

Continue reading ‘Errata‘

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Can You Outsmart an Economist?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 25, 2018
in Books, Cool Stuff, Economics and Personal
. 22 Comments

Can You Outsmart an Economist?

100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain

My new book is now on sale! Readers of this blog will recognize some but not nearly all of these 100+ puzzles (146, actually, by my count). If you’ve enjoyed my puzzle posts, you’ll probably enjoy these extended discussions of some past puzzles, and the many more that are entirely new. Most of these puzzles are designed to teach important lessons about economics, broadly defined to encompass all purposeful human behavior. All of them are also designed to be fun.

Once you’ve had a look, please don’t hesitate to share your opinions right here on the blog — or better yet (especially if your opinions are positive!) don’t hesitate to share them on Amazon or on Goodreads.

Or, if you’d prefer to taste the milk before you buy the cow, here is the introduction, absolutely free of charge.

You can read a few advance reviews here. And remember, the more copies you buy, the sooner I’ll write the sequel.

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The Elephant in the Brain

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 17, 2018
in Books
. 14 Comments

elephantI haven’t been blogging much lately, but John Lanchester’s boneheaded review of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain seemed to demand a response. But I see that Robin himself has saved me the trouble with his devastating refutation here.

This does remind me that I never fulfilled my intention to review the The Elephant myself. This fell through the cracks because I’d accumulated substantial notes while reading it, lost my notes, decided to search for them before reviewing, and then sort of fell temporarily out of the blogosphere for a while. But it is a genuinely terrific book; my lost notes contain a long list of minor quibbles, but the bottom line is that I learned a lot (about others and about myself) and had a lot of fun along the way. There was never a moment when I wanted to put this book down.

The book, for those who have somehow managed not to hear about it, is about the hidden motives for human behavior — the motives we hide from each other, and the motives we hide from ourselves. The table of contents promises to enlighten us about how hidden motives drive our body language, laughter, conversation, and our choices in consumption, art, charity, education, medicine, religion and politics — and the book delivers on those promises with a heady mix of sparkling logic and striking evidence. There are plenty of fun facts you’ll be repeating at cocktail parties, and plenty of deep insights that will make you smarter forever.

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WTF?! Indeed!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 16, 2017
in Books, Economics and WTF?
. 3 Comments

Like most bloggers, I assign each of my posts to one or more Categories, which are listed in small print somewhere near the top of the post. Among the categories I use are “Economics”, “Politics”, “Policy”, “Math”, “Logic”, “Cool Stuff”, “History”, “Oddities” and “WTF?”. The last of these is perfect for this post, which is written to call your attention to Peter Leeson‘s rollicking new book WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird.

(Edited to add: I see now that the jacket copy on Leeson’s book describes it as “rollicking”. Apparently I’m not the only one who thought this was the right adjective here.)

Leeson, some of whose work I’ve blogged about here in the past, takes us on a tour of some of the world’s seemingly most inexplicable behavior — both historical and contemporary — and uses economic insight to render that behavior explicable after all. His explanations are generally plausible and provocative, though I’m sure many an insightful reader will find plenty to argue with. That, after all, is part of the fun.

Here are the blurbs from the back of the book:

Continue reading ‘WTF?! Indeed!’

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On the Slaying of Dragons

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 1, 2015
in Books and Quotes
. 3 Comments

The frontispiece from Differentiable Germs and Catastrophes by Theodore Brocker:

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Jobbing Between Two Lives

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 22, 2014
in Books and Empirical Puzzles
. 26 Comments

cadWhen the Greek goddess Hera wanted to know who enjoys sex more, men or women, she had the good sense to ask Tiresias, who had lived as both. (She did not, however, have the good sense to accept Tiresias’s answer).

When sociologist Kristen Schilt wanted to know why men and women succeed differently in the workplace, she had the good sense to ask workers who have lived as both. I’ve read only a fraction of Schilt’s book, but I learned a little about it from Jessica Nordell’s thoughtful writeup in the New Republic. The upshot seems to be that when women become men, they feel that they’re taken more seriously, whereas when men become women, they feel the opposite.

As Nordell points out, this really is a cool idea because a change in gender doesn’t change your skills or education, so when we track people’s experiences before and after their crossings, we’re holding a lot of relevant variables constant.

On the other hand, as Nordell also points out, there’s at least one important variable that’s not being held constant, and that’s testosterone level. When you go from female to male, you acquire a lot of testosterone; when you go from male to female you give up a lot. That opens up a lot of possibilities. Maybe testosterone makes you more effective at work, which leads to better treatment. Or maybe the treatment doesn’t change at all, but your testosterone level leads you to perceive it differently. (Likewise, of course, for a variety of other hormones.)

Continue reading ‘Jobbing Between Two Lives’

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On Piketty and Capital

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 30, 2014
in Books and Economics
. 22 Comments

Important disclaimer: I have not read Thomas Piketty‘s book on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and therefore cannot possibly have given it a fair reading.

I do, however, trust Per Krusell and Tony Smith to have given it a fair reading, because Krusell and Smith have long track records as diligent and thoughtful scholars. And their analysis appears to devastate both Piketty’s model and his prediction that income inequality is destined to grow explosively over time.

Here’s why:

All of Piketty’s predictions depend on his assumptions about how much people save. The simplest respectable model (that is, a model that economists generally feel comfortable using for many purposes, and which fits fairly well with observations) says that we save a fixed percentage of our incomes — say 30%. (There are also more sophisticated models in which this percentage can change as economic conditions change.)

Piketty, by contrast, assumes that our net saving is a fixed percentage of our net incomes, where “net” means “after subtracting depreciation of our assets”. That’s a very different assumption, and, according to Krusell and Smith, not at all a plausible one. It’s implausible first because it has extremely odd implications. Most notably, it implies (though this is not immediately obvious) that if economic growth slows to zero, we will eventually choose to save 100% of our incomes(!!). Beyond that, Krusell and Smith argue in considerable detail that, compared to the more traditional models, Piketty’s does a poor job of fitting the last seventy years’ worth of data.

According to Krusell and Smith, Piketty demonstrates correctly that under his assumptions, slowing economic growth must lead to massive inequality over time. But under the far more plausible assumptions found in modern textbooks and modern research papers, that conclusion goes away. In fact, after substituting those assumptions, Piketty’s arguments yield something like the opposite conclusion — as growth slows down, changes in inequality become pretty much negligible.

If this analysis is right — and given the identities of the authors I’ll be very surprised if it’s wrong — then there appears to be very little reason to buy into Piketty’s story. That doesn’t mean he’s wasted his time. We learn a lot by making a variety of different assumptions and figuring out where they lead us, even when the assumptions are ultimately unsupportable. But a serious intellectual exercise is not the same thing as a serious prediction.

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Many Many Worlds

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 1, 2014
in Books, Math, Ontology, Philosophy, Physics, Recommendations and Science
. 54 Comments

tegmarkMax Tegmark is a professor of physics at MIT, a major force in the development of modern cosmology, a lively expositor, and the force behind what he calls the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis — a vision of the Universe as a purely mathematical object. Readers of The Big Questions will be aware that this is a vision I wholeheartedly embrace.

Tegmark’s new book Our Mathematical Universe is really several books intertwined, including:

  1. A brisk tour of the Universe as it’s understood by mainstream cosmologists, touching on many of the major insights of the past 2000 years, beginning with how Aristarchos figured out the size of the moon, and emphasizing the extraordinary pace of recent progress. In just a few years, cosmologists have gone from arguing over whether the Universe is 10 billion or 20 billion years old to arguing over whether it’s 13.7 or 13.8.

    Continue reading ‘Many Many Worlds’

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Power Transmission

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 21, 2013
in Books, History and Politics
. 35 Comments

Robert CaroAs I work my way through Robert Caro’s monumental four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, I’m repeatedly astonished by Caro’s gargantuan appetite for detail on the one hand, and his near total incuriosity about the big picture on the other.

Case in point: We get almost 40 densely packed pages on the appropriations (eventually totaling $25 million) for the Marshall Ford Dam and another 30 or so on what a dramatic change the dam (and the electricity it brought) made in the lives of Texas Hill Country farm families. But unless I overlooked it, we’re never told how many of those farm families were affected — and are thus left with absolutely no basis for thinking about whether this dam was a good investment.

At another point, we’re told of a $1.8 million expenditure to bring electric lines to 2892 Hill Country farms. (This is, of course, over and above the cost of the dam, which presumably benefited many more than just these 2892.) This time, thankfully, we are at least told how many families are affected. But since the expenditure comes to $622 per family in a time and place when one dollar a day was a good wage, where there was no running water and very little communication with the outside world, and where the soil was bad and getting worse, this raises the question of whether that $622 could have been better spent relocating that family to a better place. (All the moreso if we top off that $622 with the family’s pro rata share of the dam cost.) Caro never even acknowledges the question, pausing simply to celebrate the benefits of electricity, which, he seems to imply, were great and therefore (!) justified the expenditures.

Well, there are two ways you can get the benefits of electricity. The electricity can come to you, or you can go to it. Sometimes one way is better; sometimes the other. When conditions are as Caro describes them — with the land essentially worn out, starvation rampant, and everyone too poor to get a fresh start in, say, Austin — there’s a pretty good likelihood that the guy who could have helped you move, but instead spends a bundle to bring you an electric line, has something other than your best interests at heart.

I’m not far enough along to be sure of this, but after a little peeking ahead, it’s beginning to look like this is how Caro’s going to treat the Great Society also — hundreds of pages on the details of the legislation, hundreds more on the good it (allegedly) did, and not a single inquiry into how much more good somebody could have done with expenditures of that magnitude.

And then there’s this passage, which I feel compelled to assure you I am not making up:

Continue reading ‘Power Transmission’

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P.S.

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 14, 2013
in Books, Evolution, Religion and Science
. 27 Comments

In yesterday’s post, I claimed to have refuted Richard Dawkins’s claim that everything complex must have emerged from something simple by citing the natural numbers, which are provably highly complex (in a very precise sense) yet did not emerge from something simple. Numerous commenters suggested that I’d been unfair to Dawkins, because he’d surely meant his claim to apply only to biological processes.

Here is a quote from Dawkins’s book “The God Delusion”:

Time and again, my theologian friends returned to the point that there had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, I siaid, but it must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name….The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present existence.

I could provide additional quotes, but this one should suffice. Dawkins believes, unless I have misunderstood him completely, that he has a quite general argument, not tied in any way to biology (because the above quote, for example, has nothing to do with biology) to establish that complex structures must have simple causes. That argument, whatever it might be, cannot be correct because the natural numbers stand as a counterexample.

If Dawkins, or any of his defenders, wants to respond that his argument is not intended to apply to the natural numbers, it becomes incumbent on them to point to a hypothesis which is actually used in the argument which would rule out such an application. Absent such a hypothesis, the argument must be erroneous.

I claim to have explained in The Big Questions exactly how the first cause of our Universe could be a mathematical structure that is far more complex than the Universe itself; of course others, like Max Tegmark, have demonstrated this possibility in far more detail than I have. Whether or not Tegmark and I are correct in our beliefs, I claim we’ve at least demonstrated that (as far as we can tell) those beliefs could be true, which, once again, refutes Dawkins’s position.

An argument that leads to flat-out wrong conclusions cannot be a correct argument, even if some of its implications turn out to be true. So I stand by what I said both yesterday and in The Big Questions : Dawkins’s position fails for exactly the same reason that Michael Behe’s does — we have an explicit example that shows that complexity requires neither a simpler antecedent nor a designer.

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Hypocrites and Half-Wits

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 29, 2012
in Books and Recommendations
. 23 Comments

hhwThe letter to the editor is a literary genre unique unto itself. Unlike the editorial or the op-ed, the letter typically allows its author only a couple of short paragraphs to make a single compelling point. A good blog post might ramble from one loosely connected idea to another, but a good letter proceeds directly to its target.

Don Boudreaux is, beyond any doubt, the modern master — no, the all-time master — of this underrated branch of literature. When a radio station interviews a Galveston resident who’s just topped off her gas tank in anticipation of Hurricane Ike — and who is furious to learn that gas prices have jumped 50 cents a gallon overnight even though “Ike hadn’t hit yet” — a blogger (or an Armchair Economist) might respond with a long-winded explanation of why it’s a good thing that supply, demand, and therefore prices respond quickly to a change in expectations. Boudreaux, instead, skips right to the heart of the matter:

Your reporter should have immediatedly asked this woman: “Well, why were you topping off your tank? Ike hadn’t hit yet.”

Continue reading ‘Hypocrites and Half-Wits’

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Hang On There ….

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 1, 2012
in Books, Recommendations and Self-Promotion
. 5 Comments

Edited to Add: These problems are fixed now! The electronic versions are correct. They are still advertised as November 2007 editions, but they are in fact the May 2012 edition. You can now trust the links at http://www.TheBigQuestions.com/buy .

________________________________________________________________

hangToday (May 1) was the official publication date for the all-new revised edition of The Armchair Economist. (Read the preface here.) Unfortunately, we had a major communication screw-up and purchasers of the electronic editions (Kindle, Nook, etc.) are still receiving the 1993 edition (which is labeled the “2007 edition” because that’s when it was converted to an e-book). This will be fixed in a day or so. I’ll post to let you know when it’s safe to buy.

Meanwhile, if you’ve recently purchased an electronic Armchair Economist, I encourage you to return it, wait just a day or two till you see the announcement that all systems are go, and then buy it all over again.

I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am about this. There is at least one very particular head I’d like to see roll.

Thanks for bearing with the glitch, and watch this space for the big announcement that all systems are go.

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The Armchair Economist: Revised, Updated, and Available May 1 — or for pre-order now!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 11, 2012
in Books, Economics, Recommendations and Self-Promotion
. 44 Comments

FROM THE PREFACE:

One day in 1991, I walked into a medium sized bookstore and counted over 80 titles on quantum physics and the history of the Universe. A few shelves over I found Richard Dawkins’s bestseller The Selfish Gene along with dozens of others explaining Darwinan evolution and the genetic code.

In the best of these books, I discovered natural wonders, confronted mysteries, learned new ways of thinking, and felt I had shared in a great intellectual adventure, founded on ideas that are dazzling in their scope and their simplicity.

Economics, too, is a great intellectual adventure, but I could find, in 1991, not a single book that proposed to share that adventure with the general public. There was nothing that revealed the economist’s unique way of thinking, using a few simple ideas to illuminate the whole range of human behavior, shake up our preconceptions, and jolt us into new ways of seeing the world.

I resolved to write that book. The Armchair Economist was published in 1993, and attracted much critical praise along with a large and devoted following. But what I take most pride in is that The Armchair Economist is still widely recognized among economists as the book to give your mother when she wants to understand what you do all day.

Continue reading ‘The Armchair Economist: Revised, Updated, and Available May 1 — or for pre-order now!’

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What Is It Like to Talk Batty?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 20, 2012
in Books, Economics and Ignorance
. 40 Comments

Sometimes I think we should license economics writers.

Thomas Nagel is a prominent philosopher (author of the provocative and widely anthologized essay What is it Like to be a Bat?) who’s just reviewed Daniel Kahneman’s new (and excellent) book in The New Republic. (Fun fact: When I stepped off an airplane at Heathrow last week, the first thing I saw was a limousine driver holding a sign that said “Daniel Kahneman”. This, incidentally, was my final issue of The New Republic, due to their criminally evil subscription practices — more on that, perhaps, later this week. ) Here is how Nagel describes what he seems to think is orthodox economic theory:

Most choices, and all economic choices, involve some uncertainty about their outcomes, and rational expectations theory, also called expected utility theory, describes a uniform standard for determining the rationality of choices under uncertainty…

The standard seems self-evident: The value of a 50 percent probability of an outcome is half the value the outcome would have if it actually occurred, and in general the value of any choice under uncertainty is dependent on the values of its possible outcomes, multiplied by their probabilities. Rationality in decision consists in making choices on the basis of `expected value’, which means picking the alternative that maximizes the sum of the products of utility and probability for all the possible outcomes. So a 10 percent chance of $1000 is better than a 50% chance of $150, an 80% chance of $100 plus a 20% chance of $10 is better than a 100 percent of $80 and so forth.

AAAAGGGHHH! Even on the Internet, it’s rare to see quite so much ignorance packed into so few words. Where to begin?

Continue reading ‘What Is It Like to Talk Batty?’

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Launching the Innovation Renaissance

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 20, 2011
in Books, Economics, Policy and Recommendations
. 8 Comments

tabarroIn late 17th century England, there were no newspapers outside of London, and scarcely a printer outside of London, Cambridge and Oxford. The difficulty and expense of conveying large packets from place to place was so great that an extensive work took longer to reach Devonshire or Lancashire than it took, in Victorian times, to reach Kentucky. As a result, books and printed matter generally were largely unavailable outside of London — and London, for most rural Englishmen, might as well have been the moon.

I learned this from Macaulay’s History of England, which I just pulled up on my Kindle, which of course gives me instant — and searchable! — access to pretty much everything that’s ever been published. But the Kindle, and its brother e-readers, are more revolutionary than that. Not only do they give us easy access to existing literature; they call forth entirely new literary genres, such as the Kindle e-book, which brings to market extended essays that are too long to be magazine articles but too short to be traditional books — and are priced to sell.

All of which brings me to Alex Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast, which is both a product and a celebration of the innovation revolution, along with a recipe, or rather a set of recipes, for nurturing that revolution.

This is a great book. It’s fast-paced, fun to read, informative as hell, and it gets everything right. At first I wished I’d written it— until I realized I could never have written it half so well.

Continue reading ‘Launching the Innovation Renaissance’

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A Tale Told By an Idiot

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 22, 2011
in Books, Favorites and Memories
. 21 Comments

In sixth grade, I did not read My Side of the Mountain, though it was assigned for class. In eighth grade, I did not read Little Women and in ninth grade I did not read Great Expectations and The Good Earth. As I passed through high school, I worked my way through much of the western canon, not reading The Scarlet Letter, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Return of the Native, and dozens more. In eleventh grade, we were assigned two books by Steinbeck, two by Hemingway, two by Sinclair Lewis and two by William Faulkner. I did not read the Steinbeck, Hemingway or Lewis but for some long-forgotten reason I violated years of established tradition by tackling the Faulkner — specifically As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.

As I Lay Dying went down pretty easily, but I remember many nights struggling my way through The Sound and the Fury, Cliff notes at my side. It felt like scaling Everest, and the vistas at the top were worth the climb.

A couple of weeks ago, as part of my ongoing project to read great novels, I decided to revisit The Sound and the Fury, and I’m more than glad I did; I finally have an answer to give the next time I’m asked what one novel I’d bring to a desert island. But what I’m flabbergasted by is this: How did this book ever get assigned to high school students in the first place? I ask for at least two reasons:

Continue reading ‘A Tale Told By an Idiot’

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How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 30, 2011
in Books and Favorites
. 33 Comments

ibookshelfA few years ago, I discovered that reading on my Kindle is about 1000 times better than reading a book. This year, I discovered that reading on my iPhone is about 100 times better than reading on my Kindle. As a result (and also as a result of a lot of time spent on airplanes), I’ve been on a mad fiction-reading spree the past few months. Some mini-reviews:

Continue reading ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’

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Dow 36,000 12,000

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 28, 2011
in Bad Reasoning, Books, Economics, Finance and Paul Krugman
. 15 Comments

In 1999, the journalist James K. Glassman co-authored a book called Dow 36,000. The eponymous prediction did not pan out. A couple of days ago, Glassman popped up in the Wall Street Journal, trying to explain where he went wrong. “The world changed”, explains Glassman. The relative economic standing of the U.S. is declining. Plus terrorists and economic instability made the world a riskier place.

But there’s a better explanation. Glassman’s story never made sense in the first place, for reasons Paul Krugman explained when the book first came out.

Glassman has a substantial history of confusion about how financial markets work. Ten years before he wrote Dow 36,000, he was explaining in The New Republic that stocks are better investments than real estate:

Continue reading ‘Dow 36,000 12,000′

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The Grand Design

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 27, 2010
in Books, Ontology and Physics
. 41 Comments

granddesign

To understand the universe at the deepest level, we need to know not only how the universe behaves, but why.

  • Why is there something rather than nothing?
  • Why do we exist?
  • Why this particular set of laws and not some other?

So say Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their book The Grand Design, and so say I.

The Big Big Question is the first one: Why is there something rather than nothing? Hawking’s answer: The laws of physics — and especially the form of the law of gravity — allow for the spontaneous creation of universes out of nothing at all. We live in one of those spontaneously created universes. But this, of course, only serves to raise a new Big Big Question, namely: Why are the laws of physics as they are? Hawking’s answer: The laws of physics must be consistent and must predict finite results for the quantities we can measure. It turns out that those criteria pretty much dictate the form of the laws of physics.

So unless I’ve misunderstood him, here is Hawking’s position: In order for us to be able to measure the things that we measure, the laws of physics must have a certain form, and in order for them to have that form, universes must be able to arise from nothing. Therefore our universe was able to arise from nothing. But this does not seem to answer the question of why things couldn’t have been very different. Why couldn’t there have been no us, no measurements, no laws of physics and no anything?

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The Harvard Classics

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 3, 2010
in Books, Economics and Education
. 22 Comments

If you happen to be attending Harvard this semester, one of your course options is Greg Mankiw’s Freshman Seminar 43j, “The Economist’s View of the World”:

This seminar probes how economic thinkers from the right and left view human behavior and the proper role of government in society. Each week, seminar participants read and discuss a brief, nontechnical, policy-oriented book by a prominent economist. Regular writing assignments are also required. Students should have some background in economics, such as an AP economics course in high school or simultaneous enrollment in Social Analysis 10.

The ten books on tap for this semester are:

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Living In the Future

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 26, 2010
in Books, Progress and Progress2
. 29 Comments


My treasured copy of the humor classic Science Made Stupid, copyright 1985, contains a Wonderful Future Invention Checklist. Who in 1985 would have thought that just 25 years later, I could check off a third or so of the entries?

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65 Years Later

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 6, 2010
in Books and History
. 17 Comments

quartered65 years ago today, the world changed. In his magnificent World War II memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, George McDonald Fraser looks back on what might have been:

I led Nine Section for a time; leading or not, I was part of it. They were my mates, and to them I was bound by ties of duty, loyalty and honor… Could I say, yes, Grandarse or Nick or Forster were expendable, and should have died rather than the victims of Hiroshima? No, never. And the same goes for every Indian, American, Australian, African, Chinese and other soldier whose life was on the line in August, 1945. So [I’d have said]: drop the bomb.

…

And then I have another thought.

You see, I have a feeling that if—and I know it’s an impossible if—but if, on that sunny August morning, Nine Section had known all that we know now of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and could have been shown the effect of that bombing, and if some voice from on high had said: “There — that can end the war for you, if you want. But it doesn’t have to happen, the alternative is that the war, as you’ve known it, goes on to a normal victorious conclusion, which may take some time, and if the past is anything to go by, some of you won’t reach the end of the road. Anyway, Malaya’s down that way … it’s up to you”, I think I know what would have happened. They would have cried “Aw, fook that!”, with one voice, and then they would have sat about, snarling, and lapsed into silence, and then someone would have said heavily, “Aye, weel” and got to his feet, and been asked “W’eer th’ ‘ell you gan, then?”, and given no reply, and at last, the rest would have got up, too, gathering their gear with moaning and foul language and ill-tempered harking back to the long dirty bloody miles from the Imphal boxes to the Sittang Bend and the iniquity of having to do it again, slinging their rifles and bickering about who was to go on point, and “Ah’s aboot ‘ed it, me!” and “You, ye bugger, ye’re knackered afower ye start, you!”, and “We’ll a’ git killed!”, and then they would have been moving south. Because that is the kind of men they were.

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The Girl Who Played With Numbers

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 16, 2010
in Books and Math
. 7 Comments

girlfireI’ve just finished reading The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second book in the series that begins with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’m not giving away any significant plot point when I tell you that there’s a character who works on Fermat’s Last Theorem as a hobby, or that the book was clearly written (or perhaps translated) by somebody with no clue how mathematics works or what Fermat’s Last Theorem is about. I particularly liked the reference to Andrew Wiles using the “world’s most complicated computer program” to solve the problem. It’s my understanding that Andrew barely even uses email. And certainly if you understood anything about the nature of the problem and/or the solution, you’d recognize the absurdity of trying to tackle it with a complicated computer program.

Be that as it may, I finished the novel with a few hours left to spare, so of course I was inspired to work on Fermat’s Last Theorem, or at least on the simplest cases. The problem, if you’ll recall, is to show that there are no integer solutions to any of the equations x3+y3=z3 , x4+y4=z4 and so on, except for the so-called trivial solutions in which one or more variables take the value zero.

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The Machinery of Freedom

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 24, 2010
in Books and Recommendations
. 17 Comments

machineryDavid D. Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, a classic of libertarian thought, has long been out of print and hard to find. (Well, it’s easy to find, actually. But hard to find for less than about a hundred bucks.) It is therefore a very good thing that David’s gotten his publisher’s permission to post the entire book on the World Wide Web, for free.

What does David get out of this? Well first, of course, he wants you to read his book. But second, he’s about to start preparing a third edition and welcomes reader feedback. If you post your comments here, I’ll make sure he sees them.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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