Grasping Reality with Both Hands

I Never Knew There Were Such Things as "Book Trailers"...

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters...

"The Short and Simple Annals of the Poor..."

Thomas Gray, 1750:

Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard":
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor...

The first four or so times I read:

Robert C. Allen: The year 1762 witnessed two momentous changes in cropping [in Spelsbury in Oxfordshire]. First, turnip cultivation was shifted from the sainfoin [grass] enclosure to the open fields themselves.... Secondly, clover was introduced...

the word "momentous" did not strike me as at all out of place or inappropriate or funny...

Should I be alarmed? Or distressed? Or just accept that the particular road I have walked has made me a somewhat strange person?

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St. Giles Church, Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, next door (well, only by California standards: an hour ro so by the M40 via Oxford and High Wycomb) to Spelsbury.

(Site of Gray's "Elegy," and also IIRC of the game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy in Brave New World, of scenes in the fims Bridget Jones's Diary and Goldfinger, and something to do with Bertie Wooster...)

Jo Walton on Spearpoints

From "The Dyer of Lorbannery":

papThe Dyer of Lorbannery: There comes a point in writing, and it's a spear-point, it's very small and sharp but because it's backed by the length and weight of a whole spear and a whole strong person pushing it, it's a point that goes in a long way. Spearpoints need all that behind them, or they don't pack their punch in the same way. Examples are difficult to give because spear-points by their nature require their context.... They tend to be moments of poignancy and realization. When Duncan picks the branches when passing through trees, he's just getting a disguise, but we the audience suddenly understand how Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane....

[T]he [spear] I used as a title for this -- in The Farthest Shore, a minor character shouts out her name for all to hear. For someone who read that page alone, this would be inexplicable and possibly silly. For someone who has come all the way through Earthsea as far as Lorbannery already, it's terrible and revelatory -- and when Ged does the same thing later, quoting his own name in what Orm Embar says to him, there's an even longer spear-point that goes back to Ged's naming at Ogion's hands near the beginning of A Wizard of Earthsea...

Has Martin Wolf Been Reading too Many Comic Books?

He writes:

The cautious approach to fixing banks will not work: With one bound the banks are free...

Cicero: The Britons Are too Stupid to Make Good Slaves

I have been looking for this quote for years!

Caesar, in writing home, said of the Britons, “They are the most ignorant people I have ever conquered. They cannot be taught music.” Cicero, in writing to his friend Atticus, advised him not to buy slaves in England, “because,” said he, “they cannot be taught to read, and are the ugliest and most stupid race I ever saw.”

William Wells Brown (1863), The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (Boston: James Redpath), pp. 33-4; quoted on p. 92 by Mia Bay (2000), The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas About White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 019510045X).

Now where in Caesar's Commentaries and Cicero's Letters to Atticus are the originals?

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UPDATE: The internet to the rescue (actually the UVA Classics Department)! Gregory Hays:

I think one of the quotations in Brown is a very vague paraphrase of Cicero, Letters to Atticus 4.16.7. Here's D.R. Shackleton Bailey's English rendering:

... The Paccius letter having been answered, let me tell you the rest of my news. A letter from my brother contains some quite extraordinary things about Caesar's warm feelings towards me, and is corroborated by a very copious letter from Caesar himself. The result of the war against Britain is eagerly awaited, for the approaches to the island are known to be 'warded with wondrous massy walls.' It is also now ascertained that there isn't a grain of silver on the island nor any prospect of booty apart from captives, and I fancy you won't expect any of them to be highly qualified in literature or music!

Best,
Greg Hays

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Ah. There appears to be some confusion in the text--does the passage follow "Paccianae epistulae respondi" (I have responded to the letter brought by Paccius) in 4.16 (Scr. Romae ex. m. Iun. aut in. Quint. a. 700) or does it follow "in illis quidem tribus libris, quos tu dilaudas, nihil reperio" (no report in those three books which you praise) in 4.17 (Scr. Romae K. Oct a. 700)?

Ah. Here it is:

I am, Zeus Pater knows, no Classics scholar. But from context--we are talking about profit for the res publica from imperialism here--I would be more inclined to translate "litteris aut musicis eruditos" as something like "taught to read or play" rather than Shackleton Bailey's "highly qualified in literature or music." The point appears to be that Caesar is engaged in folly: raiding an island where (a) there is no silver to be stolen, and (b) the slaves he will capture won't be worth much.

By what process Brown gets "ugliest and most stupid race" I do not know...

Just Arrived in the Mail Blogging...

The Root Desk--the desk bought by my great-grandmother around World War I from the Root family. There is a tradition that this is the desk at which George F. Root wrote "Jesus Loves the Little Children" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom" (but when "there is a tradition" that X, that of course means that X is not true but it is nice to think that it is).

This is worth mentioning because I have been peeking over the intelligent and thoughtful Ta-Nehisi Coates's shoulder as he reads James McPherson's Civil War history The Battle Cry of Freedom, reflects on it, and blogs about it. It's all very very good. For example:

Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes - Ta-Nehisi Coates: Of the many reckonings that black people of honest political consciousness must endure, the appointment with black slavery is the most agonizing. I don't mean the appointment with the notion of white people as the enslavers of our ancestors, but the appointment with our African ancestors as brokers. I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in fact and in spirit.

I don't propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth--but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites  from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.

A few years later I read (like many of you, no doubt) Guns, Germs and Steel and was, again, heartbroken. Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost. This was heart-breaking, in the existential sense. What was I, if not noble? What was the cosmic justice at work that put me here, that made me second? Slowly, by that line of questioning, I came to understand that there really was no cosmic justice, that I should just be happy to be alive. Moreover the truth--Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells--was sustenance enough. Finally I learned to actually like that old pain, that feeling of something inside me, deeply-held, falling away. It was not the end of me, just the burn of good, refining, moral and intellectual, work-out.

As I've said, I finished McPherson's Battle Cry Of Freedom today. It deserves its own post, but I want to focus on one aspect the book handles particularly well--the South's psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don't mean defeat in the war, so much as I meanlagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally. I've actually long overlooked that last point by noting to myself that virtually all societies practiced slavery. But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom. Thus this country was not merely a moral offender among many, but a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.

It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. It was not bad enought that my people had been enslaved, but the fact that we were first enslaved by people who looked like me robbed us of any moral high ground. The South long evaded that painful reality, and when confronted with it, simply lied. Thus pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over slavery and white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty of states. To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.

Nathan Bedford Forrest (pictured above) is beautiful. Again, dig those steely eyes, that dead serious countenance, the warrior's beard. His story is American--the dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he's noble too, and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union hell the whole time. Forrest is the model of Southern chivalry--too much so. He made his money buying and selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK (Forrest).  To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort Pillow and in the KKK.

At the end of his book, McPherson has a section where the Confederacy, now desperate, considers raising regiments of black slaves to fight for them. For years, now, they've seen black soldiers--many of them their own ex-slaves--actively contributing to the South's demise. But faced with the prospect of doing the same, Lee and Davis are ensnared by the very lies that they've, until now, heartily embraced. Conceding that blacks could be soldiers, would be a tacit admission of their equality. As Southerner Howell Cobb puts it, "If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." The South eventually raises two black regiments, but the Confederacy is defeated before any of them see action. And yet, in this section, you can see them trying to square the circle, trying to find another lie that will allow the lie of white supremacy to stand.

I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause. The temptation to continue to lie, to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable--consider Lindsay Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently swims in a free world of color. But I suspect that some manner of change is coming, that we are reaching point when witlessly honoring the founder of the greatest perpetrator of domestic terrorism in American history, when flying that sorry order's battle flag, becomes embarrassing. Sooner or later, I think the South will understand that the ideology of "noble victimhood" is a luxury it too can ill-afford. Some will hold out, I am sure. But sooner or later, I think most of the South will be black like me.

And "One Last Thought on [Nathan Bedford] Forrest".

Living Standards at the End of the Nineteenth Century: Literary Evidence from Emile Zola

Erich Auerbach (1946), Mimesis (trans. Willard Trask; Princeton University Press) on Emile Zola (1888), Germinal:

We have chosen a passage from Germinal (1888), the novel which describes life in a coal-mining region of northern France. It is the end of the second chapter of part 3. It is kermess time, a Sunday night in July. The workmen of the place have spent the afternoon going from one bar to another, drinking, bowling, looking at all sorts of shows. The day ends climactically with a ball, the bal du Bon-Joyeux, at the estaminet of the fat, fiftyish, but still usty widow Desir. The ball has been going on for several hours; even the older women are coming to it now, bringing their small children.

Jusqu'a dix heures, on resta....

(It was ten o'clock before anybody left. Women kept arriving to find and take away their men; bands of children followed at their heels; and the mohters no longer troubled about appearances took out long blond breasts like bags of oats, smeared their fat-cheeked babies with milk; while the children who could already walk, gorged with beer and on all fours under the tables, relieved themselves without shame. It was a rising sea of beer, Widow Desir's casks broached, beer swelling out bellies, flowing from all sides, from noses, from eyes, and from everywhere. People swelled up so, in the press, that everyone had a shoulder of a knee digging into this neighbor; all were made cheerful, at ease, by feeling one another's elbows in this way. A continuous laugh kept mouths open, gaping to the ears. It was as hot as an oven, everyone was roasting, all made themselves comfortable, their flesh exposed, gilded in the thick smoke of the pipes; and the only difficulty was to move, a girl got up from time to time, went to the back, near the pump, tucked up her skirts, then returend. Under the garlands of colored paper the dancers no longer saw each other, they were sweating so--which encouraged the pit-boys to knock over the haulage-girls by promiscuous thrusts of their haunches. But when a strapping girl fell with a man on top of her, the cornet covered their fall with its furious sounds, the swing of feet rolled them, as if the dance had collapsed on them.

Someone passing by told Pierron that his daughter Lydie was sleeping at the door, across the sidewalk. She had swallowed her share of the stolen bottle, she was drunk, and he had to carry her home in his arms, while Jeanlin and Bebert, more resistant, followed him at a distance, finding it very funny. This was the signal for departure, the families left the Bon-Joyeux, the Maheus and the Levaques decided to returtn to the mining village. At that moment, Pere Bonnemort an old Mouque also left Montsou, both with the same sleep-walking gait, stubbornly maintaining the silence of their memories. And they all went home together, for the last time they passed through the carniaval, the solidifying pans of fried stuff, the bars from which the last mugs were pouring in streams, even to the middle of the road. There ws still a storm threatening, laughter rose as soon as they had left the lighted houses to lose themselves in the dark countryside. A hot breath poured from the ripe wheat, many children must have been conceived that night. When they reached the village, they felt let down. Neither the Levaques nor the Maheus supped with appetite, an the latter fell asleep finishing their morning boiled beef.

Etienne had taken Chaval to drink somre more at Rasseneurs's.

"I'm on!" said Chaval, when his comrade had explained the matter of the reserve fun to him. "Shake! You're all right!"

A touch of drunkenness made Etienne's eyes flame. He cried, "Yes, lets be together... As for me, I tell you, for justice I would give everything, drink, and women. There's only one thing that warms my heart, it's the idea that we are going to get rid of the bosses"...)

The passage is one of those which when Zola's work first appeared... aroused disgust and horror, but also... admiration. A reader... could believe for a moment that he had before him a literary form of the coarse realism whih is so well known from the Flemish and especially the Dutch painting of the seventeenth century... a lower-class orgy of dancing and drinking... found or imagined in Rubens or Jordaens, in Brouwer or Ostade. To be sure, these are not peasants... but factory workers; and there is also a difference in the effect produced, in that the especially brutal details impress us... as more disagreeable and painful than they would as elements in a painting.... The flowing beer the haze of sweat, the grinning and wide-open mouths likewise become visul impressions; acoustic and other sensory effects are also produced....

But... [a]mong [Zola's] enemies... were doubtless many who accepted the grotesque or comic realism of earlier epochs... with equanimity or even delight. What excited them was... that Zola by no means put forward his art... as comic. Almost every line he wrote showed that all this was meant... seriously and morally... the true picture of contemporary society as he--Zola--saw it....

The first line--Jusqu'a dix heures, on resta--would be inconceivable in a [comic] grotesque mob orgy. Why are we told of the end of the orgy at the start? For a purely amusing or grotesque purpose, that would be much too sobering. And why such an early hour? What sort of an orgy is it which reaches its end so early? The coal miners have to be out of bed early on Monday morning, some of them at four o'clock.... And once we have paused, there are many other things that strike us. An orgy, even among the lower classes, calls for plenty. And plenty there is, but it is poor and frugal--nothing but beer. The whole thing shows how desolate and miserable the joys of these people are.

The real purport of the passage.... Lydie is a girl of twelve who has spent the evening running aorund with... Jeanlin and Bebert. The three of them already work as haulers in the mine. They are prematurely depraved.... [T]wo old, worn-out pitmen, Bonnemort anf Moque... hardly sicty years old but already the last of their generation--used up and apathetic....

Crude and miserable pleasures; early depravity and rapid wearing out of human material; a dissolute sex life; and a birth rate too high for such living conditions since intercourse is the only amusement that costs nothing; behind all this, at least among the most energetic and intelligent, revolutionary hatred is on the verge of breaking out--these are the motifs of our text. They are unreservedly translated into sensory terms....

If Zola exaggerated, he did so in the direction which mattered; and if he had a predilection for the ugly, he used it most fruitfully. Even today, after half a century the last decades of which have brought us experiences such as Zola never dreamed of, Germinal is a terrifying book. And even today it has lost none of its significance and indeed none of its timeliness. There are passages in it which deserve to become classic... because they depict, with exemplary clarity and simplicity, the situation and the awakening of the fourth estate...

And, of course, the coal miners of northeast France had it relatively good: these were towns that were growing, not shrinking, in the late-nineteenth century and as a result jobs for which bosses had to pay enough to attract young workers from outside.

The Pile of Books that Must Be Read Immediately!! Grows

• Robert Allen (2009), The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective
• Justin Fox (2009), The Myth of the Rational Market
• Thomas Levenson (2009), Newton and the Counterfeiter
• Gillian Tett (2009), Fool's Gold

The pile of books that must be read is no longer something I can keep track of...

"The God Told Me to Give You the Special Message that I Have No Special Message to Give You"

The Invisible College:

Aristocles, son of Ariston, of the deme Collytus (alias "Big-Head") (ca. 370 B.C.), Reason & Persuasion: Three Dialogues: Euthyphro, Meno, Politeia I, trans. by Belle Waring, comment. and illu. by John Holbo (Singapore: Pearson Asia).

There are much worse ways to spend a foggy Monday morning than in my office eighty feet above the Berkeley campus drinking espresso and talking about the good, the holy, education, and political order with John Holbo, Belle Waring, Sokrates, Meno, Euthyphro, Glaukon, Adeimantos, Polymarkhos, Kephalos, and Thrasymakhos: "Yesterday I went down to the Piraeus with Glaukon the son of Ariston..."

And, of course, I am alone. The campus is dead this week.

The Publishing System Evolves

Bruce Bartlett emails:

I was rather astonished to discover that my next book is already available for preorder.... I only just finished reviewing the copy edits a few days ago...

http://www.amazon.com/New-American-Economy-Failure-Reaganomics/dp/0230615872/

Needless to say, it is a book of astonishing brilliance. If you have the slightest interest, preorder today. It’s actually pretty important to have as many preorders as possible.

By now it is assumed that all authors are blanketing their contact list with appeals to preorder their books, and so authors who don't do so are presumed to be both (a) friendless and (b) uninteresting--even if they are only shy.

The next stage is to offer $5 kickbacks for preorders...

John Quiggin Should Write a Book

Over at Crooked Timber Miracle Max writes:

Benefits of blogging: The discredited ideas theme really needs a book, and JQ appears to be the ideal person to write it. I will even contribute the title: “Dead Ideas from New Economists.” No charge.

The reference is to:

• Refuted economic doctrines #1: The efficient markets hypothesis at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #2: The case for privatisation at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #3: The Great Moderation at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #4: individual retirement accounts at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #5: Trickle down at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #6: Central bank independence at John Quiggin
• Refuted/obsolete economic doctrines #7: New Keynesian macroeconomics at John Quiggin

Arachne Jericho: How Iain M. Banks Ruined Me for Science Fiction, Epic Fantasy, and Low Fantasy

Arachne Jericho says, I think, that she should not have read Iain M. Banks's book Matter:

Review: Iain M. Banks’ Matter: On the nesting Matryoshka dolls of space-faring civilizations, philosophy a la Nietzsche, and how Banks ruined SF and epic fantasy at the same time for me. Matter is one of Banks’ loosely set Culture novels. As a rule they’re Big Idea tales that ruthlessly use mechanisms unique to science fiction to explore said ideas.... His world-building is more glorious and mind-bending than before, his ideas more encompassing and disturbing....

I made the mistake of getting attached to the plot threads, even though I knew ahead of time that, given the nihilistic theme that became more and more apparent, the collision of the two plots just could not end well. I don’t mind characters dying... but Banks didn’t just destroy characters, but entire plots....

After Matter, I devoured more Culture novels.... His books are excellent, exquisite in their handling of story. He’s one of the best writers out there, in any genre or mainstream. But his books are, in sincerity, not for me.... Banks made me despair of ever liking SF again. Any other book or story I attempted to read felt lifeless. I folded myself into the Dresden Files for two weeks after I discovered that I couldn't even stomach epic low fantasy anymore.

Well played, Banks. Your story stayed with me.

Ah. Iain M. Banks...

Remember: a Banks novel will be set in a galaxy-spanning space-traveling future, inhabited by super-intelligent robots with jokey names, show bizarre technological and natural marvels of enormous scale, involve fearful fanatic antagonists who cannot be reasoned with, contain do-gooders who leave a cornucopiac utopia to try to help the less-fortunate using whatever means are necessary. At the end those among the protagonists whom a malign fate has put at the end of the spear that might thwart the evil purposes of the antagonists will screw their courage to the sticking place, remember that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, do what needs to be done, and die. Or maybe not, if Banks is feeling exceptionally generous. There is always hope--until the very last line. (And be sure to read beyond the Glossary...)

It is true that Banks should be read only be trained professionals. But if you are ready for a Banks novel, what a ride!

Price Elasticity of Demand...

Palgrave Macmillan wants to charge me not $9.99 or $7.99 but rather $14.82 for a Kindle edition of:

Juan Cole (2009), Engaging the Muslim World.

Compare to $17.79 for a hardcover.

Considering that I would then spend 3 hours reading it if I got it, and that my work-time is cost-accounted out at at least $50 an hour, I would be making a $150 + $15 = $165 investment in reading the book.

Very curious that I find myself unwilling to do so--but I would already have done it (and I would right now be paging through it and not be writing this post) if it were $9.99 and so $160 in total cost.

Am I rational? It seems that Amazon has managed to establish $9.99 as a default price point, and anything more than that brings very different parts of the brain than my normal surf-click-bing! into play...

I Cannot Believe He Did Not Entitle This Post "The Giant Rat of Sumatra"

via crookedtimber.org

This may be the only opportunity ever to legitimately entitle a post "The Giant Rat of Sumatra." And now it is gone.

(What's going on? you ask. Belle Waring has bought her husband John Holbo a book by Lionel Fanthorpe.)

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Posted via web from http://braddelong.posterous.com/i-cannot-believe-he-did-not-en at Brad DeLong's Scrapbook

Amazon's Kindle and the Recovery of Readerly Naivete; or, Were-Bats--the Big Bug Scourge of the Skies!

Jane Austen:

Northanger Abbey: The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity...

In a normal book, an author cannot have the antagonist fall with an ensorcelled death-sword in its belly with one-third of the pages left to go and expect the reader to be surprised at what comes next. The thickness of the pages beneath one's right hand scream: "THAT'S NOT THE ANTAGONIST, SCHMUCK!!!"

Reading it on the Kindle--the sudden appearance of the were-bats has an extra punch that it cannot have in the hard copy...

Economic Magery

From Lois McMaster Bujold (2009), The Sharing Knife: Horizon: Three ranger-wizards talking:

“Look closely at this.” Arkady, mystified, accepted it. “If you found this somewhere, not knowing what it was, how would you judge the metalwork?”

“Well... the raised image of the crayfish is actually quite fine. And the lettering, of course, so tiny, but clear to read”—Arkady squinted—“Silver Shoals City Mint, One Cray. And making things perfectly round is harder than it looks, I suppose.”

“Aye. Yet when we all visited the mint at Silver Shoals, back when we were coming downriver on the Fetch, we saw the machine that stamps these out a hundred at a time. One of these disks is a little work of art. Tens of thousands of ’em... become farmer magic.”

Arkady raised his brows; Dag plowed on. “They’re counters, memories of trade and labor that a man can put in his pocket and carry across a continent. They make things move. With my groundsense, I can summon my horse from a mile away. With enough of these, the folks at Silver Shoals can summon a forty-mule tea caravan from eight hundred miles away. And the ground density and complexity of a big river city like Silver Shoals is a making in its own right.”

“You see a farmer town as a making?” said Barr, his forehead wrinkling at this new thought. “I do.” “What about a Lakewalker camp, then?” “That, too, of course.” Arkady made to hand the coin back; Dag grinned and said, “Keep it. There’s plenty more where that came from”...

Required Reading

jodsh Marshall asks:

Talking Points Memo: Has anyone else read this book? Many of you must have. Only Yesterday by Frederick L. Allen. The classic first-draft history of the 1920s prosperity up to the 1929 crash, written from the vantage point of 1931.

It is great. Once in Golconda is better.

A Public Appeal to Ross Douthat

Will you please stop putting some of your best work in National Review! Think of the children!

Good News For Narnia - Ross Douthat: As I put it in my NR review:

The movie plays up ... every tension it finds in Lewis's novel, and invents several more, creating rivalries (between Peter and Caspian), generating romances (between Susan and Caspian), adding battles (particularly a long set piece in the movie's middle, in which the Old Narnians launch a raid on Miraz's castle), and doubling down on the political intrigue in the Telmarine court. For the most part, the additions serve their purpose, transmuting a somewhat slight children's adventure into a gripping medieval war picture: Braveheart with more magic, or Tolkien with talking squirrels.

But this achievement comes with a price-namely, the evisceration of Lewis's major theme. If The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a story about rebirth and renewal-Aslan resurrected, and spring cracking the ice of an enchanted winter-then Prince Caspian is fundamentally a story about re-enchantment, and the glorious return of the supernatural forces that the Telmarines have repressed. Little of this survives in Adamson's adaptation; it's been pruned away to make room for battles and arguments and longing glances and one-liners. The book's climax, in which the trees and rivers come to life and a wild pagan rout overruns the sterile secularism of Telmarine society, is reduced to a brief battlefield intervention that rips off not one but two scenes in Lord of the Rings. Aslan, too, is reduced to a walk-on role, sweeping in once the body count has climbed and the CGI budget been exhausted to roar a halt to the proceedings. He murmurs about faith, in the voice of Liam Neeson, but he feels less a Christ figure than a strikingly flimsy plot device: Leo ex machina.

The bad news for Narniaphiles is that this may be the only way that C. S. Lewis can plausibly be adapted, given the economics (and biases) of contemporary Hollywood-with the metaphysics downplayed and the Generic Epic elements accentuated, the better to justify the price tag that comes attached to any fantasy film ... But judging from Caspian's middling box-office showing to date, it might be worth considering something different for Voyage of the Dawn Treader and (one hopes) its sequels: half the budget, perhaps, and a little more fidelity to the elements of theme and plot that make Narnia something more than an entertaining but two-dimensional imitation of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Charles Stross @ Crooked Timber

John Quiggin writes:

Charles Stross book event — Crooked Timber: A New Year, a new Crooked Timber book event. But instead of one book, we’re covering a dozen or so, all written by Charlie Stross, exploring different forms of the SF genre from postcyberpunk to alternate history and beyond.

The Future Is Here, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed...

Is it really the case that where Amazon offers a Kindle edition sales of it are already one-tenth of Amazon's total sales of that copy?

The Concept of the Hero in Modern Civilization (or, the Best of the Akheans)

Hoisted from the Archives: December 6, 2004:

The Best of the Achaeans: My brother Chris watches "Troy" while flying back from London and says a bunch of smart things about The Concept of the Hero in Twenty-First Century Civilization:

First, he says that "Troy" is an excellent airplane movie. You know the plot, so if you get distracted you do not thereafter feel lost. And the supporting actors are uniformly excellent: there is always something wonderful going on onscreen.

Second, he says that the makers of the movie did not understand the story they were telling, or decided not to tell the story. The story they told was by and large one of the futility of war. The story that Homer wrote was one of the glory of Achilles (and, secondarily, Agamemnon).

This raises a bunch of interesting questions. So let me once again strap on my greaves, put on my shield, pick up my spears, mount my chariot, and take my place by the Scaean Gate alongside... who?

The Greeks view Agamemnon as glorious because he is a good king: at key moments, he listens to good counsel from his advisors; and when the chips are down he values victory in the common enterprise as more important than his own pride. By contrast, Priam's pride is overweening: he doesn't send Helen back--no Achaean is going to tell him what to do!--even though in a pre-feminist world it is a grave moral offense that puts you in the wrong for your wastrel younger son to steal a queen from a fellow monarch.

The Greeks view Achilles as glorious because he is preeminent in a crucial--the Greeks, at least the Greek aristocrats who paid Homer, would have called it the crucial--field of human endeavor: war. Without preeminence in war, no other form of human excellence can matter (for your cities are sacked, you fields burned, your people enslaved). And, on the battlefield, Achilles is the best of the Achaeans.

We can see how the Greeks viewed Agamemnon and Achilles by looking at the history of the Macedonian conquest. Alexander set out to consciously emulate Achilles. And his father Philip--After the battle of Chaeronea, he refused to allow the defeated Athenians to bury their dead. One of the Athenian prisoners then said: "Lord King, the Gods have cast you in the role of Agamemnon. But you are playing it as if you were Thersites." And Philip laughed and relented: to compare someone to Agamemnon in fourth-century Greece was high praise.

Now I think that the filmmakers' decision was conscious: that we cannot today--that nobody can, since World War I--see war as glorious, and see the skill of the warrior as as source of glory. We admire the honor of Hector. We admire the strategic genius of Odysseus. But we do not see sheer excellence in the techniques of war as glorious in itself. And an earlier generation would. An earlier generation would see the march of the 3rd Infantry Division from Kuwait to Baghdad as glorious, even though the strategic fruits of that operational victory were thrown away by the incompetence of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Franks, Bremer, and company. We do not.

And so, for us, it is Hector fighting to defend his home and family (even though the war waged by the Achaeans against Troy does, by their lights, have a just cause) who is the hero of the Illiad.

Is it a good thing that we modern American liberals have the mindset that we do--that we cannot even suspend our disbelief for long enough to enter into a frame of mind in which Achilles is glorious? For example, Armed Liberal wants to call Achilles a hero, but immediately steps back: "do we respond to Achilles as a hero, or as a kind of glorious monster?"

I am not sure whether our mindset is a good thing or not...

Let me put it this way: who would you rather have standing beside you when spear meets shield--Achilles, Hector, or Odysseus? With Hector, the man of honor, you will wage war when you should--but you may well lose. With Achilles, the man of skill, you will win--but you will wage war all the time, whether or not you should.

With Odysseus, the man of strategy, you will wage war only when you can win--but will you always be happy with your victories?

I think I would take my place beside Odysseus. But who should I take my place beside? It is an interesting question...

"Weak on Dragons"

From Laura Miller, The Magician's Book:

Eustace Scrubb, in the early chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, manages to get himself turned into a dragon largely because the books he has read have “a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”

I have a sinking feeling that Laura Miller is going to evade The Problem of Susan...

Praising with Faint Damns

Tyler Cowen starts out:

Marginal Revolution: What I've been reading: 3. The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, by Torkel Klingberg.  When push comes to shove, the author fails to establish his major thesis...

He continues:

Still, this book is way above average for how seriously it treats the actual science behind its argument.  I learned a great deal from it.

Memo to Self: Murray Milgate and Shannon Stimson Have a New Book Coming Out

Memo to Self: Murray Milgate and Shannon Stimson Have a New Book Coming Out:

Murray Milgate and Shannon Stimson (2009), After Adam Smith: Conceptual Transformations of Politics and Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

But Keynes Is Saved by Walras's Law

Tyler Cowen writes:

Keynes's General Theory, chapter six: in part ii the bombshell comes, unannounced.  Keynes decides that he will declare savings to be a "mere residual."  Consumption and investment alone will determine income and savings is defined as whatever is left over to make the national income equations balance. At the time this was considered by many to be an enormous sleight of hand. The Austrian and Swedish traditions focused on the question of whether planned savings was going to equal planned investment and what happens if not.  Keynes has just banished such questions to the woodshed and he has done so by a terminological maneuver.

Whether or not you think that the Austrian and Swedish traditions lead anywhere fruitful, Keynes is on shaky ground here.  He is using definitions to favor one causal account of macro over another.  That's not right.  You can still make a plausible argument that Keynes is right on empirical grounds that planned savings is not an important force for understanding business cycles.  But so far no such empirical argument has been clinched...

I think it is much more than a terminological maneuver. Walras's law tells us that if one market is out of supply-demand balance, there must be another related market (or markets) that is also out of balance. If planned saving is in excess of planned investment, then planned consumption spending must be less than planned production of consumer goods. You can then follow the inventory adjustment chain--say that as inventories pile up producers cut back on the making of consumption goods. You then try to follow through on what is happening in the money market and you are led to the conclusion that ex ante savings must be destroyed by a process of deleveraging and deflation and... you wind up in the swamp. But you can be rescued from the swamp by recalling Walras's law, and recognizing that if you just follow the process by which equilibrium is restored in the goods market you will then discover that that process has also restored equilibrium in the flow-of-funds through financial markets.

Keynes's "terminological maneuver" would not have succeeded if it were not for the fact that Keynes's theory worked at a level that Wicksell's or Myrdal's or Ohlin's never could.

Fisman and Miguel, Economic Gangsters

Links:

http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Gangsters-Corruption-Violence-Poverty/dp/0691134545

http://www.economicgangsters.com/

---

Questions and Answers:

Brad: Sub-Saharan Africa looks like it has gone significantly backward in real GDP since 1960 while it has gone significantly forward in literacy and (except for AIDS) public health. Why do education and health seem to evolve according to different logics of corruption and rent-seeking than does the economy?

Ted: You raise an important point, which is that not everything is gloom and doom in Africa. There have been some positive trends, most notably in education and Africa’s recent successes in holding freer democratic elections. But the gains remain fragile, as we witnessed in Kenya’s recent slide towards chaos following elections last year and in the collapse of Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast, which had been held up as African success stories as recently as the 1990s.

Ray: The problem of HIV/AIDS, which you note parenthetically, is more emblematic of future challenges rather than past success. Thus far, public health systems all over Africa have failed abysmally to deal with this mounting problem. It’s hard to separate the continent’s various problems from one another. It’s surely the case that by applying some of the lessons we’ve learned in Economic Gangsters in fighting violence and corruption, the benefits would spill over into education, health, and other non-GDP measures of development success.

Brad: Even the poor of the world today are rich according to the yardstick provided by our ancestors of three centuries ago--as shown by indicators like life expectancy and adult height. Can we take the idea of a "poverty trap" seriously given that if such a thing exists our ancestors of three centuries ago were presumably caught in it as well?

Ray: We’d also side with the view that the evidence for a poverty trap is really thin. Decades of foreign aid, totaling billions of dollars for some countries, haven’t been enough for many poor countries in Africa, South Asia, and Central America to break out of extreme poverty. And some of the world’s greatest economic miracles in recent years, including China, Korea, and the other so-called Asian tigers, have done well without much foreign aid at all. So it can’t be that simply throwing more money at poor countries will jumpstart the growth process.

Ted: One of the goals of our book is to understand why all of this foreign aid hasn’t had the impact you might think it would. We focus on the role played by corruption and violence, and the economic gangsters responsible for these calamities.. Attempts to break countries out of poverty traps – by building schools and roads meant to boost future economic productivity – have too often failed because foreign aid has fallen into the hands of thieving dictators, or the fruits of aid have been destroyed by civil wars. You can’t understand the modern economic development experiences of most poor countries without tackling the issues of corruption and violence head-on.

Brad: A successful developmental state has to be fettered enough to respect entrepreneurship and enterprise while at the same time being unfettered enough to control roving bandits, local notables, and its own functionaries. Isn't this an impossible state of affairs? Why is life in America today so relatively uncorrupt, anyway?

Ray: There are trade-offs, to be sure. But that’s very different from saying we can’t strike a balance between bureaucratic oversight and unleashing the spirit of enterprise. This is actually a very interesting time to be thinking about this, as the spirit of financial innovation in America seems to have gotten a little out of hand of late, and most sensible people think we could use more oversight of Wall Street’s own bandits. For the many less developed countries that are over-regulated, though, the more important risk at this time is of an anti-market, anti-globalization backlash.

Ted: How did America become relatively uncorrupt? It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always this way. And there’s been plenty of talk about Chicago political machines and our own lingering corruption in recent weeks, with the Blagojevich Senate seat scandal. We can learn a lot from the American experience but I don’t think there’s a one-line answer. The world is much too complicated for grand unified theories of the economy and society. I’d recommend your readers check out Economic Gangsters for more nuanced answers.

Brad: Someone said that your book is the opposite of Malcolm Gladwell--that he has a simple central theory and a lot of evidence that does not fit it while you have a lot of evidence well-presented but no central theory. If Malcolm Gladwell had written your book, what would it have been called and what would your central theory have been?

Ted: It’s certainly flattering to be compared to one of the world’s best-selling non-fiction authors of the past decade or so! I like to think that if Malcolm Gladwell had written Economic Gangsters, he would have called it Economic Gangsters, too. Our central premise is that lots of global development problems can be understood by thinking about the individual economic incentives to do things that are bad for society as a whole. That’s where the rational, calculating economic gangster comes in. Al Capone, after all, was an accountant before he started applying his skills to such businesses as racketeering, prostitution, and rum running during Prohibition.

Ray: That said, it’s the nature of good economics research to proceed carefully and methodically. So understanding these and other problems will necessarily involve precision bites rather than grand sweeping statements. But the evidence we present – and the stories we tell – do help us chip away at the world’s development problems one by one, using new insights from research.

Brad: You state somewhere that in Meatu, Tanzania, there are people hacking to death their grandmothers with some regularity--and that this is largely motivated by economics, by the fact that you are in near-famine conditions and that if you off your grandmother for being a witch you get to consume 20% more calories per capita over the next year. But why is the "witch" required? And what is different about Meatu from all the regions that don't accuse grandma of being a witch and hacking her to death in a famine?

Ted: A witch is certainly not required. In many poor societies there are similarly brutal responses to extreme resource shortages that have nothing to do with witchcraft. Among certain Inuit groups, for example, when food runs short the elderly are placed on ice floes and pushed out into the sea to die. And the Inuit are not alone: related traditions hastening the death of the elderly during lean times have been documented in Iceland, the Amazon, Siberia, Fiji, among North American Hopis, Gabon Fang, and Australian Tiwi, among other groups. It sounds unbelievably barbaric to modern sensibilities, but people living on the edge of subsistence cannot avoid this harsh calculus of survival.

Ray: Some societies have also learned to deal with shortages in less macabre ways. There’s an interesting case we highlight in our book, about the region of Ulanga in Tanzania where witchcraft is similarly strong as in Meatu, but where few if any witch killings take place. The difference? In Ulanga a safety net put in place by local healers saves old women accused of sorcery from an otherwise grim fate,. Traditional healers take in accused witches during hard times, feed them and take care of them, and go through some rituals to “cleanse” them of their witchcraft. Then when the lean times ease up, they return to their families, who later pay the healers back. The same idea is behind our proposal for a new foreign aid mechanism to provide insurance for poor households during economic downturns; you can read the details in Economic Gangsters.

Brad: In what sense was Suharto--who delivered 5% growth in per capita income a year for a quarter century--"corrupt"? Shouldn't we want more of this kind of "corruption"?

Ray: It’s not that we’d want more corruption (though some economists have in fact taken that point of view in the past). Yet not all corruption is created equal. It’s crucial to understand the differences between the relatively “benevolent” corruption of Suharto, and the destructive kleptocracies of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and others. In Economic Gangsters we lay out the crucial differences between centralized systems of corruption like Suharto’s from the more chaotic situations that prevail in many of the poorest African countries.

Ted: It’s also the case that Indonesia might have experienced even faster economic growth in recent decades had it not been for the grabbing hands of Suharto and his cronies. Ray’s comments about the different types of corruption also gets to the heart of what sets our work apart from most other recent books on global poverty. Simple one-size-fits-all descriptions and prescriptions of the world – like those who say “more foreign aid is always good” or “this is the way to eliminate corruption” – are unlikely to work out as advertised. We need evidence-based development economics to take hold if we’re going to make real progress in fighting global poverty. Half the world’s population still lives on less than two dollars a day. This is too important a problem to be left to ideologues.

Charles Dickens Blogging

Paul Krugman says we should all go read--no, not A Christmas Carol, but rather Little Dorrit:

Madoff/Merdle - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never read Little Dorritt, by Charles Dickens. But I guess I’ll download it to my Kindle. A reader points out that the BBC is currently doing a dramatization, and that the character of Mr. Merdle, the fraudulent financier, bears a strong resemblance to Bernard Madoff...

Market Power!

I am told I should read:

Yasheng Huang (2008), "Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State."

The problem is the price:

Kindle Price: $21.10

I think it is time to draw the line: either people send me review copies, or I buy it for the Kindle at single-digit prices, or I wait until it shows up at Berkeley library. When a print copy costs $23.44, to charge $21.10 for a Kindle copy is ridiculous...

Madison Square Park, New York Virtual Reality Sightseeing Tour

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ HQ:

http://tpmcafe.com/ HQ:

http://tor.com/ HQ:

http://boingboing.net moderation HQ:

---

I was touched that they removed the benches, the manacles, and the whips from the TPM office before my visit...

Brad DeLong Is Excessively Diverted...

Austenbook:

And We Are Live at the San Francisco Chronicle...

Review of 'Panic!,' edited by Michael Lewis:

Review of 'Panic!,' edited by Michael Lewis: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity: W.W. Norton; 391 pages; $27.95:

Over the past 16 months, the financial crisis of 2007-9 has gone from a potential worry to a cold to the flu to galloping pneumonia. And now W.W. Norton publishes a book with Michael Lewis' name on the cover that tells us that we should PANIC! Don't think that this is a book written by the smart, thoughtful, lively and witty Michael Lewis, who made his reputation with "Liar's Poker," his memoir of working as a bond salesman on Wall Street in the 1980s. Only eight of the 50-odd short-form pieces collected in the near-400 pages of this book are by Lewis. Do think of this as Lewis' answer to the question: What good, short and comprehensible things should I read if I want to understand our modern financial crisis? And Lewis' answer is a very good one: He has an excellent eye, and what he likes, we readers will like as well - at least if we like to read him, and I do.

Over the past quarter century we have seen some half-blown (Mexico, saving and loans) and four full-blown financial panics: the portfolio-insurance U.S. stock market panic of October 1987, the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-8, the 2000-2001 collapse of the dot-com bubble and the current real-estate-triggered mess. Lewis collects the newspaper and short magazine pieces on each of these four that he thinks offer the most insight and interest, and packages them in a book. It's very handy, very readable - and you can learn a huge amount.

My one serious complaint is that it is a book. That means that only one-tenth of the material comes from 2008 - the last-written piece was first published on April 27. A lot has happened since then. Right now I have the book at my left hand and my laptop at my right, with one window open to one of Lewis' Bloomberg columns about the crisis (links.sfgate.com/ZFPG) and another open to his excellent piece of reportage "The End of Wall Street's Boom" for the December issue of Portfolio (links.sfgate.com/ZFPL). As a person interested in the panic now and in the future, I find my computer more interesting. On the other hand, I can take the book into the bathtub - so it still has one key edge, even though its production process sacrifices timeliness.

What is Lewis' take on the current crisis? His first arresting point is that this is something that we have done to ourselves rather than something that shadowy villains have done to us. "The striking thing ..." he writes, "is how egalitarian it has been. ... Stan O'Neal, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, was fired for the same reason the lower-middle-class family in the suburban wasteland between Los Angeles and San Diego may have lost its surprisingly nice home. Both underestimated the likelihood of an unlikely event: a financial panic. ... The small army of Wall Street traders ... look as naive and foolish as the man on the street. ... The man on the street ... acted on the same foolish principles that have guided ... Wall Street traders."

His second arresting point is that all of the attempts to manage risk have done so by applying a mathematical theory of finance that is guaranteed to break down when a panic actually comes and when real risk is there to be managed. Lewis quotes John Seo of Fremont Capital saying: "It's hard to believe that anyone - yes, even me - ever believed it [the theory]. It's like trying to [replace] a fire-insurance policy by dynamically increasing or decreasing your coverage [bet that there will be a fire] as fire conditions wax and wane. One day, bam, your house is on fire, and you call for [someone to sell you] more coverage?"

His third arresting point is that it was the confidence that the models could manage risk that has in fact created the kinds and sizes of risk that the models certainly cannot manage.

The hope is that the fallout will be relatively small. A few million homeowners who thought they were building equity and find instead that they were running risks that they had no business running and have really been renting - some cheaply and some expensively - for the past few years. Rather more investors nearing retirement who find that the S&P index funds in their 401(k) accounts are worth only half what they expected 18 months ago. Some princes of Wall Street with still-outsize fortunes that are much smaller than they had gotten used to looking forward to. Some tens of thousands of yuppies expecting high-paying finance jobs who find that they are not there. And a few million more workers unemployed for a year or two than if we had regulated our financial markets properly and so headed off the possibility of this crisis before it came to pass.

The hope is that the government has the tools and the energy and the smarts to keep this a garden-variety recession - and not let it turn into a semi-great or even a small depression.

That's the hope.

J. Bradford DeLong is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury. E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Un Beau Geste...

Debriefing leads me to an end of my search for accessible etext versions of Keynes's Tract on Monetary Reform and Essays in Persuasion. The only problem? They are en Francaise.

Brad DeLong: Things to Read by Keynes: "Essays in Persuasion" and "La réforme monétaire are available" in french on the site of Quebec University...

• Essais de Persuasion: http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/keynes_john_maynard/essais_de_persuasion/keynes_essais_persuasion.pdf
• La Réforme Monétaire: http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/keynes_john_maynard/reforme_monetaire/keynes_reforme_monetaire.pdf

At least it's not in Mandarin...

---

Nous avons une panne de magnéto. Comment donc nous remettre en marche? Jetons un regard en arrière sur les événements:

1° Pourquoi les travailleurs et l'outillage demeurent-ils inemployés? Parce que les industriels ne comptent pas pouvoir vendre sans perte ce qu'ils pro- duiraient s'ils les employaient.

2° Pourquoi les industriels ne peuvent-ils compter vendre sans perte? Parce que les prix ont baissé plus que le coût de la production – le coût ayant très peu baissé.

3° Comment se fait-il que les prix aient baissé plus que le coût? Car le coût représente ce que l'homme d'affaires dépense pour la production de ses marchandises, et les prix indiquent ce qui lui revient quand il les vend. Il est facile de concevoir que pour une affaire en particulier, ou pour une marchandise particulière, il y ait inégalité entre les deux chiffres. Mais il semble que si l'on considère la collectivité tout entière les hommes d'affaires doivent retrouver le même argent qu'ils déboursent, puisque ce qu'ils déboursent pour la production représente le revenu du public qu'il rend aux hommes d'affaires en échange de produits que celui-ci lui fournit. C'est là, il nous semble, le cercle normal de la production, de l'échange et de la consommation.

4° Eh bien non! Malheureusement il n'en est pas ainsi, et voilà l'origine de nos maux. Il n'est pas vrai que ce que dépensent les hommes d'affaires, en tant que coût de la production, leur revienne forcément comme fruit de la vente de ce qu'ils produisent. C'est le trait caractéristique d'une vague de hausse que le produit de la vente dépasse considérablement le coût de production, c'est le trait caractéristique d'une crise que le coût de la production dépasse les produits de la vente. De plus, c'est une illusion que de s'imaginer que les hommes d'affaires peuvent forcément rétablir l'équilibre en réduisant leurs frais généraux, que ce soit en restreignant la production, ou en diminuant les salaires, car la réduction des frais, en réduisant le pouvoir d'achat de leurs employés et fournisseurs qui sont également leurs clients, réduit d'environ autant les produits de la vente.

5° Comment se peut-il donc que le coût total de la production des affaires dans le monde soit autre que le produit total de la vente ? D'où vient l'inégalité ? Je crois connaître la réponse. Mais elle est trop compliquée et a un caractère trop peu familier pour le public pour que je puisse la fournir ici d'une façon satisfaisante (j'ai tâché de le faire par ailleurs 1). Il faut donc me résigner à ne donner que quelques indications...

Keynes is sufficiently theatrical that it does sound better--to me at least--in French...

Things to Read by Keynes

Tyler Cowen writes:

Marginal Revolution: New MR book club - Keynes's General Theory: I will go through the book [Keynes's General Theory], chapter by chapter, with an eye toward a deeper understanding of what Keynes wrote and why it is, as Greg says, so important.  I'm not yet sure what kind of pace I can maintain but order your copy here, now.  The Kindle version is only $3.96.  We'll do chapters 1 and 2 by next Monday, eight days from now.

The Marxists.org version of the General Theory is free: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/

I am of a different view than Tyler. I think that the most important things by Keynes to read do not include the General Theory. My list of General Theory-length reading from Keynes is this:

• Keynes (1919), The Economic Consequences of the Peace http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15776/15776-8.txt
• Keynes (1924), A Tract on Monetary Reform No etext
• Keynes (1932), Essays in Persuasion No etext
  • Keynes (1919), "Inflation"
  • Keynes (1923), "Social Consequences of Changes in the Value of Money"
  • Keynes (1925), "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill"
  • Keynes (1926), "The End of Laissez-Faire" http://www.panarchy.org/keynes/laissezfaire.1926.html
  • Keynes (1930), "The Great Slump of 1930" http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/keynes-slump/keynes-slump-00-h.html
  • Keynes (1931), "The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse in Money Values"
• Keynes (1932), "The World Economic Outlook" http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/budget/keynesf.htm
• Keynes (1933), "An Open Letter to President Roosevelt" http://newdeal.feri.org/misc/keynes2.htm
• Keynes (1938), "A Private Letter to President Roosevelt" http://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2008/12/john-maynard-ke.html

and I am tremendously annoyed at the absence of etext versions of the Tract on Monetary Reform and Essays in Persuasion.

---

Special bonus:

• Jacob Viner (1936), "Mr. Keynes on the Causes of Unemployment" http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1882505.pdf

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cosma Shalizi R'lyeh Wgah'nagl Fhtagn!

Ghost Peaks, Buried in Ice, in Antarctica.

Cosma Shalizi writes:

Ghost Peaks, Buried in Ice: [T]his has me terrified:

It is perhaps the last great Antarctic expedition - to find an explanation for why there is a great mountain range buried under the White Continent. The Gamburtsevs match the Alps in scale but no-one has ever seen them because they are covered by up to 4km of ice. Geologists struggle to understand how such a massif could have formed and persisted in the middle of Antarctica. Now, an international team is setting out on a deep-field survey to try to get some answers. The group comprises scientists, engineers, pilots and support staff from the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, China and Japan.

The ambitious nature of the project - working in Antarctica's far interior - has required an exceptional level of co-ordination and co-operation.... "There are two easy ways to make mountains," explained Dr Robin Bell, from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who is a lead US researcher on the expedition. "One is colliding continents, but after they collide they tend to erode; and the last collision was 500-million-plus years ago. They shouldn't be there. The other way is a hotspot, [with volcanoes punching through the crust] like in Hawaii; but there's no good evidence for underneath the ice sheet being that hot. I like to say it's rather like being an archaeologist and opening up a tomb in a pyramid and finding an astronaut sitting inside. It shouldn't be there."...

The expedition gets under way in the next few weeks and will take some two-and-a-half months to complete.

Space-travelers. In tombs. In an inaccessible, highly anomalous mountain-range in Antartica. Do the fools know nothing? Or do they know only too much?

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the Antarctic — with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain...

Home Redecoration, Minas Morgul Style

From Kage Baker (2008), The House of the Stag (New York: Tor):

"Lady."

She looked up from her loom. The sergeant of the guard, the one with red eyes, bowed to her. "Sergeant?"

"Lady, we have the workmen for you. The Children of the Sun you wanted. With all their tools and gear. Himself says come and see."

"Thank you, Sergeant." She rose, smiling. "Where are they?"

"Got 'em in the lower courtyard."

He escorted her down through the corridors. Hideous monsters saluted shyly as she passed them. She stepped out into the courtyard and beheld red men, kneeling in a long row., They were blindfolded, their hands bound before them, and some wept and prayed to their gods. Piled in a heap to one side of them were chests and trays of tools. Gard stood to the other side of them, in his full black armor. When he spoke, it was not to her but to the prisoners, in a voice full of rolling thunder.

"Now, Children of the Sun, if you die tomorrow, you will still have seen the fairest sight of your lives, and you'd not see anything fairer if you lived on a thousand years. Free their eyes!"

His guards stepped forward and pulled off the blindfolds, one by one. One by one the red men blinked, stared around, then gasped as they saw the Saint. Some of them fell prostrate before her, bound hands outstretched. "Oh, Lady, save us!"

"Have mercy on us!"

"Don't let him kill us!"

She looked at them with horror and looked white rage at Gard. "What have you done?"

"Brought you workmen, as I promised," he said in that same theatrical tone, meeting her eyes without flinching. She saw amusement there, and covert purpose. "Why, madam, are you displeased? Shall I have them hanged?"

"No!" she cried. "You will have them released at once!" The red men crowded forward on their knees, weeping, thanking her, imploring her, praising her.

"Then I will spare your lives," said Gard to the Children of the Sun. "But you will slave for me nonetheless, to make fair the rooms in which my lady lives."

"They will not slave!" said the Saint. "If they choose to work, you will pay them in gold, and then you'll let them go!"

"Lady, is it fine work you want?" said one of the prisoners. "By all the gods, I swear you'll have rooms finer than a duchess's!"

"Wife, I will defer to your wishes," said Gard. "For I am your slave in all things. Should one of them displease you, however, his head shall look down sadly from a pike."

"May I speak to you alone a moment?" said the Saint to Gard.

He bowed her to the door, and she pulled him within the hall after her. "Now they will do anything you ask them," said Gard smugly.

"How dare you!" The Saint looked him full in the eyes with all the force of her anger, and he rocked back a little on his heels but did not look away.

"Wife, this is the way a Dark Lord accomplishes his affairs. And I had to bring them up here blindfolded, you know, that's elementary security. They haven't been hurt. They haven't been robbed. If they do a good job for you, by all means pay them what you will. They'll have to be taken down the mountain blindfolded too, but you have my word they'll be released alive and unharmed. That's fair, isn't it?"

"That isn't the point! Why couldn't you have asked them to come?"

"Because they wouldn't have. What with me being a Dark Lord and all, as they'd say. But look now: we'll get your rooms redecorated. They'll go back home and spread tales about the terrible Master of the Mountain and his beautiful and saintly Lady, who saved their lives. It'll do both our reputations a world of good."

"But this is all absurd!"

"Isn't it? I lie to survive, because people fear and respect a black mask more than an honest face. Life became much simpler once I understood that."

"We have not done with this conversation," she hissed...

Added to the Pile...

• Daniel Cohen, Our Modern Times: The New Nature of Capitalism in the Information Age
• Eric Patashnik, Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted
• John Cochrane, Asset Pricing

Added to the Pile...

Over the past week:

• Daniel Cohen, Three Lectures on Post Industrial Society
• Philip Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Surviving Large Losses: Financial Crises, the Middle Class, and the Development of Capital Markets
• Charles Ellis, The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs

Charlie Stross's Saturn's Children

Boingboing recommends Charlie Stross's highly excellent Saturn's Chidren:

Stross's new novel: Saturn's Children, a late Heinlein homage - Boing Boing: Charlie Stross's new novel, Saturn's Children, is out -- this is Charlie's Heinlein tribute, and unlike everyone else who does classic, adventure -story Heinlein tributes, Charlie's written a novel in the style of the late, indulgent, sex-saturated Heinlein, from the period before a cutting-edge surgery fixed a problem with the blood-supply to his brain (seriously). Orbit, the book's UK publisher, has also put an excerpt online.

Today is the two hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it. I am drunk on battery acid and wearing my best party frock, sitting on a balcony beneath a pleasure palace afloat in the stratosphere of Venus. My feet dangle over a slippery-slick rain gutter as I peek over the edge: Thirty kilometers below my heels, the metal-snowed foothills of Maxwell Montes glow red-hot. I am thinking about jumping. At least I’ll make a pretty corpse, I tell myselves. Until I melt. And then –

Substantially Out of Touch

If there were a Kindle edition, I would have already bought and read Ron Suskind's new The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. I am sure that it is excellent.

But there isn't...

Ebook Formats...

Kindle:

Amazon Kindle - Wikipedia: Although it supports unprotected Mobipocket books (.MOBI, .PRC [and .PDB if renamed .PRC]), plain text files (.txt), and HTML (.html) and Word (.doc) documents, Kindle also uses its own proprietary, DRM-restricted format (AZW). It does not fully support Portable Document Format (PDF), but Amazon provides "experimental" conversion to the native AZW format...

ereader for iphone:

eReader.com: Moving Personal Content to eReader for iPhone and iPod touch: [Y]ou may browse from within the eReader application and directly download material from any web site that offers eReader format PDB files.... [You may u]pload your personal content to your eReader.com or Fictionwise.com account.... You may either upload eReader format PDB files, or a ZIP file that contains a bunch of eReader PDB files...

And then there are the encrypted ebooks, which encryption I want to break to make my life more convenient.

So once again I am reminded of the immortal words of Guy Fleegman:

I don't like this. I don't like this at all. Sure, they're cute now, but in a second they're gonna get mean, and they're gonna get ugly somehow, and there's gonna be a million more of them...

I Can't Believe I Missed This! Monetary Economics in "The 47 Ronin"

I Can't Believe I Missed This! Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

Subterranean Special Science Fiction Cliche Issue: I always remember the moments when I’ve run into something I hadn’t realized was missing from other books.... That wonderful moment in Chushingura where the feudal retainers, meeting in their castle to decide whether they’re going to go to war with the central government, discuss how much of the paper currency they’ve issued is still floating around unredeemed. (They have to redeem it before rebelling, they decide; otherwise they’ll leave the peasants holding worthless paper.)

Ah. The footnotes tell me it's from the Kurosawa version, which I have not seen.

Types of Fictions

I am looking forward to a cross-country plane flight on Sunday, and I am not likely to read any of the work books I will take onto the plane--even though I will try, and intend to. Instead, I will take and almost surely read Walter Jon Williams's Implied Spaces, and Iain M Banks's Matter. I know in broad outline what kind of book Matter will be: it will be set in a galaxy-spanning space-traveling future, inhabited by super-intelligent robots with jokey names, show bizarre technological and natural marvels of enormous scale, involve fearful fanatic antagonists who cannot be reasoned with, contain do-gooders who leave a cornucopiac utopia to try to help the less-fortunate using whatever means are necessary, and at the end those protagonists whom a malign fate has put at the end of the spear that might thwart the evil purposes of the antagonists will screw their courage to the sticking place, remember that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, do what needs to be done, and die--or maybe not, if Banks is feeling exceptionally generous.

But I will not read a serious work of fiction on an airplane (or when overtired, or when stressed, or in a bunch of other situations).

I am trying to think why this is so. And I start with Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings on romance novels:

Obsidian Wings: Misogyny Day At The Washington Post (Part 1): UPDATE: Gary [Farber] and others were offended by the part about romance novels.... [L]et me try to explain what I meant. First, a clarification: I meant, and should have said, genre romance novels. I did not mean Jane Austen. Moreover, I meant genre romance novels, not genre fiction generally. In general, I do not think that points made about one type of genre fiction apply to all types of genre fiction; in this specific case, I think that both science fiction and fantasy, for instance, are quite different from romance novels in some of the respects I was thinking of....

[T]he part about romance novels was meant to imply that women's taste in fiction runs to romance novels, which (according to Charlotte Allen) don't stack up well against fiction generally. My point was that that is not the relevant comparison. If you want to make some sort of stupid generalization about women, then it matters what the male analog of a romance novel is.... [T]his does not imply, and I did not mean it to imply, anything about the quality of genre romances. I honestly think not just that most of them stack up pretty well against your average Hustler centerfold, which isn't hard, but that some of them are quite good.

About whether genre romance novels are "books"... that was undoubtedly the wrong way to put [it]... and I regret having put it that way. However, I also think that there is a decent point here, which I expressed in a needlessly dumb way. What I meant was: Genre romance novels are, in my experience, written according to very serious constraints... plot constraints, characterization constraints, all kinds of constraints... certainly more stringent than those that govern fiction generally. When I assess a non-genre novel, I assess it as a work of imagination, in which the author is free to do as he or she wants. I take the author to have a kind of complete freedom: there she sits, confronted by a blank book, and she can do whatever she wants with it. Seeing what she ends up doing with all that freedom, and deciding what I think of it, is what criticism of normal novels is all about.

Assessing genre romances is different, precisely because there are so many rules. I do not think badly of a particular genre romance because the author should not have made the hero so strong, noble, and self-contained, or because its heroine should not be so completely ignorant of her own charms, or because some complication prevents the hero and heroine from recognizing their attraction to one another until they are forced into close proximity by some unexpected turn of events. Those are the rules.... I think it was Tanya Modliewski who wrote that genre romance is, for this reason, best thought of as something closer to a very constrained kind of performance than to non-genre novels.... The basic parameters are laid down in advance, and what matters, if you're writing a genre romance at all, is the grace and style and beauty with which you do it. In this, genre romance is strikingly different from non-genre novels (I'm leaving other genres out, as I noted above). Moreover, for anyone who knows the rules of genre romance, reading a genre romance would have to be different from reading a work that had no such rules, in the way that, for someone who knew the rules, watching the short program in figure skating that includes the compulsory elements would have to be different from watching a freestyle program.

With this as backdrop, when I said that "romance novels are not "books", as that word is normally used", I should, first of all, have said not "books" but [mainstream] "novels."... I did not, and do not, mean this claim to imply anything at all about the merits of genre romance novels.... I do think genre romance novels are a different sort of thing from non-genre novels. But that doesn't imply anything at all about whether the kind of thing they are is a better or worse thing to be.

Again, though, I was deeply unclear, for which I am sorry.

And this is somehow related to science fiction/fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold's description of her latest four-volume supernovel as an attempt to do three things.

1. To do a "new world" rather than an "old world" fantasy: Lois McMaster Bujold Bonus Q&A: TSK began as a project to give myself pleasure in writing again at a time when I felt very dry.... I was doing several literary experiments at once.... [First,] playing with landscapes and social-scapes that were distinctly New World, not recycled European medievaloid...

2. To do an anti-Manichean fantasy: To see what would happen if I gave my characters a real grown-up problem to grapple with, one that defied easy, cathartic solutions like cutting off some bad guy’s head or toppling the Dark Tower du Jour...

3. Most of all to do a fantasy that was also a romance, or perhaps a romance that was also a fantasy: But foremost I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to make a romance the central plot of a fantasy novel... after all, I’d had romantic sub-plots in both my fantasy and my SF books before, and wasn’t it just a matter of shifting the proportions a bit?...

And it did not work:

[W]ow was that ever a learning experience, not only about what makes a romance story work, but, more unexpectedly, uncovering many of the hidden springs and assumptions that make fantasy work. It turns out to be a much harder blending that I’d thought.... The two forms have different focal planes. In a romance in the modern genre sense, which may be described as the story of a courtship from first meeting to final commitment, the focus is personal; nothing in the tale (such as the impending end of the world, ferex) can therefore be presented as more important.... [I]t has been borne in upon me how intensely political most F&SF plots in fact are. Political and only political activity (of which war/military is a huge sub-set) is regarded as “important” enough to make the protagonists interesting to the readers in these genres.... [A]ttempts to make the tale about something, anything else – artistic endeavor, for instance – are regularly tried by writers, and as regularly die the grim death in the marketplace. (Granted The Wind in the Willows or The Last Unicorn will live forever, but marginalized as children’s fiction.) I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset)...

And with Teresa Nielsen Hayden's remarks about how writing under constraint and to expectations is only a bad thing if it is annoying and badly done:

http://scalzi.com/subterranean_issue_4.pdf: In longer works, the greater pleasure is seeing how the book makes its way from here to there, from its interesting beginning to its satisfactory if perhaps unsurprising end. You already know the detective is going to figure out which guest at the cocktail party murdered Edna Furbelow in the linen closet of her sumptuous Park Avenue apartment. The bickering couple forced to keep company with each other while having some mild adventures will infallibly fall in love no later than the second-to-last chapter. And the earnest young person born under mysterious signs and portents will inherit the Charm Bracelet of Doom, defeat the Dark One, and bring peace and plenty to The Land—five or six books from now.

Clichés are only clichés if they bother us. When we’re expecting something new and interesting in the way of a narrative mechanism, but instead get the same old same old, it feels like a cliché. If a novel employs a narrative maneuver that’s just as well-used, but we aren’t expecting novelty—hey looka, it’s yet another Regency Romance that has a scene set at Almack’s—then it’s not a problem. A book that starts from a bog-standard plot but uses it with inventiveness and grace will read fairly well—which means the bog-standard plot doesn’t bother us, and therefore isn’t really a cliché.

What does bother us are worn-out devices for setting things up or moving the story along. Mark Twain nailed James Fenimore Cooper for his habitual use of them.... One twig is a fine device. A twig or two per book is excusable if there’s enough other stuff happening; even a battered old prop can look okay if it goes past you fast enough. Too many twigs become irritating, and are therefore a cliché...

And Jo Walton:

just scenery: what do we mean by "mainstream"?: In the Handicapping the Hugos thread, there's a discussion of what "mainstream" means. In the simplest sense, "Mainstream" is everything that is not... "mystery" or "SF" or "chicklit" or "literary fiction".... That's a fairly useless category, though, because it's too huge.... [C]ategories exist to help people find books they'll like, and "If you loved Middlemarch you'll adore Rainbow Six" isn't going to do much for anyone.... What I find interesting is when there are books that are "obviously" SF but that some people think are mainstream.... The Yiddish Policeman's Union (an alternate history about a Jewish state in Alaska) is "mainstream" is that it has mainstream sensibilities, mainstream expectation, and, most of all, mainstream pacing. They may also mean that it had mainstream publication and that Michael Chabon is a writer who made his name selling mimetic fiction -- which is still true even though his last three books have been genre....

Samuel R. Delany has talked about the importance of reading protocols, and reading SF as SF. I tend to read everything as SF.  When mainstream writers come to write SF, it's normally the case that they don't understand the idioms of SF, the things we do when we (SF readers) read SF. This is very noticeable in things like Marge Piercy's Body of Glass (published as He, She and It in the US) where Piercy had clearly read Gibson but nothing much else, or Doris Lessing's Shikasta and sequels. The mainstream writers know how to do all the basic writing stuff, stories and characters and all of that, sometimes they know how to do that really well. They really want to write SF... but they don't know how SF works. They explain too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right things.... They don't get the thing I call "incluing", where you pick up things about how the world works from scattered clues within the text. I don't feel that Chabon has this problem in the slightest, because he is an SF reader and knows how to inclue -- indeed I very much admire the brilliance of his worldbuilding -- but he's very unusual.

I had a great revelation about this some time ago when I was reading A.S. Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. This is a mainstream story in which a female academic buys a bottle containing a djinn and gets it to give her wishes. It's a mainstream story because she finds the bottle on something like page 150 of 175. In a genre story she'd have found the bottle on the first page. It has mainstream pacing and expectations.... The story is really about how simple answers are not fulfulling. The djinn is a metaphor in exactly the way Kelly Link's zombies aren't a metaphor. People talk about SF as a literature of ideas... [but] I don't think it's so much the literature of ideas as the literature of worldbuilding. In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character. In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world. In a mainstream novel trying to be SF, this gets peculiar and can make the reading experience uneven.  In the old Zork text adventures, if you tried to pick up something that was described but not an object, you'd get the message "that's just scenery". The difference between a mainstream novel and an SF one is that different things are just scenery.

Writing under constraints, literature of world-building, fantasies of magic- or technology-enabled political action, or ways of fitting into the reader's expectations to add resonance to the words that are on the page--I am not sure what to make of these perspectives. I do know that I want to think about them.

I know only two things:

• Contra Hilzoy, Pride and Prejudice is too a genre romance novel--but one in which Jane Austen is always the mistress and never the servant of the constraints of the form: she makes them sit, roll over, and beg like dogs, and never lets them push her to a place she does not want to go.

• Perhaps "literary fiction" is simply a grab-bag of genres that never took off--that never developed a critical mass of readers who said "I would really like to read something like that" and writers who said "I really could write something like that--and would really like to."

---

APPENDIX: Hilzoy's unfortunate take on the romance genre was a side effect of her being allowed to read Charlotte Allen--one of many reasons why in a good and just world the Washington Post would have shut down long ago. Allen wrote:

Obsidian Wings: Misogyny Day At The Washington Post (Part 1): [I] wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial.... I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don't even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills.... [T]he women in history I admire most -- Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher -- were brilliant outliers. The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons.... I don't understand why more women don't relax... and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.... Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are... kind of dim...

Hilzoy's justified explosion at Charlotte Allen contained the line:

Obsidian Wings: Misogyny Day At The Washington Post (Part 1): [R]omance novels (update below the fold) are not "books", as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either "Ultimate Sudoku" or the Hustler centerfold. Personally, I think they come out fine in either comparison, but that's probably because I'm just a dumb woman...

If only she had written "Botticelli's Nascita di Venere" rather than "Hustler centerfold"!

Nixonland

You must read the attached, immediately!

Rick Perlstein: For the benefit of the lazy, the 881 pages of Nixonland are more or less compressed into a mere sixty-three page introduction [to]... a brand new book that ships starting this week from Princeton University Press, Richard Nixon: Speeches, Writings, Documents. For the benefit of scholars and history students (professors! perfect for course adoptions!), it collects or excerpts some thirty... well, Richard Nixon speeches, writings, and documents,

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8649.pdf

Perlstein's favorite Nixon quotes:

from (my favorite) his 1929 schoolboy elocution contest entry "Our Privileges Under the Constitution"—

How much ground do these privileges cover? There are some who use them as a cloak for covering libelous, indecent, and injurious statements against their fellowmen. Should the morals of this nation be offended and polluted in the name of freedom of speech or freedom of the press? In the words of Lincoln, the individual can have no rights against the best interests of society. Furthermore there are those who, under the pretense of freedom of speech and freedom of the press have incited riots, assailed our patriotism, and denounced the Constitution itself. They have used Constitutional privileges to protect the very act by which they wished to destroy the Constitution. Consequently laws have justly been provided for punishing those who abuse their Constitutional privileges—laws which do not limit these privileges, but which provide that they may not be instrumental in destroying the Constitution which insures them. We must obey these laws, for they have been passed for our own welfare....

—to his obscure but crucial Cincinnati speech of February 24, 1964 ("the irresponsible tactics of some of the extreme civil rights leaders..."), to the 1972 "Shanghai Communiqué," to his celebrated White House farewell address ("My mother was a saint...")...

A Rather Draconian Moderation Policy...

Jim Macdonald writes thus:

Making Light: Time Notices Comments: Here’s what moderators need to know:

1. Sure, there’s freedom of speech. Anyone who wants it can go start their own blog. On Yog’s board, Yog’s whim is law.
2. Yog is an ancient ghod of chaos and evil. And he doesn’t like people very much.
3. Moderation is a subjective art, and the moderator is always right.
4. The moderator may have minions. They need to have a private area where they keep the buckets of Thorazine and the cold-frosty bottles of cow snot.
5. The minions speak with the voice of Yog. Yog backs his minions up.
6. There is always someone awake, and in charge, when Yog isn’t around in person. The minions know who the Duty Yog is.
7. If someone starts off as a spammer, troll, or flamer, he is a spammer, troll, or flamer forever and is liable to instant deletion/banning with no recourse and no appeal.
8. If the moderator ever needs inspiration, he can re-read Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and recall that the posters are sinners and he is Ghod.
9. Rules? In a knife fight? Yog and his minions have standards, but they don’t need to tell the posters, lest some of them attempt to game the system. Attempting to game the system is, all on its own, a deletable offense.
10. ALL CAPS posts are deleted on sight, unread. Mostly ALL CAPS POSTS are ALL CAPS.
11. Anyone who doesn’t space after punctuation marks is insane, and can be deleted/banned on sight.
12. Personal attacks against Yog and his minions are ignored. Personal attacks against anyone else are deletable on sight.

More and more of the moderated weblogosphere appears to be devolving to Yog Rules--or to be shutting down comments entirely. It seems to me that there has to be a better way. But it is not clear to me what better way is (a) sustainable, (b) easy for the moderator, and (c) produces high quality discussions.

Memo to Self: Sociology-of-Finance Books

Sociology-of-finance books:

• Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
• Ricardo Rebonato, The Plight of the Fortune Tellers 0691133611
• Richard Brookhiser, A Demon of Our Own Design 0471227277
• Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera 0262134608
• Emmanuel Derman, My Life as a Quant 0471394203

Today's Additions to the Pile...

In today's mail:

• Alicia H. Munnell and Steven A. Sass ( 2008), Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge.

And yet another copy of:

• Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel (2008), Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations.

I gave the last to Gerard Roland...

That Is Not a Very Good Picture

Is this any better?

---

• Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel (2008), Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations.

• Robert H. Bates (2008), When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa.

• Robert H. Bates (2001), Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development.

Today's Loot

Courtesy of the market system, and of Princeton University Press.

---

• Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel (2008), Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations.

• Robert H. Bates (2008), When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa.

• Robert H. Bates (2001), Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development.

The World Is Not Fair!

How come Tyler Cowen has a copy of Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel (2008), Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations and I do not?

Let Us Welcome Our Web 2.0 Publisher Overlords

Charlie Stross on Tor Books's arrival on the internet at http://www.tor/com/:

Charlie's Diary: Dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat: It's something of a truism that the larger a publisher gets, the more trouble they seem to have in understanding this interwebnet thingy. While smaller outfits like Baen Books and Subterranean Press seem to have more than half a clue, it's been almost embarrassing to watch the larger book publishers flailing around... so it's nice and refreshing to see one of them get their act together.

Case in point: Tor.com — Tor's revamped and relaunched web presence. It's very Web 2.0, with original fiction, blogs, and social networking bells and whistles; hopefully it'll be linked up to their long-awaited ebook store fairly soon so you can all buy my books. (Ahem ...)

Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden says:

Welcome to the Frontpage: The conversation: Effective blogging is a combination of good personal writing and smart party hosting. A good blog post can be a sentence long, or three pages long; what matters is that it encourages further conversation.

Back in the heyday of the Whole Earth Catalog, visionary Catalog editor Stewart Brand told would-be reviewers to (I quote from memory, and probably imperfectly) “write as if you are writing a letter to an engaged and interested friend who knows almost nothing about the subject.” That’s a good starting point for blogging. Tor.com is for fans of science fiction, fantasy, the universe, and the many “related subjects” that such persons are also liable to be interested in.... We’re not trying to convert everyone to our particular geeky obsession, but we do assume that our natural audience is composed of people who understand the pleasures of geeky obsession, and we hope to share the cool.

Much of what has driven Tor.com is our desire to more fully contribute to the great conversation that is the subculture of SF.... That conversation has done nothing but expand. It is a major tributary to the modern Internet. Tor.com aspires to be part of that conversation. We recognize it as something older and bigger than we are.

We’ve recruited a number of front-page bloggers based on their knowledge of certain specialized subjects and their demonstrated ability to blog interestingly....

As this site’s editorial straw-boss, I guess what I’d say to everyone playing here, front-page bloggers and commenters alike, is: Converse. Be yourself; be a person, not a megaphone--a personal point of view, not an encyclopedia or an “objective journalistic voice.” Even the original fiction is part of the conversation; the authors writing for us are aware that there'll be a public comment thread following every story, just as if it were a blog post. Talk to the rest of us like we’re human beings at an interesting social event. If you feel like you’re up at a lectern on a big stage, reconsider. Tor.com aspires to be a room party, not Carnegie Hall. Circulate and talk.