David Leonhardt of the NY Times makes an effort to explain the credit crisis to laypeople. It helps. My favorite line:
I spent a good part of the last few days calling people on Wall Street and in the government to ask one question, “Can you try to explain this to me?” When they finished, I often had a highly sophisticated follow-up question: “Can you try again?”
Update: I just read another version, how Steve Waldman would explain the credit crisis to a kindergartener. [HT: BW]
You read Tropical Gangsters. You watched American Gangster. You read about the Economic Hit Man. But nobody’s safe when the Economic Gangsters come to town.
My friend and colleague Ted Miguel is coming out with a book this fall, bound to be a good time with insight to boot. From the website:
Meet the economic gangster. He’s the United Nations diplomat who double-parks his Mercedes on New York streets at rush hour because the cops can’t touch him—he has diplomatic immunity. He’s the Chinese smuggler who dodges tariffs by magically transforming frozen chickens into frozen turkeys. The dictator, the warlord, the crooked bureaucrat who bilks the developing world of billions in aid. The calculating crook who views stealing and murder as just another part of his business strategy. And, in the wrong set of circumstances, he just might be you.
In Economic Gangsters, Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel take readers into the secretive, chaotic, and brutal worlds inhabited by these lawless and violent thugs.
I’m not sure if the double-parking diplomat was the most intimidating way to introduce the gangster, but still… Recommended reading this October.
* My take on the prequels: Tropical Gangsters was great, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was underwhelming, and I didn’t see American Gangster.
My wife gave me this interesting volume of history for our anniversary in 2006, and I’ve read it bit by bit over the last several months. My thoughts:
worthwhile peek into the lives of ordinary saints
The best known characters of Mormon history are the presidents of the Church* (from Joseph Smith to Thomas Monson), Joseph Smith’s immediate relatives (such as Emma or Joseph Smith, Sr.), and a handful of other people included in the canonized works (such as the three witnesses of The Book of Mormon). Of course, the Church’s current membership of 13 million has been built by a much broader group of people. Arrington and Bitton draw on diaries, oral histories, and other sources to construct character sketches (most of them under ten pages) of 17 people who for the most part don’t fit into those categories; I’d only heard of a few of them. The subjects range from the founding of the Church in the mid-19th century to the people who grew up in the early 20th century (the book was published in 1981, after all).
Arrington and Bitton haven’t managed to write a page-turner (Don’t expect The Da Vinci Code or even Prince and Wright’s David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism), but the accounts contain enough choice experiences and insights into the evolving Church to make this volume well worth the reading.
I wish the book had included more women (only five of the 17), but to the authors’ credit, the subjects are diverse in other ways: one isn’t a member of the Church (Kane), one left the Church (Wight), one held firmly heterodox doctrinal beliefs (Ericksen), one grew up among Hopi traditionalists (Sekaquaptewa). The authors try not to pass judgment but rather to present the stories as the individuals or their families recorded them. The examples of these hardworking rank-and-file members inspired me in their imperfections as much as their diligence and faithfulness.
[I even encountered an ancestor of mine by surprise: Oscar Kirkham makes an appearance in the life of Edna Ericksen (p132).]
Here is a list of the book’s chapters, with the (sometimes approximate) vital dates as available in the book, to give a sense of the time spanned:
1. Joseph Knight: Friend to the Prophet (1773-1847)
2. Jonathan Hale: Preaching the Restored Gospel (1800-1846)
3. Lyman Wight: Wild Ram of the Mountains (?-1858)
4. Colonel Thomas L. Kane: A Friend in Need (?-1883)
5. Jean Baker: Gathering to Zion (?-1880)
6. Edwin Woolley: Bishop of the Thirteenth Ward (1807-1881)
7. Charles L. Walker: Sage of Saint George (?-1904)
8. Lucy White Flake: Pioneering Utah and Arizona (1842-?)
9. Edward Bunker: Living the United Order (1822-1901)
10. Lemuel H. Redd: Down the Chute to San Juan (1836-?)
11. Chauncey West: Nineteenth Century Teenager (1877-?)
12. George F. Richards: A Link in the Chain (1861-1950)
13. Helen Sekaquaptewa: Traditions of the Fathers (1898-?)
14. Ephraim and Edna Ericksen: The Philosopher and the Trail Builder (1882-1967, ?-?)
15. Margrit Feh Lohner: Swiss Immigrant (1914-?)
16. T. Edgar Lyon: Missionary, Educator, Historian (1903-1978)
* The Church refers to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I listened to another Spanish audibook, leaving me just one short of completing the Expanding Horizons Challenge. La nada cotidiana, by Zoe Valdes [published in English as Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada, deals with the challenges of life in modern Havana (Cuba). It yielded a few insights but I didn’t like the protagonist, nor did I find her experiences particularly interesting. Go read Chaviano’s El hombre, la hembra, y el hambre [Man, Woman, Hunger] instead. My thoughts:
un libro cotidiano, con el tema mejor escrito en otro lado
Este libro nos cuenta de los tres amantes de Yocandra, una joven de la habana, juntos con vistas de la vida cotidiana en aquella ciudad. Varios temas se parecen entre este libro y el de otro libro que también se trata de la vida dura en la habana (El hombre, la hembra y el hambre, por Daína Chaviano). Uno de los temas que los libros tienen en común es lo difícil de conseguir comida que a nosotros en los EEUU nos parece cotidiana, como los huevos y el queso. Los dos libros se tratan del conflicto interno que sienten los cubanos: que si deben emigrar o no, sintiendo el amor a su país de un lado y la desesperación al otro. Valdés ofrece ciertas vistas que no encontré en el libro de Chaviano: por ejemplo, oímos de las experiencias de varios cubanos que ya han emigrado (uno a los EEUU y otra a España) y lo difícil que es asimilarse a una sociedad ajena. Después de todo, el libro de Chaviano me impresionó mucho más, tanto en la prosa como en la trama de la novela.
He visto varios comentarios (aquí en Amazon) por cubanos que dicen que esta novela (La nada cotidiana) capta la vida cotidiana del cuba de una forma excelente. No soy cubano así que no puedo negarlo, pero ni el personaje ni las experiencias de Yocandra parecieron muy interesantes.
Escuché el audiolibro narrado por Olga Merediz [4 discos], publicado por Recorded Books. La narración fue buena pero no excepcional. Este libro también se puede comprar en inglés con el título no muy conciso de Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada.
[Si le importa, este libro tiene dos escenas sexuales bastante gráficas y una de aquellas es muy larga. El libro de Chaviano también tiene algo de eso, pero menos largo y con menos detalles.]
I’m reading Wizard of the Crow, the longest book ever written in an African language. It was written in Kikuyu, one of Kenya’s main languages, and then translated into English. The author is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. As you can see by his name, Kikuyu has some extra vowels. This afternoon I sat down with a Kikuyu colleague to figure out how to pronounce vowels in Kikuyu:
a as in car*
e as in egg
i as in me
o as in toe
u as in blue
ĩ as in day
ũ as in toe
You’ll note that I’ve given the same pronunciation for o and for ũ. She repeated the difference for me several times and I could finally hear it but the best I can characterize it is that the ũ sounds higher in tone whereas the o sounds lower. Very scientific, I know.
So Ngũgĩ is actually Go-gay: the n is at best very faint. One on-line writer suggests “place your tongue against the back of your front teeth and start to say ‘no.’ But instead of adding the ‘o,’ replace it instead with” go-gay. But when my friend said it, I essentially couldn’t hear it.
*I’m (obviously) not a linguist; this is my best effort based on chatting with my friend.
My good friend Andrew Evans, a DC-based writer, has posted an article on Eritrea’s sweet cultural spots in DC. If you don’t know what Eritrea is, Evans explains
Red Sea coast turned unsuccessful Italian colony turned UN protectorate then ceded to Ethiopia followed by a 30 year civil war, nominal independence, undemarcated borders… It’s your typical horn of Africa fairy tale.
I’ve been interested in this since I read a good review in the Economist, and I recently discovered the unabridged audiobook. With a book on risk and probability, one never knows how exciting the ride will be, but Taleb very pleasantly surprised me. He needs a harsher editor, but overall I learned a lot and enjoyed the vast majority. My thoughts:
a valuable book for reframing your thinking on reasoning and rare events
Not for some time has a book affected my thinking as much as this one. Taleb’s self-described “personal essay” is way too long and sometimes a little too angry, but his exposition of the flaws in our thinking has provided a new and useful lens for much of my own thinking. One salient example is the narrative fallacy: “our predilection for compact stories over raw truths” (p63). We tend to assign causes and reasons for events even when we lack any evidence of connections: We want to tell stories. Many of these stories are harmless, but others can keep us from being open to truth when it appears.
A second example is the problem of silent evidence: If one uses worshippers who prayed and survived a subsequent shipwreck as evidence of the efficacy of prayer, an observer might ask, What of those who prayed and then drowned? “The drowned worshippers, being dead, would have a lot of trouble advertising their experiences from the bottom of the sea” (p100). It’s not that I’ve never noticed these fallacies before, but having a name for them makes them much easier to identify. These points and many more like them make this volume a worthy read.
The titular Black Swans are events with three characteristics: (1) they are outside of regular expectations because nothing in the past convincingly points to their possibility, (2) they carry an extreme impact, and (3) they are explainable and predictable after the fact although not before (p. xvii-xviii). Taleb argues that many modern phenomena, including the distribution of wealth (Bill Gates’s income), book and movie success (the Da Vinci Code), and mortality in modern warfare (to name a few) are subject to Black Swan events. Many natural and historical phenomena (such as the distribution of human heights or mortality in traditional warfare) are not as subject to Black Swans.
None of the standard statistical tools used for analysis in finance, economics, and social sciences are capable of accounting for Black Swans, making them – according to Taleb – worse than worthless, as they give a false sense of knowledge and security. (For example, he demonstrates how wildly erroneous financial projections unfailingly are and asks why these are useful.)
Taleb makes his point in thirty different ways, gives his personal history, insults economists repeatedly, and creates a number of hypothetical characters. He sometimes expounds too informally given the paradigm-shifting point he is trying to make, but overall the book has much to offer. He outlines a whole host of psychological biases and reasoning fallacies (beyond the two I mentioned above) that affect our thinking and predicting, often blinding us to the possibility of black swans.
Most of the book is non-technical [not that I’m the best judge of that, with an advanced economics degree], but a few chapters towards the end get into more technical detail: Taleb warns us in advance.
I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by David Chandler [12 CDs], published by Recorded Books. The narration is very good (with the exception that the narrator always pronounces foreign names with a little pause and a flare, like it’s a separate performance; but that’s a small and entertaining flaw).
[Note on content: The book uses strong language a handful of times.]
I just listened to (most of) an interview with Harvard Economics professor Stephen Marglin on his new book The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community:
Marglin argues that markets and commercial transactions undermine the connections between us. He wants people to pay more attention to what is lost and not just what is gained by the pursuit of material well-being. Topics discussed include the nature of community, the role that voluntary associations play in our lives, the costs and benefits of mobility, the role of insurance in reducing our dependence on each other, and the nature of knowledge.
Sounds great, right? I am open to the idea that commercial transactions reduce that human something, but the case needs a better advocate than Marglin. Economists talk about social capital all the time, which is what voluntary assocations are. Development economists talk about informal insurance mechanisms (what Marglin calls “community”) all the time.
In the interview, his principal evidence consists of (a) a scene from the Harrison Ford film Witness, (b) a Wall Street Journal column about a family that moved for a job and had to shoot their dog because it couldn’t fit in the van, and (c) something less memorable. He argues that these things are not conducive to statistical measurement: That’s fine, but in its absence, I’d like a tight logical argument.
When the interviewer asked what the policy recommendations were based on the idea that free trade can undermine communities, Marglin had no answer. When the interviewer brought up revealed preference (the fact that few people choose to be Amish even though the Amish have great community), the subject rapidly changed.
I have also read that the book is unconvincing.
HT: Chris Blattman for those 40 minutes of my life…
[End of rant]
An independent bookstore owner writes about chasing book thieves. Here are the top titles for stealing:
1. Charles Bukowski
2. Jim Thompson
3. Philip K. Dick
4. William S. Burroughs
5. Any Graphic Novel
One of the more popular white person activities of the past fifteen years is attempting to educate others on the evils of multi-national corporations. White people love nothing more than explaining to you how Wal*Mart, McDonalds, Microsoft, Halliburton are destroying the Earth’s culture and resources….When engaging in a conversation about corporate evils it is important to NEVER, EVER mention Apple Computers, Target or Ikea in the same breath as the companies mentioned earlier. White people prefer to hate corporations that don’t make stuff that they like.
David Evans' personal blog 