Review of Lomborg’s new book

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook reviews Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,

One man who was not rooting for Al Gore to win the Nobel Prize was Bjorn Lomborg. The smiling Dane is the anti-Gore. Unimpressed with An Inconvenient Truth , his new book challenges many of that film’s alarming statements about global warming. Mr Gore and his admirers are paying no attention, needless to say, and that is a pity.

Lomborg’s capacity to anger his opponents is limitless. Of course, he disagrees with them, an outrageous affront in itself. He says that the state of the environment is not dire. He also argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions should not be the world’s top priority, another scandalous provocation. He makes it worse by being pleasant and reasonable (not to mention Danish), turning up in T-shirt and jeans all the time, supporting his arguments with too many footnotes and acting in other ways designed to offend.

Summer reading: non-fiction books

Here are some recent non-fiction books, suitable for summer reading,

Peter L. Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving.

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Niall Ferguson reviews the book here.

Tyler Cowen, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.

Chris Dillow, The End of Politics: New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism.

Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China.

Bernd Heinrich’s new book

On Radio Open Source, Christopher Lydon interviews Bernd Heinrich. This is one interview that didn’t work. Christopher Lydon is all over the place, and he comes across as someone with a serious attention deficit problem. However, after listening to the interview, one thing is clear in my mind. I want to read Heinrich’s new book, The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology.

I have previously read his Why We Run: A Natural History. It was excellent.

What we need now is an interview with Bernd Heinrich without so many interruptions, e.g. following the format on BBC’s The Interview.

The Myth of Inevitable Progress

A review of Indur M. Goklany’s The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet by James Surowiecki.

The core message of Goklany’s book is that economic growth and technological change are the keys to improving people’s lives. But the success of China and India suggests that no one really knows how to bring these achievements about, which makes Goklany’s wide-eyed optimism about the future seem misplaced.[...]

The fact that every country’s experience is different does not mean that there are not deeper truths to be uncovered by looking at the experience of the world as a whole. But the truths thus far uncovered are relatively few in number and often limited in impact. So, yes, free trade is a good thing, subsidies to agriculture and official corruption are bad things, and so on. And policymakers should be aggressive in implementing those practices and policies that there is a good reason to think will work. But they also need to be cautious about taking theoretical pronouncements for reality, and they should be pragmatists rather than evangelists. After decades of misplaced certainty, it may be time to recognize the limits of our own knowledge — at least if we want the state of the world to continue improving.

Falkenstein on Taleb

Who looks well-fed, sports a beard, and has an exaggerated idea of his own contribution to intellectual life? No, I am not thinking about Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, but Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan).

Tyler Cowen wrote a generally positive review of The Black Swan. He did say,

Taleb is a talented writer, and often offers up a brilliant sentence or a clever, darting aphorism; he has a harder time developing a systematic message that is not only true but also original.

Taleb (over)reacted with a Brief Discussion of Empirical and Logical Mistakes in Tyler Cowen’s Review of The Black Swan in Slate (pdf).

Now on Mahalanobis, Eric Falkenstein sets out to demolish Taleb. As hatchet jobs go, it is pretty good.

Left Libertarian Reading List

Memo to self: Chris Dillow’s useful left libertarian reading list is here.

Ousmane Sembène is dead

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest writers and film directors in sub-Saharan Africa. He produced and directed the first sub-Saharan African feature film, La noire de…, released in 1966. His book God’s Bits of Wood, first published in French in 1960, is excellent and deserves to be much more widely read.

Are Voters Rational or Irrational?

On Café Hayek Don Boudreaux writes

My brilliant younger colleague Bryan Caplan is making quite a splash with his new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter. It is, in my opinion, the most important book on the economics of politics to appear in the past decade.

In contrast, on his blog Dani Rodrik states that “Caplan is doing us a service by taking on the holy cow of the rational voter”, but points out that Caplan gets his key piece of evidence wrong,

First, I have a problem with the economics in the book. Consider the key exhibit in Caplan’s case, the fact that many or most people are skeptical about free trade even though most economists are in favor. Caplan interprets this as evidence that people just don’t get the argument about free trade’s benefits (to themselves as well as the economy overall). But in fact there is nothing in the economic case for free trade to suggest that all or most of the individuals in the economy will be better off with free trade. The median individual/voter could well end up worse off (as may have been indeed happening during the last quarter century). So the difference of views between the economist and the person on the street may be reflecting the former’s own social preferences instead of the latter’s misunderstanding.

And even with respect to the aggregate gains from trade, the economist’s case hinges on a large number of auxiliary assumptions. These may well be violated in the real world. I would bet my dollar on the common person having an instinctive understanding of these imperfections before I would trust a Chicago or GMU economist’s priors on it.

A review of the book by Christopher Hayes can be read here, another by Gary Bass here.

New review of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan

Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan is reviewed in The Guardian.

It is as if Taleb - thoughtful Taleb whom we thought we once knew - has been mugged by an editor determined to dumb down in the most stupid way conceivable. The result is a missed opportunity.

But apparently Nassim Taleb doesn’t allow editors to touch his work.

I just had to withdraw a piece from publication. The copy editor wanted to “improve” the sentences.

Quoted from Mahalanobis. A review of the book on Mahalanobis can be found here.

Sachs in Pursuit of the Millennium Goals

Jeffrey Sachs writes,

The Millennium Development Goals are the world’s agreed goals to cut poverty, hunger, and disease. Established in 2000, their targets were to be met by 2015. We are now at the halfway point. So far, despite endless words about increasing aid to poor countries, the rich G-8 countries are reneging on their part of the bargain.

The “world’s agreed goals”? There are 54 goals and 449 interventions specified to reach the Millennium Development Goals. Anything with 54 goals has been designed for failure.

By the way, if you haven’t read Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, you have a treat in store.

The Black Swan

The review on Mahalanobis of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is not really a book review. It is more about Nassim Taleb than about the book.

Strategic Economics

The Dutch merchants who wanted to continue to sell cannon to the Spanish during the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish Empire were against restrictions on free trade.

Free trade is never without restrictions. To determine just what those restrictions should be is not trivial.

Here is a sign of the times: an recent article entitled The Establishment Rethinks Globalization about Ralph Gomory and William Baumol’s book Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests. The book was published in 2001, but scepticism about free trade is much more widespread now that it was then.

Other books with a nuanced view of free trade include

Frank Bourgin. The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic.

Ha-Joon Chang. Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective.

How to grow fresh air

I have recently changed office. In the morning when I open the door to the office I am met with air that smells like a soup of chemicals. What to do? I came across a reference to this book, B.C. Wolverton, How to Grow Fresh Air: 50 House Plants that Purify Your Home or Office, based on the NASA Clean Air Study.

One of the customer reviews on Amazon mentions that the Lady Palm (Rhapis excelsa), the Corn Plant (Dracaena fragrans), and the Ficus benjamina are three of the fifty plants listed in the book that are not only easy to grow but are effective at removing toxins such as formaldehyde and ammonia from the air. I will try it.

The Privatization of the Oceans

Rögnvaldur Hannesson’s The Privatizations of the Oceans (MIT Press, 2006) is short, clear, and written with a certain wry humor.

It is the best exposition of the development of property rights in the world’s fisheries that I have seen, and it is a real pleasure to read.

Harpending on McKinnon on Evolutionary Psychology

Henry Harpending reviews Susan McKinnon’s book Neo-Liberal Genetics,

…She does not complain that evolutionary psychology is bad science according to standard criteria for evaluating science: Instead she dislikes the “rhetorical structures and strategies of the texts.” She deplores the “narrative” of evolutionary psychology because it “severely constricts the kinds of questions we can ask and the kinds of social worlds we can possibly imagine and endeavor to create for ourselves” (p. 152). In other words McKinnon dislikes the implied constraints on her political fantasies.

Everyone understands and deals with evolutionary psychology. We understand why our cat was easier to toilet train than our baby was: One has the brain of a denning predator and the other of a mobile and occasionally arboreal ape. We also understand that there is no “should” implied in this: No one thinks that children should not be toilet trained. MacKinnon, by contrast, attributes to evolutionary psychologists the belief that saying something “is” is the same as saying that that it “ought” to be. Here, for example, is her notion of what genetic individualism means: “that the ‘public good’ should be replaced by individual responsibility and social services privatized; that profit and capital should be maximized through the deregulation of markets - that is, that competition should run its course unchecked - in a ‘race to the bottom’ - regardless of the social consequences” (p. 44). Notice the “shoulds”, none of which are appropriate…

Despite an occasional interesting insight, most of this book reads like a clone of the dreadful wrong-headed ramblings that were the “sociobiology debate” of the 1970s.

Control Fraud

James Galbraith mentions in a comment the very useful concept of “control fraud” introduced by William K. Black, see e.g. When Fragile becomes Friable: Endemic Control Fraud as a Cause of Economic Stagnation and Collapse (pdf),

Individual “control frauds” cause greater losses than all other forms of property crime combined. They are financial super-predators. Control frauds are crimes led by the head of state or CEO that use the nation or company as a fraud vehicle. Waves of “control fraud” can cause economic collapses, damage and discredit key institutions vital to good political governance, and erode trust…

Economic theory about fraud is underdeveloped, core neo-classical theories imply that major frauds are trivial, economists are not taught about fraud and fraud mechanisms, and neo-classical economists minimize the incidence and importance of fraud for reasons of self-interest, class and ideology.

Neo-classical economics’ understanding of fraud is so weak that its policy prescriptions, if adopted wholly, produce strongly criminogenic environments that cause waves of control fraud. Neo-classical policies simultaneously make control fraud easier and more lucrative, dramatically reduce the risk of detection and prosecution by maximizing “systems capacity” problems, and encourage crime by making it easier for fraudsters to “neutralize” the social and psychological constraints against deceit and fraud. Thus the paradox: neo-classical economic triumphs produce tragedy…

William K. Black is also the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.

Business strategy books

When teaching business strategy to MBA students in Europe, it is not obvious which texts you should use. Strategy books published in the U.S. tend to assume that students know the American context.

So, which books to use? One popular textbook is Carpenter & Sanders, Strategic Management: A Dynamic Perspective. A dynamic perspective? Why not add a few more buzzwords; global, integrated, systems, stakeholder, win-win?

I have previously used Robert Grant’s Contemporary Strategy Analysis. It was fairly concise when it came out, but with succeeding editions it became more and more bloated. However, the latest edition has shed 60 pages. Maybe it is worth taking a look at it again.

A really excellent book is R. Preston McAfee’s Competitive Solutions: The Strategist’s Toolkit. So far, it is the best book for teaching strategy I have seen.

Science writers: two of the best

Edward O. Wilson and Steven Pinker are excellent science writers. Both are arguably better science writers than scientists. E.O. Wilson’s work on insects was really good, but his sociobiological ideas are less original than the ideas of e.g. Bill Hamilton or Bob Trivers (a talk by Trivers here). Steven Pinker’s ideas can be summarized as Chomsky plus Tooby & Cosmides; he stands on their shoulders but it it not clear that he sees a whole lot further than they did.

As writers both Wilson and Pinker are prolific, clear, readable, and mostly right. Their books are widely read. Those are great accomplishments.

The person who has done more than anybody else for building the market for science writing is John Brockman, who is a very successful literary agent. He correctly describes himself as an impresario. By creating hype and hoopla around a bunch of nerdish scientists he has promoted the public understanding of science and provided a real public service (see his Edge website, profile in The Guardian (pdf)).

Market fundamentalism, statism, and community governance

Brad DeLong writes,

How economists use the neoclassical benchmark:

• At Chicago: Assume that the economy is at the neoclassical benchmark, and demonstrate that whatever exists is, in some subtle sense, constrained Pareto-optimal efficient–except where ham-handed government intervention has caused messes.

• At Berkeley: Investigate the deviation from the neoclassical benchmark that can be caused by one single but significant market failure, demonstrate that this deviation matches up to some important feature of the real world, and demonstrate that a clever, subtle, and strategic government intervention can move us to a situation that is constrained Pareto-optimal.

If we were to be unkind, we would call these the market fundamentalist and the statist approaches (in Brad DeLong’s case, a social democratic statism). We can add a third approach, community governance.

• Investigate the deviation from the neoclassical benchmark, demonstrate that this deviation is causes by badly designed government and market institutions that have crowded out community governance. To address this failure, develop institutions and property rights that support community governance as a complement to markets and governments. Note, however, that effective community governance is usually based on insider-outsider distinctions, between Us and Them.

For an introduction to community governance, see

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons : The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Ellickson, Robert C. Order Without Law : How Neighbors Settle Disputes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

You may also want to take a look at

Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

For researchers doing interesting related work, see the list of network members from the Norms and Preferences Network.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse

John Hawks observes that Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto is basically a novelization of the Maya part of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

Diamond pushes this simplified version of Maya history as an allegory for U.S. ecological hubris…

…if you’re looking for the social zeitgeist behind this Apocalypto phenomenon, it would seem to derive from these widespread assumptions about Maya ecology and political structures that Diamond has helped to popularize. Collapse itself already simplifies vastly to make his point about ecologies and social regulation. The entire book is a case of “imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place.”

Here is a fair 2005 review of Collapse by Jared Diamond. Partha Dasgupta writes,

…I think he has failed to grasp both the way in which information about particular states of affairs gets transmitted (however imperfectly) in modern decentralised economies – via economic signals such as prices, demand, product quality and migration – and the way increases in the scarcity of resources can itself act to spur innovations that ease those scarcities. Without a sympathetic understanding of economic mechanisms, it isn’t possible to offer advice on the interactions between nature and the human species…

There is no evidence that he even realises he doesn’t have the equipment to hand with which to study our interactions with nature...[emphasis added].

Ouch.

More on Collapse in a review by Ronald Bailey in Reason, here. More on Apocalypto by Tyler Cowen here.