Book Prize Winner: 2 million!

The WINNER of the faaaaabulous prize is Andreas P, from Alexandria, VA!

He'll be receiving a copy of each of the following two books:

1.  Someguy and Grier THE LONG PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT

2.  Munger and Munger CHOOSING IN GROUPS

Thanks to everyone who entered!

Winner, Winner, Literary Dinner!

By my (not exactly perfect) detective work to discover the winner of the

FAAAAAAAABULOUS!

prize for 2 millionth visitor to KPC, that winner is:

Comcast Cable  IP:  73.201.#.#

Mount Laurel, NJ

Dear Mount Laurel:  Excellent insanity, refreshing your page 119 in less than 10 minutes.  That was some OCD there, friend.

You have until Monday at 9 am to contact us ( munger @ duke dot edu ), and supply the last two (hidden above) portions of your IP address.

If you do, you will receive the ####-Grier and Munger-Munger books, at an address that you specify.

Congratulations!  And thanks to everyone for playing.

Canonical

People, as requested by absolutely no one,  here's my list of my favorite contemporary novels, limit one book per author.

I.  All-time greats:

Infinite Jest, Dave Wallace. I have actually read this book twice, loved it even more the second time.

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell. I was loving this book even before I figured out what was going on with the structure.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami.

Three Farmers on Their way to a Dance, Richard Powers

White Noise, Don DeLillo

In each case, it's really hard to only pick one book per author, you should read their whole oeuvre (with perhaps a couple of exceptions).


II. More Recent Works:


The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Steven Sherrill. Immortality is overrated.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz. Excited to see what Diaz will do next.

The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead. Awesome debut. I worry that poker has ruined Colson though.

The Ectstatic, Victor LaValle. His short story collection, Slap-boxing with Jesus is also not to be missed.

Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem. Probably the guy in part II who should be in part I. Everything is great. Try "as she climbed across the table" for a thoroughly post-modern love story.

White Tiger, Aravind Argia. Savage and Brilliant

The God of Small Things, Ahrudhati Roy. She's gone off the rails, but this is a brilliant novel.

David Skarbek's Book Trailer

Pretty cool to have a book trailer.  *I* don't have a book trailer.  But David Skarbek does:

Political Memoir Simulator

So, you can get a title for your own political biography, with this simulator.

Mine was below:

This is surprisingly insightful, for a computer simulator of political biographies.  Many of the men who go to Washington would like to think their careers focused on legislation.  But for a lot of guys that "career" was mostly focused on his dictum.  With thanks to Dan "Sincere Audacity" Drezner.

Schooling ain't learning!

Today is the official launch day for Lant Pritchett's new book: The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning.

You can buy the book here.

You can read about it here.

While governments in the developing world have indeed managed to increase school enrollment rates substantially (as they were advised to do by rich country aid agencies and the MDGs), the payoff has been muted at best because of the often low to non-existant level of actual education available in the schools.

Development advice and aid often focuses inappropriately on the inputs at the expense of the outputs (though the RCT nation is changing this), perhaps nowhere more strongly though than in education.

To me it's another example of "cargo cult" development (Lant is much more polite, well, ok a little more polite, and calls it "isomorphic mimicry"). Build a straw airplane and balsawood control tower and wait for the cargo to fall from the sky.

Of course in education policy it can be even worse as the balsawood control tower is frequently staffed by un-accountable, un-dismissable, personnel.

Lant doesn't write in development-speak (the isomorphic mimicry phrase not withstanding). You'll have no trouble figuring out what's on his mind.

Both Mrs. Angus and I plan to use this book in our teaching and we highly recommend it to anyone interested in education policy and development.

(This post also appears at Cherokee Gothic).

Peter Leeson, Peewee Pirate!

Holy Smokes!

Here's Peter Leeson, scholar of the first rank.  I use his book, The Invisible Hook, in my intro Econ class every fall, and students love it.  Really great stuff.  So, taking nothing from my admiration.  Luv ya, Pete.  Mean it!

But here....well, here is Peewee Herman.  Golly.  I wonder if Pete L likes "Tequila!"

Books of Summer

The LMM and I are really, really boring. We go to the beach and....read.  Have been here at Wrightsville Dunes for 8 nights now, and have gone out to dinner exactly once (though it was fun, visiting with Aaron and Laurie King, and went to Bluewater)

That means I get some reading done.  With Kindle, you can read old stuff, new stuff, all sorts of things.

The good:

1.  The Code:  Baseball  Ross Bernstein.  Solid, interesting, but mostly stuff I knew.

2.  The Code:  Hockey  Ross Bernstein.  Fascinating, partly because I don't know much about hockey, but also because there is a lot going on behind the scenes.  Some of the chapters are good enough, in terms of institutions, to be used in the sort of class where you talk about Olson, Ostrom, Leeson, and Skarbek.  Really, really great.

3.  Three Nights in August  Buzz Bissinger.  The story of a series between the SL Cards and the Chi Cubs, in 2005.  Probably more, and deeper, stuff about how baseball works and how pitchers protect their teams than the Bernstein book.  But then maybe I just like it because it is a story of how the Cards beat the Cubs, back before the Cubs starting sucking so bad that this outcome is a near certainty.

4.  Havana Nocturne  TJ English.  How the Mob tried to run Cuba, and how Castro ran out the Mob.  As interesting and vivid a history as I have ever read, and gives one sympathy for poor Cuba.  Recommended by T. Pino; thanks!

5.  The Economics of Beer  Edited by Johan Swinnen.  A bit academicish, but some great stuff on beer's history and economics.  The chapters on beer in China, the largest beer consumer (total, not per capita) alone are worth the book.  And John Nye's chapter on beer and wine in England is a classic.

The Bad

1.  The Code:  Football  Ross Bernstein.  Can't blame Bernstein, and football is useful as the missing case in the instiutional story in his triloogy of "The Code" books.  Query:  What happens when there is no code, because players are allowed to cheat and take cheap shots, because they are wearing protective equipment that covers their entire bodies, especially their heads and faces?  Answer:  Football.  Hockey and baseball have codes to prevent violence.  Football just promotes violence, and that's all there is to it.  Boring, repetitive account of injuries and mayhem without form or control.

The Next

1.  Just got The Story of Spanish JB Nadeau and J Barlow.  Spanish is the second most frequently spoken language on earth, after Mandarin.  Why?

Now you have no excuse

A little over a year ago, I recommended the book "Red Plenty". At that time it was not released in the US (I got it via Amazon UK). Now it's out in paperback and kindle at the "regular" Amazon store.

Here is a recent review from the NY Times.

The book is amazing. Check it out, people.

End of Abundance

KPC friend and water economics uber-mensch David Zetland has a newversion of his book out. Very cool and refreshing, if you can get it. Like clean water, actually.

Liberty Book Club?

Anybody up for a virtual Liberty Book Club?

KPC fan Brandon Capitalism writes, "Would you be willing to ask on your blog, if any students would be interested in starting a Students for Liberty / IHS Book Club?

They would read the books listed on your blog. And they could, if they wanted, have debates about the books on our Capitalism Facebook page (up to 40k members). I would love that and help them as an Leadership Institute field rep... The vision is for students to organize themselves to study the ideas that Universities don't. "

Sounds good to me. Contact Brandon Capitalism if you want more info...

Classical Liberal Reading Group

Okay, CL fans, I need your help.

An extremely earnest and enthusiastic student just wrote to me, and asked about starting a reading group in Classical Liberalism. This student wants the movement to spread, and wants the readings to be good. And s/he also wants Progressive counterpoint.

So, let me ask the smartest people I know, the readers of KPC!

In comments, please give the BEST (most important, but also most readable) books or articles for these categories (these are my correspondent's categories, btw). And NO MORE THAN THREE per category, please. Have at you!

Classical Liberal authors of history: _____

Classical Liberal authors of the contemporary period: ____

And Progressive authors of history: _____

And Progressive authors of the contemporary period: _____

What's Your PQ?

It turns out MY "pq" is 29, very similar to that of Ron Paul. Doesn't mean all our issue positions are the same, but I would guess that in a 2-dimensional space our issue positions ARE pretty much the same.

Our guy* Tim Groseclose has an interesting web site for his new book. And you can find out what YOUR pq is, though it's a 40 question survey.

*Angus actually owns him. He bought an option, back when it was cheap. At least, he wishes he had.

Recognize the Author?

Ever seen this?

Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution. In this very minute, a child is being born to an American family and another child, equally valued by God, is being born to a family in India. The resources of all kinds that will be at the disposal of this new American will be on the order of 15 times the resources available to his Indian brother. This seems to us a terrible wrong, justifying direct corrective action, and perhaps some actions of this kind can and should be taken. But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production.

That would be Robert Lucas, The Industrial Revolution: Past and Future, 2004. (Nod to Neanderbill for the cite).

I just finished reading Joyce Appleby's The Relentless Revolution, a history of capitalism. After the first 100 pages, I thought it was one of the best books I had ever seen on the subject. After 150 pages, and from then on, I wanted to through it against the wall. Prof. Appleby has some overt Marxist assumptions, with some stubborn libertarianism underneath them. So she firmly believes that capitalism is necessary for wealth to develop. But then she favors statism and powerful labor unions.

She really makes an effort to be "fair" to statist regimes. For example, on p. 267, Prof. Appleby says, "The USSR startled the world [in the Revolution]. During the seventy-two years, of its existence, the USSR repeatedly affronted the Western world with its flaunting of its indifference to property rights and free enterprise."

Um...Ma'am, excuse me, but the USSR also affronted the Western world with its murder of millions of its citizens and the denial of basic human rights and political freedoms to the wretched population of an area that was nearly 1/5 of the entire habitable land surface of the world.

Still, an interesting book. Her discussion of the direction of China and India are both detailed and insightful, though again she shies away from any kind of critique of the repressive anti-labor policies of the Chinese, after having bludgeoned (with some cause, of course) the repressive anti-union thuggery of the US in the first half of the 20th century.

Worth reading.

Dick Cheney's Erdos number

Yes, he has one, and it's probably lower than yours my friend:

"Cheney's Erdos number is no more than seven. He wrote his American Political Science Review article with Aage Clausen, who has coauthored with Greg Caldeira, who has co-authored with me, who has co-authored with Keith Krebiel, who has co-authored with John Ferejohn, who has co-authored with Peter Fishburn, who has co-authored with Erdos."

The "me" in the above quote is Tim Groseclose, one of the greatest Okies ever, and the quote comes from his awesome new book: "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind" which drops tomorrow from St. Martin's press. The book is, as Tyler likes to say, self-recommending.

I could have had an Erdos of five, but I was such a crappy co-author that Tim kicked me off the project.

Update: Tim informs me that I'm not kicked off the project, it's just "indefinitely on hold".

Books a Million?

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

At first I thought it was a joke – a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over a million dollars. And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random – suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?

Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

ATSRTWT

(Nod to Leonard S)

Congrats to Timur Kuran

Nice article in The Economist about Timur Kuran's new book.

Timur may be the single nicest economist* I have ever met. Duke is lucky to have him.

(*Yes, nicer than Angus. Sure, that's hard to believe, but I'm just sayin'...)

D-Zet's Review

D-Zet reviews vol 5 in the Seldon Series.

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Reattachment Update

I have been trying to lay low. In fact, flat. MAG brought me over a massage table, which is like a sturdy cot, but with a frame with a hole in the middle so I can lie face down and read through the hole.

The first procedure was 8 days ago; the second procedure was Monday, 5 days ago. There is an enormous bubble in my left eye (well, a small bubble, but it's all I can see). The retina appears to have reattached in a physical sense. The problem is that the nerves all need to mate up again, and of course only some of them will. So vision from left eye will always be dim, wrinkled, and unfocused. At BEST.

The primary variable that affects the improvement of vision over the next month is lying face down and motionless. The larger the proportion of time I can do that, the more likely I get back at least some vision in the left eye. (Have always slept on stomach, so that's a help). Anyway, all I can do is look down. And dr says to stay off computer. Eye movements are too rapid, and too large.

So, I read. May I recommend:

Chernow's GEORGE WASHINGTON: A Life
Manchester's THE ARMS OF KRUPP
Strasser and Becklund's SWOOSH: The Story of Nike

Three huge books. Only the Chernow one is remotely new. But all well done. Finished GEORGE and SWOOSH, just started KRUPP. Read it years ago, but thought I would give it another go.

Fahrenheit 69

It's no "Rock Me Amadeus," and it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK. But this young lady likes science fiction, and especially Ray Bradbury.


(Nod to Anonyman, who likes to read a little himself)