Edward Jay Epstein, a wonderful journalist, has just published The Hollywood Economist. I asked the publisher for a free copy. About two-thirds I’d already seen, mostly in Slate. The back cover says “ Freakonomics meets Hollywood saga” but I’d say “ Spy meets The New Yorker” — not that many people would understand “Spy”. It has a Spy- ish “here’s how things really are” aspect but with fewer embarrassing stories. And it has a New-Yorker-ish broad and deep view. (Epstein has often written for The New Yorker.) Like both Spy and The New Yorker it is very well-written. Although I’ve visited his website many times, I didn’t know about The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend ( three books combined) nor Who Owns the Corporation: Management vs. Shareholders (69 pages). He’s currently writing a book about the 9-11 commission. From his profile: “I taught political science at MIT and UCLA for three years but then decided that researching and writing books was a far more educational enterprise.”
Category: books
North Korea and Penn State
In an excellent talk last week about North Korea — linked to his book The Cleanest Race — Brian Myers, a professor in South Korea, said that people don’t fear dying, they fear dying without significance. Without their life having meant something. Life in North Korea is far more attractive than Americans realize, he said. The border between North Korea and China is easy to cross, and about half of the North Koreans who go to China later return, in spite of North Korea’s poverty. How does the North Korean government do such a good job under such difficult circumstances? Partly by playing up external threats (U.S. troops in South Korea), the obvious way politicians win support, but also by telling the North Korean people they are special. Maybe it plays this card because it has to — they can’t afford a police state — but there is no denying how well it works. In contrast, Myers said, the South Korean government offers its citizens no more than consumerism. That doesn’t work well, and South Korea, in spite of high per capita income, has high rates of depression and suicide.
I think the attractiveness of North Korean life has a lot to do with why Penn State students like Penn State so much. This American Life did a show about Penn State a few months ago. Life at the nation’s top party school said the description. Sounds boring, I thought, so I waited to listen to it until I’d run out of stuff to listen to. It turned out to be one of their best shows ever. Mostly it’s about the large amount of drinking — this is why they did the show — but at the very end is a short segment about how much Penn State students love their school. Not much detail but I was convinced. The attractive school cheer (“We Are Penn State”) comes up in conversation! A few people reading this won’t know that Penn State has an extremely successful football team. A large fraction of the students attend its games. After graduation, a lot of them continue to attend the games.
Here is a powerful and neglected force in human life. The bland technical term is group identity. As the South Korea comparison indicates, governments don’t routinely use it to govern. As Penn State exceptionalism indicates, colleges don’t routinely use it either. Faculty routinely disparage football. Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education was written by a professor — of course. The Penn State chancellor seemed mystified that his students were so proud and supportive of their school. (They’re just that way, he seemed to say.) A lot of my self-experimentation has been about discovering what we need to be healthy, such as morning faces. I can’t self-experiment about this but I would if I could. It’s yet another thing that people must have routinely gotten in Stone-Age life but don’t get any more — unless you happen to be a rabid sports fan or an alumnus of a college with a sufficiently successful football team. Or live in North Korea.
Assorted Links
- how Andrew Gelman chooses book titles
- how to buy a car
- horizontal evolution was very important
- The rise of Chinese universities. The world’s top 100 universities. In 2004, Berkeley was #2 on this list. It is now #39.
- The IPCC under siege
Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell, Tim Beneke, and Stephen Marsh.
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
A few years ago, Gawande wrote two articles in The New Yorker about medical innovation: The Score (about Apgar scores) and The Checklist. Since then, he has done actual research promoting the use of checklists and this book (which I got free from the publisher) is mostly the story of his contribution, with sidebars about the origin of checklists in aviation and their use in building construction. The word checklist suggests that it is all about making sure certain things get done but Gawande takes pains to say that is only half of it. The other half is helping people who don’t know each other work together — by having them introduce themselves and by making sure everyone is heard.
Use of checklists, judging by the results, is a big advance and for that reason alone this would be a solid book — the story of one person’s part in an important innovation. I am sorry he didn’t tell parts of the story that reflect badly on others — such as the Office of Human Research Protections decision that Johns Hopkins research must be stopped immediately because introducing checklists and tracking their effectiveness was dangerous. (Doctors might be embarassed by the results!) I wouldn’t expect a Harvard Med School prof to get nauseous with rage, the way Richard Harris, an earlier New Yorker writer, appropriately did in A Sacred Trust (how the AMA tried to block Medicare), but every story needs a villain. And there are plenty of villains in American medicine.
Green Metropolis by David Owen
I liked David Owen’s new book, Green Metropolis (free copy from publisher), as much as I thought I would. Owen critidizes a large fraction of the environmental movement for missing the point that big cities like New York are the greenest communities in America. To make a community green you need two things: high density and great public transportation. They go together: high density makes great public transportation possible. In large chunks of New York, unlike most big American cities, it’s easy to not have a car.
The book has plenty of villains. Bill McKibben has written many books: one about global warming, one about cutting back on consumerism, one about having only one child (to save the earth from overpopulation), one called Hope, Human and Wild about environmentalism — yet he lives in a small town in upstate New York, which requires him to use a lot of energy for heating and travel that he wouldn’t have to use if he lived in New York City. (McKibben is my example, not Owen’s.) A great many environmentalists, Owen says, have causes or goals that have little to do with reducing energy use. They tend to see themselves as preserving the past rather than shaping the future — an excellent point. That’s something Jane Jacobs might have said and if the book has a hero, it’s her. “Jacobs’s focus was on the vibrancy of city life but the same urban qualities she identified as enhancing human interaction also greatly reduce energy consumption and waste,” Owen writes.
Owen sees himself almost as deluded as the average environmentalist. He and his family moved from Manhattan to rural New England when their daughter was one year old. How she will love the country, thought Owen. She didn’t. Walking through the country bored her far more than walking through the city. “And it [a country walk] usually has the same effect on me, although I hate to admit it,” he writes.
Why did my self-experimentation discover a lot? Because a lot remained to be discovered. The discoveries I made weren’t made by the experts who should have made them (e.g., sleep experts)Â because they were too busy doing research whose main goal was to impress other people. Rather than do science that worked, they did science that looked good. It’s the same with environmentalists. Rather than do projects that work (save energy), they do projects that feel good. “Sitting indoors playing video games is easier on the environment than any number of (formerly) popular outdoor recreational activities, including most of the ones that the most committed environmentalists tend to favor for themselves,” says Owen, neatly summing up the problem.
Chimamanda Adichie on Academia
After a few years of being a writer, Chimamanda Adichie — author of my Short Story of the Year — wondered if she should be a professor. (Her father is a statistics professor.) And she wanted to learn more about Africa. So she enrolled in an African Studies program at Yale. In an interview, she said:
I met very lovely people at Yale, so it wasn’t an entire waste of time. . . . After two years of the program . . . academia I discovered — particularly political science as it is done in the US — is not about the real world. It’s about academia. I would joke and say that what they do is they create straw men, and they beat them down. While all this is going on, the real world is going on in a parallel universe. It is completely disconnected from what happens in academia. I didn’t understand most of what I read. It wasn’t written in English, it was written in political-science jargonese.
This is the usual critique, but it is well-put. If you spend enough time in academia, as I have, you can see it becoming that way, disciplines turning inward, becoming less and less interested in reality. Becoming more and more ivory-towerish. Statistics, for example, became less and less concerned with real-world problems; but I could say the same about every other area (engineering, English, etc.).
This is glaringly obvious, roughly as clear as the sun rising in the morning, but some Berkeley professors denied it. “English departments have really lost their way,” I would say. No they haven’t would be the reply.
The New Yorker Reading List
For the first time, the New Yorker website contains comments by all of their contributors about the best books they read last year. It’s a great idea. I’ll be studying it for a long time. I was most immediately persuaded to read The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (recommended by Margaret Talbot) and The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser (recommended by Jeffrey Toobin). I’m interested in anything Lauren Collins has to say because she is a very talented writer. Her list was unusually long. Tad Friend misspelled the title of his own book.
Some of the writers didn’t write very well. Paul Muldoon, the poetry editor, used the royal we:
We’re very pleased to report that the title-poem first appeared here in The New Yorker.
It should be called “the pompous we“. He also wrote:
Among the poetry books that particularly recommended themselves this past year
Richard Brody wrote this:
The laser-like clarity and probity with which Lanzmann brings
I think he means “the laser-pointer-like clarity . . . “.
What I’ve Learned From Climategate (So Far)
Google “Climategate” you get 31 million hits. “Obama” returns 40 million. Yet mainstream media, such as the New York Times, have said little about it. The New Yorker has said nothing about it. Given so much interest, that will change.
Some of my prior beliefs — that empirical support for the view that man has caused global warming is weaker than we’re told, that bloggers are a powerful force for truth — are stronger. But here are a few things I didn’t think of until now:
1. The truth leaks out before it gushes out. Laurie David’s children’s book — its egregious mistake, her blithe dismissal of that mistake — is an example of the truth leaking out. In the Ranjit Chandra case, little facts implied he was a fraud long before this became utterly clear. An example is the claim in one of his papers (published in The Lancet!) that everyone asked agreed to be in his experiment.
2. Teaching is even better done via scandals than via stories. The number of hits for Climategate is an indication of how much people are learning from it. As I blogged earlier, they’re learning a lot about science. A mere story about science would never attract so much attention. I should think more about how to use scandals to teach stuff. When Nassim Taleb is scathing about this or that, he has the right idea. Spy was the perfect example. It taught me a lot about New York City.
3. Jane Jacobs was wrong. Or at least missed something very important. In Dark Age Ahead, her last book, she pointed to a number of disturbing signs. One was the rise of crappy science. She was quite right about that — as scientists have become more professional they have become more status-oriented and less truth-oriented. She didn’t foresee that the Internet would be an enormously powerful corrective force, as is happening now. Climategate is a (relatively) small example of even bigger force: the rise of the power of sophisticated amateurs/hobbyists. Who, unlike professionals, with jobs and status to protect, have complete freedom. The first big example was printed non-fiction books, as I blogged earlier (which are written with great freedom, usually); but now the Internet provides another great outlet, much faster, cheaper, and more accessible than books, for independent thought.
Interview with Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen’s new book Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World has a lot to say about two topics in which I am especially interested: autism and human diversity. What can the rest of us learn from people with autism? What does the wide range of outcomes among autistic adults tell us about our world? I interviewed Tyler by email about his book.
ROBERTS If I remember correctly, you think a book should be new, true, and something else. What’s the something else?
COWEN The “something else” should cover at least two qualities.
First, if everyone read the book and was persuaded by it, would anything change for the better? An author should aim to write a book which matters.
Second, the book should reflect something the author really cares about. If the author doesn’t care, why should the reader?
ROBERTS What was the tipping point for this book — the event that made you say: I’m going to write a book about THIS?
COWEN To me it’s very important what an author is thinking about in his or her spare time, if the phrase “spare time” even applies to my life, which has an extreme blending of work and leisure time. Ideally that is what an author should be writing about. At some point you realize: “Hey, I am constantly thinking about xxxxx in my spare time!” And then you want to write it up.
I also hit up the idea of this book through pondering the lives of some particular individuals I know — and how much they *live* the thesis of my book — although I am not sure they would wish to be identified publicly.
ROBERTS Have you been to Autreat, the annual conference of Autism Network International, that you mention? If so, did it affect your thinking?
COWEN I haven’t been to Autreat, which for me is located somewhat inconveniently away from major cities (that is on purpose, I believe). I’m also not clear on exactly who is welcome, who needs an invitation, etc. Most conferences have a very high variance in quality across presentations and mostly one goes to meet one or two key people; often you don’t know in advance who they will be. I suspect the same logic applies to Autreat as well.
ROBERTS Do you think there are jobs that persons with autism do better than persons without autism?
COWEN Autistics often exhibit superior skills in attention to detail, pattern recognition, what I call “mental ordering,” and they have areas of strong preferred interests, in which they are very often superb self-educators. So yes, that will make many autistics very good at some jobs but also poorly suited for others. But I don’t want to generalize and say “autistics are better at job X,” that would be misleading. Across autistics there is a wide variety of cognitive skills and also problems. Engineering and computer science are the stereotypical areas where you expect to find higher than average rates of autism. While I suspect this is true in terms of the average, it can be misleading to focus on the stereotype precisely because of the high variance of skills and outcomes among autistics. One of the central issues in understanding autism is grasping the connection between the underlying unity of the phenomenon and the extreme variability of the results. In the short run, positive stereotypes can perform a useful educating function. But the more we present stereotypes, the more we are getting people away from coming to terms with that more fundamental issue, namely an understanding of the variance.
ROBERTS There is a basic biological phenomenon in which animals and plants under stress become more variable. Some say variability in the genotype has been released into the phenotype. Do you think the variance seen in autism has been “released” in some way?
COWEN I am not sure I understand the question…for one thing I am not sure what is the postulated increase in genetic stress…
ROBERTS Yes, it’s a confusing question. Let’s try this: What do you think the high variance of outcome seen in autism is telling us?
COWEN I’ll try to make that more concrete. One view of autism is that autistics have greater access to lower-level perception and such that access is essential for understanding autism. On one hand it gives autistics some special abilities, such as pattern recognition, certain kinds of information processing, and noticing small changes with great skill. (In some cases this also leads to savant-like abilities.) This also may be connected to some of the problems which autistics experience, such as hyper-sensitivities to some kinds of public environments.
It could be that non-autistics have a faculty, or faculties, which “cut off” or automatically organize a lot of this lower level perception. The implication would be that for autistics this faculty is somehow weaker, missing, or “broken.” The underlying unity in autism would be that this faculty is somehow different, relative to non-autistics. The resulting variance is that the difference in this faculty gives rise to abilities and disabilities which very much differ across autistics.
That’s one attempt to come to terms with both the unity of autism and the variance within it. It’s a tough question and we don’t know the right answer yet, in my view. What I outlined is just one hypothesis.
ROBERTS A clear parallel in the increased variance of autistic persons is the increased variance of left-handers. Left-handers have brain organizations that vary much more than the brain organization of right-handers. Right-handers are all one way; left-handers are all over the place. Do you see any similarities between left-handers and persons with autism?
COWEN I recall some claims that autistics are more likely to be left-handed but I’ve never looked into their veracity. There are so many false claims about autism that one must be very careful.
ADHD is another example of something which produces high variance outcomes. I don’t think it is correct to call it a disorder *per se*.
We’re just starting to wrap our heads around the “high variance” idea. Most people have the natural instinct to attach gross labels of good or bad even when a subtler approach is called for.
ROBERTS The term left-hander is confusing because left-handers aren’t the opposite of right-handers. The dichotomy is okay but the two sides are better labeled right-handers and non-right-handers. In other words, one group (right-handers) has something (a certain brain organization); the other group doesn’t have that brain organization. Then the vast difference in variance makes sense. How accurate would it be to say that non-autistics have something than autistics don’t have? (I’m left-handed, by the way.)
COWEN I would say we still don’t have a fully coherent definition of autism. And “have” is a tricky word. I think of autistic brains as different, rather than “normal” brains with “missing parts.” Some researchers postulate differences in the kind of connections autistic brains make. In thirty years I expect we will know much, much more than we do right now.
ROBERTS I hope this isn’t too self-indulgent: What do you make of the correlation between autism and digestive problems?
COWEN I don’t think there are convincing theories about either digestive problems causing autism or autism causing digestive problems. There is *maybe* a correlation through a common genetic cause, but even if that is true it is not very useful as a means of understanding autism. This is another area where there are many strong opinions, often stronger than are justified by the facts.
ROBERTS Another “assorted” question: I loved the study you mentioned where people with perfect pitch were more likely to be eccentric than those without perfect pitch. That’s quite a result. How did you learn about it?
COWEN There is a somewhat scattered literature on music, cognition, and society. It still awaits synthesis, it seems. Someone could write a very good popular book on the topic. (Maybe Gabriel Rossman is the guy to do it.) The more I browsed that literature, the more interesting results I found.
ROBERTS I don’t think I’ve done justice to your extremely original book but here is a last question. You talk about Thomas Schelling’s use of stories. Presumably in contrast to other econ professors. I think of story-telling being something that once upon a time everyone did — it was the usual way to teach. Why do you think Schelling told stories much more than those around him?
COWEN Thanks for the kind words. Schelling has a unique mind, as anyone who has known him will attest. I don’t know any other economist or social scientist who thinks like he does, but we’ve yet to figure out what exactly his unique element consists of. I would say that Schelling views story-telling as a path to social science wisdom. They’re not even anecdotes, they’re stories. Maybe that doesn’t sound convincing to an outsider, but it got him a Nobel Prize.
I am very interested in the topic of “styles of thought in economics.”
The Alternate Universe of Fermented Foods
In the Afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that in his books he tried to create an alternate universe “where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” Fermented foods are now a big part of my food world and I remain amazed how different they are from ordinary foods. They are in another universe:
Temperature. To make ordinary food requires high temperatures. You need always be careful that you don’t hurt yourself. Fermented food requires no higher temperature than a hot day.
Deliciousness versus health. With ordinary food there is the tradeoff we are endlessly familiar with: If it tastes good (ice cream, chocolate, cookies) it’s bad for you. If it’s good for you — spinach, carrots, cabbage, brown rice, soy products — it doesn’t taste so great. Anyone who thinks raw food tastes better than cooked food is ignoring history. Whereas fermented food tastes great and is incredibly healthy. (This point has been missed at any number of otherwise great American restaurants, such as Chez Panisse.)
Price. In Berkeley, heirloom tomatoes cost a lot more than ordinary tomatoes. They taste a lot better, too. Perhaps, being organic, they are healthier. The general rule is that better food costs more. An apple costs more than a Coke, etc. Whereas fermented food is often dirt cheap. Kombucha is practically free. For 5 teabags and a cup of sugar, you can make a lot of kombucha. Ordinary milk is cheap but to me at least nutritionally worthless. Whereas yogurt is gold. They cost the same.
Time. Ordinary food takes minutes or no more than an hour or two to make. Fermented food takes somewhere between a day (yogurt) to a month (kombucha) to longer (wine, cheese).
Difficulty. In my experience, it isn’t so easy to prepare a delicious meal if you’re not using fermented food. With fermented food it becomes so much easier. And the result is far healthier, I’m sure.
Need for refrigeration. Fermented food goes bad very slowly at room temperature. Not so ordinary food. I once visited a New York pickle store/factory. No electricity.
You can read a great novel again and again, yes, but not every day. After I read Lolita four or five times, it lost its power over me. But I can happily eat fermented food at every meal, day after day and — judging by other food cultures — year after year.