Matt Yglesias

Princeton Readings in American Politics

One feature of the American political media that I’ve oft had occasion to the lament is the lack of influence by the field of political science. It’s generally taken for granted that some familiarity with economists’ research is relevant to writing about economic issues, but people seem very comfortable making broad, sweeping assertions about the American political system that are totally uninformed by research into it. It’s true that political science isn’t really science like physics that’s going to definitively answer every question you might have, but empirical and theoretical inquiry by political scientists can and does shed a lot of light on a lot of important issues. Certainly it seems to me to stand up to economics as a viable body of research, so I don’t know why people are so comfortable ignoring it.

One issue, however, may be that it’s not very accessible. So I’d like to offer a preliminary recommendation to anyone interested in deepening their understanding of American politics to check out Richard Valelly’s edited volume Princeton Readings in American Politics. This is academic work, so it’s a bit slow-going and I certainly haven’t read it cover-to-cover yet (full disclosure: I got sent a free copy by PUP) but what I have read has been interesting. And as you can see from the table of contents it covers a nice broad range of important topics in US politics.

Infinite Jest

After working at it on-and-off all summer long, I’m finally done with Infinite Jest and I feel . . . well, I don’t quite know how I feel. I was determined not to let reading this difficult book become a “difficult” process and just resolved to read a page then turn the page then read the next page (modified, as necessary, for footnotes and such) and not spend too much time worrying about whether or not I was understanding everything that’s going on. Consequently, I enjoyed myself reading the book—it’s funny, clever, etc., has some great set pieces, blah blah. Also some weak points. But by the end this has added up to . . . what, exactly? I don’t really know. A sprawling meditation on addiction and the over-entertained American, I guess.

But in a fundamental sense it struck me as very unsatisfying. Not just in terms of the weird ending, but in terms of definitely not feeling like I got more out of reading it than I could have gotten out of reading three books that were one third the length. That in turn is really making me glad that I was made to read Anna Karenina and Moby Dick in high school. I really loved both those giant honking books, but does it really make sense for a busy person in the modern world who maybe doesn’t care to dedicate all that much time to classic novels to read them? Seems like it might make more sense to read some short Tolstoy like “Family Happiness” and “Hadji Murat” and then move on to other things.

Adding new possible ways to entertain ourselves naturally starts to squeeze out the viability of some old ways. And maybe the long novel is among the squeezed. Which seems in some ways regrettable (which I take it is part of the point of Infinite Jest) but at the same time to really be a feature of the world.

The Literature of America

Writing about Moby Dick yesterday, I said “Every American should read Moby Dick, it’s our great national epic and you can’t understand the country without it.” Kevin Drum is apparently a Moby hater and demands explanation of this claim.

This leaves me with two problems. One, I was being hyperbolic. Two, I really have no business writing about literature. That said, this comment from Bob McManus basically sums up my feelings about the great American novels:

Huckleberry Finn is good enough for the young ones. There is enough darkness and questioning there

America as psychotic idealism in Moby Dick or corrupt hypocrites as in Gatsby may need some maturation. Although there are even gentler versions of those themes in HF.

I would only say that that’s a bit too dyspeptic of a way to put it. America is the land of strivers, of people who believe in endless possibility, and where triumphs and tragedies spring from this endless reservoir of boundless desire. It’s the kind of place where a president boasting about his plan to expend vast resources on a avowedly pointless mission to the Moon can be remembered as a great moment in political rhetoric:

A country of more practical people probably wouldn’t get into so much trouble. But then again, in a world full of more practical countries perhaps nobody would have ever gone to the Moon. And it seems to me that that would have been a shame. Nevertheless, this is also the kind of country that might decide one day that it wants to try to bring good government to Afghanistan (?!?!) and create an effective centralized state there. Impressive if you can pull it off, but you’ve got to wonder.

Read What You Love, But You Should Love Moby Dick

Motoko Rich had an interesting piece in the NYT about the “read what you love” approach to teaching kids to read. In essence, the idea is to let them pick whatever books they like rather than putting them through the paces of certain school classics. Diane Ravitch plays the curmudgeon:

What child is going to pick up ‘Moby-Dick’?” said Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University who was assistant education secretary under President George H. W. Bush. “Kids will pick things that are trendy and popular. But that’s what you should do in your free time.”

I’m with Kevin Carey in thinking that this is misguided. As he says “being well-read is the work of a lifetime; the most important thing schools can do is get that project started and heading in the right direction.” And the necessary prerequisite for that is knowing how to read. There’s a very big problem in the United States with people who have very limited literacy capabilities, so anything you can do to get young people actually knowing how to read books is valuable.

The other thing is that I think curmudgeons need to try to think more clearly about having realistic expectations for reading in one’s free time. Between 1939 and 2009, human ingenuity has invented a lot of new things one can do with one’s time. Human ingenuity has not, however, invented a method for stuffing more hours into the day. Consequently, if you look at just about anything that people could do in 1939—read for pleasure, take care of children, cook, etc.—they do somewhat less of it in 2009. People who are really into books, or cooking, or natalism, or what have you tend to interpret this inevitable crowding of the timespace as a sign of cultural crisis and decline but it’s an inevitable result of heterogeneous preferences and innovation.

All that said, I love Moby Dick. Every American should read Moby Dick, it’s our great national epic and you can’t understand the country without it.

A Happy Marriage — Slightly More Brilliant, and Much More Highbrow Than 500 Days of Summer

My dad suggests via email that his appearance in New York’s approval matrix “may be as cool as your Pop ever gets”:

Reproduced here is just the upper-right quadrant of the chart, containing things that are both “brilliant” and “highbrow.” As you can see A Happy Marriage is slightly more brilliant that 500 Days of Summer (the preview looked pretty awesome) and way more highbrow. So go buy it!

A Happy Marriage

Tyler Cowen reviews my father’s new novel A Happy Marriage: “I devoured this book eagerly on a plane flight and I recommend it highly to those who are married, have been married, will be married, should be married, and should not be married . . . In my view Rafael Yglesias is one of the best American novelists of the last twenty years and probably the most underappreciated.”

DC-area reader should know that dad will be at Politics & Prose on July 23 at 7PM for a reading. You can read an excerpt on the Wall Street Journal’s site where it was one of their recommended summer fiction reads.

The Kindle and Cultural Display

I’ve said before that thought I love my Kindle, it deprives me of the signaling fun that comes along with reading traditional books. I’m going through Infinite Jest, as are a lot of people this summer, but I can’t visibly display the book on the Metro or around my house. James Wolcott has a good essay on this:

Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices. As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects—digitize and dematerialize—we approach a Star Trek future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles. Reading will forfeit the tactile dimension where memories insinuate themselves, reminding us of where and when D. H. Lawrence entered our lives that meaningful summer. “Darling, remember when we downloaded Sons and Lovers in Napa Valley?” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. The Barnes & Noble bookstore, with its coffee bar and authors’ readings, could go the way of Blockbuster as an iconic institution, depriving readers of the opportunity to mingle with their own kind and paw through magazines for free. Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Now I’m pretty sure the world will survive this transition. But it’ll be interesting to see how it happens. I note that one thing a lot of people, myself included, sometimes do is use the Adium feature that automatically sets your IM chat status to the title and artist of the song currently playing on your iTunes. One way to think about that is as a substitute for the old game of visually displaying the physical records or CDs you own in your house. It’s a way to turn your music consumption into something quasi-public. Perhaps reading books in groups and writing blogs about what you’re reading will be the new way to share your cultural consumption with the world.

Create Your Own Economy

Lately I feel that the nonfiction book world has been awash in book titles and subtitles that do too good a job of explaining what the book is about. Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World is just the solution we’ve been waiting for. What’s this about? Well, it turns out to substantially be about autism. But not particularly about the science of autism or research into the condition. Rather, you get an extended riff on the idea that there are certain characteristic cognitive strengths associated with autism spectrum neurology, in particular an enhanced ability to order information. Cowen’s argument is that these skills are becoming more important in the modern world, and that modern technology is making us better and better at it.

Far from suffering from an “information overload” or unduly “short attention spans,” we’re getting better and better at slicing information into small chunks and reordering it. A somewhat trivial, but typical, example is the difference between playing a record and assembling an iTunes playlist.

It’s a bit hard to do the book justice because the subject matter is so unorthodox. So I’ll put it this way instead. I first cracked the book one afternoon intending to read for about ninety minutes and then go get on my bike and meet someone. While reading, I decided to change plans and take the bus instead so as to create more time (both coming and going) when I could read more Create Your Own Economy. There’s no real discussion of policy issues here, but you do get a fascinating analysis of Sherlock Homes.

Independence Day

America!

Instead of my usual July 4 musings on historical counterfactuals, let’s talk about some good books on American history. I’d say the key books I’ve read are:

— Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

— James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.

— Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.

— My understanding is that the professional consensus has turned against it, but I still thought Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States was and is fascinating.

— V.O. Key’s Southern Politics in State and Nation and Theda Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in United States are arguably more political science than history, but they’re both great.

Those are more-or-less all standard classic works as I understand it. Jean Edward Smith’s Grant and Eric Rauchway’s Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography would be my top selections in the “books I wasn’t assigned in college” category.

Infinite Pagination

Last night I was reading various people’s tweets about Infinite Summer and found myself caught up in the enthusiasm and suddenly burning with a desire to read Infinite Jest. Since using the Kindle is really the only practical way to buy a book at 11 PM, that’s what I did. Then I read some before going to sleep. And in doing so, I think I stumbled upon an inadvertent flaw in the Kindle. Namely, what when you read really long books—particularly as part of a quasi-group enterprise—you want to either brag about how many pages you’ve read or else whine about how many pages you’ve fallen behind. But the Kindle doesn’t have pages! Just, um, locations.

So I read 1,100 locations worth of the book. But nobody knows what that means. Normal people won’t even know if that’s a lot or a little.

In general, the Kindle strikes me as somewhat hobbled by an overly generous view of why people buy books. Not only is there this problematic lack of bragging, but with the kindle edition of the book I can’t have a handsome volume laying around the house as if to say to visitors, “why, yes, I may be a professional political pundit but I’m also a man of culture.” And I’ll have nothing on my shelf. Amazon should at least send you a sticker when you buy a book on Kindle so you can maintain some kind of display wall of all the impressive books you’ve read. People sometimes lament that element of signaling in the book buying/reader process, but I think that’s misguided. Signaling is a powerful human motivator, and often motivates people to do genuinely worthwhile things—read great books, go to college, get a haircut, etc.

The Gods Themselves

Paul Krugman, making a point about financial regulation, quotes Friedrich Schiller, “against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.” I know Krugman’s an Isaac Asimov fan so I wonder if he, like me, first met that line in Asimov’s novel The Gods Themselves. It’s a book I’ve been thinking about more lately.

To summarize the plot briefly, it’s the story of a man named Frederick Hallam who makes contact with “para-men” living in an alternate dimension. The laws of physics run differently in that dimension, and the ability to pass some matter trans-dimensionally thus opens up the possibility of a kind of physics arbitrage resulting in the invention of an “electron pump” which provides an unlimited source of cheap energy. Unfortunately, another scientist named Lamont reveals that the electron pump process is actually increasing the strong nuclear force inside the sun and thus dooming the planet to extinction by drastically increasing the rate at which the sun will go nova.

Needless to say, rather than being hailed as a hero Lamont is ignored and villified since people prefer to believe in the possibility of a free lunch. Eventually things reach a happy ending when a different scientist named Denison discovers a process that will allow for the creation of even cheaper energy without the environmental impact. Thus, people are ultimately willing to trade an apparently free lunch for an actually free lunch.

In an unrelated development, all the cutting edge public opinion research indicates that you can’t talk about global warming or environmental risks of any kind when talking about energy policy.

Book Launch 2.0

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of writing a book, or knowing someone who has, you’ll relate to this:

His book is Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain and I think I just might check it out.

Who Needs Microfoundations?

I’m currently reading Justin Fox’s new book, The Myth of the Rational Market, which is recommended. Specifically, immediately before leaving for work I read a brief aside he wrote about the formation of a Kuhnian “paradigm” in economics in the second half of the twentieth century and economists’ pride in having achieved that kind of methodological consensus and thus elevated themselves above the ranks of mere sociologists or some such. That’s what sprung to mind as I read this paragraph from Steven Levitt:

You might think that macro forecasting would be an important part of what academic economists would do, but in practice there is almost nothing of that sort being done. That sort of thing is left for economists at places like the Federal Reserve or private banks to do. You might think that the models that most successfully explain economic patterns would rise to the top, but in the current regime, if they are not meticulously constructed from “micro foundations,” they aren’t allowed to be considered.

From an outside perspective, what seems to be going on is that economists have unearthed an extremely fruitful paradigm for investigation of micro issues. This has been good for them, and enhanced the prestige of the discipline. No such fruitful paradigm has actually emerged for investigation of macro issues. So the decision has been made to somewhat arbitrarily impose the view that macro models must be grounded in micro foundations. Thus, the productive progressive research program of microeconomics can “infect” the more troubled field of macro with its prestige.

Which, as a sociological matter, I think you’d have to say has worked.

But as a methodological matter, it seems deeply unsound. As a general principle for investigating the world, we normally deem it desirable, but not at all necessary, that researchers exploring a particular field of inquiry find ways to “reduce” what they’re doing to a lower level. To make that concrete, in the modern day we have achieved a decent understanding of how principles of chemistry are grounded in physics’ understanding of the behavior of atoms. But it’s just not the case that advances in chemistry were made by demanding that chemists ground all their models in subatomic physics. On the contrary, chemistry moved forward in the first instance by having chemists investigate issues in chemistry and see which models and theories held up. Similarly, though psychology is intertwined with the detailed study of the biology of the brain, it’s not deemed illegitimate to research psychological issues in the absence of a specific neurological theory. Nor, for that matter, do microeconomists generally deem it necessary to explore in detail the psychological foundations of their models. The models are, rather, judged by whether or not they produce fruitful insights about economics. Trying to enhance models with better information about psychology isn’t against the rules, but it’s not required either. What’s required is that the models do useful work.

So why should it be that “in the current regime, if [macro models] are not meticulously constructed from “micro foundations,” they aren’t allowed to be considered”?

My Father’s Book

My father has a new book, titled A Happy Marriage, his first novel in over a decade coming out in about a month. It made The Wall Street Journal’s list of recommended summer reading and there’s an excerpt available on the WSJ website.

Check out the excerpt and pre-order your copy here.

More on Kindle Pricing

A publishing industry insider informs me that I’m missing a lot with regard to the cost side of the Kindle equation. In addition to your basic fixed costs (payments to author, payments for copy editing, etc.) I’m told that the post-cleanup conversion process is sufficiently expensive that, at this point, publishers are generally losing money on their Kindle sales. That might look different if they could move larger volumes, and I assume publishers are getting into the Kindle game precisely because they’re anticipating higher sales volumes at some future point. But it means that for something that’s clearly going to be a niche product, like Railton’s book, you need to charge pretty high retail prices.

Reading Rawls

From the thread about lying about books you’ve read comes a question about books I have read:

Also, any suggestions on books by or on Rawls?

In terms of book by Rawls, the trouble is that while A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism are both great books, neither is really what I’d call a good book. They’re not fun to read and they’re not short. But if you want to read Rawls, they’re the books you have to read. There’s also Justice as Fairness: A Restatement which is short and tries to synthesize the two works.

This kind of thing, incidentally, is one reason why I’m glad I majored in philosophy in college. Other things I’m interested in, like history, I find it’s pretty feasible to learn about on my own by trying to ask people for suggestions on good books to read and so forth. But a lot of key philosophical writings are things I would find it extremely difficult to get through without teachers. The good news on the Rawls front, though, is that these days people can check out Samuel Freeman’s Rawls which is a book-length explication and defense of Rawls’ work. It came highly recommended to me, and it’s definitely what the doctor ordered. It’s not an easy read by any means, but it’s a clear presentation of the ideas and the general consensus is that it’s the best introduction to the subject available.

Lying About Books

Tyler Cowen notes that “46% of the surveyed men lie about what they have read — to impress partners — and 33% of the surveyed women admit to lying about their reading habits.”

I have to say that I’m so accustomed to the idea of lying about one’s reading habits that my first thought upon reading this was “what’s wrong with the other 54 percent of men?” Then I wondered if maybe they weren’t just lying about lying. And then I started thinking about how there are plenty of people besides potential hookups who you might want to try to impress by lying about which books you’ve read; indeed, it strikes me as the sort of thing that’s more useful as idle chit-chat than a dating strategy.

I wonder if you see a substantial difference based on educational attainment here. It seems to me that college (at least as we did it at Harvard) largely consists of lessons on how to pretend to have read various books. How many section discussions of British Moralists 1650-1800 (by far the best introduction to the subject!) did I bluff my way through?

Team of Rivals

So has anyone actually read this book? I think it’s a book I’ve been known to pretend to read in the past. In general, I’d be more comfortable with a president drawing lessons from serious historical scholarship rather than these kind of pop histories they sell in airports.

UPDATE: Sources are telling me it’s a good book. Disparaging remarks rescinded pending me getting a copy.

The Iron Cage

Ezra Klein suggests that people might want to stick it to the smear artists by purchasing a copy of Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. It seems like a good idea. Publisher’s Weekly calls the book “A first-rate and update-to-date historical and political analysis of the Palestinian predicament.” Anthony Lewis says “Khalidi uses history to provide a clear-eyed view of the region and assess the prospects for peace. He strives successfully for even-handedness.”

What’s more, it costs just $10.20 and it’s eligible for Amazon Prime. I just placed my order.

UPDATE: Note that when you can’t get Marty Peretz to jump on your Arab-bashing bandwagon, you’ve got a bit of a problem:

Wednesday’s Jerusalem Post has an article about the Times’ refusal to make the clip public. But the news story reports exactly what Obama did say about Khalidi, and frankly it is utter pabulum. Read for yourself.

I assume that my Zionist credentials are not in dispute. And I have written more appreciative words about Khalidi than Obama ever uttered. In fact, I even invited Khalidi to speak for a Jewish organization with which I work.

I would never assume that anyone’s Zionist credentials are not in dispute when wading into this sort of territory. You’d be surprised who can get labeled an anti-semite when someone decides that’d be a good way to advance their political gambit of the day.

Of Authors And Books

Newsweek’s Jon Meacham on John McCain:

John McCain is a man of accomplishment and curiosity, of wide and deep reading, travel and experience. He is smart without being a snob. He has authored legislation and books. He is a man of parts—the kind of figure whom one could effortlessly imagine being president.

Um . . . Mark Salter wrote those books. I wrote a book. Meacham’s written books. McCain, not so much. Barack Obama really wrote Dreams From My Father and Jim Webb’s written books, but other politicians’ sign their names to work done by professionals. I think that’s a sensible thing to do, but surely we don’t all need to go pretend that’s not what’s happening. Give McCain credit for the fact that every copy I’ve ever seen of one of “his” books features Salter’s name pretty prominently. There’s no big secret here.