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Book Review - Sharpe's Triumph

Sharpe's Triumph is the second (chronological) book in Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series. Highly recommended for lover's of historical fiction.

Sharpe is a soldier in the British army around the Napoleanic Wars. The series gives a soldier's eye view of the Duke of Wellington. In the first book, Sharpe and Wellesley (the future duke) start out in India in 1799, and in this book they're still there.

It's 1803 now, and the British are dealing with independent Indian rulers and traitorous British units. Sharpe has a fortune in jewels from the last book, and his own Javert in this book who pursues him to get them.

Action ensues: minor firefights, spying behind the lines, hiding out in a native village, a big set piece battle, and the bad guy meets a gruesome end at the feet of a trained elephant. Sharpe personally saves the future duke, and earns a battlefield promotion.

I'm not a great lover of historical fiction, nor much of a connoisseur. But, I did read all 20 of the O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, so someone who loves me sees this as a good gift idea. So, I can't give an informed recommendation, other than I find this series very readable, and I am learning a bit about a part of history where I was fairly shallow.

Quote 11 from "The Other Path"

DeSoto's The Other Path points out that formal property rights offers some of the same advantages as limited liability:

Financiers are generally reluctant to deal with informals and do so only at very high interest rates and on limited occasions, for they have no way of limiting the scope of their relationship to a legally defined financial sphere, which would obviate the need for them to inspect all the possible assets and liabilities of the informal who is requesting financing.  [pp 169-170]

Quote 10 from "The Other Path"

The Other Path points out why developed countries are different from the developing ones:

...A person newly arrived in the city soon realizes that it is difficult to find anyone other than a relative or someone from the same region who will enter into a contract. [pg 166]

Quote 9 from "The Other Path"

DeSoto's The Other Path notes how lack of property rights leads to a different sort of investment (one that is obvious to anyone who has ever driven through an American ghetto:

As a result, informals tend to invest in such items as household electrical appliances and vehicles, which are movable, rather than in such fixed items as piping, drainage, or roofing., It is not unusual to find motor cars, televisions, and other appliances in informal settlements with shoddy buildings. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that no investments are made in sanitation, with serious consequences for everyone's welfare. [pg 161]

Quote 8 from "The Other Path"

It's time to get back to some posting some quotes from Hernando DeSoto's The Other Path. Here he points out that property rights offer positive externalities:

Secure property rights, on the other hand, encourage holders to invest in their property because of their certainty that the property will not be usurped. From a strictly economic standpoint, therefore, the true purpose of property rights is not to benefit the individuals or entities holding those rights, but to give them the incentive to increase the value of their assets by investing, innovating, or combining them advantageously with other resources, something which would have beneficial results for society. [pg 159-160]

Book Review: Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things

Self-motivate, interested in economics, but don't know much about it? Then read this.

Already an economist - don't bother.

I refer to Ray Fair's Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things.

I found this book to be a bit tough. I suspect that if you didn't know much economics, and were curious about our methods for analyzing data, that you might find this book interesting.

But, it reads like the notes thrown together to support a lecture on undergraduate applied econometrics. It's not bad, but it's a bit thorough and dry.

Of course, economists know that Ray Fair is an econometrician from Yale with a successful introductory textbook, so I've clearly hit the nail on the head.

The problem is that I've pegged this too well, and I think you can too.

My guess is that he was trying to put together a book to draw some attention to econometrics. I think it does, but the tipoff is that it is a Stanford University Press book - if he'd made the topic really sexy, it would've been picked up by a popular publisher. I'd even venture that it was turned down at those sort of places.

So ... if you do happen to be teaching undergraduate applied econometrics this might make a nice supplementary reading. But, it won't get rave reviews.

Read "Capitalism and Freedom"

This story from Greg Mankiw is astounding:

Student: Professor Mankiw, if you could recommend just one book, what book would it be?

Me: Am I allowed to recommend my favorite textbook?

Student: No.  Textbooks are disallowed.

Me: In that case, I'll suggest Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom.

Student: That's funny.  That's the same answer I got when I asked this question of Professor Summers.

I wouldn't call Mankiw and Summers diametrically opposed, but they are far enough apart that this sort of recommendation should carry extraordinary weight.

Book Review: The Other Path

I finally got around to reading The Other Path by Hernando de Soto.

This is the pathbreaking book from the mid-80s about how poor Peruvians - blocked out of the formal economy by regulations - responded by creating market institutions that were efficient and improved their lot.

I know ... I should've read this 20 years ago ... but it's been excerpted so many places there hardly seemed a point.

Anyway ... I'm glad I read it now rather than never. If the Nobel Peace Prize Committee didn't have its head up its *** they'd be out looking seriously at people like de Soto instead of Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Yasser Arafat, and assorted tree planters, landmine avoiders, and plagiarists.

Ahem. If you're serious, read the whole book. If you're merely interested, start with Part 2.

Part 1 has its moments, but they are few and far between. It's goal is to spend 100 pages or so detailing the history of informal markets in Peru, and the responses of authorities. It is encyclopedic, but far more detailed for anyone other than a scholar. I do recommend skimming it, at the least: you have to remember that before de Soto, no one ever wrote this sort of thing down. We hear a lot of long-winded diatribes about how most westerners are not connected to the experience of the world's poor - well here is someone that just tells you their experiences instead of jumping on a soapbox.

The second part is much better. This is where the thesis that is commonplace today is set forth: that legal institutions are critical for growth and well-being, that in Peru (and other places) they have been hijacked by mercantilist forces straight out of the late Middle Ages, that the political labels of left and right aren't as accurate as mercantilist and libertarian, and that most bureaucrats and politicians fall in the controlling mercantilist camp.

I'll run several days of quotes from the book, so be sure to check back!

Book Review: Digging Dinosaurs

I recommend:

The subject matter may not interest everyone, but the writing is breezy and the text is not overly long. If you'd read a magazine article about dinosaur prospecting, then you'll have no trouble finishing this one.

The primary author, "Jack" Horner, is pretty well-known (he was a consultant to Steven Spielberg, and the paleontologist character of Alan Grant - played by Sam Neill in Jurassic Park films - is based on him). Horner is the man who proved that (at least some) dinosaurs cared for their young in nests like birds.

This book is the story of those digs in the late 70s and early 80s. How he and a friend happened across the bones of a baby dinosaur in a rock shop in Montana. Then how they went to the spot where the bones were found and dug up a lot more baby bones. This was followed by the realization that this was a nest filled with bones and trampled shells. The latter are important because they indicate that they babies stayed put for a while - and were fed by adults. Later came the realization that they were in a nesting ground - a huge area filled with many nests of first one, and then more species (as seen in the Disney movie Dinosaur).

Horner teamed with a journalist to write the book, so this is an easy and pleasant read.

Book Review: Bias - A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News

I finally got around to reading this (although I've been following the thread since Goldberg's first op-ed about this back in the 90s):

I found it to be a fun and easy read. Goldberg's journalistic style makes the book light reading, and it isn't laden with details - just a few anecdotes, some discussion, and on to the next topic.

The broad subject is the generally accepted idea that the legacy media in the U.S. are biased towards (contemporary) liberalism and the Democratic party. The specific context it Goldberg's experiences at CBS News, and his perception that the bias runs so deep in his former colleagues, and is so fundamental to their worldview, that they don't realize they're doing it. They're so clueless about who they are, that they think everyone else is a bit twisted.

I found the discussion occasionally shrill, but not too bothersome. You'd be shrill if your career got ruined for offering constructive criticism.

Here's a few quotes I liked:

... The media divide America into two groups - moderates and righ-wing nuts. [pg. 1]

... [What] TV journalism had become: a showcase for smart-ass reporters with attitudes, reporters who don't even pretend to hide their disdain for certain people and certain ideas ... [pg. 11]

... Many TV journalists don't know what to think about certain issues until the New York Times and the Washington Post tell them what to think. [pg. 18]

The seminal event that got Goldberg going was a piece on Republican Steve Forbes by Eric Engberg. Goldberg, a Democrat, viewed it as a hatchet job by someone who didn't bother to think about Forbes' ideas:

... He was a serious, intelligent man seeking the most important job in our country, and what CBS News had just done to him was shameful and not worthy of an important network news organization. [pg. 20]

If you worked for CBS in the mid-90s, and you criticized that position, you got pushed out the door.

It's very interesting reading all of the tidbits about the behavior of Dan Rather, and the intellectual blinkers he wore: this book was published before Rathergate - the presentation of apparently forged documents as real by Rather's team in 2004. I think Goldberg could have predicted that something like that would happen.