Links & What I’ve Been Reading, March

Media recommendations

Just like with January and February, here are the highlights from my recent media consumption. If you have recommendations of things I might like, you can send them to sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com. 

Blogs

My website the Fitzwilliam just published a new essay about James Joyce and Ulysses.

Alice Evans, My Tiny Textbook on International Development. This is one of the best things I read all month. Alice provides a reading list about land reform, industrial policy, famines, gender, and many other topics. If you have read How Asia Works or are familiar with its claims, I strongly recommend reading this as a supplement. I rate Alice Evans incredibly highly, and I will be pre-ordering her new book with Princeton University Press as soon as it becomes available.    

My friend Rasheed Griffith’s reading list to understand the Caribbean.

Review of Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia Dunlop’s recent book about Chinese food. This was a particularly interesting fragment: “There’s a pattern in Chinese gastronomy where extremely intense, over-the-top flavors are a bit low-status, and flavors so pure and subtle they verge on bland are what the snooty people go for. This is true across regions (the in-your-face food of Sichuan is less valued than the cuisine of the Cantonese South, or the cooking traditions of Zhejiang in the East), but it’s also true within regions (in Sichuan, the food of Chongqing is much spicier than the food of Chengdu, and correspondingly lower status).”

Scott Alexander’s February links post. Featuring the Fitzwilliam!

List of things unexpectedly named after people. Mars bars are named after Franklin Mars, not the planet. PageRank is named after Larry Page, not the pages that it ranks. Main Street, San Francisco is named after Charles Main. Incredible. 

Profile of Dwarkesh Patel.

The Economist for and against having your savings in 100% equities. I am personally 100% in equities, but I have not had the courage of my convictions enough to actually borrow money in order to invest.   

Joe Carlsmith argues for the possibility of backwards causation. 

Matthew Adelstein, Eliezer Yudkowsky is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong. I agree with most of this. Eliezer is a powerful argument against homeschooling. He underrates academia, in certain ways. It’s rare for iconoclastic bloggers to outperform textbooks in the relevant area. Instead of reading Yudkowsky on why you shouldn’t take philosophical zombies seriously, your time is almost certainly better served just reading a leading textbook on the philosophy of mind.

Related: my friend Wolfgang Schwarz’s response to Yudkowsky and Soares on functional decision theory. Wolfgang was the reviewer of a paper Y&S submitted to a major philosophy journal defending functional decision theory, which (they claim) does a better job responding to certain puzzles (like Newcomb’s problem) in decision theory. Wolfgang was partly responsible for the paper being rejected, but he emphasises that this is not because of a bias against people outside traditional academia, but because it doesn’t respond to obvious objections (he thinks it could be published with substantial revisions). FDT gives completely insane recommendations and is almost certainly worse than other available decision theories.    

Related again: Scott Aaronson on Newcomb’s problem. 

Borges, A Fragment on Joyce.  

Financial Times, everything you think you know about Italian food is a lie. Most Italians had never heard of pizza until the 1950s. Carbonara originally comes from America. Tiramisu is a recent invention. The only tradition is innovation, my friends.  

Books

Knausgaard, So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch. This is the only book in my entire life I have read in a single sitting. Hair-raisingly good. This is a non-fiction book about Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter famous for ‘The Scream’, but much of it is written like a novel. If you know of more art books written like this, please let me know.

Munch’s painting Cabbage Field, which Knausgaard begins the book with.

James Scott, Against the Grain: The History of the Earliest States. You should also read the Scott Alexander review. At some point, I would like to write an essay applying some of James Scott’s ideas to Irish history. William Petty created a famous series of maps of Ireland in the 1650s; my idea is that it was only through this mapping that the scale of destruction during Cromwell’s conquests was possible. While the growth of unit standardisation, mapping, administration and legibility has had tremendous benefits, it came at a great cost, and the effects were somewhere between ambiguous and negative on the people who lived at the time.  

Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions. The Library of Babel is my favourite short story ever, and it prompted me to add a short story section to my reading list on my website. I recently ran a Borges reading group with my friends, which enhanced my appreciation of him a great deal. 

Ramachandra Guha, The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir. I read this book because I adored India After Gandhi, and I wanted something from Guha that was lighter than his two-volume Gandhi biography. This book is only recommended if you have a particular interest in the world of Indian publishing. 

Michael Huemer, Approaching Infinity. A very readable textbook on the philosophy of infinity, responding to various paradoxes of the infinite (like Thomson’s lamp). Featuring some polemical discussion of set theory and Cantor. 

Seamus Heaney, 100 Poems. I’m trying to appreciate poetry more. I’m not sure what else to do, other than to read poetry collections and biographies of poets. I’m grateful that there is so much good poetry about Irish history. I have just ordered Roy Foster’s On Seamus Heaney, and look forward to reading it while I’m travelling this May. My favourite of his poems is from Whatever You Say Say Nothing (about the Troubles):

Expertly civil tongued with civil neighbors

On the high wires of first wireless reports,

Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours

Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree.'

'Where's it going to end?  It's getting worse.'

'They're murderers.'  'Internment, understandably...'

The voice of sanity is getting hoarse.

Marc Levinson, The Box. I listened to this as an audiobook, which is making me realise how poor my retention is from audiobooks. What I remember: The standardisation of the shipping container was a huge deal economically, it was pioneered by Malcolm McLean, and it was vociferously opposed by organised labour. 

My friend Sean and I share a deep and abiding love of the history of canals and shipping. If anyone wants to fund us to present a documentary series where we visit the world’s largest ports and discuss the economics of shipping, that can be arranged.       

I’m trying to exert more reading discipline. There are many benefits to skimming around different books and abandoning them prolifically. But if you take it too far, you erode your attention span. So I’m trialling a new system of mostly sticking to one fiction and one non-fiction book at a time. 

Podcasts

Very Bad Wizards discuss Thomas Nagel’s paper on sexual perversion. I liked the essay more than they did; it was one of my two or three favourite essays in the superb collection Mortal Questions. VBW remains one of the most entertaining podcasts I’ve ever heard.

I’ve been listening to more of the Empire podcast, on rebels against the Raj and the Byzantines. 

Dwarkesh interviews Demis Hassabis, with notes from Zvi. He also interviewed Patrick Collison, which is self-recommending… 

Dan Schulz interviews Nabeel Qureshi, an excellent conversation. The Undertone podcast is deeply underrated and I expect it is about to explode in popularity. 

The Rest is History series about the Titanic. Contrary to popular belief, the ratio of lifeboats to passengers was among the best on the Titanic of any large ship in history. I’d also never considered the cultural context of the Titanic having been built largely by Ulster Protestants during the Irish Home Rule crisis.

80,000 Hours podcasts about why “misinformation” is overrated as a social problem and Spencer Greenberg on whether money makes you happy and many other topics. The income-happiness literature is incredibly subtle and widely misunderstood.   

Steven Levitt introspects on his career. It’s incredible how Levitt stumbled into success in different areas (for example, he himself admits that he only wrote Freakonomics for the money). He is surprisingly candid about the economics profession and the University of Chicago; overall the portrait is fairly grim. I also learned from the podcast that Levitt’s colleague sued him in federal court (!) for allegedly misrepresenting his research in Freakonomics. Insane. 

Rasheed Griffith interviews John Cochrane about dollarisation and financial markets. This is one of the best podcasts I have listened to in months. 

Doug Irwin on the history and political economy of trade. I found Shruti’s podcast invaluable when preparing for my India trip last year. 

Films

Steven Spielberg, Lincoln. One day I’d like to have watched everything Daniel Day-Lewis has ever been in. This film gives the correct take on the sort of person I understand Lincoln to have been. I confess I hadn’t previously understood the difference between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, and I thought emphasising that was a great way for the film to show how Lincoln agonised over his own political overreach and corruption. Was it really that easy to just walk into the White House, even in the 1860s?! 

Yann Demange, 71. This is probably the film about Northern Ireland which is most sympathetic to the British/Unionist side of any I have seen. The main character is completely bland and without character – that may have been intentional so that you project yourself onto him, but it did not work for me. In the Name of the Father is still my favourite film about the Troubles by a wide margin. 

Celine Song, Past Lives. Beautiful film set partly in Korea and partly in New York about the role of contingency in relationships. I also take it to partly be about how often romantic desire is inherently self-defeating, where the characteristics that we are drawn to are precisely the ones that mean that a relationship would never work. 

I’m trying to watch more movies this year. I have not seen either of the Dune films, and I do not understand the memes about it on Twitter… 

Music

Some new albums I discovered, or listened to seriously, for the first time this month: 

Electric Light Orchestra, Time. 

Eagles, One of These Nights. 

Fela Kuti, Afrodisiac. A classic of the Afrobeat genre. Kuti’s Wikipedia page is an interesting read in itself. Someone should make a documentary about him.  

Discovered long ago, but I’ve also been listening to Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard on repeat this month…  

Papers

Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Constraints on City and Neighborhood Growth: The Central Role of Housing Supply. I hadn’t realised the extent to which the growth of American cities has mostly consisted of the densification of low-density suburbs. City centres have not grown very much since 1980, and housing supply there is price-inelastic. 

Stephen J. Redding, Quantitative Urban Models: From Theory to Data.

Victor Couture and Jessie Hanbury, Neighborhood Change, Gentrification, and the Urbanization of College Graduates. The gentrification story is completely different in the US compared to Europe. In the 50s and 60s, rich white Americans left urban areas in droves due to a crime wave and probably rather a lot of racism. The current system is a reversion to the historical norm, and more in line with the experience of other countries, where rich educated people live in the city centre. Also, gentrification is primarily a phenomenon of changing the sorts of people who move into an area, and not the displacement of existing residents. 

Treb Allen and Costas Arkolakis, Economic Activity Across Space: A Supply and Demand Approach. 

Robert Tolan, ADUs for Ireland. A short report on how accessory dwelling units (granny flats) are a policy no-brainer for Ireland. I should write up a piece about this for the Fitzwilliam when I get the chance…     

Fererik Kaufman, Coming Into and Going Out of Existence. Kaufman’s argument is that we don’t bemoan the fact that we are born earlier (but do bemoan dying) because it would be impossible for you to be born earlier and still be you. I am not satisfied by his argument, and I prefer Thomas Nagel’s famous essay about this asymmetry.  

Michael Dummett, Bringing about the Past. An argument that we should take seriously the possibility of backward causation, i.e. the present influencing the past. That sounds completely insane, but the way I think of it is that there are certain cases (Newcomb, prisoner’s dilemma with an identical software twin) where causation might be better understood as a strong evidential linkage between events. My understanding is that it’s not so much that the case for backwards causation is itself particularly strong, but that ruling it out requires one to accept some highly unpalatable conclusions in these other cases. 

Christopher Belshaw, Death, Pain and Time. This paper ties in the asymmetry of death from the Kaufman paper with the general level of asymmetry there seems to be in how much we care about pleasure and pain.   

Anthon Brueckner and John Fischer, Why is Death Bad? These have been useful supplementary readings to Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. I’m about 130 pages in and struggling. 

Joe Carlsmith, Infinite Ethics and the Utilitarian Dream. This is one (remarkably readable!) chapter from his dissertation at Yale about how ethics breaks down when we consider the possibility of infinities and whether this causes utilitarianism to fail. Carlsmith is frighteningly intelligent.   

Tyler Cowen and Derek Parfit, Against the Social Discount Rate. I was familiar with the arguments here and was surprised I hadn’t actually read the original article. Annoyingly, the paper is from an out-of-print book and all I can find of it is a crappy PDF online. One way Tyler Cowen is underrated is that this academic philosophy work (despite being an economist) was very early in certain literatures. For example, his paper Policing Nature from 2003 discussed whether we could be morally permitted to intervene in the environment to improve the welfare of animals (e.g. by eliminating predators). That was more than a decade before the effective altruism community started turning its attention to wild animal welfare. And Tyler was Derek Parfit’s only ever coauthor, which is remarkable.   

John von Neumann, Can We Survive Technology? As the Bhattacharya biography makes clear, von Neumann was not totally amoral as he is sometimes caricatured. It’s fascinating to get an insight into how he thought about existential risk and his role in creating the atomic bomb.  

C. Thi Nguyen, Value Capture. I’ll have more to say about this soon, this is a paper about gamification and how the use of tracking tools like FitBits and social media likes outsources your value system to institutions… 

Oyebola Okunogbe and Gabriel Tourek, How Can Lower-Income Countries Collect More Taxes? Perhaps unsurprisingly, poor countries leave a large amount of tax revenue on the table by failing to enforce their rules due to corruption. 

Bachas, Jensen and Gadenne, Tax Equity in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. When you account for the informal economy, VAT (which is commonly thought of as a highly regressive tax) actually becomes progressive in developing countries.

Lots of papers this month! I am in the midst of mid-terms and dissertation writing.

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