EclectEcon

Bagels

Long-time readers of EclectEcon may remember that I have at times expressed an interest in finding the best bagel. Indeed, when I first arrived in London, UK, this summer, one of the first things I did was make a trip to Carmelli's in Golder's Green, just a shade northwest of London, to buy a plain bagel with cream cheese. I also bought a dozen plain bagels to take with me to Herstmonceux. Unfortunately, I do not have a fridge in my room this year, and so the bagels became too dry and less chewy as I worked my way through them. I ate them all over the next few days, and they were still far better than the fluffy pretenders provided by the food service at the castle, but as this book (mentioned below) points out, they lose something after even half a day.

Yesterday, MA sent me a link to the book, The Bagel: the surprising history of a modern bread... by Maria Balinska. I have spent some time perusing what is available of the book online via Amazon and have thoroughly enjoyed what I have read. At the very least, I recommend that bagel aficianados read those excerpts. The comparisons with Italian circle-breads are interesting, but the postscript that describes bagel establishments in Montreal, New York, Golder's Green, and Brick Lane is wonderful.

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What Ten Books Would You Save in a Fire?My Answer: None.

I came across this question the other day while reading this (likely via Craig Newmark). I thought about the question for a few minutes, and then I realized my answer is "none".

Not that I want the contents of books to disappear. Even I am not so much of an unlettered person that I would wish for that.

Rather, it's that I don't read books as books much anymore. I read books on the internet, I read books on my iPhone, but I don't often read hard copy books. And the ones I read as hard copy are generally (like most textbooks) so unimportant to me in the grand scheme of things that I wouldn't really miss them anyway (in part because they were sent to me by publishers at no charge). 

And in another 5-10 years I will hold this view even more strongly. I really doubt there will be many, if any, books in the homes of most of us or even in most libraries that are not available electronically.

This realization makes several things more interesting.

• First, censorship and control of the internet will be increasingly important. I hope people will continue to work for maintaining freedom of expression via the internet.
• Book burnings will be a thing of the past, if they aren't already. 

Ms. Eclectic and I both use our iPhones to read books electronically. They are very light and portable and are capable of carrying tonnes of books. I see little or no reason to buy books when the electronic versions are so much more convenient. And increasingly educators will be moving in this same direction.

If there were a fire, I would grab my laptop and iPhone long before I would think about saving my hardbound copies of Balzac or Shakespeare or Ayn Rand.

Cleaning out the Office: which economics books are the first to go?

I will de facto be on leave for the academic year of 2010-11. In preparation for yielding my extremely desirable pink and lavender office to some lucky colleague, I started clearing out some of the books by putting on a shelf in the hallway with a "help yourself" sign.

It probably says a lot about the profession in general and our programme in particular that Samuelson's Foundations was one of the first books taken and that Friedman's Essays in Positive Economics didn't go for quite some time.

Also, Friedman's and Stigler's Price Theory texts were taken early but Becker's wasn't, nor were either of the editions of Henderson and Quandt.

And the Modern Library edition of Smith's Wealth of Nations was gone early, but Marx was still there after some time.

On Buying Lottery Tickets and Insurance at the Same Time

Last month I posted about the book You Are What You Choose by Scott de Marchi & James T. Hamilton. In that posting I invited the authors to respond to this puzzle:

I know that many, many people buy lottery tickets (or gamble in other ways) and also buy insurance; i.e., people are risk averse and gamblers at the same time. I am hoping that the authors will explain this in their book (or possibly with a guest posting here).

Here is the reply sent me this morning by Jay Hamilton:

As social scientists, we respect the power of prices, budget constraints, and framing effects to predict the choices that people make. In You Are What You Choose, we argue that more attention should be paid to the systematic variations in how people make decisions across domains of choice. We call people’s decision-making approaches their TRAITS, which stands for Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, meToo (looking to the decisions of others), and Stickiness.

Using 30,000 respondents to Knowledge Networks internet surveys, we develop measures of people’s TRAITS based on how their roles as consumers, neighbors, and friends. To develop an index of a person’s willingness to engage in risky actions, we draw on questions about smoking, gambling, risky sports played, number of moving violations in a car, and attitude questions such as ‘does a yellow light mean speed up or slow down.’ 

In your post, you raise the interesting question posed by Friedman and Savage about why some people buy both lottery tickets and insurance.  Our model does not provide much additional insight beyond the traditional explanation of different shapes in utility curves. Instead, we explore whether we can isolate a general taste for risk that can be used to predict risky behavior across many dimensions of choice.

Our measure of Risk does allow us to predict who’s willing to take on gambles in many areas of life. The higher the Risk index that we measure, the more likely a person (controlling for age, gender, income, and education) is to :

• Say they follow an aggressive investment strategy
• Decide not to get the flu shot
• Be a political independent

We also find that people who are high on Risk and low on Information gathering end up not getting what they say they’re after in product markets. While they may say they want a safe car, for example, people with a taste for Risk and a general lack of interest in information appear to simply roll the dice when buying a car. They end up having a larger gap between the level of safety they say they want in a car and the level they actually end up with.

To see the types of questions we use to measure decision-making styles, and to see how you rate on the TRAITS, you can take our test at www.youchoosebook.com

Scott de Marchi and James T. Hamilton are professors at Duke University.

The Effects of Mass Immigration into Canada

Last week I received a copy of the Fraser Institute's latest book, The Effects of Mass Immigration. I took the book with me recently  when visiting a demographer friend, and he was quite impressed with it. His comments:

Finished it today.

Most impressed with all the chapters, including Salim's [EE: Salim Mansur, a mutual friend]. Most shocking statistics:

- only 20% of our immigrants come through the regular channels - the others are 'sponsored' or so-called 'refugees'

- Bill C-50 dropped, at the last moment, a provision to deny refugee status to those claiming from 'safe' countries already

- Despite Bill C-50, all those on the waiting list - now about 1 million, are guaranteed eventual admission (last minute cave-in by the government because .....?)

- Immigrants now cost us more than they contribute economically, mainly because of their 'inferior' quality of late.

The sad part of it all is that none of the authors seem to think any government in Canada will dare alter anything because of the votes.

Many thanks for lending me this one.

With that kind of praise, I guess I'll have to read it myself! Here is the link if you want to order a copy.

Should You Buy a Kindle?

Last May, Ironman at Political Calculations asked this question and, after going through numerous calculations, concluded

Going with our hypothetical example, it very much pays for our college student to buy the Kindle DX, assuming that they're able to also get the textbooks they will need for their classes in the Kindle format, since we obtain a positive value for the Cumulative Net Present Value Adjusted for Early Salvage. If that value had come out to be negative, then either our college student would need to really crank up their reading of non-textbooks while in school or would really have to place a much higher "warm fuzzy" on owning their own Kindle DX.

I saved a link to that posting for several reasons.

1. I don't know how Kindles work, never having seen one in person (see below), but I never learned as much from my textbooks if I didn't write in them... argue with the author, write questions, try out ideas, etc. I'm not keen on electronic texts of any sort if this feature is lacking. What I am trying to say is that students should consider more than just the comparative net present value of the options when deciding whether to buy a Kindle, and the value of the learning experience is one of those additional things deserving consideration.
2. Despite Amazon's launch of the international version of Kindles, we still are unable to buy them in Canada. Apparently, this situation has arisen because Amazon is still negotiating with cellular phone services about who will provide the download services to the Kindle. We might have considered buying Kindles at one point, but we can't in Canada (and buying one in the US makes no sense unless we load it up with things to read while we're are visiting there).
3. I read novels on my iPhone using Stanza. So does Ms. Eclectic. There are tonnes of novels available, many at very low prices, and an iPhone is much easier to carry around than either hard copies or maybe even a Kindle. I have about 20 novels on my phone now plus some scripts for plays, in addition to all the other apps that are so much fun. And it is all in one neat package, along with tonnes of music.

We are both thrilled with the convenience and the readability of novels on our iPhones. So now that we have become accustomed to reading on our iPhones, I doubt if we will even consider Kindles when they finally do work out their cellphone agreements.

LOLspeak: truly stupid

My older son, David Ricardo Palmer, recently sent me a message about LOLspeak.

I don't know if you are "up" on LOLspeak, but it's the crap that kids text to each other. It is somehow associated with Cats and Cheeseburgers now, and so this group has translated ALMOST THE WHOLE FREAKIN' BIBLE into it. John 3:16 is translated, ""So liek teh Ceiling Kitteh lieks teh ppl lots and he sez 'Oh hai I givez u me only kitteh and ifs u beleeves him u wont evr diez no moar, k?'"

Amusing? maybe, but it certainly doesn't cut down on keystrokes. And why all those stupid misspellings, especially the ones that don't save keystrokes? The bible in LOLspeak? Lord, save us.

John Lott Opposes Big Brother Tactics as Obama Plans to Address Children in Schools

So much of this sounds like Big Brother and indoctrination. John Lott is on the right track with his criticism. And for those who have never read 1984 by George Orwell or his Animal Farm, please do so soon!

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Books in the Mail

• A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burt Malkiel. I read this book in its first edition back in the 1970s, and it is still very good. I'll be using it in my course this fall on the financial crisis, mainly to set out the nature of modern finance theory and the criticisms of it. It is perfect for people who don't have a very strong background in either math or economics. It has more investment "advice" than I would like for a textbook, but that is only a minor drawback. I hope to cover the main points of this book in about 4 weeks.
• Causes of the Crisis. A special issue of Critical Review (Vol 21, nos 2-3, 2009). This is a brilliantly accessible collection of current articles by well-known scholars, many of whom had been raising questions about the financial system long before the recession hit. It is the other material I will be using for my course on the financial crisis.
• Brick Lane by Monica Ali. A novel about a young Bangladeshi woman who was sent off to London, England in an arranged marriage, about her coming of age, about her exploration of a new identity. Informative about cultural interactions, maybe, but I didn't much like reading about the tribulations she faced. In many ways, it reminded me of the pathos of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
• Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett. A very informative narrative of the evolution of the shadow banking system and its role in the financial crisis. Despite the lack of clarity in some of the explanations, and despite calling the Bank of Canada the "Central Bank of Canada", the book was very good. I have made considerable reference to it in the past few weeks and will likely make great use of it in my upcoming course on this subject. I have already mentioned this book several times (most recently here). It is not a quick read, but it was worth the effort
• No Second Class Citizens by Sir Roger Douglas. Sir Roger and I have become Facebook friends, likely through my earlier e-friendship with Rodney Hide. Both are libertarian politicians in New Zealand. In this book, many of the current policy issues are addressed from a libertarian perspective. The link is to a no-charge pdf copy of the book.
• The Retail Revolution: How Wal*Mart Created a Brave New World of Business by Nelson Lichtenstein. I love Wal-Mart and everything it does to break down barriers. Poor people get cheaper goods and better jobs at Wal-Mart, and third-world producers get better jobs, too. I didn't much care for the not-so-subtle anti-Wal-Mart, pro-union tone of this book.
• Animal Spirits by Akerlof and Shiller. These guys are bright, and they have continued the work of challenging the rational-maximizer neo-classical paradigm in economics. The phrase "animal spirits" refers to a passage in Keynes' General Theory. Shiller, btw, was one of the early outspoken analysts who warned about the coming of the recent housing and financial crisis.
• Playbooks and Checkbooks by Stefan Szymanski. An extremely readable and accessible little book that has NO graphs and NO equations. I'm considering using it in the next Economics of Sports course I teach. I reviewed the proposal for this book several years ago.
• The Myth of the Rational Market by Justin Fox. Justin Fox didn't much like economics as a student, but he has some valuable insights in this book. It's another sensible exploration of the things we need to take into consideration rather than use the simple rational-maximizer model.
• The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited by Benny Morris. Morris has shown what seems like integrity to me by revising his views about the Palestinian refugee problem as more information became available. In this book, he makes it very clear that the issue is more complicated than any one-paragraph bit of polemics might suggest.

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A Useful Book on Health Care

Ms. Eclectic tells us that interventions by her sister (a nurse) and support from the rest of us played an important role in her (comparatively) speedy recovery from surgery and cancer more than two decades ago. We have been fortunate since then, but we have ordered this book, The Essential Hospital Handbook: How to Be an Effective Partner in a Loved One's Care, just in case. Here is a brief description from the CBC:

Conlon, a journalist and [the] author who, indeed, became an active participant in [his partner,] Jim's eventually successful treatment, has used the experience to help people who might find themselves in the same situation he did.

His book, The Essential Hospital Handbook: How to Be an Effective Partner in a Loved One's Care, is a straightforward approach to handling a health-care crisis, a time when many people's common sense battles fears for their loved one's life.

The book offers a comprehensive look at emergency rooms, surgery, recovery and the hospice as it takes readers on a tour of the hospital.

Such things as living wills, drugs, hospital equipment and even slang are examined to give a well-rounded picture of what people might encounter.

While directed at caregivers and families, the book is just as helpful for patients.

...

Posner's Other Blog, Wherein He Calls Krugman a Born-Again Keynesian

I don't know how Richard Posner reads and writes as much as he does. But he does so much and does it so well.

Recently, Posner began another blog in addition to his original blog that he co-authors with Gary Becker. His latest blog, sponsored by The Atlantic, is called "A Failure of Capitalism", the same as the title of his book published this past spring by Harvard Press and about the financial crisis and the 2008ff recession in the United States.

In his most recent posting, Posner criticizes Paul Krugman's unabashed support for more gubmnt intervention in the market for health care, referring to Krugman as a "born again Keynesian".  Posner's criticism is that the debate has created considerable uncertainty and that this uncertainty has caused people not only to save but to hoard liquidity, thus prolonging and deepening the recession. Let me add that this criticism applies to much of the Democrat and Obama agenda for increasing involvement of the gubmnt in the economy. Here is the conclusion from this posting:

Initially the concern was with the macroeconomic implications of adding some $100 billion a year to the federal deficit (an underestimate, in my view, because it ignores the increase in demand for medical services by tens of millions of persons who will have health insurance for the first time, which will reduce the marginal cost of medical services to them). The concern became so acute that focus shifted to measures for financing the program so that it would not add to the deficit. But when this happened, businesses and individuals alike began asking: what part of the cost of the new program will I bear? And this question injects a new and very major source of uncertainty into the economic environment. Small businessmen are worrying about the added cost to them if they are required to insure their employees, and individuals are wondering whether their cost of health insurance will rise. Most people do have health insurance and most of those who do are more or less satisfied with it; anyway better the devil you know than the devil you don't know.

Prudent businessmen and prudent individuals alike have thus been given an additional motive for hoarding cash rather than investing and consuming. No one knows how his financial situation will be affected by health reform, if it is is enacted. There is enormous and I think justified distrust of the government's ability to design and execute so ambitious a program as the Administration and the congressional leadership envisage.

One might think that this would give a born-again Keynesian macroeconomist like Paul Krugman pause. But not only does he say nothing about the effect of the debate over health reform on uncertainty and through it on the economic situation, even though he is pessimistic about the situation; he provides no analysis of the likely costs of health reform, and the incidence of those costs on particular groups in the society. He does nothing to allay the uncertainty that the debate over health reform has engendered.

My only concern about this particular blog is that it seems designed to plug his book. Not that I think his book shouldn't be plugged; in fact, I bought the book as soon as it was advertised.

Orwell on Chaplin

The writings of George Orwell made the news last week when, without advance warning, Amazon erased electronic versions of some of his novels from people's Kindles [see, for example, this by Phil Miller]. That incident brought to mind Orwell's comments about Charlie Chaplin [h/t to BenS]:

Speaking of Chaplin in his role of The Great Dictator, George Orwell asks “What is Chaplin’s peculiar gift?” It is his power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West. We live in a period in which democracy is almost everywhere in retreat, supermen in control of three-quarters of the world, liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists. And yet everywhere, the common man sticks obstinately to the beliefs that he derives from the Christian culture.”

 --Film Review, The Great Dictator in Time & Tide, Dec 21, 1940. Reprinted in All Art is Propaganda, Critical Essays by George Orwell (Harcourt, Inc.) 2008

I would happily change "Christian culture" to "Judeo-Christian traditions", but otherwise I like the observation.

Gubmnt Pensions and Catch-22:We Are All Yossarians Now

Just substitute the age at which you can expect to receive a gubmnt pension for "number of missions". From the classic novel by Joseph Heller [h/t to JB]:

"Daneeka was telling the truth," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen admitted.

"Forty missions is all you have to fly as far as Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters is concerned."

Yossarian was jubilant. "Then I can go home right? I've got forty-eight."

"No, you can't go home," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen corrected him. "Are you crazy of something?"

"Why not?"

"Catch-22."

"Catch-22?" Yoassarian was stunned. "What the hell has Catch-22 got to do with it?"

"Catch-22," Doc Daneeka answered patiently, when Hungry Joe had flown Yossarian back to Pianosa, "says you've always got to do what your commanding officer tells you to."

"But Twenty-seventh Air Force says I can go home with forty missions."

"But they don't say you have to go home. And regulations do say you have to obey every order. That's the catch. Even if the colonel were disobeying a Twenty-seventh Air Force order by making you fly more missions. you'd still have to fly them, or you'd be guilty of disobeying an order of his. And then Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters would really jump on you."

Yossarian slumped with disappointment. "Then I really do have to fly the fifty missions don't I?" he grieved.

"The fifty-five," Doc Daneeka correct him.

"What fifty-five?"

"The fifty-five the colonel wants all of you to fly."

I am getting my raft out now and setting out for Sweden like Orr did.

Globalising Hatred: The New Anti-Semitism

Eric sent me this link to a review of Denis McShane's book, Globalising Hatred: The New Anti-Semitism.

It is easy to portray fears about anti-Semitism as overblown. British officialdom has excelled in that activity, starting with the civil servant who, in 1942, condemned the evidence that Nazi Germany was systematically exterminating the Jewish population of Europe with the calm assertion that nothing of the kind was happening. It was all down to the hysteria of 'those wailing Jews'.

'Those wailing Jews' is still a common reaction to claims that anti-Semitism is on the rise. One of the virtues of Globalising Hatred, by the Labour MP Denis MacShane, is that it demonstrates how inappropriate the 'wailing Jews' reaction is today.

Anti-Semitism - virulent, violent anti-Semitism - is flourishing, principally because it is embedded in many of the political manifestations of Islam.

MacShane notes that the Hamas Charter, the document that sets out Hamas's guiding principles, 'is one of the most anti-Semitic, Jew-hating political statements ever published'.

He quotes the invocations to kill Jews which litter the Charter, as well as the familiar claims that 'Jewish money is used to take control of the world media', and that Jews 'plunder people's money'.

Those claims are derived from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tract first published in 1903 supposedly outlining a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, which was exposed many years ago as a silly fake (the Tsarist secret police forged the document).

But the Hamas Charter simply takes them as fact, asserting that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the authentic voice of the Jewish world conspiracy - and institutions such as the Rotary Club, the Freemasons and the Lions' Club are its instruments.

It's all nuts - but it is also taken very seriously, and not just by Hamas. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed organisation in Lebanon, justifies the killing of Jewish children and asserts that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves so that they could get the state of Israel as a reward afterwards.

Sayyid Qutb, the ideological founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, depicts Jews as the mortal enemy of Muslims in his book Our Struggle with the Jews.

'Jews destroy what is holy and moral,' he says, before insisting that Allah brought Hitler to rule over the Jews. Now that 'Jews have returned to evil-doing in the form of Israel, let Allah bring down upon the Jews people who will mete out on them the worst kind of punishment'.

And so on. Many revered Islamic preachers refer to Jews as 'monkeys and pigs'. As MacShane points out, if any other racial or religious group were the target of this kind of abuse, there would be an outcry. But when it is Muslims calling for the destruction of the Jews, there is none.

Why the lack of response? MacShane suggests two principal causes: closet anti-Semitism of the 'those wailing Jews' kind; and anger at Israel and sympathy for the Palestinians, which allows many who should know better to end up thinking that Jews 'have it coming'.

In the end, however, MacShane is stumped by 'the failure of the intellectual and liberal Left to confront and take on anti-Semitism, or even to accept that it is real and a menace to every value that liberals and the Left have ever stood for'.

That failure is not restricted to the Left. It is common to all the political parties. If we are going to defend liberal values in Britain - if we are not to allow the 'Endarkenment', as MacShane calls the encroachment of fundamentalism - to erode the existence of a tolerant, secular society, then we have to fight bigotry, dogma and lies wherever they manifest themselves.

Bigotry, dogma and lies are three of the essential planks of anti-Semitism in all its forms, and so long as radical Islam has anti-Semitism at its heart, it will be incompatible with any decent social order. ...

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McShane is a typical far-left Labour MP. It is impressive that he has broken from the ranks of the leftists to take on radical Islam and anti-Semitism. From Amazon.uk,

Denis MacShane has been a Labour MP since 1994. He was deputy foreign secretary and Minister for Europe under Tony Blair. After graduating from Oxford he worked for the BBC and was the youngest ever president of the National Union of Journalists. He completed a PhD at London University and in the 1980s worked as an international trade union official which led to being arrested in Poland and South Africa as he worked with independent trade unions against communism and apartheid. He writes regularly for British, American and continental European papers. He is currently a UK delegate to the Council of Europe and represents the Labour Party at the Party of European Socialists.

Super Bowl Bets?

I had hoped to spend Super Bowl weekend in Las Vegas, but the combination of scheduling and my own preferences meant I decided not to go there this year. Maybe next year.

However, I will try to make it to Caesar's casino in Windsor, which I think is the only legal sports book in the area, and watch the Super Bowl there.

I get the impression that I will not be made to feel comfortable or welcome if I go into a sports book and just lounge around, watching others, talking with others, and cheering and laughing and hooting and yelling. So, even though I'm not a sports gambler, and even though I will try to free ride on the gambling of others, there is a chance I will place a few bets before and during the game.

So here are some questions:

• What are some of the weird bets that might be fun?
• Can Pittsburg really be seven point favourites with all their injuries?
• Last I looked, the over-under is 46.5. Does that make sense to you?

Le Deal: a fascinating story of hubris and business

Back in August, I excerpted a review of Le Deal, by J. Byrne Murphy, an auto-biographical narrative of the expansion of outlet malls into Europe. I finally got around to reading the book myself and quite enjoyed it. Over the next few days, I'll be posting some reflections on certain sections of the book, but overall, I would say the book is in the same league as Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis. It has more narration and less analysis than Liar's Poker, but it is an enjoyable read with many insights.

Murphy and his partners decided to try to open outlet malls in Europe because they had nearly lost their shirts, in part because of the savings and loan crisis in The United States. Much of the S&L crisis was related to real estate -- when the S&Ls went, the commercial real estate developers who counted on their credit also went down. And Murphy, et al., had been heavily involved in commercial real estate.

But Murphy and his partners were clearly highly driven people who threw themselves into their projects. And early on, they exhibited the hubris of intelligent, well-educated comparatively young and energetic people. As Murphy wrote, "I didn't even know what I didn't know." Indeed, much of what they had to do was learn what they needed to know about new cultures and lifestyles in different countries.

Part of this learning involved having to deal with being undercut by an initial contact who stole their ideas and became a serious competitor. Trade secrecy, fiduciary responsibilities, etc., all meant nothing, and the Murphy team took some time adjusting to this reality.

Another part of this learning is evidenced in Murphy's amusing and frustrating stories about trying to open a bank account, get credit, set up an account for electricity, phone, etc. in Paris. Amusing to read now, after the fact, but I certainly would not want to have to experience the frustration.

Overall, Le Deal is a good read and would make an excellent gift for someone, if you're still looking for a last minute gift. I didn't think it was as good as Liar's Poker, but that might well be a matter of taste, and it is certainly in the same league.

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I Was Born a Junior, but not This One.

From Rebekah's mother, via Rebekah:

From pages 93 & 94 of a battered advance trade copy of THE TIMES OF THEIR LIVES:  Life, Love and Death in Plymouth Colony (published November 2000, WH Freeman & Co.):

In some cases of people accused of witchcraft in New England, it has been possible to gain a deeper understanding of the motives that prompted the accuser by examining all the information available about them, and discerning patterns of belief and behavior that could account for them.  John Putnam Demos, in his Entertaining Satan, has demonstrated this in a scholarly and compelling way.  In this instance, the colony records show there is a pattern of tensions within the immediate Sylvester family that they litigated, and of conflicts with outsiders.  Dina and her eldest brother, John, faced criminal charges after they and a younger sister molested and abused one of the Marshfield constables when he arrested their mother, Naomi, in 1666.  They forcibly removed Naomi from him.  Naomi's arrest followed a court case against her in which her son-in-law, Edward Wright, and his wife, Lydia, her and Richard Sylvester's  eldest daughter, accused Naomi of unjustly keeping back cattle and other goods that belonged to Lydia.

Then there was the family's relationship with John Palmer, Jr., who had a long history of problems over a land deal with Richard Sylvester and even had him arrested.  It was complicated by Palmer having broken his engagement to Dinah Sylvester shortly after her accusation against Goodwife Holmes, for which he had to pay £20 in damages to her.  He was clearly harassed by the Sylvesters over this, for three years later the court publicly recorded the agreement drawn up at the time, in which Palmer had been fully acquitted,so it was evident that bad blood had continued over the affair....

Insights on Economics, Culture, and Growth from The Source

Earlier I posted that I was glad to have read The Source by James Michener even though I found it tedious and disjointed. Here are two passages that interested me for what they have to say about the importance of reducing red tape and corruption.

1. "What was exceptional about Tabari's operation was that he accomplished it with ease and even urbanity. Each underling who collected baksheesh for him was allowed to keep a portion for himself, while those in superior positions found themselves receiving unexpected contributions." [p732]
2. "By applying constant pressure and bribes whose number he had lost count of, Shmuel had advanced his case to a point where Emir Tewfik in Damascus was willing to sell the useless acres for the not exorbitatnt sum of nine hundred and eighty English pounds, but the baksheesh required to reach this agreement already totaled more than seventeen humdred pounds. And still the Turkish government would announce no decision." [p753]

Part of the vague system of baksheesh seemed to be a mechanism for implementing price discrimination -- extract as much consumer surplus from the buyer as possible. But it seems from these passages that most of the system was a deeply ingrained form of rent-seeking. And all the labour, capital, and natural resources used for pure rent-seeking have alternative, productive uses which are lost due to the system that requires so much time and effort in securing and providing baksheesh.

The Source

As a result of recommendations from several people, over the past two months I have been reading The Source by James Michener. I finally finished it, but it was slow going.

Many years ago, I read Michener's The Bridge at Andau about the Hungarian uprising of 1956, and before going to the University of Hawaii on sabbatical I read Michener's Hawaii. I recall that both of those books provided me with a sense of what had happened in another part of the world, a sense that I had not picked up from other books or articles I had read.  Michener's style, telling disjointed stories as a part of the whole, was somewhat frustrating early in both books, but over the course of the books, the stories helped to draw things together as he followed the different segments throughout the overall plot line. I am sure Hawaii helped me understand many of the nuances of life in Hawaii that would have puzzled me had I not read it.

The Source is about Israel from around 60,000 BC up to 1964. As with other Michener novels, it gave me a sense of a culture and a history of which I knew very little. That alone kept me reading the book.

Beyond that, The Source is a failure. Its fictional snippets through time are only loosely tied together (and then in ways that tax credulity more than usual). The writing style at times is good, but at other times is ponderous. I'm glad I struggled through it, but it was a long slog. I'm sure there are better ways to learn about Jews and Israel.

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Get a Kindle for $100 off?

To get the discount, you have to sign up for a credit card (and I'm guessing the offer isn't available in Canada).

Update: Possibly one reason for the promotion is this?

Playing for Pizza

I just finished reading Playing for Pizza by John Grisham. It's a nice novel: a pleasant, quick read and a nice story. No convolutions, no feelings of emptiness. The existential questions are left unresolved, but it doesn't matter. It is set in Parma, Italy, about a former NFL quarterback, now playing for the Parma Panthers.

Playing for Pizza has none of the strength and insight offered in Grisham's other football novel, Bleachers, which I highly recommend. Bleachers, along with A Painted House, show that Grisham is a really good novelist, not just a writer of suspense novels with complicated plots.

Of course there's nothing wrong with novels with convoluted plots, and Grisham has written some of the best. Among those, I would include The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and Runaway Jury, all of which were much more complex than their movie versions.

Although I like most of Grisham's novels, I absolutely detested his first one, A Time to Kill, for its gruesome violence. And I didn't like The Chamber or his foray into non-fiction, The Innocent Man.

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