Book Review: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

I started reading the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman in early 2024. This was initially recommended to me by a friend, and I became even more motivated to read it upon hearing positive things about it from colleagues at my previous job, as many of the subtleties described in the book are extremely relevant to the appropriate design of interviews, focus groups, and surveys of human subjects in social science research. However, because it is a long book and the middle of 2024 was made busier for me by moving back to Maryland, traveling a lot, and starting a new job (some of which I have discussed in a previous post [LINK]), I could not finish reading this book until much more recently. Because of this large gap between reading the initial 60% and remaining 40% of this book, I admit that I have since forgotten many details from the initial 60% of this book. Moreover, I started making notes to myself in this post based on that initial 60% because I assumed that I would be able to finish reading the remaining 40% soon afterwards and I would therefore remember the book as a coherent whole, but because that didn't happen, many of the notes that I have made in this post that were supposed to form the skeleton of this post now no longer make as much sense to me. For these reasons, this post may seem a bit more stilted than other book review posts in this blog and will likely seem stronger/more coherent when discussing the latter 40% of the book.

The book is a lengthy exposition of novel ideas in psychology & behavioral economics that were empirically validated by the author, most often in conjunction with his longtime academic collaborator Amos Tversky. The concluding chapter does a good job of recapitulating the main ideas of the book. Most of the book explores various facets of individual & group-based human behavior based on the idea that there are effectively 2 modes through which individuals process information, which the author refers to as Systems 1 & 2. System 1 "thinks fast", making snap judgments based on limited information, heuristics, and a bit of laziness, and is the aspect of thinking that drives most day-to-day reactions & decisionmaking, while System 2 "thinks slow", making more deliberate judgments with more of an effort to gather all relevant information but must in turn be consciously engaged and ultimately disengages from mental fatigue (in favor of System 1) if engaged for too long. The book also considers how individuals' typical behaviors when faced with outcomes that are certain competing with outcomes that have known or unknown probabilities deviate from behaviors idealized by microeconomic theories of expected utility, notably that while the commonly observed behavior choosing a certain gain with a lower value than the expected value of an uncertain gain can be explained to some degree by expected utility theory, the commonly observed behavior of choosing a gamble on losing outcomes with an expected loss of larger magnitude than a different certain loss cannot be explained by expected utility theory; this partly explains the risks that people take in business and can be explained in turn by how people in their perceptions tend to overestimate probabilities that are close to but not exactly 0 and underestimate probabilities that are close to but not exactly 1. Finally, the book partly explains notions of hedonic adaptation (the idea that one's sense of well-being is generally similar in many different good or bad medium- or long-term circumstances by adapting to those circumstances) by distinguishing how people rate pleasure or pain when experiencing those things versus in hindsight and shows how people's conceptions of their identities & well-being in the past, present, and future are intimately tied to their actual memories and their abilities to form & retain memories. These aspects of self-conception as well as perceptions of probability can also be tied to Systems 1 versus 2, as many seemingly shortsighted decisions or perceptions can be explained by System 1 making snap judgments lazily & using heuristics based on incomplete information.

Especially as I read the latter 40% of the book, I came to appreciate how many of the ideas of this book had permeated into other things that I had read & heard from others and that I had internalized into my own worldview & view of myself. Professionally, I could see how so many aspects of framing could be important when designing surveys & focus groups. Personally, I could see how especially as I have aged, I have in many cases consciously chosen to not worry too much about certain details and instead make decisions based on lazier heuristics because I didn't feel that the results of spending more mental energy making a decision based on System 2 would be worth the effort. At the same time, I have become more consciously aware of how my memories of things in my own life can be affected by the passage of time and by more recent events in my own life, and I have become more consciously aware of the deep entanglement between my perceptions of my own memories and the narratives that shape my perceptions of my own life & of the world. I thus feel more proud of maintaining detailed personal diaries where I take note (using System 2 as much as possible when considering things outside of the current moment) of how I feel about various things in the moment as well as in hindsight and carefully consider how & why my thoughts & feelings about different events in or aspects of my life have evolved over time. Moreover, I have become more aware over time of when I might be vulnerable (through System 1) to the power of suggestion or to a subconscious desire to align with groupthink, though given that it is System 1, I am not necessarily aware of these things until later (thinking about these things through System 2). Finally, especially over the last several years, I have come to see many things at a very broad conceptual/philosophical level, whether the experiences in my own life, the evolution of different aspects of human society, or the expansion of human knowledge, in terms of perdurantism [LINK from Wikipedia]; although I am not philosophically sophisticated enough to be able to think through & defend all of its implications, it intuitively makes sense to me to think about personal identities, feelings, people, and other things that can be said to exist, in terms of their existence in spacetime and not just in space at specific instants of time. Because of my philosophical inclination in this way, I was particularly pleased to see the author discuss the idea of time-integrated pleasure or pain and of looking at changing identities or overall life courses in terms of spacetime.

Although this book is not technical at the level of an academic journal article, it is fairly technical compared to most nonfiction books aimed at the general public, so I would say that it is aimed at a well-educated reader. That said, I do think that it is written with reasonable clarity for non-academic audiences. Additionally, the book covers many topics, and it is recommended to bear in mind the headings of sections that comprise groups of chapters, because otherwise, it is easy to lose track of the narrative of the book, especially because the book is long enough that I suspect that it would be impossible for most readers (even those who read books, including more technical nonfiction books, relatively quickly) to finish this book in one sitting. I would say that the concluding chapter is a nice way to reinforce the main points of the book in the reader's mind and that the details of each chapter can be treated as a reference when needed as opposed to forming a perfectly coherent narrative in the progression of chapters in the book.

It is important to remember that some aspects of this book are out of date. In some cases, that is just because this book was published in 2011 and had been written over many years before that; for example, the author gives an example of estimating the likelihood of choosing a particular major in college, but that example uses base rates that seem to be quite out-of-date. In other cases, the book is out of date because it is based on academic experimental work in psychology & behavioral economics, and other studies may find contradictory (either null or opposite) results to those presented in this book. The Wikipedia article about this book [LINK] discussed how most of the results from most of the studies discussed in one chapter (as an example) have been found to be not replicable, with the author afterwards admitting to putting too much faith in those studies and therefore falling prey to the same biases as those discussed in that chapter & elsewhere in the book. As a slightly different example, later parts of the book discuss the ideas of nudge theory and its seeming successes in public policy, but the Wikipedia article about nudge theory [LINK] has pointed out that later studies & meta-analyses have found that after correcting for publication biases in favor of positive results & against null results, nudging does not yield statistically significant (non-null) effects on human behavior; in this case, one of the primary researchers (who is named in this book as a collaborator of the author & pioneer of nudge theory) has made some counterarguments that I don't find convincing.

With these caveats in mind, I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in these ideas and with the patience to carefully consider them, though this may partly reflect my own biases in how I view issues of identity & the world. Follow the jump to see my other assorted & disjointed thoughts about this book.

My Time at the 2021 TRB Annual Meeting

This is a quick update from my attendance of the 2021 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting. The conference was held in a fully online format, and as a result, events were spread over the entire month, with the first & second weeks being filled with committee meetings, and the third & fourth weeks being filled with research presentations & workshops. This was my first time attending this particular conference, and it was my first time attending a conference of this size in the field of transportation since switching into this field. That said, I knew going in that certain aspects, like networking, might feel less satisfying compared to what they would have been if this conference had happened in person in normal circumstances.

I really enjoyed the committee meeting about the transportation needs of people with disabilities, and the later presentation session about the same subject, as those are among my primary research topics right now. I also really enjoyed the workshop about the history & future of road pricing, precisely because that topic is only tangentially related to my research interests, so it was fun to think about these issues that I wouldn't normally think about. Plus, in all of those sessions, I was able to meet people and expand my professional network to some degree.

Of course, the networking aspect fell far short of what I would have expected for normal circumstances, but that wasn't too surprising. More disappointing was that the last week of this conference was plagued by technical difficulties that led to me missing several sessions that I wanted to attend. In particular, the website was designed quite badly, as it often didn't load correctly, and when it did load, it was often quite difficult to navigate to the desired sessions (as it was set up to "mimic" the "spatial layout" of a convention center). Furthermore, although setting up poster sessions as a series of chat rooms may have seemed like a good idea at first, it ended up being quite frustrating to use in practice (when it worked at all), so I felt rather discouraged from signing up for further sessions.

Overall, I'm glad to have attended the committee meetings, and while I generally enjoyed the research presentation sessions that I did attend, I was rather frustrated by how this conference was rife with technical difficulties. I hope this will be a lesson for future online conferences, and I hope too that progress with vaccines against this coronavirus will mean that in-person conferences can return soon enough. (Please note that I have no expertise in epidemiology, virology, or vaccine development, so I cannot claim to prognosticate on this matter.)

Unrelated to this, please note that the public Facebook & Twitter pages for this blog have been deleted. This is because of my unhappiness with those companies' recent actions and my desire to migrate away from those platforms. Of course, this blog will continue to be published here until further notice, and it is still possible to sign up for an email subscription for new posts on this blog.

Book Review: "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow

I've recently reread the book The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, which is a book about many ways that probabilistic phenomena occur in daily life and what the consequences are for understanding individual & collective decisions. I say "reread" because the first time I read it was in high school (as I recall, although I don't remember exactly when, though I did mention it in a review for a different book, saying then that I didn't finish it because I didn't find it as engaging as the book in that review); a few days ago, I happened to see it on top a stack of books, and I figured it would be nice to reread for a few reasons. First, I have learned a lot of science, and my worldview has developed & matured a lot, since I was in high school, so I thought it would be good to see how this book would hold up in my view in that context. Second, I figured it would be nice to read a book about probabilistic phenomena, as it wasn't something that I had to worry much about in my college studies or in my PhD work (which is a little ironic, given that van der Waals forces and radiative heat transfer are phenomena of statistical thermodynamic fluctuations, but it turns out that certain mathematical formulations hide all essential randomness), it will be relevant to my postdoctoral work as I get more into travel surveys with associated statistical analysis, concepts like base rate fallacies are relevant for things like false positive result rates for tests associated with this coronavirus (please note that I am not a public health expert, and please consult governmental public health agencies for guidance with respect to this ongoing pandemic), and I've been thinking over the last several months about how many of the conceptual quandaries associated with quantum mechanics can actually be tied to questions of whether probability is emergent versus fundamental.

The book is not too long, and it is a quick & engaging read. The author uses many interesting examples to motivate the discussion of fallacious reasoning in the context of probability as well as ways that probability enters daily life even in areas where people expect more determinism. There are also many interesting historical anecdotes about the development of probability theory, especially how ancient Greece and certain medieval European societies believed that any discussion of uncertainty would go against their conceptions of a pure & deterministic universe (whatever the prime mover might be). Also, in the tenth chapter, there is an interesting discussion of how the development of chaos theory itself is an example of the unpredictable & seemingly random nature of human life (though I didn't like the conflation of chaos theory itself with probability, as chaos is a separate mathematical phenomena that can emerge in purely deterministic systems). Additionally, in the tenth chapter, I appreciated how the author is careful to state that determinism is a bad model only of human behavior (at individual & societal levels) and makes no claim about the applicability of determinism to the universe at large, and how the author makes a call for humility and for rewarding people based on their character instead of perpetuating beliefs that people who are successful are wholly responsible for their successes while people who are in marginalized circumstances are somehow rightfully being punished for past mistakes. Overall, I think the book does a good job of achieving its purpose of illustrating to lay readers how ubiquitous probabilistic phenomena are in even seemingly deterministic aspects of daily life.

Before getting into other criticisms, I should point out that my copy of this book has several printing errors (mostly missing words) and a few typographical errors, but these occurred maybe once every 10 pages (based on an instinctive guess), so these therefore didn't affect my understanding of the book. Also, the author errs in claiming that Germanic rule in the Dark Ages (commonly understood to be the medieval period) preceded the ancient Roman civilization, but this again doesn't undercut the overall argument.

Where this book falls short is in fulfilling its purpose of diving deeper into the implications of such randomness for human behavior at individual and societal levels; the author's sloppy treatment of human behavior is a recurring problem throughout the book. In particular, there are a few related broad issues that come up at various points through the book. The first is the question of how to reconcile the apparent randomness of daily events (including the phenomenon of regression to the mean) believed to be deterministic with the real phenomena of collective self-fulfilling prophecies (including emergent segregation of social groups to reinforce outcomes that are believed to be deterministic even if they are not, thereby reinforcing determinism in itself). The second is the treatment of things like superstitions as examples of self-fulfilling prophecies, even if the superstitions have no effects in their contents but may change mindsets enough to change outcomes. The author doesn't do a good job of addressing many of these issues throughout the book, and only partially acknowledges the power of self-fulfilling prophecies at the end of the book (in the tenth chapter); the author makes it seem like a slow & methodical build-up to a satisfying conclusion, but frankly, the discussion of these issues could have been a lot more clear & concise and could have come much sooner in the book. The discussion of superstition in particular is rife with condescension, as the author never acknowledges how superstitions may change mindsets & lead to self-fulfilling prophecies but instead summarily dismisses them as silly relics mostly of a bygone era, reinforced by statements about how science and religion were irreparably separated with the trial of Galileo with no nuanced discussion of how religious beliefs (even if not organized religious institutions per se, to the extent that was the case before Galileo) played a role in motivating scientific discoveries even after Galileo. Another example is how the author glibly dismisses many claims of clusters of environmentally-caused cancer; it may well be true that some cases are due to biased statistical analysis after the fact, but it doesn't really address why inequitable outcomes seem to occur so frequently in this context, and it doesn't do justice to the gravity of the problem. (UPDATE: I recognize that my argument against the author's treatment of the incidence of environmentally-caused cancer can easily be dismissed as an overly emotional reaction that is not justified by the statistics, so it is worth clarifying that further. My concern is that the statistical arguments that claim that environmentally-caused cancer is not really a problem, and that those who claim it is a problem only do so by drawing arbitrary boundaries after the fact to inflate apparent concentrations of carcinogens in specific areas, may themselves be riven with the same sorts of bias that are perpetuated in situations like machine learning determining the provision of health care, but are cast in a way that seems "neutral" and therefore "superior" to "emotionally-driven" arguments.) Furthermore, although there is discussion of both the failures of superficial statistical arguments in favor of DNA testing in the criminal justice system and of the way that Bayesian analysis can systematically codify learning of new information in terms of probabilities, there is little discussion of how these issues can combine in toxic ways to perpetuate existing societal biases under the veneer of formal Bayesian analysis (as occurs with machine learning now); I admit that I wouldn't have been thinking about this as much had I not read and reviewed the book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil, but similar examples were already available at the time that the book that I review in this post was being written. I really see an essential condescension and a lack of humility throughout the book in these discussions of human behavior, masked by the pithy & irreverent writing, that are at odds with the author's own calls for humility & deeper understanding.

There are other aspects of human behavior that this book fails to adequately capture; these may technically be beyond the scope of this book, but I think they are worth noting anyway, as they speak to larger problems with the ability of people (even those well-trained in STEM fields) to really understand probability theory. The second chapter goes over many examples of how, in the technical language of probability, given events \( A \) and \( B \), certain questions can be framed such that laypeople and professional specialists (particularly doctors & lawyers) fall into the trap of believing that \( \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap B) > \operatorname{Pr}(A) \) even though the opposite is mathematically always true. However, I can already see that the phrasing of many of those questions, particularly the way that events \( A \) & \( B \) are juxtaposed (especially if \( B \) is additional information that may be relevant to the assessment of \( A \)), may make people believe either that what should be interpreted as \( \operatorname{Pr}(A) \) is actually \( \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap \neg B) \), in which case \( \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap B) > \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap \neg B) \) could in fact be true, or that what should be interpreted as \( \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap B) \) is actually the conditional probability \( \operatorname{Pr}(A|B) \), in which case \( \operatorname{Pr}(A|B) > \operatorname{Pr}(A) \) could in fact be true. This speaks more to the way that natural human language is unsuited to the subtleties of the language of probability theory, yet rather than address these possibilities, the author again leaves the discussion there, implying disdain for people who are too stupid to know better. Another problem is that throughout the book, the author raises the question of how to determine whether a particular sequence of observations of outcomes for a process that may be random reflects a specific probability distribution model, but never clearly explains how to do this in practice, instead only giving hints about this through various examples. This is related to the question of why one may prefer an explanation based on probabilities than based on deterministic phenomena, particularly for small sample sizes. For this, I will give an example. Consider exactly 5 observations of an event, which has binary outcomes (either success or failure), for which no other observations are made, and for which in all of those 5 observations, success occurs every single time. Intuitively, laypeople might be inclined to believe that there is a deterministic cause of this, while if a probability theorist were to initially believe that this is consistent with a binomial distribution with \( (N, p) = (5, 0.6) \) but then later revise this to \( (N, p) = (5, 0.99) \), laypeople could reasonably wonder why this would be justified, and why the probability theorist refuses to believe in the possibility of some deterministic causal relationship. Of course, this is a contrived example, I understand why causation needs to be proved as an alternative to a null hypothesis, and I understand that probability distributions closer to uniform probabilities are favored as those that maximize entropy (which essentially means that subject to certain known constraints, the probability distribution that best reflects the state of ignorance about a system is closest to uniform), but the author does not properly explain these points. Finally, the broadest problem with this book is that the author only superficially acknowledges the issue that if every calculation in probability theory or statistics, whether of a certain event happening, a string of events being a true "hot streak", or a model fitting data correctly, is itself a probability, then the aforementioned disconnect of this language of probability from natural human language makes it difficult to translate probabilities into robust rules for deterministic (usually binary) decisions that laypeople must make; this is related to the idea that in game theory, a single person playing a single-shot game cannot play a mixed strategy, and the concept of a mixed strategy only makes sense in the context of observing a large ensemble of independent players, possibly playing repeatedly. Perhaps asking the author to address this problem is too much, but I still feel like such failures diminish the book in comparison to its hype.

Without hyping my own credentials, I admit that it is possible that my reaction to this book is more of a reflection of my greater experience with STEM, humanities, and social science fields and with science education/communication compared to when I was in high school. Furthermore, just as this book exhorts, I cannot be overcome by either positivity bias or negativity bias; it would only be fair to take the good & bad parts of this book together as appropriate, without believing that one outdoes or cancels the other. Given this, I can't really make a strong recommendation that readers should or should not read this book.

Book Review: "The Worldly Philosophers" by Robert L. Heilbroner

I've recently read the book The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner; this was a book that I got from a friend who moved away a few years ago, but never got around to reading until now. This book is essentially a survey of the lives & works of famous philosophers whose works & thoughts had fundamental impacts on the development of economics as a field, and who considered the general problems faced by & ultimate evolution of society to be within the purview of their grand theories. The preface gives some background regarding the writing of this book, the first chapter explains how economic philosophy can be especially dangerous as it has arguably much more immediate relevance to human society but much less rigorous testability than natural sciences, the second chapter explains why economics as a distinct discipline did not emerge until societal change in Europe (and its colonies in North America) had led to a state where the interconnections of goods, services, and money pervaded all aspects of life even for ordinary people (i.e. going far beyond the raising of stocks & bonds for the large colonial corporations like the Dutch East India Company, which had to deal with financial instruments only at the level of the national interest), the eleventh (final) chapter recapitulates the ideas of the book and explains that there may be no further grand theorists of "worldly philosophy" because the apparent inability of capitalism to effectively regulate itself (in the author's view, at the time of the publication of this edition in 1986) would mean all further development would have to come more from active political decisionmaking, and each chapter in between catalogs the lives & works of famous "worldly philosophers". A key feature of this book is that the historical context of each of these philosophers' lives is made clear, such that the development of those philosophies can be read as essentially a natural consequence of those circumstances; as examples, the optimism of Adam Smith is seen as coming from his observation of improved standards of living arising from the proliferation of many small factories, while the pessimism of Thomas Malthus & David Ricardo came from their observations of growing numbers of people living in abject poverty and in unsafe & overcrowded conditions without their living standards seeming to improve as a whole.

The book is written in a very engaging, accessible, and clear way. The details of the philosophers' lives make for a more interesting read, and they sometimes (though not always) even add further context for understanding how the mindsets behind their philosophies. Moreover, the author's contextualization of each philosophy in its historical place & time is combined with clear explanations of the more generally applicable features of those philosophies, so that it becomes clear whether certain aspects of some philosophies that are dependent on the historical contexts leading to their development might suggest that applying those philosophies today may be problematic. This is also combined with cogent & clear critical analysis of those philosophies in the present context by the author, as appropriate; perhaps there could have been a little more critical analysis of some of the assumptions of Karl Marx, and I felt like the author made John Maynard Keynes's analysis of the emergence of economic recessions from savings gluts seem unduly different from prior ideas that economic recessions are essentially mass panics, but these are ultimately minor points. (As "present" means 34 years ago, some of those analyses & predictions have obviously not aged well, but in fairness, I cannot hold that against the author, because none of those analyses suggest an arrogance on the part of the author in claiming that nothing of those analyses would change 34 years later.)

The explanations of the various philosophies aren't extremely deep, but they are deep enough to give readers an appreciation for their contexts & differences and to encourage readers to learn more. For instance, I was struck by realizing how similar my thoughts about economic policy are to those of John Stuart Mill, so I've been inspired to read more by & about him. As another example, I always felt too intimidated to read about Karl Marx, due to the high likelihood that what I would find online would be too inflammatory/partisan (as he is revered among socialists & communists and reviled among many other groups, especially in the US given the country's historically strong anticommunist stance); while I may be biased in my sensibilities from growing up in the US, I thought the author did a good job of treating Marx & his work in an evenhanded way, explicitly stating that Marx should be thought of as neither saint nor demon, and the same should be true of his work. I also thought that by the end of the book, the reasons for the author's choices of which philosophers to highlight became quite clear. For example, I wondered why Henry George wasn't discussed in a full chapter but only in a part, but then the author made clear that this is partly because Henry George's singular focus on land rents was overly narrow & simplified, and because Henry George, like other heterodox economists in the 19th century, was too uncritically revered by those who wanted to think about the deep implications of economics for society (as opposed to the narrow focuses on mathematical formalism & description of equilibrium that had come into favor among establishment orthodox economists at that time); the author's criticisms helped to solidify some of the instinctive reservations that I had but couldn't quite articulate about Henry George's claims that taxing only land & rents would solve everything, as it seemed intuitively appealing yet weirdly incomplete. As another example, I felt like the chapter on Joseph Schumpeter didn't seem to suggest any great impact that would justify his inclusion along with John Maynard Keynes or other philosophers, but the following (final) chapter made clear that the real novelty of Schumpeter's analysis was in predicting an end state for business owners/capitalists that was notably different from their beginning state, and using this to argue for socialism as an end state to capitalism for completely different reasons than what Marx argued. Perhaps it could be argued that the contributions of John von Neumann & John Nash to game theory merited further discussion, given the important application of game theory to international politics (particularly nuclear deterrence in the Cold War), but a counterargument would be that unlike those discussed in this book, they did not set forth grand economic philosophies describing society as a whole, nor did they broadly set out to describe the evolution or endpoint of capitalism.

Overall, I rather enjoyed reading this book. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in starting to learn about economic philosophies, as the engaging storytelling helps to leaven the philosophical parts that may seem drier to some readers.

Reflection: Starting a Shift to a New Career in Transportation Policy

This post is the second in a series of three posts about the end of my time as a PhD student in Princeton University (in this post henceforth referred to simply as "the university"). As a write this, I am still technically a PhD student enrolled full-time in the university, working on topics in nanophotonics & fluctuational electromagnetics. Next fall (assuming the current public health crisis abates to an extent that it is safe for me to do so — please note that I am not a public health expert or epidemiologist, so I am not making predictions in this regard), however, I will start a postdoctoral research position in the University of California Davis analyzing transportation policy, with a particular eye toward the effects of such current & future policies on the mobility and resulting socioeconomic opportunities for those who have been marginalized by current transportation systems, including people who are poor or have disabilities (like myself). This is a fairly drastic, and arguably surprising, change of career; I have told many friends and relatives about this, but not all of them, so I'd like to use this space to explain my thought process over the years leading up to this decision. Follow the jump to see more.

Reflection: A Week of Downward-Spiraling Public Health News Culminating in Unexpected Adjustments

Please note: this is about the current widespread disease outbreak that is dominating the news. I will not mention the name of this disease or other common words used to describe its spread, because for good reason, popular search engines are cracking down on articles and videos other than those from official public health agencies and related well-established organizations to stop the spread of misinformation. I have no background in epidemiology or public health. This post is merely my musings about the last week, and the implications for my near-future plans. Please consult public health agencies and other governmental agencies for guidance regarding responses to this crisis.

This post is the first in a series of three posts about the end of my time as a PhD student in Princeton University (in this post henceforth referred to simply as "the university"). As a write this, I am still technically a PhD student enrolled full-time in the university. The second and third posts will be somewhat more traditional reflections for the end of my time, but this first one has been precipitated by the current public health crisis. Follow the jump to see more; it is effectively a chronological history of the developments of this crisis from my very narrow perspective, and my own (in hindsight, arguably delusional) reactions to these developments.

Book Review: "Michael Polanyi" by Mark T. Mitchell

I've recently read the book Michael Polanyi by Mark T. Mitchell. (As an aside, it may be worth noting that some listings of this book carry the subtitle The Art of Knowing, but the usage of this subtitle within the copy of the book I got was inconsistent.) The book gives a relatively brief summary of the life and times of the physical chemist-turned-economist/philosopher Michael Polanyi in the first chapter, and then goes into a little more detail about his philosophies on economics, politics, science, morality, knowledge, religion, and other things in the second through fourth chapters, concluding in the fifth chapter with a comparison of his philosophical views to those of his contemporaries along with a little discussion about the implications of Polanyi's views for the present day.

The book is fairly short, well-written, and engaging even for a layperson like myself. The overview of Polanyi's life is quite interesting, and as I am considering the next steps for my own career (more on that in a future post), I was particularly taken by the story of Polanyi's career change so late in life. The discussion of his philosophy avoids unexplained jargon and very heavy technical arguments, instead clearly laying things out in simple terms & examples, and I was surprised (mainly as I was previously unacquainted with Polanyi's work per se, even though I have already read works about some of the people who influenced him and whom he may have influenced) to see myself having come to similar conclusions as Polanyi even before reading this book. With respect to the latter point, though, I do have a few criticisms, which are attributable in parts to Polanyi or to the author of this book. For one, the appeals to common sense & simple examples lead to the situation where the defense of Polanyi's theory of tacit knowledge against charges of subjectivism or circularity (i.e. begging the question) isn't necessarily as tightly constructed or satisfying as possible; some of this comes from Polanyi's own quotes, while the remainder comes from the author (who seems to agree with and follow Polanyi's philosophy). For another, some of Polanyi's defenses of Christianity and critiques of evolutionary theory, with respect to their implications for constructing meaning out of human existence, aren't clear as to how broadly they should be applied in his more general framework, and it isn't clear whether this very opacity is in itself the fault of Polanyi versus the author of this book. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a nontechnical clear read about a sometimes-overlooked figure in Western philosophy of the 20th century. Follow the jump to read more detailed summaries per chapter and about my thoughts regarding the book as well as Polanyi's philosophy (warning: it may be quite roughly organized).

My Time at the STEPS+ 2019 Fall Symposium

Last week, I attended the STEPS+ 2019 Fall Symposium, hosted at UC Davis. (I'll have more details about the broader reasons for the trip in an upcoming post). It was a nice set of talks and open discussions about energy issues in transportation, as well as a good opportunity for professional networking. Much of the discussion was focused on California because its large geographic & demographic size, the fact that its own metropolitan areas have minimal spillover into other states and vice versa, and the clear separation of powers between the state and local governments means that it can effectively operate like an autonomous country in miniature (evidenced also by its own large population and economic output). That said, the diverse range of political interests, geographic features, and climates in the state make it to some extent a microcosm of what would need to happen at the national level too with respect to combating climate change, decarbonizing the economy, and making transportation generally more sustainable. Thus, although my interests tend more toward the direct relationship between transportation and issues of socioeconomic equity, there are strong indirect relationships through energy and climate issues too, so it was really interesting to learn about these, to learn more about communication between researchers and policymakers, and to see what models exist for working toward greater sustainability in transportation.

Book Review: "Capitalism Without Capital" by Jonathan Haskel & Stian Westlake

I've recently read the book "Capitalism Without Capital" by Jonathan Haskel & Stian Westlake. I found out about this book from a reading list by Bill Gates that was circulated by various media outlets online, which suggested that this book would have a lot to say about the currently relevant issue of people's personal data held by large online companies like Facebook & Google. This turned out to not be the case, as there was only a single brief mention of this point later in the book. Instead, this book is a discussion about how companies in many developed countries rely more on intangible assets than tangible assets, how associated trends can explain many issues faced by societies in those countries today, and why governments need to take notice of these trends. The authors start by carefully defining their notions of investments & assets, along with tangibility (essentially physical goods that can be valued & traded relatively easily) versus intangibility (things like institutions, rules, know-how, intellectual property, and social relationships that are much harder to quantify & trade), and then discuss why the values of intangible assets are harder to measure and how various econometric organizations are trying to improve this situation. They then describe their central thesis, which is that intangible assets have much greater scalability, sunk costs, spillover effects, and synergistic effects compared to tangible assets, and this leads to qualitatively different economic & political outcomes. This leads to discussion of specific points, including the role of intangible assets in secular stagnation (low business investment levels despite low interest rates) as well as income & wealth inequality, the issues associated with creating infrastructure for as well as financing investment in intangible assets, the role of intangible assets in promoting a cult of management and the greater role of management in turn as intangible assets become more important, and the questions governments will have to face with respect to managing this growth in intangible assets.

I thought this book was meant for lay readers, but it seems more meant for policymakers, entrepreneurs, and the like, and it is a bit dense. Nonetheless, it is quite well-written, and I enjoyed gaining more perspective about these aspects of the economy that I wouldn't have consciously considered otherwise. I particularly appreciated the summaries at the end of each chapter, as the authors seemed to implicitly acknowledge the density of information in their book and wanted to refresh readers' minds after going through each chapter. Moreover, I really liked the fact that the authors were more interested in laying out the facts as they interpreted them instead of making bold, sweeping proclamations about the generality of their analysis: they really tried to avoid the golden hammer fallacy of trying to contort their explanation to fit every possible problem. As a particular example, one of the features of intangible goods being synergy would seem to suggest that as synergistic/agglomeration effects are correlated with dense urban development, then policymakers should promote dense urban development to promote the formation of synergy/agglomeration clusters and that this should be a guaranteed way of growing a local economy; however, the authors take pains to mention at multiple points in the book that the empirical evidence for this is sparse in general, and where it does exist, the results are mixed, thereby providing a testable & falsifiable scenario that leads to a failure to reject the null hypothesis. As another example, both this book and the book Radical Markets by Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl (which I have reviewed here) discuss Friedrich Hayek's anecdote of pencil-making to illustrate how markets efficiently communicate information via prices, but while the authors of the other book uncritically praise and extend that notion, the authors of this book are quick to show how in practice, gathering price & other information as well as conducting bargaining can be quite costly, which is how Ronald Coase concluded that people organize into firms with hierarchies in order to lessen these costs and uncertainties. Also, in the chapter about what governments should consider doing, the authors explicitly state that they are not trying to suggest the existence of quick fixes, but are instead laying out the challenges in full and suggesting possible general approaches that governments can tailor to their specific needs. Overall, I would need to read a lot more to more seriously evaluate the claims in the book, so I wouldn't be able to recommend this to lay readers, but specialists in the field may find this book interesting & thought-provoking.

My Time at the 2019 SmartDrivingCar Summit

Last week, I attended the 2019 SmartDrivingCar Summit, hosted in Princeton University by ORFE professor Alain Kornhauser. As someone with a physical disability, I've become excited of late about the possibilities that autonomous vehicles could offer people like myself as well as older people or people with cognitive disabilities, blindness, or even those without disabilities but live in poverty, while also wondering about the socioeconomic implications for such people with respect to the development of autonomous vehicles and associated systems in practice. Given this, I've been in conversation with Prof. Kornhauser about these issues for several weeks, and desirous of learning more & meeting people in the field, I attended the conference.

Laudably, the conference had the overall theme of prioritizing development of autonomous vehicle systems to serve the needs of those in marginalized groups (where marginalization could be socioeconomic or through disability). As I have been reading about some predictions about socioeconomic impacts for the last few months, presentations touching upon those aspects felt more familiar to me, but it was really interesting to also see the technical developments in this field, current innovations in transportation network development for elderly & disabled people, and psychological aspects to bear in mind with respect to popular acceptance of autonomous vehicles. For instance, with respect to the last point, it didn't really occur to me that some people in marginalized communities may feel a sense of social belonging with others at public transit stops as they are designed now and may feel more socially isolated in small autonomous vehicles.

The overarching concern at the conference was about the funding pressures being acutely felt following the incident of an Uber autonomous vehicle killing a pedestrian in Arizona last year, along with the general failure of fully autonomous systems to materialize at this time despite predictions from 3-5 years ago that it would happen now. As a result, the tone of the conference felt more measured than some of the hype from that time might have suggested, yet there was an overall sense of optimism and motivation to do more work toward solving these problems. Even if fully autonomous cars fail to materialize, whether the problems are technical (i.e. they just won't work unsupervised) versus political (i.e. the number of accidents in testing becomes unacceptably high), I am personally optimistic about the possibility of working toward solving some socioeconomic inequities in transportation even with current innovations. Overall, I really enjoyed learning more and meeting new people, and am hoping to get more involved in this field in the future.

Book Review: "Radical Markets" by Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl

I've recently read the book "Radical Markets" by Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl. I should disclose that I came to know of this book upon attending a talk and Q&A session on campus by the latter author about this book, and that I was able to ask a question during that time (though as I point out later, I didn't find the answer to be so satisfactory). In any case, the topic intrigued me. This book is essentially a vision for a radical reformation of society, starting in the West but ultimately spreading through the world, such that concentrations of power are systematically broken and a level playing field is quickly approached. The two key novel contributions of this work are the notion of a common ownership self-assessed tax (COST), which aims to revolutionize notions of ownership by abolishing property rights extending to perpetuity and replacing them with auctions for goods & capital, and quadratic voting (QV), which aims to replace the principle of one-person-one-vote with voting credits such that individuals can vote on issues or candidates (for or against) in proportion to their perceived importance while being prevented from unduly swinging elections. There are also other issues discussed, such as immigration, institutional investment, and the value of digital data, all in the context of concentrations of power. It is worth pointing out that though there are many arguments that extend to Canada, the UK, other European countries, Japan, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, most of the arguments are made in the context of the US.

I will leave a detailed critique after the jump, and summarize my thoughts here. I found the ideas presented in the book rather intriguing and certainly novel. However, the main flaw of the book in my view is that the authors too often like to present their ideas at a very broad conceptual (macroscopic) level while simultaneously presenting examples justifying these concepts at a very granular (microscopic) level. The missing elements are the granular implementations of their broad concepts as well as the implications of the granular examples interacting on a larger scale; as a result, particularly for the introduction of the COST ideas, the claims must be taken essentially on faith, as the authors are quite glib about the importance of implementation details to the overall path of society if their ideas were to be followed. Given this, there are many reasons to remain skeptical about these ideas. This is also evident in the writing style too, in that my need to reread parts of certain chapters multiple times, while in part because these ideas are certainly not trivial, was mostly because of these sorts of logical leaps to conclusions that were not obvious, and many times, these conclusions remained non-obvious even after multiple reads through; the writing is otherwise engaging and fun to read, but I could tell that the authors were at many points getting swept up in their own ideas at the expense of clarity for readers. Overall, I recommend this book because the ideas are intriguing and I do want to see these ideas fleshed out better, but I would not recommend this book in the sense of wanting to preach these ideas myself. Follow the jump to see more detailed discussion about this book.

Book Review: "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod

I've recently read the book The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. (Note: this is somewhat of a technical book, so I will dive right into the review with jargon, with more on this point at the end of the review.) It's a primer on results from that time showing how in an iterated prisoners' dilemma, tit-for-tat strategies are remarkably robust for their combination of simplicity, clarity, tendency toward cooperation and forgiveness, and prompt & effective retaliation when needed, and that such strategies can effectively propagate environments even where other strategies are in place, provided that those who play the tit-for-tat strategies can find & cluster around each other to interact often enough, and provided that the value each player places on the next round compared to a given round in an iterated game is not too small. The author also uses examples from trench warfare in World War I, biological evolution, and international trade policy to illustrate the seeming universality of the principles of the prisoners' dilemma and its iterated variant.

Although this book was written in the 1980s, making it a little dated in terms of the complexity of models that could be tested on computers and the formalism of game theory itself, it was great to see the author anticipate a lot of more recent developments by discussing the importance of clustering, stereotypes, reputation, regulations, et cetera. Additionally, while the author stresses that cooperation can take place even among egotistical (non-altruistic) or antagonistic individuals in the absence of central authority, the author does take care to convey the nuance that this is not always a good thing per se, rather than taking the utopic view of libertarian philosophy; such cooperation is detrimental to the public at large in situations like economic collusion in an oligopoly, while the incentives to cooperate or not change such that government (or other societal) intervention is needed to do things like collect taxes & deter evaders to fund public goods, correct historical (and present) racist marginalization of minority groups, mediating conflicts among heterogeneous populations in large cities, et cetera. It was also cool for me to understand that any iterated game where the players are unsure of when the game will end but others controlling the game know it will end after a finite number of rounds can be rewritten as a similar game where the players believe the repetition will be infinite but with a different discount factor. My only minor complaints are that while the author does acknowledge that changing parameters of a social interaction can change the prisoners' dilemma into a different sort of game altogether, it would have been nice to see a more nuanced discussion of the degree to which the prisoners' dilemma is really a universal feature of human interactions as opposed to being culture-specific, given its seeming universality in other domains, and that the author rather glibly claims that sequential versus simultaneous play by players in each round of an iterated prisoners' dilemma doesn't make much of a difference, which I find suspicious in the absence of further explanation/context in the book itself. Overall, I enjoyed reading this and could read it quickly because of my minor in economics in college & interest in the subjects of economics, game theory, and network science, so it may be appropriate to others with similar interests & backgrounds as myself; it is a fairly technical book, so it may not be appropriate to general readers without this background, while specialists in the fields of evolution, game theory, or complexity science may find this book to be too dated.

Book Review: "The Half Has Never Been Told" by Edward Baptist

I've recently been able to read the book The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist. It is a thorough account of the history of chattel slavery in the present-day US from the 17th century through the Civil War. The main point of the book is to challenge three common assumptions in prevailing historical narratives of slavery, namely that its incompatibilities with liberal democracy in the 1850s were points of universal agreement in the North at that time and drove the Civil War, that its worst aspects were its denial of civil liberties & rights to black people, and that it was bound to fail eventually for being an inefficient economic system. The author counters this, marshaling numerous statistics from that time and corroborating analyses too, to show that slavery was in fact an efficient and dynamic economic system that went hand-in-hand with capitalism and national expansion, and further uses the stories of individual slaves (often left out of conventional historical narratives) on top of the available statistics to show the violence and brutality inherent in slavery as extending far beyond the mere denial of rights (as that denial of rights remained even in the Jim Crow era succeeding slavery).

The facts are presented in a very straightforward manner, and the narrative structure is remarkably coherent and engaging; this makes the emotionally weight of the book all the more apparent. I was particularly surprised to see not just how much of financial speculation familiar to modern readers was present with respect to the products of slavery in the 19th century, but particularly to see that even the slicing and dicing of securities that was practiced on subprime mortgages leading up to the 2008 financial crisis & recession were practiced almost identically with securities representing fractions of average slave labor products in the 1830s (even leading to financial panics then too). Moreover, while I was abstractly aware of the lack of happy endings for most slaves and the conditions of enslavement that would prevent successful revolts or emancipation, the reality of this didn't truly hit me until reading this book, seeing so many stories of slaves whose histories were obscured after a final sale or flogging. It was also quite interesting (and depressing) to see just how much slavery and the desire to maintain unity across the country drove the national political & economic conversations right up until the Civil War, and how much the North economically depended on the products of slavery until they started getting many more immigrants and gaining political power in turn; that discussion really puts into perspective just how simple lies the narratives of the Civil War being "for states' rights" or "of Northern aggression" were. The content is of course depressing to read, but that only enhances its importance; I really believe that this should be taught in schools & colleges to remove a lot of the myths and misinformation about slavery that are promulgated in schools throughout the country, and for that reason, I certainly recommend this book to anyone (though one must be mentally prepared to read about the horrors described).

Book Review: "Narconomics" by Tom Wainwright

I've recently read the book Narconomics by Tom Wainwright. It's an exposition into the economics of Latin American drug cartels, looking at them as businesses rather than mysterious criminal entities. In particular, it considers the competition versus monopolistic/monopsonistic behavior on the demand- & supply-sides, issues of global operations and outsourcing, diversification in products, cartel hierarchies versus franchising, public relations versus employee incompetence, and so on. Of course, as the drugs discussed in this book are illegal for the most part, there are other issues of dealing with the police and the government, whether through hiding, bribery, or warfare, and with enforcing things like non-compete agreements and franchise territories through violent means in the absence of legal recognition (where a court system could otherwise peacefully mediate such disputes). The aim of this book is to step back from the emotionally charged rhetoric of the "war on drugs" by seeing them in terms similar to legitimate businesses, and in doing so defeat the scourges of the illegal drug trade in the long-run through economically-minded legislation rather than ineffective brute force.

The book is not too long, quite accessible, well-written, and engaging to anyone with a high school-level understanding of microeconomics and an interest in issues surrounding illegal drugs. There are a few issues I have with the book though. One is that while the focus is clearly on Latin America, I would have liked to see at least some parallel discussion about the flow of drugs from Central/South Asia (particularly Afghanistan) to Europe and the economics therein, as that is mentioned a few times without further details. Another is that the last numbered chapter discusses legalization exclusively in the context of marijuana/cannabis, even though there is a discussion about the much narrower margin between safe and fatal doses for other drugs (especially heroin) compared to cannabis, which then raises questions about whether the legalization of marijuana is really meant to be a model for legalization/regulation of other currently illegal harder drugs; the epilogue addresses this point adequately with more nuance, but the structure of the final chapter still seems subpar for that reason. Finally, my biggest issue regards the discussions of how the operations of drug cartels in Latin America are influenced by how they can compete with the governmental "monopoly" on force due to unresponsive, complicit, corrupt, or ineffectual governments, and how cartels can compete with other economic opportunities through wages, protection, and other benefits. In particular, my concern is that the book acknowledges how legalization of drugs often economically incentivizes supply-side consolidation (as being outlawed necessarily limits how large drug operations can grow before attracting government attention), but in conjunction with other trends like offshoring of drug production too, it isn't clear how people in poorer Central American countries will further benefit; while the reduction in violence that would almost surely accompany restricted legalization of drugs is certainly a laudable goal, it is unclear whether the resulting economic opportunities, given the continuing poor governance and paucity of other good economic opportunities there, will really work to better the lives of those people, or whether the situation will devolve into large drug companies bullying small countries as in the banana republics of several decades ago (as discussed in the book) or tobacco or fast food companies doing the same to such countries today. In light of that, while the suggestions made in the book for improving outcomes of drug policy do seem like they would certainly help to some extent, I can't help but feel that the title of the epilogue, that economists make the best police officers, smacks of hubris. Apart from those issues, I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the subject.

Book Review: "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis

I was recently able to read The Big Short by Michael Lewis. Even though there were quite a few details that went over my head, it's an interesting, compelling story about a few specific people who essentially shorted (in other words, bet against) the entire US financial system and ended up "winning" in the 2008 financial crisis. I knew the basic details of how mortgage-backed securities were packaged and repackaged to get high ratings from well-known agencies, even though the underlying instruments were high-risk mortgages given unscrupulously to poor people who were likely to default; that said, I found incredible just how much fraud was being perpetrated, like laundering credit scores based on essentially nothing, or ripping off low-income people with false or misleading interest rates. Also, many financial models seemed to assume no underlying information and total lack of correlation among various investments, assets, or liabilities, even this was obviously untrue: subprime mortgages bundled into financial instruments were highly correlated by underlying economic indicators, and companies' fortunes could often be predicted much more accurately even with publicly-available information (like with Capital One's fortunes depending on regulatory judgments against it), yet these models often still naïvely and nonsensically assumed Gaussian distributions for such events.

Coupled with that ignorance of information in financial modeling seemed to be an intentional lack of transparency in the market for these complex securities and other financial instruments. Typically, enlarging a risk pool would seem to produce better outcomes throughout the market, but here, the mirror image of that was happening: more and more people were being exposed to risk, and that risk was being multiplied based off of essentially nothing tangible (often simply camouflaged through clever names as comprising diversified assets), yet large Wall Street firms were making money off of that for years before the whole system collapsed. On a related note, some people have claimed that short-sellers are beneficial to the market by signaling that certain trading practices should stop as they are too risky, yet as far as I can tell, this only works in an idealized world where information and people's decisions are transparent to everyone, whereas the whole point is that the short-sellers and those selling risky financial instruments were all trying to one-up each other in a cloud of opacity and obfuscation so that they could make their big money (which is what really happened).

Overall, the book is quite engaging and well-written. As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of subtleties, nuances, and jargon that went over my head, but the narrative and salient points are clear enough to a layperson; if anything, the technicalities simply add to the authentic feel of what one of those short-sellers must have been thinking during those years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. It is important to note that the focus of this book is the financial crisis and the years leading up to it, from the perspective of the finance industry/Wall Street; it does not really touch upon the broader economic trends in the US leading up to that point (except for specific trends that tie into the discussions of specific mortgage-backed financial instruments), and it does not discuss the recession per se. With that in mind, I'd recommend this to anyone who is interested in the subject.

Book Review: "Red Notice" by Bill Browder

Recently, I was able to read the book Red Notice by Bill Browder. It is a detailed exposition of his career in finance, specifically his interests and investments in Russia (as well as other parts of Eastern Europe earlier in his career). He discusses how he and his business partners were able to find so many amazing investment opportunities in Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR just because few other people had seriously considered those countries for investment. This leads to his company being the victim of fraud perpetrated by corrupt government officials and oligarchs in Russia, and once his business partners and lawyers come under threat from governmental and extrajudicial shakedowns, he turns his focus away from his investment company and toward the broader issue of human rights abuses in Russia, thereby going from a friend to an enemy of Vladimir Putin.

The book, though it may seem long due to the page count, is a fast-paced, gripping tale of intrigue and suspense, reading so much like a James Bond-esque spy thriller novel that it is easy to forget that this is all a true story. It was also enjoyable for me to read this because I hadn't really given much thought to the issues of economic inequality, oligarchy, and investment in Russia after the Cold War, and I certainly hadn't considered it from the perspective of a financier who could make both friends and enemies in high places.

What's more interesting to me is to consider that at the beginning of his career (as the story is mostly a chronological account of his career), his actions are essentially amoral, being driven primarily by greed; his exposure of the fraudulent practices of corrupt government officials and oligarchs in Russia was driven not by high-minded morality but by his desire to ensure the success of his company and to do right by his investors/business partners who were counting on him. In a sense, there may have been a weird tribal morality that one could associate with his close kinship with his business partners and his initial desire to push forward with exposing such corruption despite the high personal and business risks of doing so. This is further justified by considering that his focus turns away from his company and toward broader issues of human rights abuses when his business partners and lawyers start becoming targets of extrajudicial shakedowns, most notably including Sergei Magnitsky, whose cruel and inhuman torture and neglect before even going to trial (which culminated in the insane posthumous show-trial of Magnitsky in Russia) made him a cause célèbre in the US and EU, leading to the passing of laws recognizing his work and financially sanctioning those in Russia involved in his torture and murder.

That said, he shows himself throughout the book as believing in the ideals of the rule of law and justice while simultaneously understanding that these are hard to come by in Russia, and as a result, he portrays himself as having some moral core that overrides business and personal considerations as his friends come in danger; it is only his initial naïveté about Putin that makes him initially think of Putin as an ally in the crusade against the oligarchs, and these illusions are shattered quickly enough when Putin co-opts the remaining oligarchs and enriches himself in the process. By contrast, he shows the oligarchs to be thoroughly corrupt in their quest for material enrichment and their ability to shamelessly lie, cheat, steal, and hurt people to that end; they operate at a totally different level of amorality. Of course, this depiction is his own, so it's not surprising that it would elevate his own moral standing, potentially at the expense of others, and the same can be applied, for example, to his rather negative portrayal of John Kerry as desperate to hang onto as well as enhance his existing power; with that in mind, his story seems somewhat more credible to me given the independent validation by all of the different people and news organizations of his accounts of Russia. It's worth noting too that the verb "corrupt" comes from the Latin word meaning "break from within", and can also mean "rot" or "spoil". In this case, the oligarchs may have some thin veneer of seeming morality (if that), but this is quickly eaten away by having a lot of money and power, revealing only the atavistic amoral lizard brain at the inner core; by contrast, the author seems to maintain some moral core throughout the story, and while he is initially motivated by amoral greed at a surface level, once things hit him in a deeply personal level, that surface is stripped off (though again, it is necessary to bear in mind that this portrayal is the author's own). Overall, this book is a very interesting and intriguing read, and I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone.

Book Review: "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage

I recently read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. It's a brief history about the technical development of the telegraph, developments in telegraph operations, its uses, its rise, and its eventual decline. It particularly goes into the various ways that optical and then electrical telegraph systems were developed by different independent inventors, the difficulties in laying cables for long-distance telegraphy, and the ramifications of the telegraph for business, politics, military actions, newspapers, and day-to-day communications among ordinary people (despite the usual hype of that time about how instant communication would bring people together and effect world peace), comparing these issues to the issues people care about with regard to the Internet, given their similar network structures (though do note that this book was written in the late 1990s, so the author couldn't have even imagined things like Google, Facebook, or Twitter at that time). It's a short book that is a fairly engaging and fast-paced read throughout, so I'd recommend it; my only minor complaint is that the discussion of messaging through pneumatic tubes, while certainly relevant to the chronological history of the telegraph, seems to be a bit of a distraction from the main point of how relatable the 19th century telegraph system would be to users of today's Internet. Follow the jump to see a few more points about the book.

Book Review: "Why Information Grows" by Cesar Hidalgo

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may be wondering why book reviews have made a return after a 6-year absence. The simple reason is that during my undergraduate and beginning graduate studies, most of my time was consumed with classes, and I didn't have many opportunities to sit down and read books that I enjoyed for great lengths of time. Now that I have passed my general examination and am doing research full-time, though, my weekends are much more free, so I can read and review for pleasure again. Some of these books are from collections/series (like the previous few that I have reviewed here, from the Issues of Our Time series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), while others (like this one) are from the reading list of Zach Weinersmith (author of the webcomic SMBC, which I read frequently).

The latest book that I have read is Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo. It basically goes into an easy-to-understand version of the technical (statistical) definition of information, illustrating with many examples how "information" does not imply "meaning", but that information is a much more fundamental physical concept than simply the ideas of which people can conceive (i.e. metacognition), emerging at many different levels in nature. Information requires energy to occur, solids to be preserved, and computation to propagate and have an influence on its environment, and it is a fundamentally out-of-equilibrium phenomenon. The author then applies this understanding of information to further understand how information occurs in human societies, and how the primary distinction between humans and other animals (or, in other words, "what makes us human") is that we can consciously crystallize and realize information into physical objects instead of simply reacting to the world around us. That said, humans need to form networks at various levels to be able to transmit knowledge and knowhow and thereby realize more complex forms of information, and this transmission is imperfect and not always as efficient as might be assumed from classic textbook models of market dynamics; this can explain a lot of the economic inequalities seen on a global scale.

The book itself is decently written; I think the writing becomes better and more engaging toward the middle and end, whereas the beginning seems rather trite. Additionally, some mention is made of how bureaucratic institutions are far less efficient than markets or networked structures built on trust, yet I would have liked to see a fuller discussion of the similarities and differences of the network structures of bureaucracies versus markets to better contextualize why they operate differently. Finally, I did like the quantitative analysis near the end of the text (along with numerous references to the author's more quantitative The Atlas of Economic Complexity, coauthored with several others) with regard to the correlations between the complexity of a country's economy and its level of economic development, but I would have liked to see a discussion of whether this model of economic complexity is more predictive than more traditional economic explanations. Overall, I do appreciate the pulling together of ideas from fields that used to be disparate, and I think that most of the book is written at a level that an interested layperson can appreciate.

Book Reviews: "Modern Liberty" by Charles Fried & "Development as Freedom" by Amartya Sen

I recently finished reading the books Modern Liberty by Charles Fried, and Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen. The first was part of the "Issues of Our Time" series, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., of which Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele (which I recently reviewed) is also a part; the second was one I chose as a comparison book mentioned in a review for the first on Amazon. Both deal with liberty and freedom, but in rather different ways. Below are my brief, decidedly nonspecialist thoughts on these books (content and style). After the jump will be some musings about issues related to these books. I am not a philosopher, nor am I an economist or sociologist, so many of the things that I say will probably be wrong or inconsistent; please feel free to point out issues in the comments below.

The book by Fried is a detailed defense of what appears (to my untrained eye) to be a centrist libertarian conception of liberty. The author essentially posits that human actions, and therefore the liberty to do so, are essentially individual in origin, so individual liberty should be held paramount, and can be taken to exist even in the absence of the state. He acknowledges the legitimacy of the state to tax and spend (even when the taxation is progressive), but argues that people should keep in mind that the state can simultaneously be the best friend and worst enemy of liberty. Additionally, he argues for equal application of the law as much as possible, and for the state to not interfere with people's choices when such interference would reduce choices that they would otherwise have no problem making, especially when those choices do not directly harm others in a criminal manner, focusing on three examples in particular throughout the book. With this in mind, he argues that the state should discourage certain behaviors through taxation rather than through heavy-handed direct intervention, and that stability in the laws and tax systems enforced is the least bad thing that the state can do with respect to liberty. Though I've focused specifically in pointing out things related to the state, he focuses on more abstract philosophical notions of liberty while simultaneously bringing the reader's attention to more mundane matters such as work, market transactions, and even sexual intercourse to better illustrate these points.

The book itself is fairly short, and moves along reasonably quickly (though I admit that I did get lost in some of the finer philosophical points). When introducing each justification for its conception of liberty, it also introduces each common criticism of that justification, and tackles almost every criticism head-on, without fear. There are quite a few things that I don't agree with about the ideas in the book. The overarching difference that I have is that this conception of liberty focuses on its origin within individuals, whereas I see the manifestation of liberty as being more dependent on societal contexts. An example of this would be in his contention that things like language, music, and culture originate within individuals; I would posit that these things would be meaningless for a single human in vacuum without any human contact, and it is only contact (and the history of such contact) with other humans that gives these things meaning. This is what I see as further leading to the author's general neglect of the consequences of liberty, choosing only to talk about the origins and processes of liberty; while I can see that this is philosophically consistent with the axiomatic treatment of the individual origin of liberty (and this also seems to be consistent with the desire for a static, predictable state due to its focus only on the unchanging processes of liberty, though I wouldn't agree with that either), the biggest issue that I have is that the author brings up the problem of the homeless person who has liberty but cannot make use of it if all property in that person's area is privately owned (and would therefore lead to the homeless person being kicked off of that property), but dances around this issue without really addressing it in a satisfactory way. With all of that said, I did enjoy reading this book overall, as it got me to think about the fundamental origins and processes of liberty in a new way, because before that, I was really only thinking about its manifestations/consequences.

The book by Sen is a longer exposition into how economic and political freedoms have to go hand-in-hand if they are to both be meaningful, and how human development is part and parcel of both. The author goes into how while utilitarian consequential formulations and libertarian process formulations of liberty are both important, both must be taken together instead of taking one or the other for liberty to be meaningful in the context of economics or politics. He further discusses how measures of economic development based solely on income or GDP/GNP per capita are quite flawed, so more nuanced, granular metrics are required, based on how different people's "functions" and "capabilities" operate, are fulfilled, and can be altered. Ultimately, he demonstrates that free markets and economic liberty, in conjunction with institutional corrections for certain glaring inequalities in capabilities, would allow the greatest human development leading to the greatest freedom.

Reading this book made me realize that I had intuitions for many ideas that the author clearly put into words (so I guess for now my lay economic views have a lot in common with those of Amartya Sen); in particular, I was already thinking about how Fried's neglect of the consequences of liberty made his treatment somewhat incomplete, and how humans being social animals means that the circumstances of one's political and economic existence cannot be ignored when considering the meaning of liberty, even before picking up Sen's book. However, there are a couple of issues that I have with this book. One is that there are several times where he repeats a point overly much. I don't mean that he just just repeats few words over the course of the book: I mean that he sometimes repeats entire multi-paragraph passages for no good reason, so the book could be a lot more terse and concise than it is. The other is that he argues that loss of income can affect a person mentally and physiologically in more lasting ways than simply by loss of purchasing power, especially if that person is ill, disabled, or so on, so he argues that specific institutional safety nets (presumably like social security, food stamps, and so on) and not simply lump-sum transfers of money (or increases in income) are necessary for countering poverty and promoting human development. I'd argue instead that if he can say that loss of income (and not just low income) is enough to push people into that downward spiral, then it would stand to reason that providing a strong enough guaranteed safety net through a simple money transfer (essentially, a minimum income, which I will discuss farther below) should be sufficient to prevent that, while simultaneously giving people the choice as independent agents to spend it as they like. Finally, at vary points, he promises to discuss how lessons from development in underdeveloped countries can be applied to the development of marginalized groups in more developed countries, yet as far as I could tell, that promise was never satisfactorily fulfilled. (Also, as a minor quibble: he makes reference to Madhavacharya having catalogued various schools of "Hindu" thought, including Buddhism, Jainism, and various atheist schools of thought, while calling him a Vaishnavite. A simple Wikipedia search shows that this Madhavacharya was a follower of Advaita philosophy, and was a separate person who was born only in the last few years of the life of the Dvaita founder Madhvacharya. It seems odd that Sen, who seems familiar with the "atheistic schools of Hinduism" catalogued by the later Madhavacharya, would make this error, so perhaps this was an oversight by the editor, or maybe the distinction between the two only became clear with scholarship after the publication of this book.)

In the Amazon review that I read, it seemed like these two books would oppose each other, but I would instead posit that they complement each other nicely. That brings me to the end of the review. Follow the jump to see some further thoughts on minimum income and related things that have been bouncing around in my head of late.

Stuff in Between Monopoly and Competition

It has been a while since I've ranted about an economics article, but there was one by Peter Thiel (cofounder of PayPal and Palantir) in the Wall Street Journal that caught my eye, so it is the subject of this post. In it, he argues that monopolies are not always the bad entities that people make them out to be. In particular, he argues that Google's dominance in the search market has allowed it to expand to other markets such as advertising, robotics, and phones, and in all of those it is far from a dominant market player. He also argues that firms in perfectly competitive markets are too caught up with staying afloat to be able to innovate in any meaningful way, so real innovation can only come from firms with dominant market positions (such that they have money to gamble on such an innovation). Follow the jump to see my reaction to this.