I just finished this. Holy shit. Please go read it. We’ll talk after you’re done, which will be about three hours from now.
Author: stevereads
It is well past the point where I need to describe what this book is about. So maybe it’s just worth noting that, even after I’ve been steeped for my whole life in a culture that reveres Smith as a god, there was still room to be surprised by how far ahead of its time [book: The Wealth of Nations] is. It still holds lessons on the power of institutions, on trade policy, and on why nations succeed or fail. Indeed, despite its title, I think we’ve become accustomed to thinking of Smith’s book as a mere celebration of capitalism. But no, it’s really about what it says it’s about: how nations become and remain wealthy. This includes long digressions about, say, the pernicious influence of religious education. But it also contains lots of nitty-gritty about the folly of trade restrictions and a million other things besides.
If your schooling was at all like mine, you’ve heard that [book: TWoN] was an attack on “mercantilism”, which has always been accompanied by the only use of the word “specie” that you’re likely to hear in your life. The doctrine is that a nation is wealthy or poor depending upon how many or few pieces of gold it has; this doctrine, in turn, leads to policies that aim to maximize exports (which would send, say, corn out of the country in exchange for gold coming in) and minimize imports. But this fetishization of gold and silver confuses the map with the terrain. The ultimate wealth of a society doesn’t come from how many coins it has on hand; wealth comes from the productive labor of its workers. Smith adopts the simplification — which maybe was appropriate in its time — that an hour of labor is a fungible commodity, which over all time is worth the amount of food necessary for the worker’s survival (and no more than his survival). So any measure which increases the cost of feeding the worker — like restricting corn imports to keep gold within a country’s borders — is going to increase the *real* cost of that labor, even if it’s decreasing the *nominal* cost.
That was the most surprising piece of [book: The Wealth of Nations] for me: that its most central argument is essentially about the real-versus-nominal distinction. Nowadays we’re inclined to think of real-v.-nominal as inflation-adjusted versus not, but Smith was using it in what feels like a more natural sense.
The book is well worth reading. But having worked through all 1200-odd pages of the unabridged original, I can now safely say: it is not important that you read the unabridged original. Much of it is given over to minute discussions of tax policy over the course of several centuries of British kings. Then there are many-page digressions which I thought were some sort of 20th-century British affectation when I read them in Wilson’s [book: The Victorians] or in Ernest Gellner, but apparently started hundreds of years before. A better modern edition, which would leave in only the parts that a modern reader would need to know about, would be a vast improvement over this one. I’m sure such editions exist. (And no, this is not similar to asking for an edition of Shakespeare that translates it into hip-hop idiom. Smith is interesting and readable, but his prose is not so special that it needs to be preserved.)
The edition I read also thinks it’s very important to note the differences between Smith’s first, second, and third editions in the footnotes. Turns out that’s not important; those differences amount to the use of the subjunctive “were” in place of the indicative “was”; I learned within the first couple pages to ignore the footnotes entirely.
So: worth reading, but maybe not worth reading just exactly *this*.
It was almost three years ago that I invited people to read Adam Smith with me. A couple weeks after I wrote that post, I started a new job (where I still work today), life caught up with me, and nothing came of that reading.
…*until now*.
I’ve been quite happily chugging away through [book: Wealth of Nations]. It is much, much more interesting than I ever would have guessed, because basically all anyone ever talks about in this book are a few quotes: the division of labor (starts on page 8), specifically the pin factory; self-interest (page 18); when businessmen meet, they always conspire to raise prices (page 144); and the invisible hand (page 477). The book is around 1000 pages long. Surely he has other stuff to say.
And indeed he does! I’d like here to single out just a few things:
1. Macro dictates micro:
> Masters of all sorts, therefore, frequently make better bargains with their servants in dear than in cheap years, and find them more humble and dependent in the former than in the latter. They naturally, therefore, commend the former as more favourable to industry.
I was really surprised to see that Smith appreciates the importance of macro conditions (how the economy as a whole works) on micro interactions (e.g., negotiations between boss and employee). That’s an idea that I more commonly associate with Paul Samuelson.
I also read this as an attack on the self-serving words of businessmen, and against the belief that what businessmen want is always what’s best for the society at large.
2. The importance of institutions. I don’t have a quote ready to hand for this, but he says somewhere that it’s obvious why business hasn’t returned to some country: the lack of a functioning government makes it impossible to conduct your affairs. I had thought that this idea was more associated with early-20th-century economists and their early-21st-century descendants.
3. While enumerating the different kinds of capital, we get this on page 297:
> The Second of the three portions into which the general stock of the society divides itself, is the fixed capital; of which the characteristic is, that it affords a revenue or profit without circulating or changing masters. It consists chiefly of …
> Fourthly, of the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society. The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expence, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as thy make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise of that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labor, and which, though it costs a certain expence, repays that expence with a profit.
This is, in essence, what we today call “human capital”. I was shocked to read this idea in a 237-year-old book.
Now I’m eager to see whether other ideas which we consider more modern — like marginalism, say — got their start in Smith.
I’ve been obsessed for some years with the economist Sam Bowles, one of whose projects has been to return economics to its roots in larger philosophical questions. What’s important about economics is not downward-sloping demand curves, or whether people substitute chicken for beef when the latter becomes more expensive; what’s important is understanding how we build a functioning society out of members who have wildly differing conceptions of the good. More mechanical questions, like what the proper level of taxes ought to be if we want to encourage the development of renewable energy, are also important, but (as I understand Bowles) that’s not what animated our intellectual fathers.
In this light, I’m really quite charmed by how widely and deeply Smith casts his net. He’s not spending 1000 pages repeatedly informing us that the free market works best; he’s constructing a conceptual taxonomy of how economies work. It’s really a work of philosophy, studded at all points with empirical bits. If at points he’s repetitive (for instance, in the chapter distinguishing between real and nominal price levels), it’s because he’s clarifying these concepts for maybe the first time in history. (I’ll have to go read, say, the Physiocrats if I want to understand pre-Smith economics.)
It’s hard to write about this book without feeling like the worst kind of college freshman (of which I was one): “No, you guys don’t understand! The market, guys! The market!” I realize that nothing I say about Smith has gone unsaid before now. Please don’t read anything I say here as though it were novel; read it instead as one man’s revelation that Smith is just as good as everyone says he was. Reading him is going to inform my upcoming reading of, for instance, Amartya Sen.
__P.S.__: To understand Sen, I think I’m going to want to tackle the [book: Theory of Moral Sentiments] first. Approximately no one talks about this book, relative to the number who talk about [book: Wealth of Nations], but I gather that Sen thinks it’s vital.
I didn’t know, before reading this book, why Benjamin Franklin is often honored as the greatest American. Having now read 800 grippingly constructed pages that are as close as possible to a first-person account of Franklin’s life, I now understand, and I agree. A philosopher, printer, diplomat, scientist, sage, and a revolutionary starting in his 70s, it’s hard to imagine a more complete person. Or to put it as Carl Van Doren does in the concluding paragraph of this book, in words that had tears streaming down my face,
> The death of a great man begins another history, of his continuing influence, his changing renown, the legend which takes the place of fact. This is not a biography of the posthumous Franklin. He has here told his story, which ends with his life. Nor should there now be need of a further comment on the record. Let the record stand, and explain itself. It has meant to make clear that Franklin was not one of those men who owe their greatness merely to the opportunities of their times. In any any age, in any place, Franklin would have been great. Mind and will, talent and art, strength and ease, wit and grace met in him as if nature had been lavish and happy when he was shaped. Nothing seems to have been left out except a passionate desire, as in most men of genius, to be all ruler, all soldier, all saint, all poet, all scholar, all some one gift or merit or success. Franklin’s powers were from first to last in a flexible equilibrium. Even his genius could not specialize him. He moved through his world in a humorous mastery of it. Kind as he was, there was perhaps a little contempt in his lack of exigency. He could not put so high a value as single-minded men put on the things they give their lives for. Possessions were not worth that much, nor achievements. Comfortable as Franklin’s possessions and numerous as his achievements were, they were less than he was. Whoever learns about his deeds remembers longest the man who did them,. And sometimes, with his marvellous range, in spite of his personal tang, he seems to have been more than any single man: a harmonious human multitude.
Truthfully, I couldn’t help but say out loud, “GodDAMN” when I reached those final four words. Franklin the genius met a biographer who deserves him.
Van Doren’s emphasis on the record, at the beginning of that paragraph, is not for nothing: his book feels, to the extent possible, like a stitched-together collection of Franklin’s letters and diaries. One might wish that the biography would contain more context from the 18th-century United States and Europe, but there is no such context — unless Franklin himself was aware of that context. Imagine a biography that ruthlessly forbids itself to step outside of the world of its subject; there you have Van Doren’s [book: Franklin].
There is so much to say about this book, and so much to quote — because Franklin was, if nothing else, endlessly quotable. I will limit myself to the following; it gets to one of my hobbyhorses, namely that when “libertarians” claim to be “classical liberals”, they are merely putting on daddy’s big-boy business suit in the hope that they’ll gain all the respect that daddy earned. But the suit doesn’t fit. Classical liberals believed in, say, progressive taxation (look in there for the phrase “support of the government”), and here we see Franklin essentially telling us that “You didn’t build that”:
> In November 1789 [Franklin] was firmly opposed to the plan to alter the constitution of Pennsylvania so that, as was proposed, the upper house in the legislature should represent the property of the state and the lower house the people, with equal authority between them. “Why should the upper house, chosen by a minority, have equal power with the lower chosen by a majority? Is it supposed that wisdom is the necessary concomitant of riches, and that one man worth a thousand pounds must have as much wisdom as twenty who have only 999? And why is property to be represented at all? … The accumulation … of property … and its security to individuals in every society must be an effect of the protection afforded to it by the joint strength of the society in the execution of its laws. Private property therefore is a creature of society and is subject to the calls of that society, whenever its necessities shall require it, even to its last farthing; its contributions therefore to the public exigencies are not to be considered as conferring a benefit to the public, entitling the contributors to the distinctions of honour and power, but as the return of an obligation previously received, or the payment of a just debt … The important ends of civil society, and the personal securities of life and liberty, these remain the same in every member of the society; and the poorest continue to have an equal claim to them with the most opulent, whatever difference time, chance, or industry may occasion in their circumstances. On these considerations I am sorry to see … a disposition among some of our people to commence an aristocracy by giving the rich a predominancy in government.”
(The ellipses are in Van Doren. Unsure if they’re in Franklin.)
That quote is a prelude to my lifelong project of taking the Founders back from the “libertarians” (which I’m constantly going to put in quotes, because I simply hate how they have claimed ownership over liberty). I include the quote, not because Franklin’s having said it makes it correct, but rather because “libertarians” themselves claim to be the sole legitimate heirs of the Framers’ philosophy, and claim that the Revolution sprang fully formed from John Locke’s brow. Any number of scholarly works refute this idea; I’d cite, just off the top of my head, Pettit’s [book: Republicanism], Bailyn’s [book: Ideological Origins of the American Revolution], Pocock’s [book: Machiavellian Moment], and Wood’s [book: Creation of the American Republic]. If the bulk of “libertarians'” justification for their radically anti-American minimal-government project comes from mythical origins in the Framers’ minds, then it’s more than fair to fire back at them from the same source.
(I should add a general note here: looking for a single story of what the Framers wanted is a fool’s errand. They fought over whether they should even have a Constitution, and the document that resulted was the result of compromise between passionately opposed views. The document that resulted contained visible fractures that the country only mended after a civil war. Read Elkins and McKitricks’ [book: Age of Federalism], and you’ll find the Framers arguing over what their “original intent” was *even while the Framers themselves were still alive*. This would be hilarious if we weren’t still suffering from Supreme Court justices who believe that they, 200+ years on, know what the original intent was when the Framers themselves could not agree on it.)
Van Doren’s [book: Franklin] should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the origins of our republic, and anyone who wants to read biography from the hand of a scrupulous artist.
I think these are fairly reasonable assumptions on the sort of home you could buy in Boston / Cambridge / Somerville / Brookline:
* Home value: $600,000
* Downpayment: 20%
* Mortgage interest rate: 4.5%
* Mortgage term: 30-year, fixed-rate
(For the home price, see, e.g., the Census Bureau’s Cambridge QuickFacts. Boston’s median home price is lower, apparently. Somerville’s is higher than Boston’s but lower than Cambridge’s.)
Then the mortgage you take out will be $480,000, and the monthly payment will be $2,432.09. Add in property taxes, a low estimate of monthly repair costs, and an estimate of the water bill. Subtract the mortgage-interest deduction. What I end up with, in Somerville, is a total monthly out-of-pocket expense of about $2,800.
The standard guideline seems to say that you should spend 30% or less of your income on housing. So to afford $2,800 a month, you need to earn $9,300 or more every month, or about $112,000 per year. Only about 5% of all Somerville tax returns claimed adjusted gross income of more than $100,000 in 2008. (Check ZIP codes 02143, 02144, and 02145 in that spreadsheet.) Now, granted, if you and your spouse both file separate returns, and you each earn $100,000, you really should count — for the purposes of this exercise — as a household earning $200,000; that’s certainly the unit that would be buying the home together. In 2010 about 95.5% of all married-couple tax returns were filed jointly, so it may be reasonable to assume that the tax statistics aren’t hiding much income across multiple tax returns.
So is that it? Do you have to be in the top 5% of incomes to even afford a home around here?
__P.S.__: The illustrious mrz, in comments, mentions the other part of the math that I worked out: homes around here are much more affordable, on a month-by-month basis, if you buy a multi-family building and rent it out. Figuring that your standard 1,200-square-foot unit rents for a couple thousand dollars per month, a triple-decker gains you $4,000 in rent every month. You lose some of that in income taxes; assuming you’re in the 28% bracket, for instance, that’s $1,120 in income taxes every month. But then, a multi-family home usually costs more than a single-family home, which means a few things:
1. Larger downpayment. I assume that around here the price of admission for a triple-decker is about $800,000. Again assuming you put down 20%, that’s a $160,000 downpayment.
2. Since the home is worth more, you pay more in property taxes. In Somerville, for instance, a home assessed at $800,000 would cost $427.47 every month. (I haven’t looked into whether the two units that you’re not living in are eligible for the residential exemption, so don’t quote me on this. The actual property-tax amount may well be higher than $427.47/month, because you may not be eligible for the exemption.)
3. Those property taxes are deductible on your Federal income taxes.
4. Since the home is worth more, your mortgage payment is larger, and in particular your monthly interest payment is larger, which means that you can deduct more interest every month on your Federal income taxes.
All told, I work out that the net out-of-pocket monthly expense for an $800,000 triple-decker is about $1000. Which is a whole lot less than the $2,800 you’d spend every month on a single-family home. But of course a multi-family means you’re a landlord, with all the badness that that implies.
This book is “okay”.
A year or so ago, I finally paid off my college loans, after 12 years of bearing that giant psychic weight. My employer is good to me, so now I’m at a point where I can think about saving. My first impression was — and still is — that everyone is out to screw me over. There are financial advisors, but their incentives are well-known; there are mutual funds, but all my reading tells me that they can’t be expected to beat the market consistently, and hence that your best bet is to just place your money in an index fund and be done with it. Or you come to the topic of buying a house, and you can’t help but feel that everyone *there* is also trying to pull a fast one on you: the realtors, the banks, the owners of the homes themselves.
So I asked around on Twitter, and Austin Frakt helpfully pointed me to The Bogleheads’ books. A Boglehead, if you’re unfamiliar, is a discipline of John Bogle, founder and former CEO of The Vanguard Group, a mutual-fund company now managing around $2 trillion in assets. If you didn’t know about the Vanguard Group before picking up this book, you soon will; much of the book reads like an advertisement for Vanguard.
I’m still a little confused, after reading it, what exact purpose it’s supposed to serve. Is it a beginner’s guide to retirement planning? If so, I think it was incorrectly structured. It contains a chapter on defined-benefit retirement plans (i.e., pensions), for instance, which only 29% of the population even has access to. That number drops to 17% if you exclude the public sector. Yet it’s one of the first chapters in the book. That is part of the testimony to this book’s odd structure.
So let’s imagine that the book were restructured into a more appropriate form. Honestly, I think the best form would be as a web app of some sort, à la TurboTax: ask you a series of questions, and let previous questions guide subsequent ones. “Do you have a defined-benefit retirement plan?” 7 out of 10 of your readers would answer “no”, and on you’d go. That would also allow most people to skip over the “are you in the middle of a divorce?” section, or the “are you in the middle of a financial crisis?” section, or the “here’s the order in which you should withdraw from your retirement savings when the time comes to withdraw from them” section. I submit that that last section isn’t really helpful to someone like me, who’s 35 years old and (hopefully) many years away from drawing down his retirement savings.
What I *do* want to know, and what I haven’t yet found the appropriate book for, is how to spread my money around across various buckets. Right now, I can choose to save money for a house, for retirement, for future children, for a rainy day, etc. How should I split things up? This retirement guide provides a bit of useful guidance in that direction, inasmuch as it taught me that profits on the sale of your primary home are non-taxable (at least for now). That’s fantastic news. It certainly suggests that your primary home should be considered a central part of your retirement strategy; maybe you should buy the largest home you can afford, and tax-shelter the appreciation in its value. Unfortunately, the Bogleheads’ book only approaches the home when retirement time comes; they suggest that you consider selling the home, downsizing, and pocketing the difference. That all sounds correct, but what do I do *now*? Suppose I have $1,000 lying around; do I put it in my 401(k), or put it in a house? And how about buying a triple-decker and using it for rental income; is that a thing I should do?
That’s one problem I’ve noticed with a good many books of this sort: they focus on one problem, like buying a home or saving for college or planning for retirement, but don’t necessarily treat those problems as parts of an integrated whole.
To the extent that it *does* treat them as part of an integrated whole, the Bogleheads’ book seems to have one bit of advice: all the various things you need to think about — which life insurance to buy, which mutual funds to invest in, how to write a pre-nup — require professional help. You and your partner should write your pre-nup with two lawyers; find an insurance broker you can trust; choose a financial planner who doesn’t live off commissions. (They illustrate this with a nice quote: where are the *customers’* yachts?)
Which just brings us back to where we started: the problem is finding people whom you can trust. Find trustworthy insurance brokers, trustworthy realtors, trustworthy lawyers, etc. How do you decide whether they’re trustworthy? Well, ask your friends, I suppose. But how do you know whether, for instance, your friends have been suckered into buying a life-insurance policy that will not actually help out their beneficiaries when your friends die? To paraphrase that famous story about the scientist explaining the origins of the universe, it’s trust all the way down.
What I conclude from reading this book, and from life more generally, is that I am too stupid to make above-market returns. I’m willing to go further and suggest that the vast bulk of Americans are also too stupid to make above-market returns. And if we *do* make above-market returns, they’re frittered away by fees from investment companies, who are the ones making all the money. So one conclusion is: invest stupidly. Put my 401(k) in a low-fee, passively managed mutual fund that invests in a broad market index.
This adds fuel, by the way, to the book I want to write. Americans are told that we can’t afford to provide the good life for our people, and specifically for our retirees; the best we can hope for is that Social Security will be cut less than Republicans would like. In fact we can afford the good life; it’s just that the story over the last 40 years or so has been that we 1) remove people’s safety net, 2) tell them to take care of themselves, and 3) turn the safety net over to private companies, thereby creating a rentier class that siphons the public’s money into the pockets of the already-wealthy. We can certainly afford the good life; it will just require that the rentiers be euthanized.
If we’re not going to do anything to alleviate the causes of poverty, the least we can do is help reduce the damage it causes. Among the least controversial (or so I thought) things we could do is provide food to poor people. About one in every ten households has received food stamps, and they average about $120 per month for food. That’s The total SNAP budget is about $81 billion. To put that in perspective, it looks like we’re budgeted to spend $85.6 billion on Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan this year. Yet the recently-rejected House farm bill included a $2-billion-a-year *cut* to SNAP. So apparently we owe it to soldiers to stay the course, even when the course was disastrously conceived and executed, but we owe the poor nothing even when their poverty is our fault (e.g., your skin color consigned you to an officially inferior station with limited voting rights until at least the 1960s; your father ended up in jail as part of the country’s catastrophic war on drugs; the Federal Reserve cares a lot about inflation but not so much about unemployment).
I’m reasonably happy that House Democrats opposed these cuts to SNAP; I’d be happier if anyone’s imagination extended to *expanding* the program. But no; the Senate, which *has* passed a SNAP bill, cuts the program by $3.9 billion. The best we can come up with is to cut this program — just like the best we can come up with when it comes to Social Security is to cut benefits by using an alternate measure of inflation, even though Social Security pays retirees only about $15,000 a year, and even though Social Security is the *sole* source of income for one in five people over 65.
I don’t know what we’ve lost: the imagination that allows us to think our society can achieve great things, our feelings of brotherhood toward our fellow-men, or our ability to experience outrage. Whatever it is, it is sad as hell.
We continue to act like a poor country — like we’re going broke and can’t afford to guarantee a minimally good life for our brothers and sisters. I continue to lament this; the more I think about it, the more I know that I need to write a book about it. We’re not poor. We’re the most prosperous nation that the world has ever known. We’ve just chosen to redirect much of the massive increase in real incomes since the 1960s into the wrong things. What’s even more worrisome than that, however, is that we’ve made the mistake of believing that our “poverty” is baked in, rather than the result of an explicit choice. But it was and is a choice. It’s a choice that we make anew every single day, when we decide that we don’t have a society filled with people who owe something to each other, and instead decide that we’re each on our own fending for ourselves.
I see this in myself, and have to fight it constantly. “Save until it hurts,” I tell myself, “because when the time comes, no one is going to be there for you.” Or I consider how much I’ll have to save for my notional future children, in the expectation that well-funded public universities won’t be there to help them.
So that’s the plan on my end: write up where we came from and how we ended up at this particular sordid state, make it clear to our society that our “poverty” *is* a choice, and try to recreate the social imagination that we so desperately need.
I would like to commend to your favorable attention this Evgeny Morozov essay on Tim O’Reilly. If any essay ever owned the noun “takedown”, it is this one. O’Reilly, in this telling, is yet another popular Internet “philosopher” wearing his libertarian blinders. There’s no need for politics in this world — only more private actors’ economic bodies bouncing off one another inelastically like financial billiard balls. Once again (documenting this is a Baffler staple), what could have been a revolution in values and in the basic structure of our institutions (personified in this essay by Richard Stallman — and actually, the shoe fits) is transformed into this generation’s Tom Peters.
There’s a lot I could quote from in here. I’ll leave you with this:
> Sorting through the six thousand or so academic papers that cite OReillys essay on Web 2.0 is no easy feat. It seems that anyone who wanted to claim that a revolution was under way in their own field did so simply by invoking the idea of Web 2.0 in their work: Development 2.0, Nursing 2.0, Humanities 2.0, Protest 2.0, Music 2.0, Research 2.0, Library 2.0, Disasters 2.0, Road Safety 2.0, Identity 2.0, Stress Management 2.0, Archeology 2.0, Crime 2.0, Pornography 2.0, Love 2.0, Wittgenstein 2.0. What unites most of these papers is a shared background assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances. Except that there was no coming of Web 2.0it was just a way to sell a technology conference to a public badly burned by the dotcom crash. Why anyone dealing with stress management or Wittgenstein would be moved by the logistics of conference organizing is a mystery.
(Thanks to an employee — an owner, I believe — at the Harvard Book Store for pointing me to the latest Baffler.)
On the basis of its title and cover art, you might believe that [book: Dr. Euler’s Fabulous Formula] is a work of popular mathematics on the level of, say, [book: How To Lie With Statistics] or [book: Innumeracy]. Don’t get me wrong: both of those books are spectacular — must-reads, in fact. But you don’t read them in the expectation that they’ll contain interesting mathematical content. If you have a background in mathematics or statistics, you in fact don’t read them; you assume that you already know everything that’s in them. ([book: Naked Statistics] is like that for me, though the author’s recent appearance on Planet Money makes me think again about reading it.)
[book: Dr. Euler’s Fabulous Formula] is not like that. It is accessible to anyone with a basic college calculus education, and its rewards are astonishing. Starting from the premise that the Euler formula “e^(i theta) = i sin theta + cos theta” is amazing — which is a correct premise — Nahin is off and running. He runs through Fourier series, Fourier transforms, proof that pi is irrational, how to design radio circuitry, whether a tailwind helps or harms a runner on a circular track, and a hundred other things besides.
But not only is the content remarkable; Nahin pulls off the trick — which is incredibly rare among mathematical writers — of being completely, 100%, crystal clear in his proofs. His book is filled with full-frontal integrals, but every step is spelled out so clearly, and so conversationally, that I never missed a single step in the argument. I love mathematics, but I’ve long wished that I were better at it. Nahin makes me wonder if the mathematicians are the problem, rather than me. (Though it doesn’t matter what the answer to that question is: if I want to learn more math, I need to learn to read mathematics as she is written [by people other than Nahin]. Sad but true.)
So Nahin’s book is both filled to the brim with extremely interesting mathematics, and written clearly enough that any college sophomore could understand it. It’s a trick that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before. On this basis, I’m strongly inclined to read Nahin’s other work, starting with [book: An Imaginary Tale: The Story of the Square Root of Minus One]; apparently Nahin’s Euler book is best viewed as the second half of [book: An Imaginary Tale].
Many thanks to Chris Young, of the long-defunct Explananda blog, for the pointer to this fabulous book.
My memory of [book: The Major Transitions in Evolution] is a little hazy, but I believe the thesis is that there have been several important jumps in the history of life on earth, wherein life took a jump from a simpler form to a complex form in such a way that a movement back to the simpler form was impossible. (Synopsis on the wiki.) I seem to recall, for instance, a story going like this: a single-celled organism one day became parasitic on another, until they fused into a multicellular organism, and from that day forward the two organisms could only function in the presence of the other. Each of these transitions, as I recall the story going, involved a new mode of information transmission, which made the transition stick. (This synopsis is likely wrong. My knowledge of biology is even weaker than my knowledge of, well, everything else. “Symbiosis” is the keyword here; it’s associated with the late Lynn Margulis.)
I wonder whether complex market economies are a new transition, in the sense that we have simply ceased being able to function without a division of labor. None of us in Western capitalist democracies could even consider living as economic hermits, tending our solitary farms or whatnot, because all the components necessary to *even start* that farm presuppose so much from the society around us: a government to maintain the roads that bring our products to market; a state with a monopoly on violence so that we don’t need to pay off the Mafia every time we want to *get on* those roads; industrial corporations to manufacture the steel tools that we use to plow the land; miners to dig up the iron that the corporations convert into steel; other corporations to build the pickaxes that even primitive miners would use to extract the iron ore from the ground; and so forth.
All of which is just to say: Boston is shut down right now, and I’m out of food, and the restaurants are closed, and I’d really like to eat dinner. Thanks.
Steve Reads 