Statistical software visual pun

 Hat tip: An old friend.

Book: Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel

Angel, Katherine. 2022. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent. Verso.

The book presents a critique of current consent-based, heavily contracted norms regarding sexual interactions from what one might call a left-humanist perspective.

If that sounds like something you would find interesting, you'll like the book.

I purchased this book at the Dussman English Bookshop in Berlin. It has the virtue of being open quite late so that one can stop by on the way from from dinner.

Oh dear [insert deeply disturbing noises here]

 

Hat tip: The only person for whom I have written a letter who has also written a letter for me.

Book: Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever by John McWhorter

McWhorter, John. 2021. Nine Nasty Words, English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. Avery Books.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia. He also writes a column on language issues, broadly conceived, for the New York Times, and appears as a frequent guest on the Glenn Show podcast with economist Glenn Loury. Befitting his many accomplishments, he has a fine website.

I have read three of his books. The first was his book on black English, which I blogged about several years ago and quite liked. The second was his Woke Racism book, which I did not blog about and liked the least of the three. 

The present book, as its title subtly suggests, concerns the etymology of nine English naughty words, a set that includes words related to religion, such as hell and damn, words related to bodily functions, and racial and other slurs. McWhorter makes the case (drawn from the literature) that the naughtiest of naughty words have evolved over time through the three categories.  

The book delights in both substance and style. The histories of several of the naughty words exhibit wild twists and turns. Along with the summarizing (in most cases) the current consensus among linguists on these histories, McWhorter also elegantly dismisses various myths, such as one false origin story involving the instruction "ship high in transit." He demonstrates an amazing knowledge of pop culture references as well, ranging from obscure Broadway musicals of the past to episodes of the Jeffersons. And the wordplay ... ah the wordplay. So much fun. So many puns. 

My only complaint, which I suspect most readers in his target audience of people who buy small books displayed at the check-out counter of their independent bookstore would not share, is that I would have liked more talk about how linguists came to believe the various etymologies he recounts. I did appreciate the books discussion of how hard it is to trace down the usage history of some of the words because back in the day people did not write them down, at least not in the sorts of ways that would survive to the present day.  

In short, recommended. I liked it well enough that I bought a fourth McWhorter book when I finished this one. 

Addendum: Fixed McWhorter's affiliation from Brown (that's Loury) to Columbia.

Book: Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences by Michael Billig

Billig, Michael. 2013. Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.

I read this one back during the pandemic and, indeed, even began a review post at that time.

The book offers a frontal assault on bad writing (and thus worse thinking) in the social sciences, with most of the examples drawn from the author's discipline of social psychology. 

Lots of negative lessons here for how to write better in economics, as well as some excellent examples of contributions to acronymic science (e.g., CHAT = "cultural historical activity theory") in the context of branding ones ideas. And wonderous jargon like "ideational metafunction." 

I have not laughed this hard at a non-fiction book since reading Frederick Crews back in gradual school at the recommendation of Nat Wilcox.

Recommended.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Book: The Voltage Effect, by John List

 List, John. 2022. The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. Currency.

This is another one of those books by people I know. John and I overlapped for a time at the University of Maryland in the early noughties, when I was in the regular economics department and he was in the Agricultural and Resource Economics department. We had a handful of quite enjoyable lunches during that time. Once I got to Michigan it was on my to-do list to try and recruit him there, but Chicago hired him before I had a chance to reach out. 

The book mashes up a memoir with discussion of some of John's work as an economist both academic and professional. I found the parts I knew the least about the most engaging, namely the origin story about how John ended up as an economist and his contributions to the various private firms for which he labored along the way. John frames all of the stories in terms of various economic and business concepts and thus as lessons illustrated or sometimes lessons learned. At the end of it all, just when (or if) John sleeps remains unclear.

If you think you would like it, you will.

I won a free signed copy of the book via a raffle sponsored by the BFI (= Becker Friedman Institute or Big Frigging Institute, as you like). 

Society of Labor Economists Call for Papers

The call for papers for the next annual meeting of the Society of Labor Economists is now available!

The meetings will be in Denver on May 1-2, 2026. They will include, among other fine entertainments for the mind, a presidential address by yours truly.

You can find the call for papers here.

Book: Mr. Smith Goes to Prison, by Jeff Smith

Smith, Jeff. 2017. Mr. Smith Goes to Prison. St. Martin's Press.

So, yes, of course I read this partly because the author shares my name. This other Jeff has a doctorate in Political Science and got involved in state politics in Missouri. He (as the dust jacket says) "lied to the feds about seemingly minor campaign malfeasance" and ended up spending 366 days in a minimum-security federal prison. 

The book alternates between telling the author's own story and linking it to broader social science literatures on various aspects of incarceration. The literature surveys, aimed at a sort of intelligent lay audience -- think the audience for the Freakonomics books -- were not perfect to my academic eye but surely fit for purpose. And other Jeff is clearly correct that we could do a lot (a lot) better than we do at incarceration. The current system seems mainly about acting out revenge fantasies on the inmates and providing comfy union jobs for corrections staff rather than about actually changing anyone's behavior upon release. 

I especially enjoyed the parts about prison education, which provide a useful reminder to quantitative social scientists busy estimating the difference in outcomes between those who do and do not receive some treatment that implementation matters a lot. Prison education that no one in charge puts much thought or effort into is unlikely to work. Prison education that someone actually wanted to work might possibly work. The material about prison sociology fascinates as well. Other Jeff is obviously a rather odd duck in prison but manages to find ways to fit in and not constantly get pounded on.

Recommended.

N.B. I read this one a while ago but am catching up on these posts.

Book: Squanto, by Andrew Lipman

Lipman, Andrew. 2024. Squanto: A Native Odyssey. Yale University Press.

In the traditional telling that was common in my youth, Squanto was the friendly "Indian" (no quotes back then) who helped the pilgrims survive their early years in North America. This book takes on the task of telling Squanto's tale as academic history, which is very much not what I got as a child. Though an academic book, the writing is clear and fun, with occasional wordplay and some clever turns of phrase. Probably that helped it win the Bancroft Prize.

I was surprised by the extent of Squanto's travels -- hence the "Odyssey" in the book's title. He spent time not only near his home in the area near what is now Plymouth, MA, but also in Spain, England, and what are now Newfoundland and Virginia. Not bad for the early 1600s! The material on Squanto's youth is mainly generic, which is to say it simply describes what we know about what life would have been like for a young man in his community in those times. But after that, there is a surprising amount of documentation specifically about him, including in particular writings by various members of the Plymouth colonies, as well as by or related to the people who held him in Europe. I also learned quite a lot about the early colonial period more generally, including the (generally involuntary) travels of other Native Americans to Europe, interactions both positive and negative among different indigenous communities along the Atlantic coast, and the interactions among the various early European settlements and between the settlements and their sponsors. The book also has a welcome epistemological side, as the author talks explicitly about the quality of the available information on various topics and about how he and other historians interpret and learn from it.

Recommended.

I found this book at the delightful Collected Works bookstore in Santa Fe, NM.

An addendum: An alert reader points out that while Lipman did indeed win the Bancroft Prize, it was for an earlier book. 

Book: Controlling Contagion by Sheilagh Ogilvie

Ogilvie, Sheilagh. 2025. Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid. Princeton University Press.

As the title suggests, this book provides a mighty overview of how different institutions -- state, market, community, religion, family, and medical guilds and associations -- influence how societies react to epidemic disease from the Black Death in the 14th century through COVID-19 in the 21st. Ogilvie carefully delineates the strengths and weaknesses of each institution, illuminating each with numerous historical examples. For example, markets produce wealth, which is useful in a whole bunch of ways when fighting contagion, but markets also encourage interaction while failing to price in the social externalities associated with contagion. 

I found the bits about the history of variolation and immunization particularly new and interesting, Who knew that many medical guilds initially opposed one or both for dubious reasons both economic and epistemological. The material on the so-called "European marriage system" and whether or not it helped societies in epidemic times also stood out to me. My one complaint might be the occasional absence of a "denominator" to give me a sense of, when reading one of the many lists of diverse examples of particular points, whether the list contained all of the available examples on that point or just some tiny fraction of them. The final chapter of the book offers some wise thoughts on particularly effective and ineffective institutional combinations, while carefully noting that the very limited historical data as well as obvious identification problems (i.e., more theories and institutions than historical epidemics) severely limit the boldness of any conclusions. 

Recommended.

Full disclosure: I have reached an odd place in life where I could spend all my reading time reading books by people I know and still not read all of the books written by people I know. In this case, Sheilagh is an old friend from graduate school days. As I remember it, she came to Chicago in the midst of her doctoral studies to do a Master's degree in economics, with her main interest being interacting with Gary Becker. You can listen to her lively interview with Tyler Cowen, mostly about this book, here.