Book: The Shortest History of Germany by James Hawes

Hawes, James. 2017. The Shortest History of Germany. London: Old Street Publishing.

This book delivers on its promise in both senses - it is indeed short, just 227 relatively small pages - and it is about the history of Germany. It achieves its compactness in part by zooming through the "initial conditions" up to the year 526 in just 26 pages, and then skimming the next thousand years in just 44 pages. Do not look to this book if you seek to learn about pre-modern Germany in any depth.

In 1524, the book slows down. The heart of the book concerns the most recent 500 years of German history, and the single overarching point that the book devotes itself to defending lends itself to an easy summary: Western Germans are great, but Prussians are big trouble now and have always been big trouble. Indeed, it seems that all the good things in German history come from the West, while all the bad ones, up to and including the "Alternative for Germany", come from the East. Perhaps.

Certainly the book does make a strong case that the East and the West differ in socially and culturally important ways.

Similar themes arise in this recent Economist (which called the book "a must-read" according to the blurb on the front cover) piece on East-West differences 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a parallel (gated) piece in the Financial Times as well as in this recent paper:

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IZA DP No. 13032: The Separation and Reunification of Germany: Rethinking a Natural Experiment Interpretation of the Enduring Effects of Communism
Sascha O. Becker, Lukas Mergele, Ludger Woessmann

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly selected treatment and control groups. First, the later border is already visible in many socio-economic characteristics in pre-World War II data. Second, World War II and the subsequent occupying forces affected East and West differently. Third, a selective fifth of the population fled from East to West Germany before the building of the Wall in 1961. In light of our findings, we propose a more cautious interpretation of the extensive literature on the enduring effects of communist systems on economic outcomes, political preferences, cultural traits, and gender roles.

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Note the first point in particular and note that, perhaps surprisingly, the paper does not cite the book. The paper is forthcoming in (as I write) the next issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

In sum, if you are interested in German history (or European history more broadly) the book provides a quick and provocative read.

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I accidentally bought two copies of this, one at the airport in Munich and one, on a different trip, at the train station in Mannheim.

Book: Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

Sonali Deraniyagala. 2013. Wave. New York: Knopf.

This memoir tells the story of an economist who lost her husband, her two children, and her parents to the 2004 tsunami. She survived, by chance and by action, hanging on to a tree while the wave rushed back into the sea. The book starts off with the tsunami and then chronicles, in episodic detail, Sonali's gradual (and never complete) reconciliation with her loss and with her life.

The NYT book review has more to say.

I bought the book many years ago, but put off reading it because it has a personal connection: I worked with the author's late husband, the economist Steve Lissenburgh, when I consulted at the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) in London in the late 90s and early 00s, helping them mainly with their evaluations of various bits of the Blair government's New Deal programs, such as this one. Indeed, I had the honor of giving the fourth annual lecture in memorial of Steve organized by the PSI in October of 2008. Michael White, who managed the employment group at PSI prior to Steve taking over (and who recruited me to work with them at a conference organized at Her Majesty's Treasury in the mid-90s), wrote a heartfelt obituary for the Independent.

I am not sure that the notion of "recommended" quite fits for a book like this - not everyone will find this sort of book good pandemic reading. I will say that the the book is moving indeed, both because of the nature of the events it describes but also because  of its combination of a gentle spirit, lush writing, and brutal honesty.

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Book: The Golden Rhinoceros by Francois-Xavier Fauvelle

Fauvelle, Francois-Xavier. 2018. The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

I chose this book because it covered aspects of the history of a time and place about which I had never read before, namely Africa during the middle ages. As the book makes clear, one reason I had not read much about the history of Africa during the middle ages is that the literature on the topic is not large; in turn, an important reason for the smallish literature is the lack, relative to Europe in particular, of surviving written records from the middle ages for much of the continent.

The book provides a series of what one might call historical vignettes, rather than attempting a complete narrative history. The vignettes rather strongly oversample parts of Africa that had economic and social interactions with Europeans and Arabs, and rely primiarly on a combination of contemporary written accounts by Europeans and Arabs and the physical evidence provided by archaelogists, among them the author. The author clearly understands and reflects on what one might call the epistemic selection issues implicit in the available written and physical record.

I found the book an enjoyable and informative introduction to its time and place. The stand-alone chapters also make it more suitable than a cumulative narrative history to episodic casual reading.

Recommended.

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So many diamonds

Some very good news from Delta in regard to elite status and the pandemic, as interpreted by air travel blogger Gary Leff.

A few months after I start travelling again - my current three-month break from air travel will be my longest since around 1993 - I will become a two-million-miler on Delta / Northwest.

On inter-university online seminars

Marginal revolution linked to this tweetstorm (*) regarding the pandemic-induced appearance of a number of on-line seminars in economics not tied to particular universities. I had it on my list to do a post about that very topic, so I can now frame my post in part as a response to the tweetstorm.

I am aware of at least five such seminars: one on the pandemic and related topics run by the NBER, an econometrics seminar run out of Harvard, and seminars on crime, education, and experimental / behavioral economics started by individual researchers or small groups of researchers.

Some remarks:

Most regular seminars in economics are 80 or 90 minutes, though departmental seminars in which students present work in progress are sometimes 50 or 60. My sense is that most online inter-university seminars are 60 minutes. Perhaps there is a view that attention spans are shorter when not in person or perhaps the start of a "new" seminar allows a change that would have (or should have) happened to in-person seminars but for the stickiness of the old equilibrium.

One thing the tweetstorm omits is the relatively unique character of economics seminars that arises because they typically involve substantial back-and-forth between the speaker and the audience during the seminar, not just at the end as is common in other disciplines. This feature has important implications for the extent to which economics seminars can scale up in the same way that a lecture does. In my view, the in-person seminars that the NBER runs in labor economics and education (especially at the summer insitute where the audience for the labor talks sometimes rises to over 100) already well exceed the optimal scale given the interactions.

There are a number of solutions to the interaction / scale issue. One is to generate and maintain strong social norms about who gets to ask questions, so that what appears to be a seminar with 100 participants is actually a seminar with 25 participants and 75 non-speaking onlookers. That's how NBER meetings work. Another solution is to limit the size of the seminar. At least one of the online seminars that I am familiar with asked invitees not to broadcast the existence of the seminar (which is why I am being coy about it here) for precisely this reason. There is, of course, an aspect of this to the NBER meetings as well - you have to be invited and not everyone gets invited.(**) A different solution dials down the interaction, limiting questions during the presentation and then having a formal discussant or a formal period for questions and answers (or both) after the presentation. A couple of the online seminars I am familiar with have gone down this road.

A related point is that the online seminars I have participated in - including the informal student public economics seminar here at Wisconsin, which has moved on-line (as have some of the student seminars at Michigan) - is that they make use of the virtual hand-raising facility built into the meeting software rather than allowing audience members to simply shout out their comments, as often happens in person. I like the change to raising hands and hope it carries over to in-person seminars when they return.

The tweetstorm thinks these inter-university seminars will persist and worries about who should run them. I agree with the tweetstorm author's prediction and also with his focus on the importance of the gatekeeper role. I predict that either organizations like the NBER, or its European semi-analogues like CEPR, IZA and CESifo, will end up managing the on-going on-line seminars, with the subject area leaders within those organizations playing the gatekeeper role, just as they do now with group membership and in choosing who presents at the reguular subject area conferences / seminars. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and we all know the track record of economists' predictions.

One last point: on-line seminars are only a partial substitute for in-person departmental seminar visits, which I do not think will go away. Much business gets done at seminar dinners, and much is learned during in-person office visits with the seminar speaker on the day of the seminar. One of the highlights of seminar visits for me is often meeting with the local gradual students and hearing about their work. Online seminars omit all of these features.

(*) A "tweetstorm" is a blog post made harder to read by being shared on twitter in little bits.

(**) I do not mean to pick on the NBER here; I am using it as an example that I think most economics readers will have some familiarity with, even if from a distance. These same issues arise with, e.g. the Institute for Research on Poverty Summer Research Workshop of which I am a co-organizer. It is a real problem. No matter how inclusive and open and non-hierarchical and encouraging of junior scholars you want to be, there are real fiscal and technological constraints: budgets are finite and seminars / workshops that get too big are not as intellectually useful.

Book: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Chiang, Ted. Exhalation. New York: Knopf.

Wow. This is some of the best science fiction I have read in a very long time. Chiang uses the flexibility afforded by the implicit rules (or lack of rules) of the genre to craft shorts stories that meditate on various philosophical issues, stories richly informed, it seems, by reading of the relevant literatures.

The one that resonated most for me is "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" which concerns the difference between, bluntly, what actually happened and the narratives that people construct around their pasts. One strand of the story plays out in the context of the world where some people create "life logs" - essentially videos of their entire lives - and the cost of searching the lifelog suddenly falls dramatically, leading to a lot more sometimes wrenching comparisons between actual facts and remembered narratives. I tend to think about these issue in terms of my last few years at Michigan, as my mental narrative of those years differs dramatically from that of others (and, of course, I think mine does a much better job of tracking actual events).

I also quite enjoyed "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," which  conemplates the moral status of artificial intelligences, and "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom," which concerns the ethical implications of parallel universes.

The book concludes with a few pages of notes about the origins of each of the stories, a feature I would be happy to see in basically every fiction book (and mybe in non-fiction books and papers too).

Highly recommended.

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Addendum: A market test of sorts: used hardcover copies of Chiang's first book of short stories - Exhalation is his second - in good condition go for nearly $200 on abebooks.com.

An Atlantic piece on Americans and guns

This Atlantic reporter does the unthinkable and actually tries to understand both the gun nuts and the anti-gun nuts. The result is, I thought, interesting and useful.

Among other things, the debate - not the best term given the general absence of actual engagement on either side - highlights the "elite virtue signalling" versus "deplorable rebellion against smug elites" dynamic that seems to me to be the signature aspect of American cultural and political life these days.