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.

New published paper: Bucky, Becky, and Student Financial Aid Policy Design

Marifian, Elise, Jeffrey Smith, and Sarah Turner. 2024. "Bucky, Becky, and Student Financial Aid Policy Design." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 711(1): 200-224.

Abstract

Bucky’s Tuition Promise (BTP) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison offers generous financial aid to low-income, in-state students. Unlike many similar programs at other public universities, financial eligibility for BTP depends solely on a family’s adjusted gross income (AGI), rather than on the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or some function of the poverty line. This program design aims to make eligibility simpler and more transparent for students and their families and thereby to encourage application and matriculation. We investigate the implications of the program design for who does and does not receive additional institutional aid, with a particular focus on the marginal group of BTP-eligible students who lack federal Pell Grant eligibility. With this analysis, we aim to motivate a broader discussion of different notions of equity in financial aid administration and the tough trade-offs implicit in simplifying eligibility criteria.

Published version on journal webpage (open access)

NBER Working Paper No. 33053

This paper is published in a special issue of the ANNALS in honor of former UW-Madison chancellor (and former Ford School dean at Michigan) Becky Blank. I first met Becky when she was an assistant professor at Northwestern and I was an assistant professor at Western Ontario. We were on at least one dissertation committee together at Michigan. And, perhaps not surprisingly, she was the only university president who sent me a recruiting email when I was on the job market back in 2016, though she carefully noted that she was not writing to me in her capacity as chancellor, because the chancellor did not meddle in the hiring decisions of individual department, but rather in her capacity as a member of the economics department. She is very much missed.  

Book: Our Strangers by Lydia Davis

 Davis, Lydia. 2023. Our Strangers: Stories. Bookshop Editions.

An unusual but very engaging book of very short to really, really short "fictions". It has the feel of notebook, jumping from topic to topic, sometimes humorous and sometimes somber, and with many of the very short "fictions" consisting of simple observations, such as:

Fun

As we pick up the invitation and read it again,

the morning after,

the party still looks like fun,

even though it was not fun.

Not everyone's cup of mead, but I quite enjoyed it and have ordered another of her books.

Note that at the author's insistence, the book is sold only at independent bookstores. I got mine at Paragraphe in Montreal.

Hat tip: Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution

LLM Moment of Zen

On Microsoft Copilot: 

"It's like having a bad RA". 

- One of our doctoral students 

Book: Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

Christian, Brian and Tom Griffiths. 2016. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions. Holt.

This book summarizes, in prose aimed at the intelligent lay reader, important themes in computer science, such as sorting, caching (keeping select bits of information close at hand, pun intended), and scheduling. 

Back in the early 1980s (!), one of my computer science professors claimed to us in class that the knowledge embodied in our degrees had a "half life" of five years, a figure which would imply that only about 1.5 percent of my computer science degree remains with me in 2024. The strong feeling of familiarity I felt when reading this book convinced me that whatever the quality of the five year half-life approximation in the early years following degree receipt, the decay eventually slows or even stops when only the key themes of the discipline remain.  

The rather imperialist conception of the substantive domain of computer science embodied in the book's chapters complicates the decay calculation, particularly for me. For example, the book contains chapters on optimal stopping, on search, and on game theory, which I think of as mainly economics topics rather than computer science topics, and on Bayes Rule, which I think of as a statistics topic. The authors do cite economists and statisticians when relevant, so perhaps rather than complain about imperialism (surely economists live in a thin glass house on this point) one can celebrate the cross-disciplinary breadth of the underlying problems and their still-in-progress solutions.

The text makes some nods toward the "to live by" part of the title (in the way an author of an economics book for a general audience might explain the value of thinking about sunk costs in daily life) but that's not the main point of the book. Instead, it seeks to illuminate some of the key themes in computer science, in clear, enjoyable prose decorated with stories of various researchers who made contributions along the way.

Overall, I found this a most enjoyable read that led to a bout of nostalgia for my undergraduate computer science adventure. And now I know why simulated annealing bears its otherwise inexplicable name and feel better about all the stacks on my office desk.

If you think you might like such a book, you will almost certainly like this particular one.

Hat tip: Dan and Susan

Book: Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

Ikstena, Nora. 2015/2018. Soviet Milk. Peirene.

A short, beautiful novel about an ugly time, and about the sorts of people who found life under the Soviet regime most difficult.

The book is an English translation of a Latvian best-seller. I purchased it at the delightful English bookstore in Talinn, the capital of neighboring Estonia, when I was there to give a talk at their Central Bank last December.

Recommended.