How to be Human (Though an Economist) by Deirdre McCloskey, kindly recommended by Jason Soon. As an anecdote, it’s hard to top the story of the reaction of the dean of the Iowa business school when Donald (as he then was) announced his impending change of gender.

His response, after sitting for a moment in slack-jawed amazement, was a stand-up comic routine. “Oh, thank God! I thought you were going to confess to converting to socialism. (Relieved laughter- he was going to react as a friend.) “This is great for our affirmative action program: one fewer* man, one more woman” (more laughter) ” And wait! I can cut your salary to two-thirds of the male level (not so funny). And then seriously “That’s a strange thing to do. How can I help?” And he did

* I wonder if business school deans, even civilised ones, really use “fewer” rather than “less” in circumstances like this, or if McCloskey has done some editing here? Not that it matters to the story.

In the pursuit of the goal of humanising economics and economists, McCloskey recommends a variety of reading. In a couple of places she notes, as an indicator of a civilised economist, acquaintance with the companion volumes of Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. I agree, particularly regarding Boswell’s book, which is a kind of pilot episode of his Life of Johnson, the first genuinely modern biography, and still one of the best in existence.

I’ll turn now to the bits that are interest mainly to economists, and other social scientists (or, as McCloskey might prefer to put it, scholars of society).

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A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges. Among other interesting features is the fact that Borges has drawn on sources including Gangs of New York (which was only recently published at the time Borges wrote) and Life on the Mississippi. I haven’t read either and also missed the film of Gangs of New York when it came out. So I’ll have to follow Borges’ pre-hyperlinks. I think he would really have loved the Internet.

I also went to see Life + Debt, a documentary about Jamaica and its troubles with the IMF. Insofar as there was a ‘line’, it was the standard anti-globalisation story of farmers being driven out of business by import competition and so on. A couple of things struck me about the film. One was that Jamaica seemed to have tried everything (self-sufficiency, free trade zones, general liberalization) and nothing seemed to work. So while the analysis implicit in the film was inadequate, it didn’t seem to me that the IMF had any better answers.

The other point, discussed previously in Ozplogistan, is how bad economists look on film. The film gave a lot of time to Stanley Fischer and wasn’t obviously unfair to him, but he came across dreadfully nevertheless.

The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. Hesse had a huge vogue in the late 60s – along with Charles Dickens and Aldous Huxley, he’s one of a handful of writers to have been the inspiration for the naming of a well known rock group – but he seems to have slipped into obscurity nowadays. Rereading The Glass Bead Game, there’s an obvious similarity with Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, which in turn are reflected in Harry Potter. I’m tempted to say that this is a line of descent in more ways than one, but actually Le Guin stands up pretty well to comparison with Hesse and I’m not going to bag JK Rowling for writing readable massmarket kids books rather than great literature.

I got some useful suggestions from readers for additional reading for my chapter on the economic policies of the Howard government. But most of the readings I have so far (with the exception of some Reserve Bank conference volumes) are critical of the government from a leftish perspective. Can anyone suggest an accessible source for
(i) an overview of economic performance under the present government (I was hoping to refer to the INDECS State of Play books, but they seem to have ceased in 1995
(ii) a defence of the government’s economic performance in general, or on specific issues
(iii) a critique from a free-market or other right-wing perspective (please, no debate on whether free-market = rightwing, I’m just trying to use commonly understood definitions).

The Passions and the Interests by AO Hirschman. Hirschman is always worth reading – his Exit, Voice and Loyalty is a classic. The Passions and the Interests, is a piece of intellectual history describing the development of ideas about rational self-interest and the invisible hand.

I’m also reading Watershed by Ticky Fullerton. She’s an ABC reporter and the book is about Australian water issues, mainly, but not exclusively, the Murray-Darling. She gives a summary of blogger Chris Sheil’s excellent book Water’s Fall, including an appealing adjectival characterisation

Water’s Fall is eloquent and convincing, but should carry a health warning for any investment banker in the CBD. Such people would soon find themselves frothing uncontrollably at the mouth with outrage at a Quigginesque thesis, which blames almost all incompetence on greed and a general bias in favour of the shareholder over the consumer.

I’m not sure if ‘Quigginesque’ is an original coinage (I have the feeling Henry Ergas has used something similar) but I like it anyway.

The Wealth of Man by Peter Jay. Among other claims to fame, Jay was one of the writers of Yes, Minister and this book has both the strengths and weaknesses of the series.** In essence, it’s a public choice view of the world. This is conducive to telling a convincing story, as long as you don’t worry too much about what’s being left out. In Jay’s story, private initiative is the key to progress and governments are at there best when they keep in the background setting the rules, and defending producers against internal and external predators.

To tell the story this way, you have to leave out some pretty important chapters, or, as in Jay’s case, report them and disregard. While reading about the Mesopotamian civilisations based on gigantic irrigation systems and the Roman road system that enabled rapid communication from Scotland to Syria, I was waiting for some sort of discussion of public goods, but this is not a category for Jay.

In fact, it would be quite plausible, though a drastic oversimplification, to tell a story in which the main engine of progress is the appropriate choice of public goods. Military grandeur, monarchical display and religious edifices like pyramids and cathedrals soak up capital, while schools and transport infrastructure generate high returns. In 18th century England, even the allocation to religion was turned to good account with clergymen like Priestley and Stone discovering oxygen and aspirin instead of writing devotional tracts.

I also read and very much enjoyed Isabel Allende’s memoir of Chile My Invented Country.

**A totally erroneous claim. As James Wright Russell points out, it was Antony Jay. What’s annoying here is that I had doubts about my recollection on this, and relied on Google, which produced this link, referring to “co-writers Jonathan Lynn and Peter Jayâs 1980-1982 series Yes Minister, said to be the favourite series of then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. ” What’s really annoying is that I have a DVD of the series, so I could easily have done a more reliable check.

The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust by John Judis. This book was published in 2000, but the analysis is still relevant. What’s interesting, particularly from an Australian perspective, is that the book is not, as might be expected, a diatribe against elites and interest groups. Judis argues that the American system relies on participation by interest groups representing real constituencies and by disinterested elite groups – his models are the Brookings Institution and the Committee on Economic Development.

But now, Judis says, most interest groups have no real members, and are merely “letterhead groups” relying either on business lobbies or direct mail appeals for their funding, while the elites have capitulated to business. The result is a corrupt, money-driven system of politics.

The bad guys in the book are the lobbying industry (“K Street”, in the intra-Beltway jargon) and members of the elite who act as mouthpieces for partisan interests – the prime individual example is Henry Kissinger, and the main institutional villain is the American Enterprise Institute. Having never looked into the history of the Institute, I’ve accepted Brad de Long’s judgement that it was once a reputable, if conservatively-inclined outfit. By Judis’ account, though, it was always a front group for partisan conservatives, and so, its recent activities (discussed here, here and here) can be seen merely as revealing its true colours.

Judis’ analysis is quite US-specific, but it is still helpful in trying to work out an appropriate response to the Australian debate over “elites” most of which is at a very low level.

My model in work is Anthony Trollope who turned out 50 or 60 three-volume novels despite having, for most of his life, a full-time (admittedly, not very demanding) job at the Post Office (he invented the pillar-box). According to his autobiography, Trollope achieved his output with a writing stint of three hours per day, starting at 5am. He set a target rate, with the requirement to write more if he fell behind for a couple of ideas.

All of this sounds crass, at least to those impressed with the Romantic notion of spontaneous expression, but, for those of us who aren’t tortured genii, I think Trollope’s rules are spot-on. To adapt a favorite maxim of the Labor Party, write early, write often and write lots.

That said, I can’t really believe Trollope’s claim that he regularly wrote 250 words a quarter-hour for a three hour stretch. I imagine my methods are similar to his, in that I have my pieces turning over in my head for a fair while before I sit down to write them, and so, when things go well, I’m basically constrained only by typing speed. I can manage about 30 wpm with moderate error count, so that, in principle I ought to be able to beat Trollope’s output rate handily, 450 words to 250. But even the most modest cleaning up – correcting typos and grammatical errors, rearranging clumsy sentences and so on, is going to take 5 minutes in every 15, which cuts my maximum rate to 300 words per quarter hour.

And, while I’m not Flaubert, agonizing over “le mot juste”, I care about picking the right words and so, pretty clearly, did Trollope. I spent 30 seconds or so in the previous para thinking about whether to write “typos” or “minor errors”, and this kind of delay is bound to hit you every few sentences, even when you have the main ideas clear before you start.

All up, I consider myself pretty satisfied when I can turn out a 750-word column in an hour and a half, which is a rate of 125 words every quarter hour, or half what Trollope claims. Given that Trollope was writing by hand, and had to rewrite anything he wanted to change, I don’t believe he could consistently achieve twice that rate.

Trollope described his methods in his Autobiography, which he ensured was published posthumously. He knew that his production-line work ethic would shock the Victorian public, and I suspect he stretched the truth a bit to increase the shock value. (425 words, 45 minutes!)

Riemann’s zeta function by HM Edwards (includes translation of Riemann’s original paper as an Appendix) . What with A Beautiful Mind and the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem a few years back, the Riemann hypothesis is the last big maths question accessible to amateurs like myself. It’s hard going though – heaps of complex analysis applied to concepts as simple as those of prime numbers and factorials. In fact, the zeta function is a relatively simple modification of the factorial n!, extended from positive integers to complex numbers in general, and the Riemann hypothesis says that all zeros of this function lie on a given line. With a bit more work I hope to understand this better, and will try to post or link to a good explanation.

Meanwhile, Sunday being the day of religious observance in Australia, I finally did something about the change of religion I announced last year, taking the family out to the Gabba. I’m pleased to report an exciting victory by the Brisbane Lions over the Hawthorn Hawks, 14.9 (93) to 11.15 (81). As a neophyte, I was happy,if surprised, to learn that my new club song is to the stirring tune of La Marseillaise.This set me thinking about other possibilities -perhaps the Horst Wessel Lieder would fit Carlton and Rupert Murdoch’s rugby league teams could use The Star-Spangled Banner.

This was the first AFL game I’ve ever been to, and the first top-grade Aussie rules game I’ve been to since I followed West Torrens in the SANFL 40 or so years ago (In the intervening years, I’ve lived in rugby league territory almost continuously). Things have changed in all sorts of ways, but the change in relative prices is the most obvious. Back then (B&W) TV was a luxury while going to the footy was taken for granted. Today I could get a brand-new colour TV for the price I paid for tickets for the family (not the cheapest on offer, but nothing special). It’s not hard to explain given technology, wages and so on, but it’s striking nonetheless. And despite the prices, the ground was packed.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, one of the books recommended to me by readers, and, until now, a surprising omission on my part. I’m enjoying it very much. I’m also reading Gensler’s Introduction to Logic (‘You should have done that before you started blogging’, I hear you all say), from which I’m hoping to tighten up my understanding of modal logic.

Today I went to Southbank to see the Bonnard exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. As a successor to the Impressionists, Bonnard was among the last painters who filled the role created by the 19th century notion of the artist in a fairly unselfconscious fashion, making some innovations in technique without adopting innovation for its own sake. After about 1910, we get the disaster of ‘modern art’, based on the assumption that formal innovations are necessary to artistic greatness and that success in the game of ‘epater le bourgeois’ (shock the middle-classes) is the test of sufficiency.

Finally, this afternoon I took my son and a friend to see ‘The Matrix Reloaded’. Good fun, in a RoadRunner vs Wile E Coyote kind of way, but, as so often, a good argument against sequels.