Brief Reviews

Fishkin, James. Untitled (forthcoming).
Smil, Vaclav. Numbers Don’t Lie.
Ambedkar, B. R. Pakistan or the Partition of India.
Weisberg, Sanford. Applied Linear Regression. A good introduction by a master.
Hernstein, Richard, and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Primarily uses data from the public NLSY’78-79 survey to describe the distribution of IQ and its impact. The book makes at least three big points: 1. IQ is a great predictor of success, even within professions and better than parental SES, 2. There is increasing segregation by IQ (see, though, papers like this), and 3. large differences in IQ between Blacks, Whites, Jews, and Latinos in the US. Notes. (See also the Wikipedia article on the book.)
Naipaul, V. S. India: A Million Mutinies Now. A collection of deep interviews with a not particularly carefully selected cast of characters. Insightful on occasion but also untrustworthy—there is no effort to validate the claims made by the interlocutors. The point about moving from instinctive living to awakening to history deserves more focus. Notes.
French, Patrick. India: A Portrait. A popular history of post-independence India. It switches between journalistic coverage and big picture conclusions primarily based on secondary historical sources. Poorly footnoted. Highlights include data on hereditary MPs—two-thirds of MPs under 40 were hereditary in 2010—and a useful section on Mahalobis, who was the main culprit behind India’s poor economic performance in the early years. Notes.
Kuklinski, James. Ed. Thinking About Political Psychology. Notable for Luskin’s takedown of Brady and Sniderman. Krosnick’s criticisms of interpreting positive correlation between personal and favored candidate attitudes as evidence for projection are well taken. He argues the data could be a result of: 1. persuasion (changed views about the policy), 2. evaluation (like candidate as a result of the views on the policy), 3. candidate presenting diff. views to diff. people, and 4. false consensus effect. Krosnick also makes some useful methodological points. Notes.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. A diverting deep dive into the techniques used by comic artists. Notes.
James, Gareth, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, and Robert Tibshirani. An Introduction to Statistical Learning. A reasonably written hands-on introduction to (mostly) estimating functions from data. Portions of it seem like compendia of small points without a front-end. I believe an expanded form of my lecture 4 can be inserted up-front to guide what comes later. Would be better for discussion of MLE and visualization. Notes.
Iyengar, Shanto and Don Kinder. News That Matters. A landmark book, notable for its realistic lab-in-the-field experiments. Marred by small n, unconventional analyses of heterogeneous treatment effects (IV than interaction; it still tracks), a lack of discussion of constraints on agenda setting, etc. The link from the news media to people is made clear but the questions for me are about the constraints on the agenda setting power. For instance, could it be that we could make Americans care about the war in Darfur? The other standard ways by which issues come on the agenda, exogenous events, e.g., mass shooting, are not discussed. I also wonder if priming works with barely relevant dimensions. Notes.
Iyengar, Shanto. Is Anyone Responsible. There is much to admire about the lengths to which Shanto goes through to have realistic lab-in-the-field-experiments but the book is marred by small ns, with 10–20 observations per cell quite common. Notes.
Gelman, Andrew (et al.?) Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. This badly put together book never answers the question in the title. Worse, it doesn’t present data behind key claims. For instance, there is no over time data on why the rich in rich states increasingly vote Democratic. Or why the poor still vote Republican in similar numbers (see here) (or why a majority of the poor in KS, etc., voted for R in 2004 or why the delta as seen in Figure 4.3b has stagnated) given the hard right shift among Republicans on economic policy. (By trying to explain over time change in difference between the rich and the poor, which is hard to interpret uniquely, the book makes a hash.) On the plus side, it has some interesting nuggets. Caveat Emptor. Notes.
Alesina, Alberto, and Geoffrey Carliner. (Editors.) Politics and Economics in the Eighties. Alesina and Carliner did a cruel experiment in the 80s. They got political scientists to write essays on the political economics of the 80s and economists to write commentaries on the essays. The results are occasionally entertaining. Prime among them is a “No Holds-Barro” takedown of McCubbins. The lessons from the book are two. First, much of the conventional wisdom about Reaganomics is wrong—under Reagan, the welfare spending didn’t decline much, tax rates flip-flopped, deficits increased by 2x, etc. Second, the small-data-elementary-game-theory-proves-my-pet-theory enterprise about how the laws are made was incredibly stupid. Notes.
Allport, Gordon. The Nature of Prejudice. A comprehensive but not a very empirically informed look at American inter-group prejudice. Notes.
Schlozman, Kay and Sidney Verba. Injury to Insult. Why do the unemployed not come together as a group to protest or ask for greater accommodation from the government (esp. during recessions). Notes.
Webb, Eugene, Donald Campbell, Richard Schwartz, and Lee Sechrest. Unobtrusive Measures: Nonreactive Research in the Social Sciences. A diverting catalog of creative unobstrusive measures used by social scientists. Notes.
Sniderman, Paul, and Thomas Piazza. Black Pride and Black Prejudice. One of the few books on the topic. Less sure footed than some of Sniderman’s other books. One of the more compelling results in the book is that vast majorities of African Americans prefer that a white person with better scores be admitted than a black person with worse scores even when the difference between the two candidates is not a whole lot. The other compelling finding is that Afrocentrism increases with education. Notes.
Sniderman, Paul, and Edward Carmines. Reaching Beyond Race. Lucidly, if dramatically, written, the book provides excellent evidence (now ~ 30 years old) for the following: 1. The correlation between racial prejudice and opposition to affirmative action among White Americans is slim. 8 out of 10 of the 1% most racially tolerant whites oppose affirmative action in hiring and 6 out of 10 in college admissions (compared to 9 out of 10 whites on the 75th percentile) (1992 ANES), 2. The correlation between prejudice and racial policies is also weak, e.g., support for programs to get blacks jobs (the average correlation is .16), 3. Racial prejudice explains more of the variation in support for policies among Liberals than Conservatives, 4. There is much greater support for race neutral policies than for race specific policies, e.g., tax breaks for locating in largely black areas vs. poor and high unemployment areas, and 5. 70% or more of Blacks and Whites believe that blacks should work their way up without special favors. And this agreement is rooted in similarity in how both groups see the causes of why Blacks are doing worse. Notes.
Landemore, Helene. Open Democracy. The core idea of lottocracy has real appeal but it deserves careful inspection. Much of the book, however, is devoted to understanding what Rousseau meant and railing against inferred beliefs, e.g., “Rousseau’s mistake is perhaps even worse. …He might have even thought …”, the flaws in popular ways of thinking about representation, etc.
Stone, Daniel. Undue Hate. A primarily individual-psychological explanation of excess polarization. Covers less discussed reasons like WYSIATI, limited strategic thinking, mistakenly assuming noisy signals to be reliable, etc. Notes.
Heath, Chip, and Karla Starr. Making Numbers Count. Compelling examples but sloppy abstraction to principles and little theory. It wasn’t clear to me if all the techniques are backed by research. Notes.
Manski, Charles. Patient Care Under Uncertainty. A narrow but useful view of some of the shortcomings of how the evidence is generated and used in medicine. There are at least three big points: challenges in extrapolating study results are underappreciated given how studies are conducted (primary deficiencies include excluding patients with co-morbidities, and using bad surrogate outcomes), Clinical Practice Guidelines are likely suboptimal, and we would likely be better off if the FDA, the organizations that come up with CPGs, etc., used statistical decision theory. Alongside these important points, Manski also has more debatable policy proposals for which he has no data including “CPGs could encourage clinicians to recognize that treatment choice may reasonably depend on how one interprets the available evidence and on the decision criterion that one uses…” Notes.
List, John. The Voltage Effect. What prevents interventions (products/companies) from scaling? The usual suspects: 1. initial results were False Positives, e.g., DARE, 2. the sample was different from the population, e.g., Opower, 3. general equilibrium effects kicked in, e.g., a rise in base fares for drivers causes new drivers to enter the market driving down the dynamic portion of the wages and reducing the number of rides, 4. the non-negotiables for the success of the intervention were hard to scale, e.g., quality was hard to maintain at scale, etc. Notes.
Kahneman, Daniel, Oliver Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. More Sunstein than Kahneman. And more of a business book than a social science book. Some of the data is interesting, but the proposed remedies generally lack evidence. The Kindle edition doesn’t link to the sources. Review. Notes.
Kohavi, Ron, Diane Tang, and Ya Xu. Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments. The only way to run a field experiment is to pay attention to everything. Don’t assume the technology will work as you think it will. Don’t assume that people who work with you will automatically pay attention to the relevant points. Notes.
Lencioni, Patrick. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Conveys a few key points in a pointed and dramatic way.
Bryar, Colin, and Bill Carr. Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. Amazon became a diversified conglomerate in an era when the mantra was to focus. How much its principles and processes contributed to its success is anybody’s guess. But still worth going over some of its innovations, including single-threaded leadership, the PR-FAQ, the 6-pager, and the WBR. Notes.
Wheelan, Charles. Naked Statistics. A good introduction to some basic statistical concepts that will make the reader a better consumer of data.
Kearns, Michael, and Aaron Roth. The Ethical Algorithm. More an introduction than a substantive take on the topic. Strays well beyond the topic to cover things like publication bias.
Domingos, Pedro. The Master Algorithm. A good introduction to machine learning. The book has multiple insightful, clarifying passages.
Cowen, Tyler. An Economist Gets a Lunch. Diverting. Pairs lay economic theorizing with keen observation and detailed notes on personal experience. The writing is below average. And the material can run thin. Disappointing given the author.
Rodrik, Dani. Economics Rules. A modest book that is written well. More informal commentary than serious analysis. The key points are 1. Economic Science grows by adding models than by refining models, 2. Models are best seen as fables (or parables — Nancy Cartwright), 3. Most models (and data) are contextual, 4. The art of picking the right model is important and underdeveloped.
Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain. Excellent.
Doerr, John. Measure What Matters. Three parts promotional material, one part plausible-sounding-baloney, served with a side of insight, this book firmly belongs in the anthology of business books that should be no more than two pages. Like much of business wisdom, OKRs are a carefully stated tautology wrapped in claims of efficacy. OKRs work when the inputs are correct and when everything else works. And it is better than other tools because the carefully selected sample says so. But if you are looking for guidance on OKRs, Google’s OKR playbook, tagged on at the end of the book (also available online), is worth a look. Notes.
Jackson, Matthew. The Human Network. Elementary. Degenerates into generalist commentary on a wide range of topics, from the decline of news media to inequality. Reinforces my belief that insights from network science are important but shallow. Notes.
Cairo, Alberto. How Charts Lie. Elementary. Poorly organized. Fails to abstract out enough. Notes.
Banerjee, Abhijit, and Esther Duflo. Poor Economics. Banerjee and Duflo have a talent for seeing what is in front of them—nearly all of us miss it, the gumption to ponder over it and learn. The result is a terrific book. They notice the epidemic of unfinished buildings on the outskirts of most developing world cities, the fact that some poor parents call some of their kids stupid with them in the room, and that many poor people don’t fertilize their fields or get cheaper loans when they can. Banerjee and Duflo also give hard data. With the data, they put the lie to the idea that the poor are “natural” entrepreneurs—they are not; they open up small undifferentiated unscalable businesses because often they don’t have access to full-time jobs. Not satisfied with demolishing one misunderstanding, they go after another—the idea that most poor don’t have the money to buy enough food. They show that the world is thankfully rich enough in 2011 that many poor people can buy a full complement of calories. But many poor people choose not to, preferring more expensive tastier calories to a full quota of calories. Poor Economics is a well-written book by people who care about getting it right. Read it to learn how to learn and how to see the obvious. Recommended.
McMillan, John. Reinventing the Bazaar. To shed light on market design, the book covers some big achievements, e.g., spectrum auction, Pneumococcal Advance Market Commitment, and some big failures, e.g., deregulation of the electricity market between generation and distribution in CA (though never passing costs to consumers), and shock therapy. The book pauses to reflect on well-known but still not well-considered facts like intra-firm transactions account for 71% of Americans’ aggregate income. The book’s key point seems to be that there are too many nuances for any market design principle to work all the time. Lastly, like most non-fiction, the book sags at the end.
Pisani, Elizabeth. The Wisdom of Whores. A basic misunderstanding about causal inference right at the start gave me pause. But I was wrong. An honest and original book. It makes an effective case about how political correctness and a bleeding heart can come in the way of understanding the problem and implementing good solutions. It has a smart perspective on the political economy of AIDS aid. And it sheds light on why some of the gruesome predictions in the 90s about the impending AIDS crisis didn’t turn out to be true. Recommended.
Helmer, Hamilton. Seven Powers. What allows businesses to make money consistently? Helmer points to the usual suspects: innovation, economies of scale, network economies, switching costs, branding, and cornered resources (luck + rent-seeking?). Helmer adds counter-positioning to explain why incumbents fail to adapt—I doubt that is something we can hold on to. I wonder what explains Helmer’s success?
Grove, Andy. High Output Management. The book comfortably clears the extraordinarily low bar of management books.
Reinhart, Alex. Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide. Crystal clear explanation of common statistical errors in science.
Gawande, Atul. The Checklist Manifesto. Gawande shows glimpses of talent in writing, especially early on, but flubs the organization of the book. Details about what people are wearing and how they look when describing events, the slightly doctors-are-so-special description of the complexity of doctor’s jobs, calling everything a checklist, and the emphasis on barely applicable anecdotes like the Sullenberger episode, are grating. But the book has an important point: checklists are useful in reducing some errors. My take: they likely work because a) they increase knowledge about the right thing to do (if not the reason for doing the right thing), b) serve as a failsafe when people are distracted, and c) increase social pressure to do the right thing when the process is public, and d) cause people not to skip steps. Notes. Here’s an article synthesizing my thoughts on why we fail and how to prevent failures.
Collins, JL. The Simple Path to Wealth. The formula for achieving financial freedom is simple: save at least 50% of your salary and invest in VTSAX or a similar such index fund, and don’t forget to click on ‘re-invest dividend.’
Agarwal, Ajay, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. The big gain from ML is the ability to predict better. If you haven’t thought at all about how to capitalize on that, read this book. Here are my notes. And I call out a cheeky way the authors frame some modest numbers here. Here’s a slightly expanded review.
Royal, Brandon. The Little Red Writing Book. Elementary.
Gigerenzer, Gerd. Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You. The book provides plenty of compelling numbers and a thoughtful way to communicate risk in what Gerd describes as natural frequencies. I recommend it. Here are my notes for the book.
Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl’s book is many things. It is part (disputed) memoir, part reflection on the scope of human achievement in a limited life, part tactical advice, and part stray observations about psychology and philosophy. At its deepest, it provides the beginnings of a clear way to think about life. Notes.
Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. Astrophysics in a Hurry. Except for some of the later chapters, which are badly organized, the book does a fine job of conveying key points and some diversions. It makes you appreciate the specialness of some things, including the possibility of a complete solar eclipse. Not for complete novices.
Nadella, Satya, Greg Shaw, and Jill Tracie Nichols. Hit Refresh. This is a PR job. Bland and shallow. This book is written by kinds of people who are so short of ideas that the third leadership principle is ‘deliver success.’ Useful points can be counted on three fingers, and they are 1. A leader’s job is to a) lead with pride, b) instill confidence, and c) communicate clearly the ‘sense of mission’ (and the mission, hopefully); 2. A good leadership principle = bring clarity to whom you work with; 3. Get engineers in meetings with customers. None of these points are really new. The big thing I learned is that Gates is an excellent writer. Notes.
Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction. (30th Anniversary Edition) A treat to read. Bill conveys important, if basic, points with panache and humor. I disagree with his advice to columnists: write with a clear point of view. But other than that, there is much to like.
Stein, Sol. Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies. Elementary, clear, unvarnished, and pragmatic advice for writers, especially fiction writers.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Frank, personal advice on how to write fiction.
Cialdini, Robert. Influence. People are cognitively lazy. So they often rely on ‘cheap’ heuristics to make judgments. For instance, people think that if something is popular, it must be good. And while heuristics are good rules of thumb, they can cause problems, especially because strategic actors can exploit them. Bob talks about 6 (actually more) heuristics. The evidence that he marshals on the heuristics tend to be scattershot. And he often freely mixes anecdotes with evidence. But the book is still useful, especially for someone starting out, and if they keep in mind that a) there are many more heuristics, b) there are better ways of organizing the heuristics. Notes.
Mcpherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom. Its plaudits are well-deserved. If you were to read one book on the American Civil War, this should be it.
Jurafsky, Dan. The Language of Food. Educated, charming, and wryly funny. It gives a new appreciation of how interconnected our histories are. On the flip side, it overflows with distracting trivia.
Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Frustrated with cryptic advice on writing? This book is the perfect antidote. It is the single best book on writing that I have read.
Sniderman, Paul. The Democratic Faith: Essays on Democratic Citizenship. If you are looking for a restorative after Trump’s election, this isn’t one. Sniderman is there is to deliver at best a gentle pat. The first chapter re-analyzes and re-interprets Zaller’s data. It shows that people generally have many more considerations in favor of the position they hold. It upends the hopelessly confused voter picture that you ended up with Zaller and Feldman’s analysis. What is more startling and sobering is that something regularly taught in graduate courses and so well cited is so under-scrutinized and so underthought. The citation/scrutiny ratio is pretty high. And tells a bunch about biases of academics and chances of scientific progress. It is a strange fate to be cited but not be scrutinized.
Coffey, Diane, and Dean Spears. Where India Goes. Well-written, edifying, and important. The book presents a compelling puzzle: 70% of Indians living in rural areas defecate in the open when poorer and worse-educated people in other parts of the world tend to defecate in the open at much lower rates. It then sheds clear light on the puzzle. The authors find casteism, misinformation, pleasantness of defecating in the open, and ideas of ritual purity likely have much to do with it. The book then summarizes some key evidence on the consequences of open defecation. About 100,000–200,000 of the over 1.5M infants that die before the age of 5 each year in India die because of disease load from open defecation. The authors also present some ‘suggestive’ evidence (correlation with some controls) about the impact on physical and intellectual stunting and even antibiotic overuse. My only complaint? The book is written in parts to overstate the case for the importance of open defecation. I also wonder why interventions like handwashing wouldn’t be effective. Notes.
Chabris, Chris, and Daniel Simons. The Invisible Gorilla. Illuminating and well-written, with a hint of right-wing nut. Often artfully overstated. Has its share of incorrect statements. Inadvertently makes a convincing case for AI to augment or replace people in a host of jobs.
Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. More expansive than what the title would suggest. Flirts with depth. Makes a few smart points and offers a few potentially useful homegrown strategies. Pleasant.
Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Think pragmatically about injustice. Everything else is self-pleasuring.
Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. A readable book about the phenomenally weird place that is our universe. I understood both the general and the special theory of relativity better as a result of reading the book. Explanation by analogy gets tiring.
Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Stupefying. If you overlook the problems with ecological inference, the crudeness of normalized search data, the lack of detail about how the precise number of searches are arrived at, numerous inaccurate statements, and plodding writing, you will have a few really compelling numbers as a reward. For instance, 25% of female searches for straight porn emphasize pain/humiliation, and 5% are for non-consensual sex. And women search for such terms twice as often as men. Now someone, please explore the social science gold mine that is WhatsApp, the network of misinformation, hate, uplifting messages, and religious gobbledygook. Notes.
Waldrop, Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. Admirably researched. A generally edifying history of computing. Gives a surprisingly short shrift to Bell Labs. After all, the invention of the silicon transistor was key to the miniaturization of computers. Key points = 1. the singular importance of WW II and, more generally, defense funding in the rise of computers, and 2. the power of ideas. Explains some key technical points clearly. A worthy read. h/t Alan Kay.
Thaler, Richard. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. A triumph. Nicely written. Admirably clear. Worth it just for its clear description of what underlies prospect theory. Edifying.
Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. Mostly a waste of time. Especially for anyone reading in 2017 or after. The most illuminating nugget? As recently as 2008/2004, prominent people were prognosticating driverless cars, SLAM, human voice recognition, etc. were unlikely to ever become a reality.
Akerlof, George, and Robert Shiller. Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception. Two Nobel Prize winners come together to deliver an unsatisfactory amuse-bouche. How ironic is it that the two have phished us for phools by doing some “reputation mining” of their own? The two state that they intend for Phishing “to be a very serious book” but go on to deliver an assortment of stories about how people are being phished. Some stories hang by the barest thread of evidence. The sections on politics are particularly cringe-worthy. That market economy is not optimized for what people “really” want is an important point deserving careful attention. Someone serious should give it the time it deserves. Notes.
Horowitz, Ben. The Hard Things About Hard Things. A self-aggrandizing account with some homey advice about management. Some of the most revealing passages deal with the sacrifices spouses of high-powered executives willingly make (lesson: marry someone like Dorothea from Middlemarch) and the role of looks in hiring. Modestly edifying. Badly written and organized. p.s. Ben says he is friends with Kanye West.
Schmidt, Eric, and Jonathan Rosenberg. How Google Works. Includes a side order of a Silicon Valley baloney sandwich. Like all successful people (organizations), gives itself too much credit. Focus on hiring the best technical talent is not new. But the singular importance of it has never been highlighted so effectively. Includes some useful tips for hiring well. Ghostwritten by some marketing person, which takes much away. Badly organized.
Sloman, Steven, and Philip Fernbach. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. A disappointing book about a topic that is very close to my heart. Aptly, the authors suffer from illusions about how much they know about the illusion of knowledge.
Pfaff, John. Locked In. A book about what isn’t rather than what is. Likely to clear up a lot of misinformation that people have about incarceration and crime in the US. Pleased and impressed that the book goes after public sector correctional officer unions. On the other hand, the author repeats himself endlessly, regularly compares between extremes as a rhetorical device, hoists crucial points on citations to studies which are never described so that the reader could judge the research design, misses several key points, rebuts his own points, has too little original data, and at the end of the book resorts to just broad arguments. Frustratingly, very likely the best book on incarceration in the US.
Dahl, Roald. Boy. Simply written. Sweet and moving. Conveys the immense strength of his mother in surprisingly few words.
Lane, Nick. Life Ascending. An educated, well-written, well-reasoned account of the ten biggest inventions of life, including the invention of life itself. You will come back staggered, charmed, and excited about the miracle that is this world.
Sharma, Akhil. An Obedient Father. Honest, devastating, and well-written. A triumph.
Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl. Immensely moving.
Eyal, Nir. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Light on science. Brief. But grasps enough about addiction to make it scary. Lessons: 1. Get customers to want to use your product to ‘scratch their itch.’; 2. Sell what people really want—social validation, feeling more competent, etc.; 3. Focus on stuff triggered by negative emotions; 4. Make it easier for them to get to it; 5. Variable rewards like gambling are more ‘addictive’; 6. Get people to invest as the more people invest, the more they like something.
Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. More Achen than Bartels. Starts with an unexpectedly verbose meander through American political history as it relates to ideas about democracy. Full of long quotes that convey little beyond the summaries they accompany. Relevant empirical research is cited in a particularly pernicious manner —excerpts of only the broadest of the conclusions. The book sputters into life in Chapter 5, only to periodically die. Evidence for accessibility bias in retrospection is well taken. So is the point about group attachments and rationalizing voter, and the evidence on citizen ignorance. But too many words for the data. Soggy. Inattention to the role of institutions in exacerbating or mitigating the problems is disappointing.
Larry M. Bartels. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. A compendium of Larry’s already public papers? A disjointed book with no one particular point beyond perhaps citizen ignorance. Contains the slightly misguided ‘rebuttal’ of Thomas Frank—doesn’t engage with the fact that both Republicans and Democrats have moved to the right on economics. And the interpretation of finding in chapter 1 is likely not correct. See Blinder etc.
Ansolabehre, Steven, and Shanto Iyengar. Going Negative. A more measured, thoughtful interpretation of the results would have made for a good book. Starts out well before disintegrating.
Groeling, Tim. When Politicians Attack. Badly written and researched. Hopeless.
Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian. An illuminating dive into India’s argumentative tradition. Shows that spiritual-East, rational-West stereotypes are weakly founded in history. Third-world citizens interested in secularism and rationalism, and attacked by the religious right for being cronies of the West will walk away from the book with newfound confidence.
Boo, Katherine. Behind the Beautiful Forevers. People sometimes have trouble looking beyond images of deprivation. But beyond the beautiful forevers lie ordinary lives, in all their pettiness and beauty. A largely honest account of life in the slums. On the downside, writing is plodding, and Boo at times struggles to be sympathetic.
Epley, Nicholas. Mindwise. Among the best of the recent set of popular books on psychology. Deserves a special mention for its focus on numbers. Among other things, you will learn that ‘perspective getting’ is superior to ‘perspective taking.’ (That point has implications for Bob Goodin’s point about ‘deliberation within.’)
Mehta, Suketu. Maximum City. A fat-free readable account by an outsider-insider. Full of important, if rarely new, points. Fixation on gangsters, film stars, and prostitutes is slightly grating. But the book redeems itself by its honesty.
Greenstein, Fred. The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Barack Obama. An analytical account of people in a very complex job. Clear, concise, and illuminating. A must-read for presidents and their advisors.
Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Eldar Sharif. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. A charming introduction raises hopes. But such hopes are quickly dashed. Existing concepts are relabeled and cannibalized to describe and explain the consequences of scarcity. As a result, the cartilage between the overall point and specific arguments and evidence is thin at various places. Equally gratingly, tendentious interpretations of anecdotes and data abound.
Sunstein, Cass, and Reid Hastie. Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter. Nobody would be a whole lot wiser for having read it. Carries a lot of new folk wisdom. Like other mass-market social science books, claims with scant empirical basis are not hard to find. Poorly organized. The points could have been conveyed in a quarter as many pages. And this is a slim book to begin with.
Dunning, Thad. Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences. Elementary. The typology of natural experiments makes little sense. Chapters 2-4, which list examples of ‘natural’ experiments, may be useful to some.
Sniderman, Paul, and Edward Stiglitz. The Reputational Premium: A Theory of Party Identification and Policy Reasoning. Some of the writing in the book is luminescent. As with ‘A group basis for political reasoning’, I am convinced that is how people ‘reason’ (inapt term). I am equally convinced that such ‘reasoning’ can lead to trouble. The research design for the key novel claim in the book is weak.
Gerber, Alan, and Donald Green. 2012. Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation. Perhaps the single best book on the topic. Lucid. Accessible. Could do with better organization in Chapter 5 and a discussion of the weaknesses of field experiments.
Yan, Mo. 2006. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Brimming with creativity and energy. A tour de force. Acerbic commentary on communism by a petty landlord may disagree with some.
Bronte, Charlotte. 1847. Jane Eyre. Melodramatic. Cliched in parts. The opening section could have been from Cinderella. Saving grace — some sections that talk about similarities between what women and men want.
Morgan, Kenneth. 2008. Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America. A clear, concise, edifying account of British involvement with the Atlantic slave trade.
Drew, Elizabeth. 1980. Senator. An illuminating recounting of a week in a senator’s (here John Culver of Iowa) life. It leaves one with a greater appreciation of not only the pressures faced by politicians but also a better grasp of the business of being a Senator.
Chandra, Vikram. 2007. Sacred Games. Richly deserving of the million-dollar advance, it is readable ‘filmy’ mass-market trash. A close cousin of Shantaram—as vacuous but marginally better written.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1998. The Affluent Society (Revised Edition). A wonderful writer, Galbraith presents arguments against ‘conventional wisdom’ precisely and persuasively. A must-read.
Lelyveld, Joseph. 2011. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India. Fills out Naipaul’s insight. Focuses heavily on his years in South Africa. The latter half of the book, focusing on his time in India, is poorly organized and feels rushed.
Korda, Michael. 2010. Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Ably researched but pockmarked with facile observations. Written by someone in love with Lawrence.
Shipman, Alan. Market Revolution and its limits: A price for everything. A rudderless, if a mostly clear, summary of economic concepts. In dire need of pruning and a narrative. Sections on Administered and Relational Transactions may prove useful to the uninitiated.
Dwyer, Philip. Napolean: Path to Power. An engaging account of the Corsican’s life till the coup but blemished by too many unsubstantiated claims.
Clover, Charles. The end of the line. A comprehensive, engaging, and sobering account of how corruption, and untrammeled capitalism, have wreaked havoc on the world’s oceans.
East, P. D. Magnolia Jungle. Autobiography of a progressive Southern editor. A joy to read; it sheds light on White poverty along with racial issues of the day and what it took for a Southern White man to write a biting satire against segregation
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. The two most popular novels by the author, 1984 and Animal Farm, are also his worst. Orwell’s talent never lay in writing thinly veiled polemical fiction; his talents lay in writing honest, clear-eyed accounts of complex politics and social issues. Homage to Catalonia, widely considered to be among the best books on the Spanish civil war, is a clear-eyed account of the leftist politics that botched the war. Burmese Days, a complex atmospheric novel about colonialism by someone with ambivalent feelings towards colonialism, deserves reading as well.
French, Patrick. The world is what it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul. A near-perfect biography of an imperfect man. It was all about sex.
Griffin, John. Black like me. A simply told story of a white journalist who changed his appearance to live like a black man in the Jim Crow era South.
Venkatesh, Sudhir. Gang Leader for a day. A sociologist catalogs the ghettos and gangs of Chicago from the inside out. Only modestly insightful and a tad tedious.
Lewis, Anthony. Gideon’s Trumpet. An edifying, readable book by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist on the historic sixth amendment case, Gideon Vs. Wainwright/Cochran.
Dickinson, Charles. With or Without. A collection of exquisite, distinctly American short stories that carry the waft of Cheever and O’Henry.
Forester, E.M.. 1924. A Passage to India. An elegantly written novel about the conflict between the rulers and the ruled and the impossibility of friendship between the two. While the novel occasionally deals in cliches, Forester’s perspicacity and humanity provide a calming influence. A significant achievement for its time and an important book for the readers of English literature.
Nasr, Vali. 2006. The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future. A useful introduction for people who don’t know anything about the history between Shias and Sunnis. Otherwise, a tedious compilation of relatively obvious information put forth in uneven style.
Verne, Jules. Around the world in 80 days. The story moves a touch too quickly. Surface stereotypes stand in for descriptions of places. Replete with prejudices of its time. Mediocre writing or mediocre translation or both.
Verne, Jules. Journey to the Center of the Earth. The Icelandic guide, Hans, is no more than a caricature. Some charming portions but mostly a slog. Would deem it badly written, except allegedly it is badly translated.
Wodehouse, P. G. Jeeves (Misc.). Delicious. Characters are expertly reduced to a single dimension.
Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods. Immensely readable. An ordinary man takes on an adventure. Like Bryson’s other work, speckled with self-condescending anecdotes that make it much easier to identify with him.
Bryson, Bill. Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe. Neither here nor there indeed. Unsatisfactory. A book that appears to have been written on auto-pilot.
Trollope, Anthony. Phineas Finn. An insider’s account of the politics of the day. Reasonably honest and astute. Among other things, highlights the importance of good looks and social networks in success. Notable for its portrayal of strong women.
Mehta, Ved. Mummyji and Daddyji. A warm, intimate portrait of his dad’s and mother’s families. As much a book as a meeting with a friend.
Seth, Vikram. A suitable boy. A bureaucratic novel.
Smith, Zadie. On Beauty. Easy, efficient caricatures.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. Mediocre and self-involved.
Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance. Melodramatic.
Rushdie, Salman. The Jaguar Smile. Mediocre. Superficially observed, tediously written.
Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the sea of stories. Endlessly creative.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. News of a Kidnapping. Forget magic realism. Reality, magically written. A treat.
Sniderman, Paul. The Scar of Race. An achievement for its writing and its incisive analysis.
Art Spiegelman. Maus. Because you must.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The Little Prince. For all the serious adults.
Maurice Sendak. Where the wild things are.