Links & What I’ve Been Reading, August

Media recommendations

Here are the highlights from what I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to in the last month. As always, you can email me recommendations at sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com. 

Blogs

I wrote about microfinance and Jonathan Swift. 

On average, the British public thinks that 8% of total government expenditure is MPs’ salaries (it is actually 0.01%). 

It’s time to ban intelligence operations from interfering in public health. 

The origin story of ‘Mehran’s Steakhouse’. 

Baggy Shanker, the new parliamentary spoonerism.

Gavin Leech: a PhD by the numbers.  

Scott Alexander’s links for July. 

Dan Wang on the peculiar life of Philip Glass. 

A review of the autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, the man from the ¥10,000 note and a key figure in the astonishing translation efforts of the Meiji Restoration.  

The conventional wisdom is that, in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, there was a housing supply boom in places like Nevada; too many houses were built, if not in total, then at least in certain areas. The conventional wisdom is wrong. 

How to read an econometrics paper.

Some words about the lyricism of Jack Yeats, younger brother of WB Yeats and one of my favourite painters. Many of his more textured paintings translate to screens particularly badly and need to be viewed in person. Here is A Summer Day (1914):

Dynomight’s obvious travel advice. 

I hadn’t known about the 167 islands which are de facto part of the Republic of China but not part of Taiwan. The question of the ownership of the Kinmen and Matsu islands off Fujian province was a major issue in the 1960 presidential election between Kennedy and Nixon! 

According to Cuba’s national statistics office, 10% of the entire population emigrated between 2022 and 2023.  

Podcasts 

Rasheed Griffith explains Rihanna, the most famous Bajan of all time. I admit I had never listened to a Rihanna song before listening to this podcast. As you may be aware, in recent years Rihanna was made a National Hero of Barbados, making her official title The Right Excellent Rihanna.  

Jan Swafford discusses Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, and other topics in classical music. Undertone remains a highly underrated podcast. 

Sihao Huang on the nature of US-China AI competition.  

A time capsule: Kevin Rudd (former Australian prime minister) discussing coronavirus with my friend Joe Walker.

The economic odyssey of Ken Henry, the former secretary of the Australian treasury. Australia was the only major economy in the world not to suffer a recession following the 2008 global financial crisis, and one of the reasons for this was a quick response by the treasury which was widely seen as effective. I saw on Twitter that this podcast episode was recently cited in an academic journal article!

Patrick McKenzie discusses VaccinateCA with Dwarkesh Patel, self-recommending. You can also see this article for context.  

The Rewatchables retrospective on Pulp Fiction.

Alan Taylor discusses various topics in North American history. This was far from the point of the podcast, but it’s quite remarkable that one of the most esteemed living American historians has never visited Mexico. 

The Empire podcast on the birth of North Korea. And on the 1943 Bengal famine. I was surprised to learn that there is not a single plaque or monument in India (or anywhere else) to commemorate the Bengal famine. This pairs well with the essay about the political economy of famines recommended in last month’s links post. 

Books

David Roodman, Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance. This was my main source for my recent post about microfinance. I wish more books like this existed, where someone with a generalist quantitative social science background would blog about a narrow topic for two years or so, and then turn those blogs into an informal textbook on the topic. I would love for someone to do for lead poisoning what Roodman has done here for microfinance. Roodman keeps a low profile, but you can listen to him on the 80,000 Hours podcast here. 

Thomas Lin, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire. If you don’t read Quanta magazine, you’re making a mistake. It’s a lot better than New Scientist or any other science ‘news you can use’ I’ve come across. This book is a collection of some of their best essays about physics and biology. They also have a collection of some of their best mathematics stories, which I’ll read at some point. My favourite article from Quanta was their profile of the South Korean Fields Medalist June Huh, who dropped out of high school to become a poet and didn’t take his first maths course until his sixth year of university.   

Michael Palin, Himalaya. Michael Palin’s travelogues are delightful: I previously mentioned how much I liked his journals from Iraq and North Korea. This one was a bit longer and covered his journey across Pakistan, India, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. I listened to the audiobooks; the books were released as companions to an associated documentary series (which I have not seen). The Himalaya series was filmed during the Maoist guerilla war in Nepal in the early 2000s, which I had never even heard of.  

Bernard Share, Shannon Departures. Another book where quite possibly I am the only person in the world who would benefit from reading it. I’m surprised it took me so long to come across this book, which is one of the few written about the various projects associated with Shannon Airport in the West of Ireland in the latter half of the 20th century. I have a big project about this in the pipeline.  

Karl Ove Knausgård, A Death in the Family. This is volume one in the My Struggle (Min Kamp) series. I don’t re-read enough, and I don’t read novels enough either. In this case, I was doing both. A Death in the Family might honestly be my favourite novel of all time. It’s a shame that most people (including the author himself) agree that volumes three, four, five, and six are considerably worse, as I haven’t found any novels which evoke emotion in me as strongly as the first two books did. 

Papers

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal. This is Swift’s famous satire from 1729, in which he argues that poor Irish people should ease their economic woes by selling their children to be eaten by the British elite. The full title is A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from Being a Burden on their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. I had somehow never read this essay, or anything else from Swift directly. It’s only about ten pages. The first paragraph has an interesting mention of the Irish poor who “sell themselves to the Barbadoes”, i.e. into indentured servitude in Barbados.  

Aidan Hollis and Arthur Sweetman, The Life-Cycle of a Microfinance Institution: The Irish Loan Funds. Hollis and Sweetman are the main experts on the Irish loan funds, i.e. a microfinance institution which existed primarily during the pre-famine period in Ireland. This paper was my other source for my Jonathan Swift article, though they have several papers which cover very similar ground.  

Paul Krugman, Ricardo’s Difficult Idea. “Why do policy wonks who will happily watch hundreds of hours of talking heads droning on about the global economy refuse to sit still for the ten minutes or so it takes to explain Ricardo?” Why indeed! David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage is one of the most important contributions by economics ever, yet there is enormous ignorance of it – and resistance to learn – even among clever commentators on policy. This classic essay makes my shortlist of papers I would most like to be able to force every world leader to read. 

Cormac Ó Gráda and Kevin O’Rourke, The Irish Economy During the Century After Partition. Key passage: “By 2001, Irish national income had grown exactly as much as would have been predicted given its relative income in 1926, with under-performance prior to 1973 being precisely matched by over-achievement during the 1990s, and Ireland’s long-run performance remains unexceptional today”. I was also struck by this graph, page 341:

This plots a regression of GDP per capita in 1926 using the famous Maddison database against average annual growth rates from 1926 to 2018. Ireland is bang on trend, and indeed, the only country that is particularly anomalous is oil-rich Norway. The growth rate of income per person is suspiciously stable and well-predicted by what region of the world you’re in. On this point, I also recommend reading Lant Pritchett and Larry Summers on regression to the mean in the context of Asian growth rates.  

Something else this paper points out which almost nobody seems to realise is that Ireland was not unusually protectionist in the 1930s. Sure, it was certainly very protectionist! But so was everybody else. When it comes to trade restrictions, tariffs may be the first thing that comes to mind. But other forms of restrictions like quotas and capital controls can be far more restrictive, and Ireland’s system of quotas in the 1930s was less restrictive than other comparable countries.  

Melissa Dell, Deep Learning for Economists. A 50-page highly readable overview of what economists should know about deep learning, complete with a companion website and lots of additional resources. This is a fantastic project, and I wish academia were more set up to incentivise people to write things like this. I’ve been talking to a friend about running a reading group for undergraduates for this and other deep learning economics papers. I also second Dell’s recommendation of 3Blue1Brown’s excellent visual introduction to deep learning. 

Music

Casiopea, Casiopea, especially ‘タイム・リミット’. Groovy fusion band from Japan in the 1970s. 

Hiromi, Blue Giant Soundtrack, especially ‘The Beginning’. Hiromi is a Japanese composer who I linked to last month. I have no idea what ‘Blue Giant’ is, but it has a great soundtrack.  

Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes. The first opera I’ve listened to the whole way through. I did not follow the plot, though perhaps I’m not supposed to.  

Roy Ayers, Everybody Loves the Sunshine. The melody of the title track is unmistakable and has been widely sampled in hip hop, but I’d never listened to the rest of the album before. Kamala Harris is also a fan. There is a joke here waiting to be made about ‘Swing States’. 

Films

Christopher Nolan, Memento. This film has been on my list to watch for years; I liked it a lot more than Oppenheimer. I also recommend the discussion from Very Bad Wizards. Some trivia: Memento is not Nolan’s first film. That title belongs to Following, an independent crime thriller lasting barely over an hour which had a total budget of $6,000. 

Wong Kar-wai, In the Mood for Love. This one didn’t stick with me as much as Chungking Express, which is the other film that the director is most well-known for. I chose to watch this film with two other male friends who had minimal context, which was maybe a mistake. My favourite moments in this film were the funny ones: twice a scene is revealed to only be a ‘rehearsal’ of future events by the characters involved, to great effect. See also: Molly Mielke’s reflections. 

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car. I had tickets to go see this film when it first came out in cinemas, but then something came up and I couldn’t go. I was unable to convince any of my friends to take my tickets to go see a three-hour Japanese film about a car for free. Like Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, one of my favourite films of recent times, Drive My Car is based on a Haruki Murakami short story. This is one of the most multi-lingual films I’ve seen: significant dialogue takes place in Mandarin, Japanese, English, Tagalog, Indonesian and – most beautifully – Korean Sign Language. I’ll certainly be rewatching.