Falkenstein on Taleb

Who looks well-fed, sports a beard, and has an exaggerated idea of his own contribution to intellectual life? No, I am not thinking about Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, but Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan).

Tyler Cowen wrote a generally positive review of The Black Swan. He did say,

Taleb is a talented writer, and often offers up a brilliant sentence or a clever, darting aphorism; he has a harder time developing a systematic message that is not only true but also original.

Taleb (over)reacted with a Brief Discussion of Empirical and Logical Mistakes in Tyler Cowen’s Review of The Black Swan in Slate (pdf).

Now on Mahalanobis, Eric Falkenstein sets out to demolish Taleb. As hatchet jobs go, it is pretty good.

Left Libertarian Reading List

Memo to self: Chris Dillow’s useful left libertarian reading list is here.

Ousmane Sembène is dead

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest writers and film directors in sub-Saharan Africa. He produced and directed the first sub-Saharan African feature film, La noire de…, released in 1966. His book God’s Bits of Wood, first published in French in 1960, is excellent and deserves to be much more widely read.

Are Voters Rational or Irrational?

On Café Hayek Don Boudreaux writes

My brilliant younger colleague Bryan Caplan is making quite a splash with his new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter. It is, in my opinion, the most important book on the economics of politics to appear in the past decade.

In contrast, on his blog Dani Rodrik states that “Caplan is doing us a service by taking on the holy cow of the rational voter”, but points out that Caplan gets his key piece of evidence wrong,

First, I have a problem with the economics in the book. Consider the key exhibit in Caplan’s case, the fact that many or most people are skeptical about free trade even though most economists are in favor. Caplan interprets this as evidence that people just don’t get the argument about free trade’s benefits (to themselves as well as the economy overall). But in fact there is nothing in the economic case for free trade to suggest that all or most of the individuals in the economy will be better off with free trade. The median individual/voter could well end up worse off (as may have been indeed happening during the last quarter century). So the difference of views between the economist and the person on the street may be reflecting the former’s own social preferences instead of the latter’s misunderstanding.

And even with respect to the aggregate gains from trade, the economist’s case hinges on a large number of auxiliary assumptions. These may well be violated in the real world. I would bet my dollar on the common person having an instinctive understanding of these imperfections before I would trust a Chicago or GMU economist’s priors on it.

A review of the book by Christopher Hayes can be read here, another by Gary Bass here.

New review of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan

Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan is reviewed in The Guardian.

It is as if Taleb – thoughtful Taleb whom we thought we once knew – has been mugged by an editor determined to dumb down in the most stupid way conceivable. The result is a missed opportunity.

But apparently Nassim Taleb doesn’t allow editors to touch his work.

I just had to withdraw a piece from publication. The copy editor wanted to “improve” the sentences.

Quoted from Mahalanobis. A review of the book on Mahalanobis can be found here.