pro libertate net

I already read Making Money last year after a long period of Pratchett abstinence. And thus I desperately wanted to read the prequel Going Postal that introduces Moist von Lipwig. Alas, there is only so much time.

Last week’s trip to Berlin — I was invited to a workshop — finally led to me reading the book on my by now not so new any more Sony ebook reader.

I am not an expert on the postal system. But, I think this novel took a lot less research than Making Money. It is rather the typical Pratchett paltering with stereotypes. Nevertheless, nice. I really do like Pratchett’s takes on the state, government, and democracy. Vetinari’s precious few remarks on these societal phenomena alone are worth reading the novel. I will most definitely read the next von Lipwig novel that is, again, supposed to deal with an economics topic: Raising Taxes.

I am not at an economics department any more. Yet, I am still interested in the profession. Maybe even more interested than a few years before. David Colander provides with The Making of an Economist, Redux a brief overview about the state of the economics curriculum and the economics student at a few of the elite US universities in the early 2000.

I am a little bit disappointed, disillusioned and reaffirmed.

Disappointed because I expected more from this book. The content is mostly fine as far as the topic allows. The presentation, however, could be improved considerably. All the endless tables should have been made into less messy and more clear graphical illustrations. Or at least been complemented with them. The data analysis is cursory, yes. But, I guess this serves a purpose. The data may suffer from several biases and the current analysis does not pretend any false precision or representativeness.

Disillusioned because US economics students may be even more ignorant than I would have thought before. The system really seems to produce basically only a conforming mass of idiot savants.

Reaffirmed because there seems to be only minor differences between the economics education in the US and Germany. In both places the history of economic thought and more broader philosophical questions are not addressed any more — at economics departments. General knowledge about economics is under-appreciated and training focuses on producing least publishable units.

I wonder: Is there any comparable research done for Germany and / or Europe?

It was time for another science thriller by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child: Thunderhead is set in the Pendergast-universe, though the FBI agent himself does not appear in this novel. The story takes places some time before Cabinet of Curiosities, that is even before the rather ambivalent Diogenes trilogy [1] [2] [3] that was my reason to start reading Preston and Child novels. The only known character (given the timeline of novels) is the journalist Smithback who accompanies an archaeological dig in a remote corner of Utah’s canyon country. The leader of the expedition Nora Kelly will re-appear in later novels, too, one additional character that will be recycled throughout the series.

Thunderhead is less mysterious and less mystic than most other Pendergast novels. The solution to the single seemingly mystic puzzle is almost mundane. Yet, or maybe for this reason, the novel is a very entertaining and absorbing reading.

The current public interest in behavioral economics is inspired by a number of popular science books on the topic. Or the other way round, I don’t know. Nudge is one of these books. It is coauthored by one of the pioneers of the field, Dick Thaler, professor and director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago. His coauthor Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar taught at Chicago, too, before he moved to Harvard Law School.

Both authors plead for a philosophy of governmental minimalism. Yet, they recognize that humans make mistakes, take shortcuts in their decision making and are easily directed to certain actions by simple and seemingly innocent changes in the decision environment. The latter is exactly what they argue for: To nudge people in the right direction. Offer people freedom of choice, reasonable defaults if necessary, and structured information to avoid overwhelming the decision maker. Since all this nudging is supposed to improve the well being of the decision maker and the welfare of society they call their policy of gently guided freedom of choice libertarian paternalism.

I do not want to start another discussion about the benefits and perils of such paternalism. Thaler and Sunstein address some of the opposing arguments at the end of their book. This is not where they make their strongest points.

The main text, however, gives a very nice overview of some of the observed regularities in decision making and the resulting applications of behavioral economics during the last decade. Some more controversial topics are discussed in the last third of the book. Here they cover two themes where many people will have strong prior opinions. First, they argue that the government should allow anyone to waive his right to sue for negligence. As a consequence health insurance fees would decrease and better coverage would result. Second, they argue government should privatize marriage and instead introduce civil partnerships. Marriage is mainly a religious concept. The religious rules concerning marriage may sometimes lead to a retrenchment of personal freedom, e.g. in the choice of (approved) partners. Therefore, the state should not link additional privileges or responsibilities to this institution. Instead, the state should recognize a more modern concept of family, a caretaker—dependent relationship. Current privileges, social and economic subsidies for married couples should be transfered to this new entity.

I cannot say that I am not sympathetic to these proposals. I just do not see the nudge…

During the late 90s Peter F. Hamilton published his Night’s Dawn trilogy. A rather dark space opera where humanity is segregated into two major groups characterized by their different technology and personal enhancements and the resulting societal organization.

A second chance at Eden is a collection of some good and some not as good short stories that depict some steps from our world today, or let’s better say tomorrow to the fictional universe of the trilogy. Hamilton shows how advances in technology and space travel may transform society but not necessarily man. His work is sometimes utopian, sometimes dystopian.

I really liked the trilogy. This book, however, leaves me a little bit torn. I was somewhat lost after one of the otherwise nicer stories, candy buds. Who the heck is Rubus? Ok, I may have read the book too fast and cursorily. Nevertheless, in my opinion it’s always the authors’ fault if the reader is lost or does not get the point.

Almost three weeks ago I bought a Sony Portable Reader System PRS-505, also known as the Sony Reader, so it is time for a first assessment of the little gadget.

Though the actual purchase was a rather impulsive affair The choice was well informed. I already thought about buying an e-ink ebook reader for some time and read reviews on the web and forum post to learn about the pros and cons of the different available devices. The Sony Reader is one of the most reasonably priced devices available in Germany. It is light, it is robust, it is heavily advertised, and it is not my first Sony. I first thought about buying the irex iliad or even the professional. They have bigger screens (8 or even 10 inch), wireless, and you can write on them with a wacom stylus. If it were not for their price that is about twice that of the Sony Reader I would have bought one. But first, I needed to find out whether I would be comfortable with such a device. So for a test drive the cheaper one seemed to be the better choice.

The intended main purpose was to read PDFs when I am on the road, err, train track. Sometimes I carried more paper in my bag than clothes. Comes with the job. On this particular Friday three weeks ago, there were several PDFs waiting for me to read on the weekend. Instead of printing them all out I went buying the Reader before I went to the office.

The problem with PDFs is that most PDF pages are in letter or A4 format. Much larger than the 6 inch of the Reader what is just about the size of a standard paperback novel’s page. Fortunately the Reader can “reflow” PDFs when you increase the font size (There are three sizes: S-M-L.). Yet, there is no real zoom. The inconvenience with this reflowing feature is that you will loose your tables and formulas. Unfortunately most of the PDFs I read contain lots of tables and lots of formulas. Increasing the font size and reflowing is, consequently, not an option. At least not for me, most of the times. You could rotate the page by 90 degrees and read the upper and lower halves of a page separately. This helps a little. Most times the font is still too small.

Most times there is, however, a huge white margin that could be cropped. If you have a working recent LaTeX installation you already have a small script call pdfcrop that can do the job. Alas, sometimes it will choke on some files. Bigger ones, normally, like the ones I read. There is a solution. Since you need some software to manage your ebook collection, chances are you already have calibre installed. And with calibre comes a small python script called pdftrim that can help. You just need to tell it the amount of space it should trim off the edges of a page, all the pages. An easy way to do this automagically is let ghostscript decide: gs -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=bbox inputfile.pdf 2>bounding. Afterwards, pdftrim -b bounding inputfile.pdf will then do as asked.

A last inconvenience I encountered were auto-rotated pages in PDFs, e.g. large rotated tables. Every page needs to be in “Portrait”-orientation for successful trimming. Pdftk comes to rescue: pdftk inputfile.pdf cat 1-endN output outputfile.pdf.

Ok, this is how I coped with the problems I had the very first weeks using my Sony Reader. Do I use the Reader? Is it comfortable to use? Does it feel “right”? Yes, and surprisingly its main use is not reading job related PDFs. I still read them during my weekend trips, yes. But the every day use is reading news on the train during my ride to the office. News that were fetched from the WWW in the morning using calibre. Calibre offers a nice selection of built-in scripts to fetch webpages from news sites like The Times, CNN, Science Daily, etc., and RSS feeds from google reader. And this is really a nice feature. No bulky newspaper but my personal selection of news from different sites.

I have to admit that I am disappointed by Thomas Schelling’s certainly influential Micromotives and Macrobehavior. It is well written, yes. It, sure enough, is educating and illuminating. Nevertheless, it lacks depth. I expected more.

The main message is that seemingly innocent individual preferences, the unobserved micromotives, may lead to surprising and drastic consequences in the aggregate, the observed macrobehavior. He illustrates this by simple thought experiments, graphics and very little mathematical / logical reasoning; game theory, actually. His message is spread over 200+ pages and still I feel like it lacks depth. He fails to offer any remedies while pointing to possible moral dilemma. At the end, there are more questions than answers.

I was much more enjoying Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation.