18 April 2022

Podcast Link: https://www.econtalk.org/tyler-cowen-on-reading

Exceptional podcast episode where Tyler Cowen and Russ Roberts discuss each other’s reading habits as well as the books they like, and what they like about them.

Tyler

How he reads

• I like to read books in clusters…I think I remember things better by sampling them from different sources. So, read a bunch of books on the Irish land question. Any one book you read on that topic, you are not going to retain, unless you're exceptional with your memory. But if you read four, five-- on that topic, even if you only read parts of them, you'll know something about it.
  • But I think more and more, the idea--you learn methods, you read in clusters, you don't obsess over single books, you try to read on a project you're working on so you have context--that those are the best ways to read. I think I'm now believing more firmly than before.
• I just start at the beginning and see if it grabs me, and enough other people do that that if the author can't grab you fairly quickly, it may in fact not be a good book. Now, older books are quite different. They were not written to grab people up front. So, if the author's bad at that, it's not a negative signal.
• I think picture books are greatly underrated. So, if you want to learn about Venice, Italy, one thing you could do is go to Amazon, type in Venice, read a book on the history of Venice. I mean, that's fine. But if you just go to your public library and pull down a picture book--it's probably just titled Venice- most people will actually learn more doing that, reading the picture book.
  • If you read picture books about animals, about science, you'll probably learn more than if you do what most people do. This is not about books, but I think most of us--I know it's true for me--I don't spend enough time on YouTube. So, YouTube is in many ways becoming more potent than books. So, just evaluate your YouTube consumption and see if you could improve it, would be another tip.

What he recommends

• If I had to pick five novels everyone should read, Moby Dick would be one of my five. (The others) ****Let's say Proust, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Cervantes, Moby Dick and Dickens' Bleak House-or Gulliver's Travels. That would be the off-the-top-of-my-head list.
• (Tolstoy’s) short fiction like "Hadji Murat," or "The Cossacks," or Death of Ivan Ilyich, or others, which I think are phenomenal.
  • Russ Roberts: "Master and Man," which I think is one of the greatest short stories ever written
• The main thing I'm reading. It's a new book, review copy, Leo Damrosch, Adventurer: The Life and Times of Casanova, which is a book about 18th- century Venice, the Enlightenment, Casanova himself; and it's wonderful. I'm a big fan of Damrosch. All his books are very good.
• Favourite chess book: Alexander Kotov, How to Think Like a Grandmaster, which is still a wonderful book for learning how to do almost anything. So, it encapsulated a lot of the wisdom of the Soviet School of Chess--how they trained people to become better. And the way you become better is by doing exercises with actual feedback that might prove you wrong. So, try to annotate a chess game and then compare your ideas against--then a grandmaster, now it would be a computer--and that's much better than just playing through games or staring at the board or what most people do. So, that's a fantastic book even if you're not mainly a chess player.
• Books that changed his life
  • Reading Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, was a big thing for me. I never loved the long novels or even a lot of the philosophy, but reading her on capitalism; Hayek, Mises, the Austrian School of Economics in general--I'm an economist so that's been my life. And those are books I read when I was 13, 14 years old.
  • Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, which I just discovered in a Harvard bookstore in 1984--I had never heard of it, never heard of him--that shaped-- It's a philosophy book. I don't know that it makes sense to read the whole thing now because it has been absorbed, and you can read how it's been absorbed. But that book definitely changed my life, a lot of my work and writings. Stubborn Attachments came out of reading Parfit.
• If you're trying to understand, say, the current war--Russia attacking Ukraine--I think fiction often does you better than to read political science and international relations.
• I think I, Robot might go down as the most influential book of the 20th century. Not counting something like Mein Kampf, which is a very different direction--
• Try Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men from the 1930s. He was Neo-Hegelian philosopher who sketched out how he thought the world was going to evolve. If I get together, say, with a tech crowd, the book that everyone has read--it's some mix of Tolkien or I, Robot-not the Bible, not Charles Dickens, better or worse. Not Proust. But everyone has read those books, or almost everyone.