Reviews and News:
You’re familiar with the VIDA count, perhaps? It’s that annual tallying of bylines by women at a handful of American literary publications. The idea is to shame those magazines and journals who publish more men than women for talking the progressive talk but not walking the walk—and to pat the few “good” ones on the head. But do you know who were very good at parity without thinking about it at all? Victorian publishing houses: Researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkley “used an algorithm to examine 104,000 works of fiction dating from 1780 to 2007, drawn mostly from HathiTrust Digital Library. The algorithm identified both author and character genders. The academics expected to see an increase in the prominence of female characters in literature across the two centuries. Instead, ‘from the 19th century through the early 1960s we see a story of steady decline…the proportion of fiction actually written by women…drops by half (from roughly 50% of titles to roughly 25%) as we move from 1850 to 1950.”
A few weeks ago, I shared Nick Ripatrazone’s enjoyable little piece on Andy Warhol’s Catholicism. The artist was surprisingly devout. Over at Garden and Gun, C. J. Lotz writes about another surprising passion of Warhol’s: nature.
Mark Tooley, a life-long John le Carré reader, takes stock of the novelist’s politics and explains why his earlier work is still worth reading.
Stuart Kelly tells the story of a man who killed his mother and later became a minister in the Church of Scotland in 1984. Angela Tilby reviews: “The central issue is the character of Nelson. What caused him to kill his mother, did he ever regret it or repent of it, what led him to seek ordination and what did his past mean to him in his ministry? The evidence suggests that the original crime was an impulsive outburst.”
Rachel Lu writes about transgenderism’s “assault on reality” in a review of Ryan T. Anderson’s new book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.
Essay of the Day:
In Reason, the ever-readable Deirdre McCloskey thrashes Richard Thaler’s 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics:
“Richard Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. It’s not an original Nobel prize, as recipients in the other fields will be glad to inform you. Alfred Nobel detested economics. Nonetheless, since 1969, some 79 prizes have been given by the Swedish National Bank to economists, and one to a psychologist in economists’ clothing.
“Thaler is distinguished but not brilliant, which is par for the course. He works on ‘behavioral finance,’ the study of mistakes people make when they talk to their stock broker. He can be counted as the second winner for ‘behavioral economics,’ after the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. His prize was for the study of mistakes people make when they buy milk.
“Thaler’s is the 10th Nobel for finance. (What, labor economics doesn’t exist? Public finance is chopped liver? One lonely prize for economic history?) It’s also the 29th for an economist associated in one way or another with my beloved University of Chicago. Yet Thaler is not of the famed ‘Chicago School,’ which thinks the mistakes people make when buying milk or talking to their stock brokers are not all that important for how and why markets and trade work.
“The Committee wrote that by ‘exploring the consequences of limited rationality, social preferences, and lack of self-control, he has shown how these human traits systematically affect individual decisions as well as market outcomes.’ I object to the market outcomes part. His work is not about markets. It’s about the mistakes you make all the time, you idiot. Along with his fellow behavioral economists, Thaler is reinventing individual psychology.
“One might wonder why he would go to the trouble of doing so, and then claim, with no evidence, that individual mistakes discernible with the methods of individual psychology matter greatly for market outcomes.
“Yet the politics is clear. Once Thaler has established that you are in myriad ways irrational it’s much easier to argue, as he has, vigorously—in his academic research, in popular books, and now in a column for The New York Times—that you are too stupid to be treated as a free adult. You need, in the coinage of Thaler’s book, co-authored with the law professor and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, to be ‘nudged.’ Thaler and Sunstein call it ‘libertarian paternalism.’”
Photo: The Dead Sea
Poem: Wesley McNair, “Getting Lost”
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