But the prose was elegant all right, Beck had to admit that. Even simple in large parts. He recorded it for later use: Beck decided to refrain from further extracts of the FAZ review. It made no much sense to him to adapt the thoughts of others and make them his own. He looked at the paper on which he had taken notes while reading and realized how few there were.
He jotted down some sentences in which the most important words appear. The themes of the book, so to speak, that had to go into his own review in any case: Language , for instance. Dealing with it, and its importance for the protagonist. That was an important issue in the book, no question, at least in the first half. Also the translation of language. He split the long sentence into several shorter ones that are more manageable. Then Beck thought about the problem of translating this book into other languages.
And just like Perlmann in the book Beck started to think about the German word Schweigen and what associations it triggers in his mind. Silence could also mean Stille , or Ruhe in German, and those clearly have other connotations. Will an English native speaker respond to Silence the same way Beck does to Schweigen? Another theme would be time. Not as a physical quantity but more like the perception of time. The past, the future and especially the presence. Here the first sentence of the book actually made sense, so Beck wrote it down, again: He read his review.
To Beck a good book, a great one, should always let its readers make some connections to their own lives. For Beck that was the day when he had to hold a lecture in London on a software program in front of a thousand people His preparations were, as it turned out, insufficient and he had to improvise all the time. And then he asked himself how far the memory of that day, 18 years ago, is at all correct. Maybe he started to make things up, just like Perlmann, and reinvented his own history, his own self. He chose to delete the section on London again. Despite all the personal touch it was too long and it would not interest the readers anyway and the relevance to the book was only marginal.
He also wanted to add some references to other books. Come to think of it Beck added free will and freedom of choice and chance to the list of themes. The exact title of this book escaped him at the moment and he had to look it up later. He briefly considered if he should tell the readers about the other major themes of the book.
Maybe it would help to let them know that the story turned into some sort of psychological-crime-thriller. Beck thought back on the crime and how meticulously it was planned. He also realized how little he had written about the other characters of the book. Are they worth mentioning in his review? Or his daughter Kirsten. He saw that he should come to an end now. Otherwise his review would become too long. Perfection lies in the eyes of the beholder, and for Beck this book comes pretty close to it.
What if, just hypothetically, he would not write not an ordinary review, but a text about his attempts to write one, and in a style similar to the one in book? Would his friends and followers understand this approach? Beck believed so, for there are many smart people in this group. Of course he had to write in the third person, just like in the book, so he would keep a distance from himself.
And he would also have to give himself another name. All the personal touch would be gone, true, but that would be no big deal after all. He would also add a title to review, preferably one that is used in the story as well. Beck smiled, saved what he had written so far, and opened a new file to start over again.
View all 15 comments. This novel is difficult to characterize. It is an incredibly courageous debut, in that it puts the reader through hell, which is not what most readers are looking for. And the novel is unrelentingly serious like its grief-stricken protagonist. The hell is an emotional one, a train wreck in slow motion, but one presented in the third person rather than in the first person. The novel starts off with a hundred This novel is difficult to characterize. The novel starts off with a hundred pages of setup, which, as in some Victorian novels, is something to get through more than enjoy.
The setup involves the characters at an academic conference near Genoa, Italy, seen through Perlmann's eyes. Then comes the best part of the novel, at least for me: It could be taught in a moral philosophy class with a psychological bent. The author approaches the irrational in a rational, systematic way which, as a lawyer by training, I enjoy. The result is humorless, but appropriately so. This kind of seriousness, outside of a gothic novel, provided me with a new reading experience. Then comes the descent into hell. Another two hundred pages that feature feverish overthinking and activity but not thrilleresque activity.
And the second section itself is worth the price of the book. You can then decide how much hell you can take. I've been living with this book for a couple of days. It's utterly compelling, but also almost too rich. I keep putting it down in order to breath! It's a pity that the writing is marred from time to time by the use of inappropriate translations; but maybe these are intrusive only because reading the book is such an intense experience.
Well worth all the effort it requires A long and winding journey into the troubled mind of the academical protagonist, who has put himself into an impossible dilemma. I feel like having lived for a long time with Philip Perlmanns traumas towards the academic world with all its demands and neverending pressure. Every page offers a density of troublesome inner struggle and philosophic reasoning. Still, I was simply unable to put it away, bound to follow this A long and winding journey into the troubled mind of the academical protagonist, who has put himself into an impossible dilemma.
Still, I was simply unable to put it away, bound to follow this highroad of psychological suspense, and actually, I find myself missing this book after finishing it! Pascal Mercier is a very fine author, demanding an effort from his readers, but it was all worth it! Sep 26, Leo rated it really liked it Shelves: Jul 02, Coulter rated it really liked it Shelves: I have mixed feelings about this one.
The first third or so was definitely five-stars: Mercier does a great job of depicting a linguist who's tired of the academic conference circuit and all the rivalries he has with other linguists including oneupmanship over getting BWV numbers right. But then the main character starts to go insane or rather, even more insane than one has to be in order to be an academic in the first place , and while Mercier does a good job of bringing the reader along as I have mixed feelings about this one. But then the main character starts to go insane or rather, even more insane than one has to be in order to be an academic in the first place , and while Mercier does a good job of bringing the reader along as the protagonist suffers this excruciating break-down, it remains an excruciating break-down, and pages of that got to be rather a lot.
Stopped reading, but there isn't a shelf to indicate that and I didn't want this book to linger the rest of my Goodreads-life on my currently-reading shelf. After or so agonizing pages I finally feel freed from the boredom of this story and its most irritating main character. Voor Philipp Perlmann, een gerenomeerd taalkundige, boeit het wetenschappelijk onderzoek niet meer, hij ziet er de zin niet meer van in. We worden als lezer geconfronteerd met zijn worsteling als gevolg van deze beslissing, zijn onmacht om nog iets op papier Voor Philipp Perlmann, een gerenomeerd taalkundige, boeit het wetenschappelijk onderzoek niet meer, hij ziet er de zin niet meer van in.
We worden als lezer geconfronteerd met zijn worsteling als gevolg van deze beslissing, zijn onmacht om nog iets op papier te zetten, zijn gebrek aan zelfvertrouwen, zijn twijfels, zijn onverschilligheid ten opzichte van zijn vak en de wetenschap dat hij niets meer te zeggen heeft, zijn gebrek aan opinies over taalkundige kwesties, … Schitterend geschreven al hadden sommige delen voor mij zeker een heel stuk korter gekund.
En het is natuurlijk jammer dat een dergelijk boek, over een taalkundige dan nog notabene, een Nederlandse titel met een kanjer van een spelfout heeft. Author Peter Bieri was born in Bern on June 23th He is better known under his pseudonym Pascal Mercier. Bieri studied philosophy, English studies and Indian studies in both London and Heidelberg. He currently lives in Berlin where he is a professor of philosophy. Review I finished this book. I would say finally but that does not sound nice.
Still I am not sure if I want to write nice things about this book because though I finished it I kind of despised it too. It took me a few rants to people in my surrounding to understand that my experienced feeling on the book and the fact that I could not put it away where not really making sense until I realized that I actually was interested in how it would finish and what would happen to all the characters.
So to start with them. The book's main character is Phillip Perlmann. A man of whom I do not remember an age but he must be around During the book you live inside his head and this man should really stop thinking for just a second and realize what is really going on. His thoughts are scary and there are to many. It does not matter what happens to him he can see it all go wrong. His thoughts take him to all the dark spots. As you see the other characters trough his eyes you get a very dark colored view on them, even though not all of them are having that effect on Perlmann, specially not the woman in the book.
Still you really want to slap his face to get him back to reality, cause the actions the other characters show, even seen trough his eyes are really not all that bad. As I am a more positive personality myself I could not relate to him at all, in would probably not want to spend more than an hour with that man. The story itself is dragging and kind of depressing still you get curious eventually if Perlmann gets away with all the evil he comes up with in his head. So I did finish the book but am now doubting between giving it 2or 3 stars.
Under indifferent circumstances I would have given it two stars for sure but because there where some very beautifull written sentences in the book I will be generous and give three stars. They don't put up the slightest resistance. Nothing would shatter if I were to walk trough it. Because there is actually nothing at all between me and the world. A single step would be enough. Why didn't I take it long ago?
At a month-long academic conference near Genoa, a burned out professor procrastinates to the extreme. Perlmann shows up with no paper to present or even work on because he believes he has nothing left to say. Recently widowed, he's not sure why he's even ended up at this conference. The first pages build up to Perlmann committing the worst academic crime ever: The next pages deal with his wild efforts to keep the crime from coming out.
This book At a month-long academic conference near Genoa, a burned out professor procrastinates to the extreme. This book is a chunkster, and the digressions about linguistics and classical music tried my patience. But it's also very very funny. If this were a movie, Perlmann could be played by Paul Giamatti. Almodovar could direct, or Woody Allen if he wanted to revisit his Crimes and Misdemeanors days. Perlmann is crazy in that obsessive, over-analytical, incredibly self-absorbed way that, well, seems to fit with an academic career.
Frame-by-frame details show that the author knows what he's talking about when it comes to the academic life. The way academic jealousies start over nothing and simmer for decades. The subtle jousting during a colloquium, where the person presenting the paper is almost irrelevant, because the real show is how the colleagues in the audience display their knowledge. The various ways Perlmann puts off working on his own paper, but then doesn't actually work on it, geeking out instead over translating something from one foreign language to another foreign language, reviewing world events from the year of his birth on.
All crazy, all realistic. When it comes to academic satire, this is not knee-slapping funny like Russo's Straight Man or Smiley's Moo. It's quieter, and much slower. It's about a man losing and recovering his mind. But I did laugh out loud at Perlmann's extreme efforts to track down a Bach CD just to shame his piano-playing rival, his jamming coins into a seatbelt latch as part of a murder plan, his showdowns with a waiter at a nearby hotel, and his lunatic efforts to rescue a text that he himself had destroyed.
Recommended for anyone who likes academic satires. This is an immensely difficult book to read, and an even harder one to review. I have spent the past week wishing it would just end, and yet I was psychotically unable to leave it unfinished. To say this was a slow book would not only be an understatement, it would be misleading. There are hundreds of pages where almost nothing happens. In fact, near the end and that would mean past the th page , the protagonist, Perlmann, himself has an experience similar to mine where he notes: And yet, there is so much of brilliance here.
I was enthusiastically describing the madcap events of the first half of the book to someone else, and I realized that just the plot line was by itself genius. The relationships between the academics, the jealousies, the paranoia, were beautifully drawn. But the most interesting part for me was the gripping and gradual slide into insanity that Perlmann experiences along with his internal struggles, his panic, his introspective ramblings.
In some ways this reminded me of Crime and Punishment except here the great mental anguish happens equally before the crime as after. Perlman's Silence demands a lot of courage, patience and persistence of the reader, but it is worth it. Bieri's insightful description of the slow inner deterioration of the middle aged academic Perlman is a compelling read. At first I thought that it was all too detailed and long, but that is the way it also is for the protagonist. As a reader you have to crawl so deeply into Perlamn's skin that his thoughts almost become yours. And that is great writing!
Both books are sort of a quest for the right relationship with reality. I found Perlman's quest harder to read, because I didn't like Perlman as a person, so I was not always sympathetic to crooked reasoning of this egocentric man. By the way the English translation of this book is a lot better than the one for 'Night train to Lisbon'.
The book is probably a 3 star, but I am giving it 1 star to save other readers with tastes similar to mine from wasting their time reading it. First of all it was vastly overwritten - nothing would be missed in plot or tone if it was pages. I like books about intellectuals, particularly university types. I like psychological and philosophical subjects. That is what attracted me to this book: Great concept, but failed execution.
The crucial plot element that drove so much of the story was easily and obviously resolvable without any drama, and the ultimate outcome of his mental crisis was unconvincing. Invest your reading time in something that will provide a better payoff. Nederlandse vertaling uit het Duits Een professorenroman die toch? Aan het plot ligt het zeker niet en Pascal Mercier weet de taalkundigen niet bepaald doorsnee-helden tot leven te brengen.
Maar wat houdt deze roman dan van een hogere beoordeling? Niet omdat het erg lang is, maar omdat met of zelfs pagina's een even goed boek geschreven had kunnen worden misschien zelfs wel beter. En Nederlandse vertaling uit het Duits Een professorenroman die toch? En dat is ironisch, want breedsprakigheid is juist het verwijt dat de hoofdpersoon aan het einde van het boek zowel Maksim Gorki als een Russische collega maakt.
May 21, Frederik rated it really liked it. Dec 26, Catherine Davison rated it really liked it Shelves: I may be going out on a limb here when I say that what I loved about it was the similarity to Thomas Mann's Sauberberg. Mercier was relentless in describing poor Permann's anxieties and the ramblings of his unravelling mind, that may not sound like fascinating reading but it was. I was totally drawn into the small, small world of the group of linguists and Perlmann's moral dilemma. Fabulous book but I know it won't suit some readers, it requires a certain patience and willingness to sit with Per I may be going out on a limb here when I say that what I loved about it was the similarity to Thomas Mann's Sauberberg.
Fabulous book but I know it won't suit some readers, it requires a certain patience and willingness to sit with Perlmann as his world spins out of control. I enjoyed this book, and I'm surprised I did. Normally, following the long-drawn-out internal monologue of someone getting more and more panicked and desperate would turn me off, but in this case, it's not overwhelming or tedious, and is in fact very funny in places.
There's some interesting thoughts about linguistics along the way, too. Als je een boek zoekt waarin denkprocessen, gebeurtenissen en emoties tot in de kleinste details worden vertraagd en weergegeven, en waarin de impact van het kleinste detail wordt onderzocht, dan is dit je boek. Heel interessant allemaal, maar je moet er geduld voor hebben. Naarmate het boek vorderde had ik dat minder en minder. Maar het blijft een unieke prestatie. Not easy but absolutely brilliant. Very good read, but long. Jul 07, Ms. New Yorker "in brief" review.
His proposals reflect a renewed examination of semantics, drawing from interest in literature, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. Part I is a lengthy presentation of ideas, interspersed with the introduction of numerous characters including Philippe Perlmann. Perlmann, recently widowed, had agreed to conduct a multi-disciplinary conclave of linguists at a small southern Italian hotel, meant to double as an academic retreat.
All expenses are being paid by the sponsor, Olivetti Corporation, in order to allow the scholars to focus on intellectual discourse. The novel is told in the third person exclusively from Perlmann's viewpoint. Artists and writers on the other hand thrive on criticism, all they need is a few followers as well. Big successes in the world can, according to Taleb, be explained by the antifragility in which the actors were be it that they were by accident or not. A lot of it comes down to not having complex models and strategies in this complex world.
We are better at doing than thinking, if doing is done right: A mix of small-error-tolerating tinkering and experience-based heuristics, instead of complex theories which need to be correct about what happens when. The choice to be a free, independent actor instead of joining large complex structures. Keeping options open to yourself that will do less harm than good in the long run, whatever happens.
This is an especially strong message in a civilisation that is building more and more complex structures. Taleb is coming from the financial world he was a quantitative trader , so he's seen all the needless and hurtful complexities that make up our economies. In the course of the book, Taleb explores the idea in various ways, among them: A more mathematical but readable for everyone look at the issue.
He introduces convex and concave payoffs to events. We might not have a good idea of the event x's distribution, but to be prepared for the payoff f x , we can at least look at the function f. Substracting things from models and strategies is more often than not enriching. He uses medicine as an extended example. Ethics of being antifragile. Many people can be antifragile to the cost of others who have to be fragile. Most currently, and in Talebs, experience, bankers are still anti-fragile as they're being bailed out by fragile tax payers.
He argues that only of you have put value into y time or work of building it, or money betting on it you can be taken serious in your opinion about y - this is what he calls "having skin in the game". Now, how is this book written? It is a wild ride of opinions, personal and biographic stories all in favour of the author , many little tidbits and example from classic literature, repitions and also dialogues between more or less made-up characters. Honestly, I was close to giving up on it because the author thinks he is insightful and helpful but really isn't.
It is mostly the overly creative chapter names and little chapter summaries that throw the reader out of the flow and make him forget where he is. That's what you get if you refuse to accept an editor - a luxury Taleb can afford after his two best-selling books beforehand. However, this previous success and experiences in the media world after that also allowed him to be refreshingly harsh.
Several professions, such as my current one research , are not treated well and even specific persons are put in the spotlight. I was delighted that Taleb shares my refusal to like Thomas "the world is flat" Friedman and Ray "the singularity is near" Kurzweil for the simplistic visions they have about our complex world. He also picked Nobel price winner Joseph Stiglitz as his preferred target of critique, for being seriously wrong about the crisis, during the crisis, and having cherry-picked his past statements afterwards this cherry-picking is currently too easy for all experts who have no skin in the game, I wonder if there is a future technology to make cherry-picking harder, given that lots of statements are actually published, as this is how economic commentators like Stiglitz or, more general, scientists, operate.
Several reviews have focused on Taleb's self-centeredness, favourably or not. I agree to a lot of what they have to say. However, the metaphor he proposes seems useful and, sometimes, the messenger is important: Taleb rode around in the complex world of finance for decades so if he argues in favour of substracting complexities from the world, he is more believable than someone who comes from the outside.
He actually bet on the system failing for years losing money and in the end won big. It's debatable if that is ethically what you want your messenger to have done, but he can say that he not only said something was going to happen many people did actually but he had "skin in the game". Again, this is helping believability in most circles, especially inside the complex modern ones. At their core, the models of the human economy have always been sketches of the real thing, at best.
And economic practice i. What this book delivers is highly enjoyable education. It has many gaps, but who would expect no emissions has no respect for the multi-dimensionality of the topic. Everyone always cuts it their own way, so let's leave Goodwin to his cuts. He tells a good story which must have been hard to carve out, with very nice illustrations from Dan Burr. I think the book does work as an introduction as well as a reference to come back to. Though it proceeds chronologically, I think the book is in essence two parts:.
The second part is much bigger than the first. Goodwin also has a strong anti-cooperation, anti-corruption, U. It was interesting to get a new view on how the U. I didn't know that it was republican president Eisenhower who coined the term military-industrial complex. Den Untertitel des Buches finde ich eigentlich passender: Erheblich beeinflusst war Dobelli dabei aus dem Feld der "Heuristics-and-Bias" Literatur, wie sie derzeit von ehemaligen Investmanagern wie Nassim Nicholas Taleb ins Rampenlicht getragen werden.
Unsere Intuition ist effizient.
Der Autor ist in den Niederlanden sehr bekannt. Sein Mandant ist ein alter Mann, das Opfer auch, beide schienen sich nicht zu kennen. In dieser Reihe ist der Held ein Autopsie-Experte. Dieser Krimi ist sehr lesbar kostete mich ca.
Sie ist zum Teil autobiographisch und portraitiert junge Menschen, die im Europa der 50er Jahre einen eigenen Zugang zu ihrem Leben suchen. Damals reisten viele junge Menschen per Anhalter durch Europa, und anhand der Menschen, die sie treffen Autofahrer, Bewohner lokaler Orte und nicht zuletzt andere Hitchhiker , lernen sie, was ihnen selbst wichtig ist. Sie scheinen mir als Stream Of Consiousness niedergeschrieben.
Es leidet dann aber ein wenig die Spannung unter all dem Realismus.
This book has a lot of insight to offer about the background on which we should lead current discussions about debt and money. I found a lot of things to think about in here and very much enjoyed reading it. However, it is maybe too rich. It is so full of anthropological evidence as well as Graebers own interpretation of circumstances that it is not easy to keep all of them in mind, much less to make out the big picture that Graeber wants to paint.
In fact, I only got a feeling of the big picture of Graebers line of thought by compiling this post. I decided therefore to write neither a review nor a complete summary. Instead, I provide here the shortest summary I can come up with in three minutes and then leave the reader with a chronological collection of notes I made while reading. Sometimes I summarized the gist of an idea, sometimes I simply cited important or well-written paragraphs that capture the gist well by themselves.
I do not make any claim to completeness or having picked all the cherries. The too short summary: The book first looks for the foundations of money and debt, both in human morality and culture Chapters 2 through 7. Graeber finds a deep tie in the anthropological evidence between debt and violence and dishonor and reminds us that being in debt is a social construction much more than a mathematical fact and thus can mean different things. Then, it provides a compelling history of four known and very long world-stretching ages of markets and money Chapters 8 through This history of ages seems to be cyclic and in fact, we entered a new age in the last decades.
The effects of this transition may become more understandable in this big picture. Is that really true? And in the light of the financial crisis, this question has been asked many times - even if the conversation everyone was expecting has never really taken place: There's really no nicer way to say this. The Myth of Barter Graeber takes some time to take a stab at the myth from page one in every text book of economics: According to Graeber who also cites other anthropologists, by the way , this image is based on no evidence at all: In particular, it can serve as an argument against the notion that money is created by and belongs to the government.
In fact, Graeber makes clear later in the book that governments are actually always crucial in markets that use coinage. Primordial Debts Societies have had to deal with overbearing of debt for thousands of years - and the evidence tells us that most of the time, they cancelled most of the debt at some point, be it through revolution or to avert a revolution. Often, it was a newly installed king e. A brief treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic relations Graeber identifies three main moral principles of economic relations among humans.
In our lives, we often switch back and forth between them. Graeber says a kind of "base communism" is basis of a lot of our daily lives, mostly in small, but numerous interactions. Here, economic relations are all about equivalence between the actors. Gift exchange economies often insist on inexact retribution of gifts, in order to keep the system out of equilibrium and in motion.
With gifts, honor enters the picture and with it, the third moral principle:. Precedents often happen not with the actual intent to create this durable relation - examples are violent acts e. Graeber concludes that often, there is no definition of which type an economic relation actually is, which creates conceptual confusion in economics. Mathematical models of markets certainly do not cover all of these aspects.
What, then, is debt? A debt creates relationships. Not being able to pay off a debt creates hierarchy subordination. Wealthy debtors on the other hand, get leverage over their creditors if you owe the bank dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe million dollars, you own the bank. Games with Sex and Death Graeber makes a distinction between "Human Economies" and commercial economies. Graeber shows examples from African societies, where a human can not even be exchanged with another human, even if the cultural laws do something very similar e.
Less extreme cases are for instance societies that establish that certain forms of violence, e. Honor and Degradation, or, On the Foundation of Contemporary Civilisation Graeber paints an image from ancient times that seems familiar today: The prospering cities with free expression and choice of life, surrounded by evangelising nomads, the latter growing stronger as debt-ridden citizens, victims of the city's ruthless accounting, having often lost their families, join their ranks - founding and deepening the nomad's hatred of the city and its way of life.
This image comes up again and again in the history of civilization. Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators. It is fitting to think of a living human who is completely owned by other humans as undead - and by those who own him as having unnatural powers. But this theory is one of the wilder ones in the book. Credit versus Bullion, and the Cycles of History Graeber notes how years of human economic history seems to be cyclic, to some extent.
Two types of economic age interchange. Rome, or The East India Company. The second type are ages of paper virtual credit money, with smaller empires, less production and slower innovation, where religious preachers try to tame economic effects on humans e. He only shortly visits the First Agrarian Empires Mesopotamia, Egypt, China - which had virtual credit money of which we don't know much and then explains the next four great ages in detail see next chapters , where the last one again one of virtual credit money is only 40 years old.
It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty - … as the kind of absolute power of 'use' and 'abuse' … - to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke and Smith, about the origin of human society in some collection of … males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully-formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or to begin to swap beaver pelts. As a sidenote, the emergence of the main philosophical ideas is why Karl Jaspers called it the "Axial Age". This is its secret; one might almost say, the thing that has become invisible to us.
Then, Graeber also notes that he would not write off religion as purely escapist movements - they brought overall positive effects, e. Certainly, it had terrible effects on literacy; but one must also bear in mind that ancient cities could only be maintained by extracting resources from the countryside. They were, after all, enormous concentrations of wealth managed by what were in effect monastic corporations, which were constantly seeking new opportunities for profitable investment.
Regularly, when they were in dangerous shortage of precious metals, Confucian regimes had to break down monasteries, in order to melt the giant Buddha statues that had once been coins. Commerce in the Islamic world was very flourishing and some islamic thinkers formulated foundational ideas about money centuries before Adam Smith did. Islamic commerce forbade usury no interest on loans , and as a result there was much more emphasis on trust p. True value lay elsewhere.
The Age of the great capitalistic empires - Without exploding population and market activity in China, as well as a government which had recently switched from paper money to silver and gold as currencies, the extraction of precious metals from the New World by Europeans could not have gone on profitably for as long as it did three centuries - and who knows how different the outcomes would have been for Native Americans?
The Ming dynasty, after regaining power from Mongol rule, had returned to the silver standard around and abandoned paper money. Also in that time, the Chinese population strived and thus the Chinese were in dire need of silver to keep their domestic commerce flowing. The European merchants accumulated world trade in these times. They imported a lot of Chinese goods and thus all currency made from gold and silver actually never really reached the European people. Those making the decision did not feel they were in control anyway; those who were did not particularly care to know the details.
It is, rather, the story of how an economy of [personal] credit [among people] was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal -and often vindictive- power of the state. Graeber shares stories from the first bubbles in early modern western capitalism.
Of course, we all know the Dutch tulip bubble. In Britain, there was also the "South Sea Bubble" of , where the South Sea company very quickly became too big too fail as big as national debt. If that doesn't already relate well enough to our modern times keyword: The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill.
Graeber wonders why capitalistic regimes are constantly overshadowed by a fear of impending doom social revolution, nuclear holocaust, global warming. Because if there's no end to it, there's absolutely no reason not to generate credit -that is, future money- infinitely. The beginning of something yet to be determined -? President Nixon abolished the international gold standard - an age of credit money began. We don't know much about the effect on the coming time yet - the early decades showed the opposite of what one might expect in terms of moral institutions and even stronger U.
But the latter seems to be on the decline, maybe the former observation is bound to change, as well. Its national debt has become a promise, not just to its own people, but to the nations of the entire world, that everyone knows will not be kept. What we have seen so far is the opposite [but elsewhere he says that four decades are a very short time in history]. We were all to think of ourselves as tiny corporations, organized around the same relationship of investor and executive: In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have been the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense os possible alternative futures.
This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away. Graeber notes that the banking system is often justified as democratic in two ways. He cites Ludwig von Mises and Niall Ferguson Both seemingly contradictory arguments are used, whenever the situation requires it. Graeber thinks this approach asks the wrong questions. What about the "non-industrious poor"?
They are completely left out here, as if they do not deserve not to live in poverty. And do the industrious people really help us as society, given that we now see that the assumption of endless economic growth is destroying our resources? Manna is a short SciFi novel that you can read in a couple hours. It's the classic setup of portaying a doom scenario versus an utopia scenario.
The first part is the doom scenario, in which the narrator explains how the U. This part is very plausible, with the simple beginning assumption that it is not the low-wage work that gets automatised first, but middle management. Through innovations in the fast food industry, the management software "Manna" quickly makes low-skilled workers so efficient, that all middle-management gets replaced by it. Soon, all air travel gets automatised and when robot vision is finally good enough, all transportation and all general low-skilled work is also replaced.
The giant out-of-work population is put in welfare homes out of sight, supervised and being kept hidden in the most efficient manner by robots. This development is explained in a very plausible manner and serves as an example of the perils of automisation in the name of profit-making. I often see people on the internet linking to this story when they want to make that point and now I finally read it.
The second part deals with the narrator being flown out of his welfare housing to Australia, where his dad had, years ago, bought him a place in a novel society, which was built with technology that is open-source, transparent and centered around human needs, not profit everyone has the same budget of credits to spend, it is a zero-waste system run by robots.
It deals less with a scenario how it developed. Instead, it spends almost all pages with descriptions of the coolest technologies which the author could think of. Kreisler ist auch herumgekommen. Er musste Wien verlassen und durfte mit Chaplin arbeiten. Einer der allerersten Science Fiction Romane, geschrieben um konnte ich grad nicht genauer rausfinden. Ein junges Liebespaar findet nach Umwegen entgegen gesellschaftlichen Konventionen zusammen.
Sehr gut geschrieben und interessant - gerade auch aus der Perspektive der Welt um herum. Aber polnisch kann ich nun eh nicht. Mir gefiel der zweite Teil des Buches am Besten. Das Buch ist sehr lesbar - Eschbach ist ein sehr erfahrener Bestseller-Autor. Ich empfehle das Buch also trotzdem. Werde sicher noch versuchen, einen anderen Near-Future Sciencefiction mit diesem Thema zu finden.
A Cambridge physicist derives systematically if and how Britain could live on locally generated renewable energy. And in which cases nuclear power or external renewables think Desertec need to be part of the equation. He describes every source of energy that is worth mentioning wind, solar, hydro, offshore wind, wave, tide, geothermal. He conveniently uses one unit of measurement everywhere: Currently, the outlook is bleak: Then, he describes what he thinks are ways to narrow that gap. Finally he sketches 5 energy plans that would even out.
It is partly estimation and partly prognosis, both seem mostly reasonable and I learned a lot. I bet that he is wrong here or there, but at least it is a documented process it also has an extended technical appendix. My recommendation is the new indicator he introduces to compare security of generation technologies deaths per Megawatt and when he notes how house-cats kill many many more birds than windmills.
Vieleicht ein kleiner Vergleich: Kiss haben Rock'n'Roll satirisch aufs Korn genommen mit ihrem Auftreten, machten aber zugleich auch noch selbst wirklich guten Rock'n'Roll. Und Moers zeigt hier wirklich viel davon. There is organisational concept that many of you would might find intriguing: It is a method of organising people on the basis of consent, while maintaining a form of collaboration that is looking out for its own effectiveness, such that it can actually be used for modern businesses.
It is based on the ideas of a dutch Quaker from the early s. It then was further transformed by a dutch entrepreneur who inherited a large electrician company and was looking for a humane way to manage it and this company is still large and successful after several decades of employing sociocratical concepts. This book is one of the only newer ones I could find which is not written by one of the original main figures. It was written by two American consultants who fell in love with the concept and are using and promoting it.
The authors do three things in this book: First, they give a readable introduction to the history of sociology so far, which is very interesting. Then, they describe the basics of the method, which turns out to be a rather short exercise. The last part is a set of tools and practices for someone looking to introduce Sociocracy to an organisation e. To conclude, the book helped me to learn and understand what this concept is about, though not in too much depth.
But as far as it gives an explanation, this book is very readable. I had no use at this point for the third part applying Sociocracy , so I will not judge on it here. A very readable exploration of a british journalist, who researches the true history of humor under communism. Said humor is known to be the funniest and most cynical humor created by oppressed humans that we know of 'Why, despite all shortages, was the toilet paper in East Germany always 2-ply? Because they had to send a copy of everything they did to Russia.
Many argue that it helped bring communism to its end. Lewis put this hypothesis to a test and this book is the well-written tale of this test, in which he speaks to many interesting old people all over Eastern Europe and his eastern-german ex-girlfriend , sprinkled with many jokes. I learned even more about communism history on the way. Maybe not a coincidence that it works well when a resident of one great humor-culture Britain researches another great humor-culture.
Gelesen im Budapest Urlaub. Dalos beschreibt einige Wochen aus seiner Jugend in den 60er Jahren, als er in Budapest als naiver Parteigaenger aufwuchs und sich zum ersten Mal verliebte. Waehrend eines Schulfestes kommt es zu einem Eifersuchtsdrama, wegen dem er zum ersten Mal Kontakt mit der polizei bekommt.
Wenig spaeter wanderte Dalos nach Wien aus. Wieder kramt ein beruehmter Autor nochmal in seinen Kindheitserinnerungen. Heeresma wuchs in Sued-Amsterdam auf waehrend der deutschen Besatzungszeit. Sein Vater gab ihm Halt waehrend dieser Zeit, in der viele seiner juedischen Freunde ploetzlich verschwanden. Sie versteckten sogar jem anden in ihrer Wohnung. Fuer mich war es nicht nur sinnvoll, um die Besatzungzeit dieser Stadt besser zu verstehen, sondern auch interessant, bekannte Strassennamen mit 60 Jahre alten Eindruecken zu verbinden.
Da stecken sicher ein paar Wahrheiten drin Jared Diamond's take on collapsing societies is widely praised and a lot has been written. I don't want to add to much to that, other than a few notes:. Visions This is the actual "timeline" part. Throughout several workshops held in english transition communities, four scenarios were developed, running from now, , to In the first two, we continue business as usual and ignore 1 or acknowledge 2 the evidence, respectively.
In the third and fourth scenario we make cultural shifts s, but fail to really acknowledge the challenge 3 or acknowledge them and start to transition early on 4. All four timelines are described in text and make up several events that could happen in such a scenario with title and year. Challenges in transition This chapter details some topics that pose quests for our society in transition to post-peak-oil. It covers demographics, food and water, energy, travel and transport and health. The road to energy descend plans what could be the steps to make and the tools to use when preparing for energy descend?
An energy descend plan is made by the people in order to imagine what their lives could be like and prepare. A timeline is one of the first tools that come to mind and this chapter introduces some more that could be used in practice, like planning the high school reunion, visualisation techniques or finding indicators of resilience.
Peak Oil and Climate Change This section surprised me by being a short, but highly informative primer on these two topics. For instance, I learned what the most basic indicators for climate change are plus what the likely sources of confusion in discussions are.
Also, it was explained how the reports of the IPCC come about and what they say. There are a lot of numbers to back up certain claims and the whole point seems to be made pretty objectively. I might give this chapter some people I know to read. The challenges we face are likely to be threatening our economic growth model at its core. The transition movement has some clear messages and a solid concept I am anticipating the video of Rob Hopkins TED talk - notes are already here.
This book, however, has several ingredients. Every chapter has its own message. In this book, they assume it will be The question to me is: Will we be able to feed cities at all in the future? I should look at this book. I already mentioned some of the thoughts of this book here when I started it. Though it is pretty long, it was a rewarding read and I came back after a break from it to finish it. Beinhocker claims and who would argue with him about it that economics as we have it develops models that seldom relate to reality and leads to false predictions, false hopes and false politics.
He argues for a new kind of economics, which he calls "Complexity Economics", in which it is acknowlegded that the human economy is one of the most complex systems imaginable and in a constant state of unrest as opposed to the equillibrium view of traditional economics. He puts his case forward on the shoulders of many advancements in science: The books proceeds in four parts:. It is always interesting to see when someone tries to put pieces together. Then, of course, he mixes facts with wishful thinking and it can be hard to set those apart. Then again, this book is meant to provoke discussion and in addition, he cites a lot of serious research so it's not just him talking.
Actually, he cites some really interesting papers, some of which I had a closer look on. Let's close with Beinhockers first sentences in the book: I also believe that just as biology became a true science in the twentieth century, so too will economics come into its own as a science in the twenty-first century. In diesem Szenario wurden die Medien gleichgeschaltet, stetig und folgerichtig im kapitalistischen System, zur Gewinnmaximierung.
Es maximiert den Gewinn, wenn die Leute sich nicht wirklich aufregen, und somit gewinnt am Ende der Verlag alles, der konfliktloses Schreiben meistert. Das ist das Geheimnis der Sonderabteilung im Und woher die Bombendrohungen kommen, berkommt er auch erst am Ende heraus. Das ist wohl kaum anders hinzubekommen, wenn man nur Seiten Zeit hat, aber mitunter etwas offensichtlich.
Being a good scientist requires the ability to think in highly complex ways. Being a successful scientist requires even more: The reason behind this phenomena is that science has internal and an external aspect. Internally, things have to be sound and correct. New circumstances have to be modelled and put into numbers in a reasonable way. Some say there is even math and statistics involved.
But externally, science has to communicate itself. It's about getting money and attention. But most importantly, it's about understanding. Why is this research important? Only if s he excels on both fronts will a researcher be really successful. He is one of the highest-praised young economists in the USA. He is doing sound work of course, but his greatest ability is to ask simple and appealing questions and then answer them with complex statistics.
Then, he published the answers in a highly readible book: He asks qwuestions like "Do real estate agents actually work in the interest of their clients? What makes successful parents? Should we make DNA sampe of dog poo to identify owners who don't clean up? Levitt can alternate between thinking simple and thinking complex. And he is not afraid to be heard asking asking seemingly childish questions. In reality, Levitts simpe questions may sometimes be the result.
What triggers most ersearch he did is the availability of good data. He performs regression analysis in which one controls for all variables but one to test for its effects and thus needs big data sets. So this may be what makes a creative scientist. Whatever comes first, a good question or a promising tool - Levitt is able to find the other and then formulate a good story around it. Another thing that makes a good scientist is also related to communication: Being able to put your work in the context of other researchers.
Levitt doesn't provide a lot about this, but that can have two reasons: First, Freaconomics is popular science so readers generally don't care. Second, this context-provision is most important for young scientist to be accepted as I currently experience and maybe becomes less important when you climb the ladder. I have enjoyed Roald Dahls short stories as an adolescent, and I still do. The short stories in this collection are typical Dahls - brilliantly narrated very english though and slightly abnormal. I really liked about this one that it is not like his really weird stories which you would find in "Kiss, Kiss" for instance.
These stories are a little more down to earth. They could just be real. And another great difference here is that in some of these stories, you just don't see the ending coming. Dahl is a brilliant storyteller, because he can manage to reveal his cards only in the last paragraph. That is really remarkable. Dahl was indeed a person with some controversial opinions on some matters.
But it is mostly controversial people who can write story arcs like the last one in "Someone like you", building up a hero over four short stories, making him very likable, following him in his quest minute by minute - only to let him fail most abruptly in the end, in the most injust manner. And in one paragraph. Seine Adelsfamilie verarmt seit Jahren, und somit ist er Experte. Er selbst war jahrelang arbeitslos und ist nun freier Schriftsteller.
Die Stil-Beratung klappt ganz gut und ist unterhaltsam. An author with something to say, but still only 60 pages. Vails main message is that hierarchy has come to be our form of organization as our societies grew in size and economic productivity. As growth is approaching is limits e.
Vail spans an arc over human evolution to explain how he thinks our hierarchical power structures came into place. His most important themes are genes and memes. Examples of the latter are the inventions of agriculture, economics and states. One must not agree with everything Vail utilizes on his way of explanation, for instance the Selfish Gene metaphor or the image of memes controlling us. The important stance that draws me in here is looking at human society from a structural viewpoint and explaining structure by what we have learned about ourselves by science.
That way, you can present anarchism to me.
Ein japanischer Roman aus den 80ern. Laut Wikipedia aus dem Genre Magical Realism. Er verschluesselt Daten mit seinem Unterbewusstsein. Ohne sein Wissen hat man an ihm und anderen seines Fachs ein Experiment durchgefuehrt, welches er als einziger ueberlebt hat. Als Konsequenz ist sein Unterbewusstsein dabei, sich vom Bewusstsein zu trennen. Waehrend das Thema des Buches die Gefahr ist, seine Seele zu verlieren, wenn man nur Beobachter ist selbst ein guter , wird hier erfrischenderweise nicht verurteilt.
Mit diesen zwei Welten blickt Murakami von zwei Seiten aus auf die gleiche Welt. Und ich habe beim Lesen beide geliebt. Das ist nicht einfach. The novel describes a typical "American Idol"-clone-tvshow from behind the curtains. An entertaining view, really. I bought it when I had to kill time in Amsterdam one day. I especially noticed how exact a clone of "American Idol" the german "Deutschland sucht den Superstar" is. For instance, all the emotional scenes seem so planned out, they feel all just like in the book. And, the "heroes" in this novel, the self-centered and cynical jurors, are the same characters in each of those shows in real life: The smart boss with the cruel put-off line, the guy who has some experience in the showbiz but noone remembers which and of course a woman to hug the poor but cute losers.
I think that maybe more of this book is actually true than most viewers think, even the ines who tune in for fun, knowing that it's all "a little" artificial. It might very well be casted and planned from A to Z So much to the show system in this book and in reality. Concerning the characters Elton exaggerates a bit for the sake of the fun and that's ok. A nice read for lonely afternoons in Amsterdam cafes, really. Sie sind irgendetwas zwischen Sachbuch und Pamphlet.
Sie enthalten keine grundlegende, durchdachte Theorie und auch keine eigenen Versuchsergebnisse. Dass die Psychologie diese Meinung, auf ihr Gebiet bezogen, teilt, ist weniger neu, aber nicht weniger wichtig. Dieses Buch will somit zeigen, dass es keinen Sinn macht, den Menschen weiterhin als rationalem Kampfmaschine zu betrachten.
Dass Kehlmann nie einen wirklichen Dialog, sondern nur indirekte Rede verwendet z. Diese Kurzgeschichten beschreiben seine masurische Heimat, die er als junger Mann nach dem Krieg verlassen musste. Der sonst so ernste Lenz z. Ich habe es mir dann nochmal auf Deutsch gekauft aber leider noch nicht gelesen , weil es mir auf Englisch gut gefallen hatte.
Rothbart geht auf die Geschichte der Geldwirtschaft ein, von der Steinzeit bis ins Jahrhundert und der Abkehr vom Goldstandard. Jahrhunderts und Rothbarts Interpretation derselben. Ask your software developer about software complexity. New Fairphone2 camera module - before and after pictures. My email to European MPs about the coming copyright reform. Don't count on it. Lenz benutzt sehr beeindruckende Naturbilder und kann Konflikte gut auseinandernehmen. Der Mann, der bei "Bild" Hans Esser war. Planet der Habenichtse The Dispossessed.
One of the few Science Fiction - books I actually read that is not really geeky I know While Urras is a world that refers to ours, Annares is a moon of it where anarchists have settled after the big revolution years ago. Shevek, a brilliant scientist living on Anarres, visits Urras for the first time. He is overwhelmed by the beauty of the nature on that world, but shocked by the ways people behave there. The story hops back and forth often, we follow Shevek back to his childhood, to the present on Anarres that reveals the problems that this society faces after several years the subtitle of that book is " An Ambiguous Utopia" and back to his visit to Urras again.
I appreciate LeGuin's intent to compare those worlds with each other by switching the context often, though it confused me a bit. Speaking of confusion, maybe I was a little too young, but there is lots of scientific theories that Shevek develops on his journey. I did not understand too much of that and it made me a little tired.
I just read that to many people in the Sixties, Anarres seemed like an Utopia compared to the America of that time. Today, more people feel that Anarres would not be a place for them to live. What you think while reading this ambiguous approach, depends on how you feel in your life today. That might be a goal LeGuin achieved without actively going for it. The book is a fascinating read and because I think I couldn't really appreciate it back then I always thought I should read it again maybe I understand a bit of the scientific blah today: Der Herr der Ringe.
Menschen, Elfen, Orks, Zwerge, Zauberer - sie sind alle da. Fast ein amerikanisdcher Traum. Man kann weise herrschen, oder brutal. Dazwischen ist immer eine klare Trennung meistens Krieg. Oh, schon wieder ein amerikanischer Traum. Eine erfrischend andere Sicht der deutschen Geschichte. Engelmann holt die Herrscher dieser Epochen demonstrativ von ihren Sockeln. Das Spiel der Logik. Lewis Carrol hat "Alice im Wunderland" geschrieben. Man bekommt ein Spielbrett und Steine mit dem Buch, und das ganze Buch ist nicht sehr lang. User Interface Design for Programmers. I'm referring to the online version of the book here the paper version is longer.
I like the examples and his way of writing, but sometimes I couldn't escape the feeling of "come on, I knew that! Maybe that's because I read Joel's articles before. As you can try out this book freely, I suggest peeking in there. It's great for the bus or as a gift! The return of Utopia We have an utopia on our hands - if we only want it. Why we should give free money to everyone The case for a basic universal income. The end of poverty Fighting poverty has high returns for taxpayers: New figures for a new era The story how GDP was born and why it is out of date as a useful indicator for how a country is really doing.
A fifteen-hour workweek The case for less work and more leisure. Why it doesn't pay to be a banker A short rant against "bullshit jobs". Race against the machine Here, Bregman explains the ongoing disruption by computers. Beyond the gates of the land of the plenty We don't really know which development aid is actually helping. How ideas change the world As we now know, people have difficulties letting go of their convictions - even when faced with convincing evidence to do so.
Epilogue Bregman calls for the Left to become brave and constructive again. Homo economicus is dead as a complete model of human behaviour. When making economic decisions, people do not simply act rational - they also choose actions according to moral motivations like general fairness, relationships and identity.
This moral part of economies is interesting by itself, but an important follow-up question is what this means for incentive schemes e. Finding the answer requires a closer look at experiments with human participants - what are they thinking when they see a price? It also requires an interesting discussion of why economic systems are so complex that there will be no perfect incentive scheme and no real equilibirum.
Incentive designers can learn a lot from proven wisdom about contracts from ancient Greece and also need to consider the contemporary hot-button topic that trust and peer punishment work differently across the world's societies. The topic of this book is human decision-making in direct economic interactions. It deals another jab at the concept of Homo economicus the purely rational and payoff-maximising model of human decision-making and at any incentive schemes which are entirely built on this model e.
However, Bowles spends most of his text in a constructive manner, talking about what we actually do know about how humans all over the world react to incentive schemes and what schemes actually do work or might work. These insights are built on careful research with real humans, by economists among them Bowles himself as well as anthropologists. For context, Bowles has also written books on microeconmics and the origins of human cooperation. This book took me a while to digest. It is easy to read, but actually grasping the details requires some deep concentration.
However, I believe it is important as this can serve as a source in any discussion of such issues - it combines scientific detail with constructive content. It is filled with history of economic thought, detailled descriptions of experiments and their interpretations both readable by laymen and in a way economists can work with: It spans a bridge between older theoretical discussions and current debates for instance about the cultural differences between different countries' economies or the governments role in cultivating values.
For anyone else, I guess this is a helpful starter which makes reading the actual book easier. To give a first impression before summarising chapters, I will start with a examples of incentive schemes which did and did not work and a short list of stronger statements expressed in this work my copy is from the first edition, printed btw:. Here is my attempt at summarising the major themes expressed in this book I'll go into more detail afterwards:. Incentive mechanisms which do not take pre-existing moral preferences of humans into account are over-simplifying the process of human decision-making.
They are making the dangerous assumption that moral preferences will not be affected by the incentives. They will be affected, as many people know and experiments prove, either negatively moral preferences are "crowded out" - people act as if they don't have them or positively moral preferences are "crowded in" - people who usually don't act upon them do make use of them. For instance, moral preferences often are in line with what the incentive designer wants to achieve anyway e. Maybe even a negative effect e.
This makes the design of incentive schemes, which we still need in our society, more difficult. Humans are not simplistic, so there is a lot to consider. But at least now we can understand what we are dealing with. For example, moral preferences are often influenced by environmental factors, like who announces the incentive for instance, a central designer or the peeers in a decentralised mechanism or how a certain action fits to a desired self-image which itself will differ between contexts.
The message is not only the amount of the incentives, attached to it is the framing as "bribes, bonuses, incentives, salaries, Moreover, some situations can only be solved in the moral sphere - "Morals must sometimes do the work of prices, rather than the other way round. This is also why mechanism design is not working. In turn, the use of trust and the belief that punishments by peers outside of clan structures has meaning are needed in populations and their presence needs to be accounted for in incentive schemes. I will now move through the chapters, for a summary of Bowles' way of telling this story, from problem to possible solution:.
The assumption that humans decide rationally and self-interested Home economicus has recently been attacked from two directions that have experimental support. The first attack direction e. This book represents an attack of the second direction - we are not purely maximising our own gains when dealing with others. Before presenting the major contribution this book wants to describe, Bowles gives a historical perspective.
He shows how this second attack direction is not even a novel insight, citing thinkers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau, Burke and Confucius p. On the contrary side of this argument, claiming that people are mainly self-serving and should be treated as such, he cites thinkers like Machiavelli, Mandeville and also Smith and Mills. However, not one of these classical thinkers completely favoured a world where purely number-based incentives schemes would run a complete economy.
Smith was aware of moral sentiments and paired natural liberty with a protective system of justice for all. Mills clearly states that his profession often makes an "entire abstraction of every other human passion or motive" in order to describe economies p. In spite of their reserverations, number-based incentives and a favourisation of the Homo Oeconomicus model has taken over as a serious candidate for running our societies in the last century. Bowles does not muse how this process went about in the minds of journalists and decision makers in general, but he gives some details about how economists argued how markets could internalise morals if they only were sophistiated enough e.
At the end of this mostly misled road of economic thought lies Mechanism Design, which is still around. Employers prefer to hire workers with a strong work ethic; banks prefer to lend to people whome they trust What Bowles considers the crucial novelty within the recent work which attacks the notion of self-interested humans is the proof that self-interest and morals are separable. Bowles uses different terms throughout, I like these ones to contrast: So if an incentive scheme designer does not think humans humans can be described by Homo economicus, can he or she at least treat self-interested motives and intrinsic motives separately when they design their scheme?
That would indeed make it easier to handle the design task. This book spends the majority of its text to argue that they are not separable and how to think about this - both as economists and as incentive designers. While the previous chapter was more an historical road through economic thought, this chapter lays down fundamental technical notions for this book.
There are two of note:. First, Bowles dives into the experimental games which real humans played in decades of experimental behavioural economics research. He explains the details of eight games, e. One-shot or multi-shot prisoner's dilemma with or without punishment of betrayal , Trust with or without fines , Ultimatum or Dictator. These games have been played by humans in all roles, from CEOs in Western societies to villagers in rural India. While it is easy to show that Homo economicus is not a model that can explain a majority of actions in such situations, it is more challenging to develop a generic model of the differences that were found.
Bowles introduces his attempt at this in the second part of this chapter. This section is quite technical and was for me the major hurdle to overcome. It is not that hard, though, it is simply required to digest this section in one sitting and not put the book down in between. Incentives contain more information than just the monetary gain or loss.
Next to explaining a lot of experiments where this showed clearly, Bowles takes this "bad news" as an opportunity for a modern incentive scheme designer a "legislator" as he calls this job to check his toolkit which is more than simply monetary distribution. The conditions the actors find themselves in can lead to moral disengagement. Is the room well-lit? What names are chosen for the player roles, like "buyer" and "seller" instead of "proposer" and "responder". Is a third party observing the interactions?
Can participants assume they will be held responsibility for their actions? Also, the presumed motives of the person administering the incentives is additional and crucial information. For instance, are they self-serving or neutral? Finally, the relationship between participants frames the situation as well. For example, incentives can signal control by authority and therefore lead to refusal of participation.
What could possible responses for the legislator be? Bowles gives a short list at this point but this was not easy to extract:.