Category: Audio Courses/Books

This Great Courses series of lectures provided an interesting insight into Economics, or more to the point the mindset of economists, and not necessarily in the way the professor behind it intended.

I mean, it does present some of the basic tenets of Economic theory. Namely, that people respond to incentives to make their lives according to their standards better; that decisions have costs; that free markets are good; that nobody has complete information for any decision; that decisions and actions often have unintended consequences, and that in the aggregate, crowds are wise (until they’re not). It really emphasized the concept of marginal value, which is that eventually effort will yield smaller results (also known as the law of diminishing results).

All of which I agree with. But then, economists’ thinking takes a turn into the totalitarian, where since economists have mastered these principles, they should build or help systems to alter individuals’ incentive structures so that they, the individuals, will make the right choices according not to the individuals’ but the economists’ ideas of what the subjects “free” individuals should be. So if traffic or air pollution is too high, it just makes sense to raise taxes to make it more expensive to drive into town. And when it comes to the environment, the economists must act because of the tragedy of the commons or something.

You know, the tragedy of the commons: When individuals share a resource, they will take more than their share because they alone are not responsible for its upkeep. Which, too, is an economist’s invented problem, because it features individuals divorced from tradition, religion, or morals who only act according to the economist’s reasoning constraints and unlike people.

So it falls to philosopher-king economists, ultimately, to set the incentive structures for people who don’t natively play by the pure economist rules to reach the economist-reasoned best outcomes. They ignore or diminish the elements of uncertainty that their own principles recognize (incomplete information, unintended consequences, freedom). Instead, they become Jigsaw Keynesers: You’re free to choose whether you want to cut your comfort off or pay extra taxes for heating your home.

Maybe instead they’re Keyneser Soze, except the greatest trick economists have ever pulled is convincing themselves they’re not the devil.

Maybe I should stop with the Keynes jokes already and get to the “at any rate” summation of what I got out of the course.

At any rate, some good, practical ways of thinking about values in decisions, but only at a low, tactical level. It’s best not to build a whole philosophy on it or to let others with credentials impose it upon you.

This course offers a history of how the books of the New Testament became the canon. I guess the title indicates that. But it’s not a straight ahead timeline of the conscious development of the New Testament. Instead, it’s more of a survey of different things to consider when looking at the history. It discusses the different types of literature in the New Testament, the Gospels, the epistles, and apocalyptic literature. It touches on apocrypha that did not make the final cut (and sometimes why). It talks about the creation of the written literature as the church evolved and needed a central repository of teachings to share among the scattered churches. It also talks about copying errors and whatnot and a touch of church history.

So it’s an interesting listen. My beautiful wife would not like it because she rankles at people who are probably not Christians opining or discussing Christian or Biblical history from a non-Christian perspective. This lecturer says that he’s not going to tackle the theological content of the books under discussion, but at times he does make light of what his Christian students say, so he’s probably not exactly a homer. I, on the other hand, am very interested in church history and consideration of the imperfections of translations of the Bible.

So you good bit of listening if you don’t mind those things.

This audiobook is a collection of sort little essays about, well, counting your blessings and finding the bright side of things. It has eleven pieces by eleven authors. One of them is, literally, a woman who enumerates one hundred blessings, so it’s a couple minutes of sentence fragments.

A couple of them seem a little fictionalized. One features a woman coming to college in her forties who collects aluminum cans from the campus garbage for her daily bus fare and sometimes, on good days, her lunch. I look askew at this story, though, because I cannot remember a time when aluminum can prices were high enough that you could pay bus fare with a couple cans picked up. You’d have to fill a bag or so. Even the old automated machines that appeared briefly in grocery stores only gave a penny for two cans, and that was at the height of the market. Another deals with a snow storm where a woman breaks up furniture and keepsakes to burn them to keep warm, and how liberating that is. A lot of wood stuff, especially inexpensive stuff, is made with pine, and that would have been an unpleasant indoor fire indeed.

At any rate, it’s a little like the mindfulness that more la-de-dah people get from their Buddhist and Yoga texts. With a little uncluttering thrown in (ironically). It’s got a Christian bent, and the first three or four items featured divorced (and sometimes multiple divorces) people. I bet they needed some perking up.

Did it make me feel better? It’s not the sort of thing that changes your life in one listening. It’s the sort of thing you should probably steep yourself in to eventually, over the repetition, that can guide you to a better mind set. And it’s not an unpleasant hour or so of drive time.

This is a short course from the Modern Scholar series that focuses on myths and stories from the Middle Ages and how true they are. The four discs / eight lectures cover:

• King Arthur
• The Holy Grail
• Pope Joan
• Witches and Inquisitors
• Chastity Belts and The Droit du Seigneur
• Robin Hood
• The Flat Earth
• The Shroud of Turin

Not to spoil it, but basically, it boils down to there might have been a kernel of a real person for King Arthur and Robin Hood, but the stories have outrun the truth (print the legend!). A number of stories (Pope Joan, Inquisitors, the Droit du Seigneur, Flat Earth) were invented after the fact to reflect poorly on the past. As to the Shroud of Turin, who knows?

The author goes back to original sources and earliest mentions to try to get to the germ of each, and he does a pretty good job at a high, summary level or presenting the material. I enjoyed it, and it was only four hours which meant I could finish it on the recent drive up north.

So the guidebook to this course presents me with a little dilemma: Should I count it as a book against my annual reading or not? I mean, I counted the guidebook for the course From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History as a book, but not the one for Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion. Of course, the former was over 100 pages, and the latter was like 25. The guidebook to Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations is 72 with the glossary, timeline, and bibliography. All right, you have convinced me to count it as a book read in 2019 even though I listened to the course probably over a year ago and only completed the guidebook now because I found it at one of my book accumulation points.

At any rate, this is a fascinating course, twelve lectures in all, that covers Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations (with a bit of a nod to early civilization in the Indus River valley, but as this last was not that well explored at the time of the course, it only gets passing recognition). The course covers the Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, so you’ve got lectures on Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Israel, and the Persians as well as mention of the Hittites and Chaldeans and other tribes in those time periods who made a name for themselves.

As I mentioned in the book report on From Yao to Mao:

The fact that this succession of different groups controlling different regions could all be called “Chinese” history. You’ve got, for example, Mongols, Manchus, and various other tribes from outside the Chinese homeland taking over, succeeded by other non-Han peoples running things. But scholars continue to call it “Chinese” history. It would be like calling all of ancient Near East history Babylonian history (or Iraqi, perhaps) history–you’ve got different groups coming in and controlling the region around the ancient city of Babylon, but it’s Akkadian history or Chaldean history or whatnot. There’s not quite the enforced commonality you get in “Chinese” history. One has to wonder if that’s because in the 20th and 21st centuries, there’s a single Chinese government trying to control a large territoriy comprising different tribes’ homelands and to prevent fracturing or another tribe, so to speak, assuming power.

This sort of holds true for the Egyptians, whose civilization is controlled at various times by tribes from the Delta, tribes from up the river, and Greek peoples. The tribes that roam back and forth over Mesopotamia, though, aren’t characterized as a single civilization. I wonder why this is. The limited geography of Egypt versus the distributed loci of the other civilizations’ power? Aliens?

From the lectures and the guidebook, I come away with a vague understanding of the succession of the small empires and their chronology, and I will have something to say about the origin of the peoples in real life called Akkadians or Cimmerians when my boys are old enough to watch The Scorpion King or Conan the Barbarian.

Reviewing the guidebook makes me want to go through the lectures again, which is probably as high of praise as I can put into a brief report on the course.

Also, in retrospect, I want to count the much shorter guidebook for Elements of Jazz to my annual list.