BOOKS - What are ASF members reading?

[It's Snake Pliskin]

Anyone read David Hewson's books based in Italy?

 

[Amungee]

Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

 

[gav]

Economyths

Whilst my fiance was handing in her final assignments at Melbourne University, I decided to check out their book store. Not surprisingly, their Economics area consisted almost entirely of Keynesian-based books. The one book defied the norm was titled Economyths: Ten Ways That Economics Gets it Wrong. I normally don't buy books without doing research first, but this day I made an exception. The book is written by David Orrell, a mathematician. Orrell claims to trace the history of neoclassical economics, show ways in which it is mistaken, and propose new alternatives.

Orrell points out some of the flaws in mainstream economics such as efficient market hypothesis, markets are nonlinear, flaws in risk models, etc. but there was absolutely nothing ground-breaking or original in this book. What's worse, his proposed 'new alternatives' are nothing more than fierce government intervention and regulation.

There are some frightening quotes in this book. For example, when Orrell explains how humans act irrationally, emotionally, over-eat, over-drink, don't save for retirement, etc. he says "Government should therefore consider 'nudging' citizens into making healthy financial decisions." Orrell attacks mainstream economics, yet seems to support the most mainstream and widely taught form of economics, Keynesianism. Yet Keynesianism hardly gets a mention in this book. It makes no sense at all.

When faulting current risk models, Orrell's answer is more regulation, of course. However he also adds "Time-tested risk management techniques such as experience-honed intuition, common sense and conservatism." Experience-honed intuition? The same "intuition" that makes us act irrationally and emotionally? Surely Orrell cannot be serious?

Orrell also claims that the economy is a giant casino ruled by hedge funds, banks targeting ethnic minorities, and even blames the GFC on gender discrimination. He states "In other words - and we have to admit this - the credit crunch really was a guy thing."

He fiercely attacks the free market and Milton Friedman with obscure reasoning, and blames the recent financial crisis on the free market. As part of his argument, Orrell uses the example of the bailout of AIG. AIG then used the bailout money to give employee bonuses. Apparently this is the fault of the "free market". Orrell keeps calling for more government intervention and regulation, yet we only need to look at the AIG situation to see what happens when the government intervenes. The fact is, AIG failed to manage its risk. There is nothing "free market" about this scenario at all. Free markets would have let AIG fail.

Another of Orrell's reasoning's for ridiculous amounts of regulation is that "all forms of life, from bacteria to an ecosystem, are closely regulated". What Orrell fails to mention is that there is no "government" or "authority" regulating nature. Nature is SELF REGULATING. If a plant or animal cannot adapt to environmental changes or competition, it perishes. It is survival of the fittest. Nature is the ultimate self-regulating "free market", where plants and animals are responsible for their own survival. Yet Orrell obscurely tries to use nature as an example of why we need high levels of government intervention and regulation. Just like the rest of Orrell's arguments, this makes no sense at all.

There are literally dozens of further poor examples throughout this book, where Orrell tries to impose his socialist ideals (although in an interview I read online he claims not to be a socialist). Do not waste your time reading this book. If you really want to learn about the economics and how markets work, I strongly suggest More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places by Michael J. Mauboussin.

 

[It's Snake Pliskin]

Started reading Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, seems a bit dry. Anyone read it, thoughts?

 

[It's Snake Pliskin]

Re: Economyths

That's a good review there Gav.

Naked Economics is a good read too.

 

[GumbyLearner]

The Forever War - Dexter Filkins

 

[Vicki]

The great depression ahead.
Harry S. Dent.

 

[gav]

Thanks Snake

Just finished reading:
- Linchpin by Seth Godin
- The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot

 

[Calliope]

My Kindle will be arriving shortly. I would appreciate any sources of free downloads of ebooks.

 

[tigerboi]

just started...bart cummings my life.

so far a great insight into how bart cummings became the industry leader in racehorse training,he was one the first trainers to go to nz in 1958 to buy yearlings to win the melbourne cup.

i always remember a saying of his...the harder you work the luckier you get & in october 2009 when i had my life turned upside down i never forgot what he said,since then i came out the other side in much better shape work wise,money & personal.

even if your not into racing grab his book & read it you might be surprised...
he is the only man to strap(comic court 1950 for his father),bred,own & train a melbourne cup winner(saintly).viewed his last at 40/1 very nice odds...tb

 

[Dowdy]

I got my Kindle from my trip in the USA.

So far i've read

The Big Short
How an Economy grows and why it Crashes

currently I'm reading

Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Managers

it's got some great tips on how to be a better business


I love this Kindle. I never used to read before I got it. Now i can fit so many books in such a small package, and best of all I never have to spend a single cent on a book - I get my books of torrent sites

 

[joea]

Beyond the Brink

All about fixing Australia agriculture woes and the correct way to solve climate problems.
Explains why the temperature is rising, and how to reduce CO2 emmissions.
No need of carbon trading.

 

[gav]

Currently reading "High Intensity Training" by Mike Mentzer.

Have implemented some of the methods in my training recently and already seeing results

 

[It's Snake Pliskin]

Nearly finished The Little book of Sideways Markets - from Wiley publisher's little book series.
Probably not out in Aus yet.

Will have a look at Peter Schiff's little book - Bull moves.

Recently read UBIK by P, K Dick. What a mind bend it was. Great stuff for average prose.

 

[Dowdy]

Will have a look at Peter Schiff's little book - Bull moves.

My brother bought me that book for my birthday. Not a bad book but if you listen to his commentary on youtube, then there's nothing much new in the book. I would recommend "How an Economy Grows and why it Crashes" instead. It's a much more interested and fun book to read.


I just put "The six figure second income" on my kindle so i'll be reading that soon

 

[tothemax6]

My brother bought me that book for my birthday. Not a bad book but if you listen to his commentary on youtube, then there's nothing much new in the book. I would recommend "How an Economy Grows and why it Crashes" instead. It's a much more interested and fun book to read.
I just put "The six figure second income" on my kindle so i'll be reading that soon

+1. Exactly what I thought about the books.
In 'bull moves' he pretty much says exactly the same things as he says on TV and on his Vlog anyway, so it is a waste of money, no new info, no technical information about anything. Just 'buy gold, US is **** get all of your money into foreign markets'.
"How an economy grows" however was a good book, agreed.

My current books are:
General theory (Keynes). Damn this is painful to get through. Never has there been such a deliberately over-complicated treatise written on anything. Some of his sentences are as long as this post, with dashes, semi-colons and commas galore. I read a sentence to a mate, three times over at his request, and he still couldn't understand what the guy just said.
Bleak house (Dickens). Dickens, nuff said.
Value-able (Montgomery). Good buy, interesting and valuable addition to ones investing savvy.
Making sense of Japanese (Rubin). Useful book, worth the buy if you happen to be learning the language.

 

[white_crane]

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien.

 

[motorway]

http://www.wellsphere.com/healthy-e...us-art-de-vany-answers-your-questions/1303531


Good book.

Afterward by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

A good introduction to the concept of paleolithic insights to health and fitness and the concepts link to life reality and naturally trading.

Each of us has what I call an ensemble of stochastic life paths–the choices we make. You make each choice in life based on your understanding of the possibility that it will take you where you want to be.

But you don’t determine the outcome, only the probabilities. Each path leads to more choices: a cascade to echo all the other cascades that rule our lives. Choosing the path is the extent of your control–beyond that, it’s out of your hands. You choose, and then life rolls the dice.

"At some point I realized that a human being is just another economic system. Indeed, your body contains an entire economy. There is the allocation of assets according to a hierarchy of needs. There are competing interests that sometimes struggle over resources and other times cooperate for the common good. There are surpluses. There are shortages. Like economies–like the movie industry–your body is a complex, decentralized system poised between chaos and order.

In the movie business, word-of-mouth reviews, more than anything, were what prompted fans to see one film instead of another. It is a powerful feedback loop made up of millions of small parts, each acting independently. This system has grown exponentially since the advent of the Internet. Where once millions of moviegoers chattered, now there are billions, perpetually in contact with one another, weighing in, arguing, linking, connecting and disconnecting, uploading and downloading.
It mimics perfectly what goes on inside our bodies. Billions of cells, all connected but working autonomously, with no central authority to guide them, take in information. react, then talk back and forth at the speed of electrons, each one responding in small ways that collectively add up to a powerful force.

“Information cascade” is an economics term to describe how even a small piece of knowledge can be amplified as it spreads from one decision maker to another. Your body is also controlled by cascades of information–your bloodstream is hit with a dose of carbohydrate, which is the signal for your pancreas to release insulin, which turns off fat burning and silences the signal from leptin, the hormone that would ordinarily tell your body that it has adequate reserves of energy and need not store any more.
Likewise, in the aging cascade, we lose metabolic fitness. And as a result, insulin rises and we grow more acidic, which further decreases metabolic health, and each event amplifies the momentum of what preceded it.

Hollywood wanted to believe that there was some stable, easy-to-predict dynamic that ruled the movie business. If there were, decisions could be made and investments taken with confidence in their outcome. Similarly, health experts use oversimplified analogies to predict how metabolism manages nutrition and weight. All you have to do is burn more fuel than you take in, we were instructed, and you will reliably lose weight. Burn precisely as much as you consume and you will maintain. Burn less and you’ll gain. Simple arithmetic that doesn’t add up.
We tend to simplify what otherwise seems overwhelmingly complicated. But as we now know, our metabolic function is infinitely complex. I found myself using concepts from other scientific disciplines to help me understand and explain the human body’s inner workings.

According to chaos theory, certain systems that seem to be random in fact are not–it’s just difficult for us to perceive, at the outset, all the subtle factors that set the course and determine the outcome. One landmark of chaos theory is the “butterfly effect.” This says that even a very small, unseen occurrence in a far-off place can have a large eventual impact–that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong, the resulting breeze can trigger a cascade of atmospheric events and cause a hurricane in Brazil.

This can be used to explain many of our bodies’ inner workings. Here’s a simple one: If you go to the gym several hours after your last meal (so that you’re on a relatively empty stomach), your body will quickly burn through whatever glycogen is in your muscles and then move on to burning fat, which is the desirable state. But if on your way to the gym you have a sports drink, one with lots of carbs, you’ll need to burn off the glucose first. And depending on your workout, you might never get around to burning fat at all. Same exact exercise routine, very different outcomes, all because of your choice of pre-exercise beverage.

Another scientific concept, the power law, also comes up often in my discussions of health and fitness. It is based on the Pareto principle, named for Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. In essence, it describes the relationship between how common a factor is and how much influence it exerts. It says that the most unusual events will have the greatest impact. Pareto’s study determined that 80 percent of privately held land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population.

Similar power laws exist all around us. This relationship between low frequency and high impact is found again and again, in various fields of science, business, and elsewhere.

There is a power law of exercise, too: Your least frequent, most extreme exertions will have the greatest influence on your fitness. The peak moments of a workout count far more than the amount of time you spend working out. This is why a series of 40-yard sprints at full speed benefits you more than half an hour of jogging.

It’s also the reason why lifting a weight heavy enough to make your heart pound and your muscles burn counts more than spending hours at the gym. When a work-out becomes an unvarying, monotonous routine, it loses its effectiveness.

My average output of energy per week may look fairly modest. But the stretches of relaxation are offset by two or three sessions of extremely intense activity, which do most to determine my well-being. Ancient hunter-gatherers spent much of their time doing little or nothing. And then, every so often, they took action that would exhaust any 21st-century gym rat. Overall, they burned twice as much energy as we do.

A few of the personal trainers at my gym laugh at “cardio queens,” people who waste hours on the treadmill and Stair-Master, trudging away but never really pushing themselves to intensity. But many more trainers recommend the unproductive exercise of “doing cardio” because they still subscribe to the energy-in, energy-out model of body weight. By doing the same cardio workout day after day, their bodies adapt to that exact level of energy demand but nothing greater. The internal message these people send is that they don’t need much fast-twitch muscle fiber, and so it atrophies, and as a result, they lose bone mass, too.

I use other terms and concepts that are not normally found in fitness books. Stochasticity, for instance, means “randomness” or “chance.” A living human leaves a “trail” of events and accomplishments that is so complex that it appears to be random. That means there is no model that can compress the information that is required to describe a lifetime. The appearance of randomness is an acknowledgment of the limits of our knowledge. So it is in markets and in life.

My particular form of engagement with the subject of health and fitness has even proven to have a metaphysical side. Each of us has what I call an ensemble of stochastic life paths–the choices we make. You make each choice in life based on your understanding of the possibility that it will take you where you want to be. But you don’t determine the outcome, only the probabilities. Each path leads to more choices: a cascade to echo all the other cascades that rule our lives. Choosing the path is the extent of your control–beyond that, it’s out of your hands. You choose, and then life rolls the dice.

For example, you can determine what you eat and drink and how you will exercise. But then your genes express themselves as they will. They are beyond your control. You can’t even completely determine your genes’ environment, since outside factors (such as air and water quality) and internal ones (like emotional stress) also have a say. I learned about the limits of control when caring for my first wife, Bonnie, through her terminal illness. I learned it again in my studies of the movie industry, and now in the course of my ongoing education in health.

It has even allowed me to recognize, in this thought, the Zen of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle: There is no failure, only feedback."

Motorway

 

[drillinto]

"Epidemiology - A Very Short Introduction"
by R. Saracci
Oxford University Press(2010)

[This is an excellent discussion on this central science of population health]

 

[Julia]

"In My Skin" by Kate Holden. Essential reading for anyone fiddling about with drugs.
The autobiographical account of a well educated, middle class young woman who quickly found herself out of her depth when socially, recreationally using heroin.

Her degradation into addiction when she was a hooker on the streets of Melbourne, then later an abused employee in various brothels, whilst living in a squalid boarding house sleeping on a filthy mattress on the floor, shows in horrible detail the depths to which a human being can fall.