David Trinh

1. Too Big To Fail (Andrew Ross Sorkin): Sorkin does a superb job of providing an entertaining narrative of the financial crisis.  Honestly, while the subject matter itself might be a little dry to some and the acronyms and last names a little overwhelming, this is an extremely well constructed account, filled with reconstructed dialogue, of the crash.  Don’t miss the scene where Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson dry heaves into a trash can in Nancy Pelosi’s office.  Priceless.

My only criticism of the work is that there is little in the way of analysis or explanation of exactly what contributed to the crisis.  Save for a brief overview of CDS and sub-prime mortgages, Sorkin largely leaves it up to the reader to figure out the intricacies of the investment banking and mortgage trading realms on their lonesome.  This is fine if you have a decent understanding of the crisis to begin with (and honestly, if you’re willing to page through a 550 page tome on the subject you probably already have a passing interest in the US financial system) but if not I highly recommend that you take a listen to this excellent This American Life episode as a primer.

2. Transforming America’s Israel Lobby (Dan Fleshler): Overall an excellent read. Fleshler does a good job providing a relatively even-handed account of the power of the Israel Lobby inside the United States and provides a solid plan for strengthening the left in the debate over the future of Palestine and Israel. Further, Fleshler manages to do this while avoiding many of the cliches (he even does a good job of lampooning many of them) that one frequently hears bandied about during discussions of the Middle East.

The only problem I had with Fleshler’s work is that he repeatedly cites random bloggers, or, even worse, random commentators on random blogs to score points against the far-left. I know that Fleshler needs to keep up appearances and criticize some lefties to avoid appearing entirely one-sided but the strawmanning becomes extremely obvious at the point where he’s citing a comment by “Cogit8″ on the “Mondoweiss” blog. I read a ton of blogs and I can assure you that I have never heard of Mondoweiss, nevermind Cogit8. If Fleshler wanted to criticize the left for supposedly over-the-top rhetoric it would have does his credibility to mention some names that actually command some respect in the academic community.

3. Lost in the Meritocracy (Walter Kirn): I was really excited to read this autobiographical work by Walter Kirn that details his journey from small town Minnesota to the Ivy League–albeit a school that doesn’t really matter.  Unfortunately, my excitement was sorely misplaced.  Kirn spends most of the book either bitching about Minnesota or castigating Princeton for teaching him how to test well and act smart instead of instructing him on how to understand the ideas of others.  I can sympathize with this to a point.  After all, as a former denizen of rural Minnesota, I can appreciate how some of the people there can be painfully stupid (Marx didn’t complain about the idiocy of rural life for nothing); however, I really would stop short of characterizing everyone as a rube, a distinction that Kirn doesn’t seem to quite grasp.  I can also see where Kirn is coming from when he lambasts the Ivy Tower for its approach to education.  (It doesn’t help that Kirn was a comp lit major– a particularly useless and vapid field of study.)  Sadly, it gets a bit tedious to listen to Kirn complain page after page about his classes considering (1) there are other, more meaningful, majors he could have pursued and (2) he was getting access to some of the best educational resources in the country.  Other people had it worse than you Kirn, get over it.

Moreover, Kirn genuinely comes off as a bit unstable and bratty.  There is one instance in particular where he appears to be legitimately deranged.  Three of his suitemates buy a new set of furtiture and expect him to contribute towards the cost.  Not being from means and not having been consulted about the purchase in the first place, Kirn declines only to be told by his suitemates that he will not be allowed to touch any of the furniture in the common room for the rest of the year.  Obviously, this is a dick move on their part but Kirn unfortunately chooses to reply to this provocation by cutting the wires of his suitemate’s Steinway, pouring champagne on the rugs, and generally destroying the entire suite before he leaves for winter break.  Not only is this totally unproportional to the offense but it betrays a lack of maturity in Kirn’s character that makes it nearly impossible for a reader to sympathize with the author for the duration of the book.

I wanted to like Kirn, as we hail from similar places and ended up at similar schools.  I dunno what went wrong for Kirn (maybe Princeton is just that bad) but I can attest that I am capable of mustering up much more joy and appreciation for the Ivy League (and Minnesota) than Kirn.

4. Taking Rights Seriously (Ronald Dworkin): Wonderful.  Impossible to describe.  If you’re interested in human rights, constitutional law, or social contract theory (particularly as applied to Rawls) I highly recommend it.  In other words, this is a book for debaters.

5. Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History (Brauer and Tuyll): One of the worst books I have ever read.  I thought Castles, Battles and Bombs would provide me with a good opportunity to use some of my newly acquired econ knowledge to better understand military history.  Instead I got to read a series of essays explaining how ‘there’s opportunity costs associated with building castles’ and why ‘an asymmetry of information can influence warfare!’  All of this, of course, is painfully obvious and could probably be summarized in a few short phrases (err, sort of like I just did).  I’m generally a big fan of Marginal Revolution and Tyler Cowen but I can’t for the life of me figure out why he recommended this book.

As a future law-school student, scholarships like this should make me swoon:

Costs are rising rapidly throughout the University of California system, but its newest law school, at Irvine, announced this week that the 80 students chosen for the second entering class will get privately financed scholarships covering at least half their tuition for all three years…

Most of the scholarship money, Mr. Chemerinsky said, comes from Southern California lawyers. Just last week, Mark Robinson, an Orange County trial lawyer who had donated $1 million for the inaugural class, made an additional $400,000 contribution.

However, I can’t help wondering if it’s a good idea to so aggressively subsidize legal education.  By all indications, there’s currently a glut of lawyers in the United States, a surplus that’s only expected to swell as more and more people enter law school to escape the economic downturn.  Further, it’s not entirely clear to me what the marginal benefit of adding another lawyer to our society is.  Do we really need more litigation in our society, our worthy cases being missed because of a dearth of lawyers?  If the marginal benefit is low and if there are few jobs for newly minted lawyers to take, then it seems as if we’d want to encourage fewer people to attend law school rather than providing a huge incentive to pursue a legal education.

After all, if the status-quo holds, most of these new lawyers are going to have wasted three years of their lives and thousands of dollars on tuition (if they go to a conventional law school, unlike UC: Irvine) by the time they discover that they can’t find a job.  Even worse, a surplus of lawyers means that the cost of litigation will fall and a whole host of marginal lawsuits that would otherwise be unprofitable to launch will enter the legal system, further gumming up our legal system. I think SoCo lawyers could find a better cause with which to commit their dollars.