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Favorite Books

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The following is a list of Tyler Cowen’s favorite books.

My short-list canon of classics includes the following:

Homer, the Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey and the Reck translation of The Iliad.

The Dialogues of Plato

Dante’s Inferno

Shakespeare

Cervantes, Don Quixote

Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Boswell’s Life of Johnson

Goethe, Faust, parts I and II

Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Ibsen, plays

Tolstoy, some of the short fiction

Kafka, Metamorphosis

Joyce, Ulysses

Borges, Ficciones, and El Aleph

I also recommend the following, in no particular order:

Virgil, The Aeneid

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and Cressida

Sir Thomas Browne, works

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

John Milton, especially Lycidas and Samson Agonistes

Moliere, works

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

David Hume, works

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Turgenev, On the Eve

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, others

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, Victory, others

Henry James, The Golden Bowl, some of the short fiction

August Strindberg, plays

Franz Kafka, assorted works

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks

Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil

Virginia Woolf, assorted works

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

William Faulkner, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom, others

Raymond Chandler, works

Pramoedya Toer, This Earth of Mankind

For contemporary fiction, I recommend the following assortment:

again in no particular order:

Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Wild Sheep Chase

Michel Tournier, Friday, The Four Wise Men

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Age of Cholera, Notice of a Kidnapping, Living In Order to Tell It

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, Executioner’s Song, Oswald’s Tale, and his book on the astronauts

Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Robert Bolano, The Savage Detectives

Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

John Fowles, The Magus (although the ending falls apart)

Anthony Burgess, Autobiography

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

Patrick Suskind, The Perfume

Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual

Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees, Invisible Cities

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, A Turn in the South, Among the Believers

Keri Hulme, The Bone People

Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

Naguib Mahfouz, assorted works

Johannes Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace

Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, War of the End of the World

Ian McEwan, Black Dogs, Atonement

John Le Carre

Charles Palliser, The Quincunx

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Ha Jin, Waiting

Juan Rolfo, Pedro Paramo

In science fiction I like best:

Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, Starmaker

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Greg Bear, Eon

Dan Simmons, Hyperion set

Ursula LeGuinn, The Lathe of Heaven

Orson Scott Card, the Ender Trilogy

Frank Herbert, Dune Trilogy

/fir fantasy, my favorites are Tolkein, Lord of the Rings and Theodore White, Once and Future King>

In poetry I like best:

Emily Dickinson

John Keats

Wordsworth

Hoelderlin

Rilke

Blake

Tennyson

Neruda

Favorite Music

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The following is a list of Tyler Cowen’s favorite music, broken down by category.

Classical

In classical music, the immediate canon is Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart.

With Bach and Beethoven it is hard to go wrong. But my short list there would be Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. Matthew’s Passion, The Art of the Fugue, Well-Tempered Klavier, some of the organ music, the Brandenburgs, the Partitas, the Goldberg Variations, and the solo violin works.

For Beethoven it would be the late piano sonatas, the late string quartets, and the symphonies.

For Brahms I like best the chamber music, such as the sonatas for cello and piano, or for clarinet and piano, some of the piano music, and some of the songs, in addition to the German Requiem and the symphonies.

Mozart I like the operas best, definitely.

Other composers worth checking out:

Palestrina

Monteverdi

Haydn (the string quartets, piano sonatas, the trios, The Creation, assorted symphonies)

Chopin

some pieces by Schubert

Mahler’s 9th

Do not be duped into thinking that 20th century and contemporary musics are a wasteland (see my book *In Praise of Commercial Culture*, on this). I very much like:

Shostakovich

Stravinsky

Hindemith (Kammermusik, Das Marienleben, early version, Ludus Tonalis, Die Daemon, music for viola, viola and piano)

Varese

Assorted bits by Ives, such as The Unanswered Question, Central

Park in the Dark, Three Quarter-tone Pieces for Two Pianos

Messiaen

Helmut Lachenmann

David Tudor

Robert Ashley (Perfect Lives, Improvement, Purposeful Lady/Slow Afternoon)

early Philip Glass (like Einstein on the Beach)

Poul Ruders

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Morton Feldman (For John Cage)

Harry Partch

Pierre Boulez (especially Pli Selon Pli)

Scelsi

Elliott Carter (Sonata for Cello and Piano, other works)

Eric Lyon

Rock and Roll

In rock and roll, in addition to the obvious classics (Chuck

Berry, Beatles, Rolling Stones, James Brown, Motown, and many

others, etc.) I recommend the following:

Beach Boys – Pet Sounds, 20//20, Friends, Sunflower, Love You

Byrds: Notorious Byrd Brothers, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Greatest

Hits, volume 1

Harry Nilsson, all, with Duit on Mon Dei as my favorite

Can – Soundtracks, Monster Movie, Future Days

Kraftwerk, early works

Led Zeppelin, I-IV

Brian Eno – Here Comes the Warm Jets, Before and After Science

Taking Tiger Mountain, Another Green World

Sex Pistols – Never Mind the Bollocks

Queen – A Night at the Opera, Sheer Heart Attack

Clash – The Clash, London Calling, Black Market Clash My Bloody Valentine – the album is called Loveless, maybe the best album since the Beatles

Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation

Laibach – Let It Be, Opus Dei

Sly and the Family Stone – There’s a Riot Going On

Nirvana

Hole – Live Through This

Aphex Twin and Richard D. James (in general there is much good stuff in techno, jungle, drum&bass, but it is hard to find consistent artists)

If you think you know how good the Beatles were, you probably don’t. Go back and listen to their best songs, including If I Fell, Please Please Me, Hard Day’s Night, She’s a Woman, You Won’t See Me, Rain, Strawberry Fields Forever, For No One, A Day in the Life, Back in the USSR, and Hey Jude, among many others. There is also much of value in the Beatles’s solo careers, albeit scattered. From Paul I recommend McCartney, Ram, Band on the Run, Flowers in the Dirt, Flaming Pie, and assorted singles and B-sides, like C Moon, or Daytime Nighttime Suffering. Lennon’s best are Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, and Double Fantasy. By the way, Yoko is much underrated.

Jazz

In jazz, I like best Sun Ra and Thelonious Monk, plus some swing, such as Benny Goodman.

Show Tunes

In show tunes I give pride of place to Jerome Kern, with Showboat being a particular favorite.

World Music

In world music, I recommend the music of the Pygmies of Central Africa, most extant collections are good. The Pygmies are among the world’s greatest and deepest musicians.

I also very much enjoy Indian music, gamelan music from Indonesian, and African popular music since the 1950s, from almost anywhere on that continent, with first place perhaps going to Zaire. The musics of Madagascar and the Cape Verde Islands are deserving of special attention. There is also Brazilian and Cuban music, or almost anything else African-derived. Untold riches there. Calypso from Trinidad deserves notice also, with Roaring Lion as a special figure of note.

From Jamaica, my favorite album is Buju Banton’s *Til Shiloh*, I am also a big fan of Desmond Dekker, King Tubby, Lee Perry, Burning Spear, Luciano, and others. The book *Reggae on CD* gives an impeccable set of recommendations.

Country Western, Bluegrass

In country and western and bluegrass music (most of which I do not like), I recommend the following:

Johnny Cash

Louvin Brothers, especially Tragic Songs of Life

Flatt and Scruggs

Everly Brothers, Roots (yes, the Everly Brothers!)

Hank Williams, Sr.

Gram Parsons, Grievous Angel

Flying Burrito Brothers, Gilded Palace of Sin, Burrito Deluxe

Final Note

“If you are looking to buy something contemporary, and extremely affordable, check out the works of Susan Dayal of Trinidad. She is fantastic. Her email is jdayal@carib-link.net”

Movie Recommendations

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The following is a list of Tyler Cowen’s favorite movies.

Personal Favorite Movies

Most movies by Hitchcock

Bergman movies, especially Smiles of a Summer Night, The Devil’s Eye, Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, but there are many good ones.

Paths of Glory – Kubrick’s best

Babette’s Feast

Dangerous Liaisons

City Lights

Sullivan’s Travels

Stairway to Heaven (known as A Matter of Life and Death in the UK)

Black Narcissus

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (revised version)

Blade Runner, Director’s Cut

A Hard Day’s Night

High Noon

Top Hat

Ran

Ikiru

Enter the Dragon

John Woo movies, but only the Hong Kong ones

Ringo Lam movies

Children of Paradise

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Siegfried (Fritz Lang)

The Maltese Falcon

Double Indemnity

Bringing Up Baby

Pillow Talk

Body Heat, other film noir

White Heat

Ernst Lubitsch movies

Kaspar Hauser, Nosferatu (both by Werner Herzog)

The Story of Qiu Ju

Pathfinder

Robert Flaherty documentaries, such as Nanook of the North,

Louisiana Story

Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! Kill!

Star Wars Trilogy

The Last of Sheila

Wayne’s World

Cable Guy, Ace Ventura

My Best Friend’s Wedding

The Advocate

A Little Princess

Princess Mononoke, and all the other Miyazaki movies

Map of the Human Heart

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Stalker, The Sacrifice, all Takovsky movies are visually and conceptually brilliant.

Donnie Brasco

The Godfather

Last Tango in Paris

Monsters, Inc.

Dumbo

Some Like it Hot

Proof

Dead Ringers

The White Balloon, The Circle

Time of Drunken Horses

Taste of Cherry and other Iranian movies

The Hole

Puppetmaster

Celebration

Goodbye, Lenin!

Master and Commander

The Host

Oldboy

The New World

Amores Perros

Y Tu Mama Tambien

Satantango (very long)

I am Cuba

Grizzly Man

Little Dieter Needs to Fly

My Winnipeg

Apocalypto

Away from Her

Two Syndromes and a Century

Lebanon

Waltz with Bashir

Art Recommendations

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The following is a list of Tyler Cowen’s favorite artists.

My Favorite Artists

Velazquez is probably the greatest painter ever, followed by the usual choices, such as Leonardo, da vinci, Raphael, Rubens, Caravaggio, the nineteenth century French, van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse. Poussin is much underrated, I think, as are many of the eighteenth century French. Mondrian is especially dear to my heart. Morandi and Franz Marc are sentimental favorites. Rene Magritte is a recent interest.

Later in the twentieth century, I very much like:

Jasper Johns

de Kooning

Andy Warhol

Lichtenstein

Frank Stella

Philip Guston

Gerhard Richter

Georg Baselitz

Balthus

Frida Kahlo

Howard Hodgkin

Robert Gober

Bruce Nauman

Susan Rothenberg

Damien Hirst

Matthew Barney

John Currin

Contemporary South Korean art

I am a big fan and collector of Hatian art. Going to Haiti changed my life. Haitian voodoo art is my favorite. The web sites typically don’t sell the best stuff, though. Please see my short page related to Haitian art.

Many of the other arts hold great appeal for me, including Islamic calligraphy, Indian miniatures, Indonesian textiles, south Pacific tapa cloths and clubs, Latin American colonial art, Naive and Outsider Art, Russian Icon painting, African arts of all kinds (Nkisi most of all perhaps), Chinese and Japanese painting, 19th century Japanese prints, and Korean celadon, among many others.

It’s an Election, Not a Revolution

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This article was originally published in The New York Times

It has become common wisdom that the battle for the presidency is all about the economy. Voters are being told that the country’s economic health depends on pulling the right lever in the polling booth.

This election is certainly important. But based on the historical record, it isn’t likely to result in a major swing in economic policy. Fundamentally, democracy is not a finely tuned mechanism that can be used to direct economic policy as a lever might lift a pulley. The connection between what voters want, or think they want, and what ultimately happens in the economy, is far less direct.

Voters may be concerned about the economy, but there is little evidence that the electorate, as a whole, really wants to engage in close consideration of economics. The current campaign season is a case in point.

On the Democratic side, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama arguably represent the best thinking in their party. Yet voters seem to be making their judgment on the basis of image and style, not substance. Mrs. Clinton has won some state primaries by pulling in votes from Latinos, Asians and single women, while Mr. Obama does better among well-educated voters, the young and African-Americans. Former Senator John Edwards, perhaps the biggest “policy wonk” among the original Democratic candidates, never generated much voter support. He was often viewed as the guy with the $400 haircut, rather than as a leading advocate of the redistribution of economic wealth. If we look at opinion polls and actual voting patterns, the Democratic electorate has not been giving very definite economic instructions or making very specific demands.

On the Republican side, the situation is no better. The candidates have generally sought to cloak themselves in the mantle of Ronald Reagan, emphasizing his conservative principles, particularly his disdain for big government. But they might have stressed how President Reagan improved funding for the Social Security system or how he engineered what was then the largest tax increase in American history. In fact, the economic policies of his administration and that of Bill Clinton were marked by more continuity than change — and it is no accident that both administrations were happy to work with Alan Greenspan.

The economic debate is likely to be even less useful in the general election than in the primaries; general election campaigns tend to rely more heavily on the tactics of attack and misrepresentation. And for all the talk about the rising influence of independent voters, independents tend not to be as well informed as the partisans. Many studies have shown that voters who enter the election campaign with very particular views tend to be the ones who take the time and trouble to become well informed.

The classic response to such worries is simply to exhort voters to do better and to care more. No one can oppose such calls, but we would be wiser to recognize the limits of elections.

To put it simply, the public this year will probably not vote itself into a much better or even much different economic policy. To be sure, the next president — whoever he or she may be — may well extend health care coverage to more Americans. But most of the country’s economic problems won’t be solved at the voting booth. It is already too late to stop an economic downturn. Health care costs will keep rising, no matter who becomes president or which party controls Congress. China is now a bigger carbon polluter than the United States, so don’t expect a tax or cap-and-trade rules to solve global warming, even if American measures are very stringent — and they probably won’t be, because higher home heating bills are not a vote winner. A Democratic president may propose more spending on social services, but most of the federal budget is on automatic pilot. Furthermore, even if a Republican president wanted to cut back on such mandates, the bulk of them are here to stay.

Yes, the election does matter. Even small differences on economic issues affect millions of Americans. But the record of the Bush administration should prove sobering to all those who expect the American political economy to turn around in the next four years.

Many conservative and libertarian economists supported President Bush, thinking they would be getting policy drawn from the work of Milton Friedman and Martin Feldstein, two respected market-oriented economists. Instead, in economics, the Bush years have brought an increase in domestic government spending, and some poorly-thought-out privatization plans. For all the talk of an extreme right-wing revolution, government transfer programs like Social Security and Medicare have continued to grow. And despite big mistakes involving the Iraq war, Mr. Bush wasn’t punished by voters in 2004.

Of course, an administration can make big economic changes. The New Deal brought about a revolution in economic policy — but those were special circumstances. The United States was in a very deep depression, and the concept of economic planning was sweeping the world. That period is an exception; it does not reflect the general tendency of the American political system, which usually operates by checks and balances. Shifts in economic policy are usually quite moderate.

The reality is that democracy is a very blunt instrument, and in today’s environment we are choosing between ways of muddling through. We may hear that the election is about different visions for America’s future, but the pitches may be more akin to selling different brands of soap.

We hear so many superficial messages precisely because most American voters have neither the knowledge nor the commitment to evaluate the pronouncements of politicians on economic issues. It is no accident that the most influential political science book of the last year has been “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” by Bryan Caplan. The book shows that many voters are ill-informed or even irrational; many economic issues are complex, and each voter knows that he or she will not determine the final outcome.

Rather than being cynics, we should be realists. Democracy is reasonably good at some things: pushing scoundrels out of office, checking their worst excesses by requiring openness, and simply giving large numbers of people the feeling of having a voice. Democracy is not nearly as good at others: holding politicians accountable for their economic promises or translating the preferences of intellectuals into public policy.

That might sound pessimistic, but it’s not. Many Americans will be living longer, finding new sources of learning and recreation, creating more rewarding jobs, striking up new loves and friendships, and, yes, earning more money. Just don’t expect most of these gains to come out of the voting booth or, for that matter, Washington.

And if you’re still worrying about how to vote, I have two pieces of advice. First, spend your time studying foreign policy, where the president has more direct power, and the choice of a candidate makes a much bigger difference. Second, stop worrying and get back to work.