As a Flying-Car Guy...

[beamjockey]

...I expect I'll be getting some e-mail about XKCD #864:


Speaking of reading books on one's phone, I mentioned to my sister (a heavy Sony Ereader user) that I had some books on my Droid.

"I downloaded Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations," I said. "It sounded kind of interesting, and ever since high school I've sort of intended to read it. Now at last I'm getting through it, whenever I find a moment to read on my phone."

She has an Android phone, too. "Have you played Angry Birds?" she said. With great enthusiasm, she explained that you shoot birds at pigs, or something. (I can't blame them for being angry.) She intimated that one could spend quite a lot of time doing this.

"Let me get this straight," I said. "You think that I should spend my time shooting birds on my phone instead of finishing The Wealth of Nations?"

Usually she has been more willing to encourage my intellectual growth. In this case, one might well say, she has an unEnlightened attitude.

Comments

[whl.livejournal.com]

Well, this is one less email I have to write. I was just typing at Bentley that I would need to make sure you saw this xkcd...

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

There's quite a variety of old free book content available. Among others, I've downloaded _Origin of Species_ (go with the first edition) and a number of G. K. Chesterton books (_Eugenics and Other Evils_ is a great read, especially when you consider he wrote it decades before Hitler.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hey, Angry Birds is straight-up Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

[tlunquist.livejournal.com]

Having read a significant percentage of Wealth of Nations, and eventually concluding that it was one book I would seriously consider burning (hell, it would probably heat my house for most of the winter) not because I necessarily disagreed with or disliked it, but because I found it stultifyingly dry, I would be willing to debate the relative merits of finishing it vs. playing Angry Birds.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I'm about a third of the way through it (I only read a little bit at a time, at moments and locations where the phone is the only thing available to read). I appreciate that Smith is carefully examining many elements that affect an economy, but the book would be much shorter if the guy incorporated some algebra.

To pluck a typical passage from Book 1, Chapter VIII, "Of the Wages of Labour :"

Had this state continued, the wages of labour would have augmented with all those improvements in its productive powers, to which the division of labour gives occasion. All things would gradually have become cheaper. They would have been produced by a smaller quantity of labour; and as the commodities produced by equal quantities of labour would naturally in this state of things be exchanged for one another, they would have been purchased likewise with the produce of a smaller quantity.

Smith is describing something I would probably express with an equation or a graph. Perhaps he was not mathematically inclined; perhaps he did not want to limit his readership to those hip to algebra.

Of course, my complaint and your complaint are orthogonal (as we mathematically-inclined readers say). Putting in algebra would not have made the book less dry. But at least it could have been shorter.

[tlunquist.livejournal.com]

Shorter, with more algebra, would have been better. Much better. Especially when I was 18, not really interested in economics, and being assigned to choke down a couple of hundred pages of it a night on top of a mountain of other homework (including some extremely difficult calculus).

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

It's not a math book; it's a book of moral philosophy. Look up the rest of Smith's career.

[tlunquist.livejournal.com]

Well, no, It's not a math book. And economics is not a mathematical field, exactly, but doing it is a whole lot more complicated if you don't use math in the process.

And like most philosophy books, it's tedious to read, even if the content is worthwhile.

[carbonel]

Isn't Wealth of Nations the one that Steven Brust was doing chapter-by-chapter commentary on for a while? If so, you might find that of interest as a companion thing.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I hadn't known about this. The first installment appears to be here. The commentary of a major fantasy writer on a major economics text-- could be interesting.

For symmetry, we need a major economist to comment on the works of Steven K. Brust. (I guess the remarks of Paul Krugman on Charlie Stross's work are in that ballpark somewhere.)

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Actually, the person I thought of alerting to it was Patrick:

I'm going to write a story set after the Singularity, a million years hence, when we are all intergalactically-empowered immortal sentiences in the Beyond, and people will STILL BE COMPLAINING ABOUT NOT HAVING SODDING JETPACKS.
-- PNH

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

"I appreciate that Smith is carefully examining many elements that affect an economy, but the book would be much shorter if the guy incorporated some algebra."

Your surmise concerning the level of familiarity with mathematics beyond arithmetic is probably correct. Even by the turn of the 19th Century, it was recognized that the need of the general population (who would get access to education, still made somewhat spottily available) in the Industrial Age to reckon accurately was valuable. However, even among the literate elite of the 1700s and 1800s, mathematical education typically did not include much in the way of algebra. (It is not in the quadrivium and there is, of course, no Muse of Algebra. Geometry was and is still considered more important in a liberal education, more for its value in teaching people how to form a rigorous logical argument, rather than to know the Postulates of Euclid and their consequences.) So I would imagine that not a large proportion of the Enlightenment philosophers had worked with algebra all that much...

Consider that, even at the turn of the *20th* Century, topics like vector and matrix algebra were still regarded as "advanced" subjects (there were only a handful of the "quantum physicists" who had seen enough abstract algebra to recognize that mid-19th Century mathematicians had already worked out how to build non-commutative systems). In 1950, calculus was still a "university" subject; Sputnik and Big Science changed that.