Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is a book by economics professor Bryan Caplan and has quickly become my favourite book on parenting. In it he argues that regardless of the number of kids you were going to have, a few more might be better. So if you were planning on zero, maybe you should have one. Or if you are planning on having four, maybe you should have six.

His thesis is that having children is actually less work than most parents put themselves through. People spend hours and hours ferrying their children round activities and after-school clubs, playing them Mozart and generally doing things they hate doing, and often the child hates doing, because they want the child to be more successful.

However, all the research shows that this has basically no effect. Whether it is IQ, happiness, success, character or honesty, most of it is set by genes and the rest is set by the environment, only of which a small fraction is parenting. Therefore parents are simply making themselves totally unhappy for basically no gain.

Let’s say you have a child, and the chance of them growing up to be a lovely person is 80%. You could work really hard and sacrifice your life to budge that to 82%. That gives you an 82% chance of having a lovely child when they’re grown up. Or, you could do nothing, have two kids, and give yourself a 96% of having at least one lovely grown-up child.

Even religion is not determined that much by parenting. What parenting does affect is the labels that people use. But actually turning up to the place of worship as an adult is a whole different ball game.

They are drawbacks to having more children. However, Caplin tackles these too. For example, people without children are slightly happier than people with children. Repeated studies find this. However, when you take out all the stuff the parents hate doing, this gap is incredibly small. Also almost no parent says they regret having kids, whereas the majority of childless people do say they regret it. Finally, most of the happiness hit is with the first child, so once you have had one, you might as well keep going.

There is also the time, money and sleep loss. Caplin tackles this too. This is a short term perspective. Sure, four kids is a huge amount of kids if they are all three years old. But, by the time they are teenagers you will probably have to ask them to spend time with you. And by the time they are adults it is a pleasure to have four adult kids that you can go see. Not to mention that the only reliable way of improving your odds of grandchildren is to have more children yourself.

Is it a message of doom and gloom that parenting doesn’t matter? Not at all. You can change your child in the short term. Discipline, for example, is necessary to have any kind of sane household. Just don’t expect those lessons to last forever. More importantly, the one thing you do have a long-lasting impact on is how your child remembers and perceives you. So shower them with love and kindness. Don’t bother doing stuff you both hate, or culture-cramming. Instead, use your time together to just have fun. It does no harm and makes both of your lives more enjoyable.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book by Robert M. Pirsig. It tells the story of a motorbike trip across America that he and his son Chris undertook. It reads like a novel, and in fact I thought I was reading a fictional story for most of it. However, it is actually an autobiographical retelling.

Pirsig uses the rides to go into deep philosophical discussions he labells as “chautauqua”. These explore the meaning of the term quality and slowly retell his life story: he explored the concept as an academic, to such a degree that eventually led him to a breakdown.

I found the novel dragged quite a bit. I am simply not that interested in epistemology in its relation to quality. It is interesting to hear his life story, but I think you have to have a strong interest in philosophy to enjoy the novel to its full extent.

I read The Wind in the Willows many times as a child. It is a lovely story so while looking for a low cognitive load and pleasant read, it seemed like an excellent choice. It was. It is such a fun story and moves at a pace that it is difficult to get bored. There was none of the usual awkward drag I find plagues most novels at least once. This is despite, or possibly in part because, I knew what was coming next.

Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong and What You Really Need to Know is a book on pregnancy by economist Emily Oster. Oster is known for applying her economics to other fields having given a TED talk on re-thinking AIDs in Africa. During the pregnancy of her first child she got sick of uncited recommendations and decided to look at what the evidence really said.

Take alcohol for example. I wrote about alcohol and pregnancy last month. Oster’s review of the available evidence and theory behind alcohol use during pregnancy is that having up to one drink per day is fine after the first three months. Coffee gets the green light too.

There is no evidence that bed rest is beneficial for pregnant women. In fact, it is quite the opposite: laying around for weeks or even months on end is likely to have a negative impact on the mother’s health. Aromatherapy provides no benefit either, but not everything is out the door: having a doula at the birth produces much better health outcomes.

With each topic, each stage of the pregnancy and each taboo, Oster reviews the available evidence and produces a short summary at the end of each chapter explaining what is safe and what is not. This is by far the most important book on pregnancy I have read.

How important is face-to-face contact? In her book The Village Effect, Susan Pinker argues it is super important. In almost every key aspect of our lives, strong social ties play a large role.

Longevity for one. Pinker shows that strong social ties have one of the strongest effects on life expectancy, bigger than almost any other factor. She discusses the villages of Sardinia where a strong sense of family and relationships help record numbers of people reach the age of 100. Interestingly, these stronger social ties not only help people live longer but also reduce the gender gap.

The differences in social ties can also explain other differences between gender. Men tend to have a wider less-intimate social network while women have fewer but closer friends. On average this benefits men more in things like the workplace as high-paid jobs are often gained through a weak connection. However, in terms of longevity it gives women the advantage because they have more people to confide men. Men on the other hand often only have one person, their spouse, and therefore nobody should their spouse die.

Having plenty of social relationships is important then, but it also turns out that they need to be face-to-face. Otherwise, no oxytocin release for you. Unfortunately spending time socialising online actually reduces face-to-face contact. The number of personal emails somebody sends directly correlates with depression.

Strengthening your intimate social connections has a large benefit. For example, getting married. I assumed that cohabiting was just as good as getting married. It’s not. People who choose to get married (marrying for family pressure does not count) live longer than unmarried people. Being in a marriage reduces your chance of cancer, depression, hospitalisation, premature death and prison.

In the workplace, increased social connections can bring benefits too. Call centres used to schedule people’s breaks at different times. What happened when they aligned people’s breaks so they had 15 minutes to chat to each other? Productivity and team work went up by a significant amount. In contrast, remote working has a negative effect on integration and cohesiveness.

Pinker suggests that being loneliness is a lot like being hungry. It causes you to feel actual pain. This is because we evolved in a world where we needed to stick together. Being excluded from the clan was a death sentence. So, just as being hunger-pain is a sign you need to get some food, loneliness-pain is a sign you are in danger of losing the group. We fear exclusion and people talking behind our back because we are tuned by evolution to fear exclusion.

What message should we take away? That social connections are really important If you want to live a long and happy life (and surely all of us want at least one of those) then having strong social connections is key. Spend time with people, and make sure that time is spent face-to-face.

P.S. If you are wondering if Susan is any relation to Steven Pinker, the answer is yes, they’re siblings. Anything that comes out of the Pinker family seems to be an amazing read.

I was recommended Le Cordon Bleu’s Complete Cooking Techniques who said it was more than just a cookery book: it really took the time to explain the techniques used in cooking. It is available new for around £65, but it you are happy with a used copy you can pick it up a hardback copy for £0.01. There is £2.80 shipping on that, but still a bargain.

It is a comprehensive book. There are five full pages discussing the different equipment you may find in a kitchen and what they are all used for. Each section (fish, beef, cheese, vegetables, etc) has a full spread on what to look for when buying them. It takes you step by step through cleaning fish, which colour photographs to illustrate each stage. The margins contain suggestions containing extra tips for doing it like the pros, examples of cuisines that use the technique and histories of the foods.

There are very few recipes in the book. In the chicken section for example, it shows you how to prepare a bird for roasting, jointing and cutting the pieces, and different methods for cooking chicken. It is up to you what you do with those techniques. There are some recipes in there, but they feel more like they are there for illustrations, and perhaps a little out of place. Some of the techniques are recipes in themselves: making a terrine for example is pretty much the whole process of terrine-based dinner.

I like the attention to detail the book brings. It has a “finishing touches” spread in which it talks about the garnishes of herbs and decorations you can add to a dish to finish it off. It also contains a host of useful tables: approximate cooking times, what cut suits each cooking method, what herbs to use with what dish.

The downside is two-fold. First, I already knew a lot of the stuff in the book. Not because I had ever read it but because you pick it up as you go along. I am interested to know why you should add herbs at the very end (heat destroys their delicate flavour) but after 100 recipes telling me to add the coriander just before serving, you pick that stuff up anyway.

Second, there is very little actionable stuff in the book. I feel I know a little more about cooking, including why I am doing things, but I don’t know what I will do now to put these ideas into practice to reinforce the knowledge.

SuperFreakonomics is a non-fiction book published in 2009. It is written by Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt as a follow-up to their 2005 book Freakonomics.

I had this book vaguely on the back-burner of things I wanted to read. However, while holidaying in Wales I found, to my surprise, a copy lying around in the cottage we had rented. So I sat down and had a read.

It is a short book, weighing in at just over 200 pages plus an extensive notes section. It is also a fun book. I read through it in about 24 hours. While enjoyable, I find it less enlightening or informing than their first book. I enjoy their writing style. There is a short rant about how people say things were better in the old days, even though on almost every metric things are better today. I often have this exact same rant.

The most interesting statistic they produce is arguably in the introduction. They discuss the risk of fatal accidents while driving drunk. It turns out that you are actually more likely to die if you walk home than if you drive. Walking home is dangerous: you might wander out into the road for example, or, if you’re in Leeds, into the river (sadly people frequently have).

It makes sense that drunk driving is illegal, because you are more likely to take an innocent victim with you, but actually it would be safer to let people drive home. Or, if you are the drunk trying to work out what method of transport to take, the best option would be to take a cab.

While the book is on the subject of vice, it next moves onto prostitution. Prostitution pays comparably well compared to many other professions but used to be far better paid. The problem: increased competition. These days, pre-martial sex is acceptable, and so you don’t need to pay a woman to have sex with you, you can just go dating instead.

They suggest this has implications for fighting drugs. If you go after the dealers, more will pop up, because the demand exists. Prostitution reduced because demand reduced, and so perhaps the way to deal with drug dealers is to go after the users and reduce the demand. This ignores the complexities of addiction but could be a good way to think about many other problems society faces.

They also discuss whether child car seats save lives. I blogged about this last month after watching Steve Levitt’s talk at TED.

While on children, they talk about how increased access to television correlates with criminal convictions later in life. This is something I am also reading about in The Village Effect, a book that stresses the importance of face-to-face communication over raising a child in front of the TV.

The book ends with a discussion on climate change. They note that food transport makes up only 11% of carbon emissions. Therefore, buying locally can actually be bad for the environment because large farms are typically more efficient. Rob Lyons talks about the same thing in Panic on a Plate: local farms might be closer, but in third world farms far more is done by hand, as opposed to carbon-polluting machinery.

I am less convinced about their solution to climate change though. They suggest that a technique called Budyko’s blanket could solve the problem. It would be nice if there was a simple solution that we had overlooked. However, a quick check on Wikipedia seems to rule this one out.

The Essential First Year is a parenting book by Penelope Leach. On the whole. I found it an irritating book.

It is difficult to say how useful the advice is at this stage, not having a baby yet. However, I found much of the tone very patronising. Maybe I will feel like it is obvious that I would want to sacrifice any free time and happiness for my baby. But maybe I won’t, and if I decide I want some kind of balance between caring for my family and looking after myself, that is fine too.

I think this comes from the premise that the book is baby-centric. It is about how to give your child the best possible start, at the cost of sacrificing the parents. This is a complex issue though. For example, the book recommends not letting father’s get involved with feeding.

You may hear that bottle-feeding is better for modern families because the father can share the joy of feeding his baby and the mother can sleep while he does some night feeds. Oh please! Every parent knows that feeding is the baby’s basic need and has to come before father’s joy or even mother’s sleep.

There are two possibilities here. One is that I will feel as I do now: that having a family is a compromise involving the welfare of all parties. That sometimes getting some desperately needed sleep, or bonding with your child, might equally weight in on what is best for the child, beyond the obvious.

The other, is that I accept I could feel differently after the baby is born, and that I will then agree with the sentiment expressed above. Even in this case, Leach’s writing is still amateurish and offensive. Some basic thought on the topic would suggest that people may feel this way for perfectly valid reasons, such as I have stated above, and that there is a far more effective way of winning people to your side than yelling “oh please!”.

Conventions are a bit annoying too. The book mostly uses the pronoun “she” when referring to the baby, but then seemingly randomly switches to “he” instead, and flips back between them. What pronoun to use for a gender-unknown baby is a genuinely difficult question, and perhaps it is asking too much of a book to solve it.

There is a lot of useful stuff in here: reasons for find out the gender for example, and any book that says some moderate alcohol intake is okay, which the evidence says it is, gets some points for that. Understanding what stages babies go through and a rough guide to when they will do what is also very helpful. However, this could probably have been presented in two or three pages of charts rather than a hundred pages of prose.

The production of the book itself is high quality. There are lots of full-page colour photographs to illustrate the stages of a baby’s first year.

Overall, I do not think this book was worth reading. It’s just too irritatingly patronising and long-winded. This is a shame as it does have a good evidence-based grounding. Time will tell as to whether I refer back to it after the baby arrives.

Absolute Favourites is 2015 cookbook by Mary Berry. It ties in to a TV show that I haven’t seen.

One of the things that Elina always comments on is how practical Mary is, especially in comparison to Paul Hollywood. Hollywood will insists on all kinds of different kitchen implements, whereas Mary will usually find a way to re-use the same bowl. This shines through in the book. Most of the recipes have a “you can do this bit in advance” or “make this and freeze it for later” section.

I was very much amused by comments such as “teenagers will love this”. It is organised by meal time and does classic dishes: steak with peppercorn sauce, meatballs in tomato sauce, fish pie. It still feels contemporary though: chilli burgers, sticky chicken and tapas all put in an appearance. The dishes are easy to make too.

Where perhaps it falls down in our kitchen is that perhaps the quintessentially English dishes are just a little bit boring. I felt like I was going easy on myself when I picked one of these up. The food does not suffer because of it though: everything we did was reasonably tasty or better.

My two favourite dishes were the lentil shepherd’s pie, a great alternative if you want to cut down on your meat intake, and the fish pie (shown below).

This is a super recipe that uses chunks of bread as croutons that you sit on top and toast slightly, revealing a sea of fish pie underneath.

This isn’t the most adventurous cookbook I have had but it has a lot going for it: the recipes are simple, easy to get right, have scope for pre-paring many of them and produce lovely results. Well worth investing in if you want to cook some English.

The Time Machine is a science fiction novel written by H. G. Wells. It was published in 1895 and tells the story of a man who travels into the distance future to find that humanity has split into two separate species.

It feels more modern than it should. The ideas are rich and relevant. I had to keep reminding myself that it was not merely a piece that attempted to invoke Victorian society as a backdrop: it was genuinely written in these times.

It was quite a short read; about half the length of a typical novel. Very much enjoyable.