In Defense of (Many) Books
Opportunity Costs Are Real But Also Are the Benefits of Books
Back in February, I wrote a post where I was hypothesizing that there is a general trend of increasing opportunity costs. This trend is responsible for a marginal adjustment in the tradeoffs between a large set of activities. This is especially true within academia, where people seem less and less inclined to spend time reading books:
“While this is happening in chess, I wonder if a similar phenomenon is not happening in society in general. When I read the Chess.com article, recent discussions I’ve had about academics who no longer read long books immediately came to my mind. Academics are less and less taking time to read others’ research, especially when they take the form of long texts because their time is more and more valuable. There is so much else to do: writing one’s own papers and doing one’s experiments, fulfilling one’s administrative and teaching duties, allocating time to non-professional activities… Again, as for chess, this is not new. Reading the work of others has always had an opportunity cost. But this cost is rising as an academic’s career (and thus income) increasingly depends on their ability to publish and because the administrative workload keeps on growing. There is a more general tendency in the academic world to push for less time-consuming format: you should write shorter output, you should make “posters” rather than write papers for conferences, and you should be able to present your PhD thesis in three minutes.”
Richard Hanania develops a more general argument against reading books (and so, presumably, against writing them) that also underlines the importance of taking opportunity costs into account:
“The issue here is opportunity cost. Let’s say you want to learn about why people form the political opinions they hold. You might read a 300-page book. Or, for the same amount of time and effort, you might read two chapters of that book that are 20 pages each, plus 15 different articles that are 15 pages each, plus say 5 Wikipedia articles that are the equivalent of another 35 pages. Something like the latter is usually the better path. And most academic articles are, to be frank, full of filler too, so you’re probably better off skipping the intro and conclusion of many of them. Substacks and Tweets are actually efficient methods of transferring information because you cut out so much of the useless fluff people include when they’re trying to build a CV.
It’s not that nothing can be learned from reading the 300-page book. It’s just that reading the book is a large commitment, and puts you at the mercy of one author, who probably took way too long to make his points for reasons of ego and career interest.”
Hanania notes (sensibly) that there are exceptions, though. History books and great books written by genius are worth spending your time on. The former because learning history is learning about facts and details, and the more pages the more details you have. The latter because, well, because they are great and enlightening. Beware, however, the latter category is far from including all the classics. Many of the classics in philosophy or social sciences have been written by authors who, though they were brilliant minds, didn’t have access to all the knowledge we have. There is therefore no reason to think that they have insights that we are missing today.[1]
I definitely buy the opportunity costs point. At least at the descriptive level, you cannot understand the trend in some parts of academia to less and less value books without acknowledging the role of opportunity costs. Though, as we know, an “is” cannot imply an “ought”, it is hard to dispute the claim that, when assessing the value of a book, we should account for the opportunity costs for reading but also writing it. I also agree with Hanania that the value of classics is overestimated. I do not dispute the fact that reading some classics must be part of a well-balanced education as this gives a background and a perspective making one more able to appreciate contemporary ideas. But many people typically overvalue this activity. There may be individual pleasure in it, but the social value is unclear.
Now, I think Hanania overstates his case a bit. There is no doubt that most (all?) books contain material that for many readers is irrelevant, uninteresting, and already known. However, you don’t write a book (or an article, or a substack post for that matter) for any specific reader. You write for a community, more or less heterogenous, with a range of expectations, different backgrounds, and diverse interests. It’s just impossible to write something that fits exactly what each reader wants or that maximizes the value of the time they spent on it. So when you write, you have a particular representation of the population of readers you’re addressing and you try to find the best tradeoffs between the various relevant dimensions that characterize your piece of writing. The point is that someone may find the last two chapters of a book useless or repeating things that they already know, but someone else less knowledgeable may find them interesting. You can’t fully judge a piece of writing without making an assumption about the target audience – though of course, the validity of the argument and the correctness of empirical claims can obviously be assessed in the abstract, but this is not Hanania’s point.
For sure, it may still be true, even once all of this is acknowledged, that many books are just wasting readers’ time. Still, nobody is forced to read them from cover to cover, or to read them at all. As a matter of fact, there are readers willing to pay to read books and consequently, there are publishers willing to invest resources to publish them and eventually to pay their authors. This is just the verdict of the market. Maybe consumers are wrong, but it sounds a bit pretentious to claim that this social practice as a whole is based on a widespread error of appreciation of the value of opportunity costs.
Maybe, however, the main problem comes not from the demand but rather from the supply side. Maybe the problem is with authors who, either for self-interested reasons (writing and selling books can earn you big money if you’re lucky) or because of self-deception do not choose the most efficient format to convey their ideas. This seems to be Hanania’s real point, as suggested by his quote of the infamous Sam Bankman-Fried: “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that… If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Again, this kind of claim is difficult to assess if we don’t specify who is the targeted audience of a piece of writing. The best format for conveying ideas depends on who you are addressing. Moreover, the claim is overstated. It is simply not true that books can be reduced to a six-paragraph blog post without losing substance. Is this substance valuable? Well, this is up to the reader (in general, not SBF in particular) to judge. It is easy to state an argument in five or six paragraphs. Unless it is trivial, it is impossible to defend seriously in such a constrained space. But who cares? Maybe what matters is just to throw ideas around, not to back them with serious theoretical arguments and empirical material.
This is an issue I have with the blog/Twitter/Substack subculture in which I’m participating for the last fifteen years (yes, I created my first economic blog more than fifteen years ago!). It is partly built on the delusional belief that all that a serious conversation needs are ideas thrown around in six-paragraph long, one-hour writing time blog posts (or unreadable tweetstorms). Many blog posts, including those written by serious scholars or journalists, are just trash: interesting at the surface, but underdeveloped at best, wrong at worst. It’s true that reading blog posts is less committing than books. But stop a minute and thought about the time we are collectively spending on reading a myriad of blog posts that we’ll forget in one week, if not the day after. How many blog posts ever written really have had a deep impact and changed the epistemic state of affairs in a given area?
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy reading (and writing) blog posts, but in the same way as many people just enjoy reading books. But the fact that blog posts are shorter and thus faster to write and read does not prove that the opportunity costs of the social practice are lower than those of writing and reading books. This is essential to have this in mind when making the case for or against books.
[1] This argument is reminiscent of the one developed by the philosopher Hanno Sauer against the value of historical approaches in philosophy and that I’ve discussed in a preceding post.