What I've Recently Read

• Guys, Dolls, and Curveballs: Damon Runyon on Baseball. Edited by Jim Reiser.
  A wonderful, marvelous collection of Runyon’s everyday posts as he covered the NY Giants and NY Yankees from 1911 through the Roaring ‘20s.
  
  Runyon’s deft prose keeps the players, games, umpires, stadiums, celebrities, and fans as alive as today even though the action depicted is nearly a century past.
  
  Runyon’s work recalls the day when reportage was an art form. A time when clever storytelling sold newspapers. Sadly, today reporting is a lost art thaqt has been replaced by post-modern analysis, most of which is fueled by pm’s favorite cocktail, narcissism and nihilism, where stories are devoured and facts are treated as set-pieces to decorate point of view.
  
  Here's Runyon’s lead for a column on the murder of Arnold Rothstein, the infamous gambler and fixer who’s propositions fueled the fixing of the 1919 World Series.
  
  

  November 17, 1928
  Baltimore: Life, for the average man who is active in his own affairs, is about even money.
  That is to say, when he walks out of the door in the morning it is 50-50 that he will return safe and sound.
  A gentleman was arguing to the contrary with me last night. He holds that everything is 6-5 against, no matter the proposition.
  I recall that the late Mr. Dion O’Bannon, the Chicago Robin Hood, remarked to me on occasion that it was 4-1 at any season of the year that the snow wouldn’t fly on his back.
  But in those days , Mr. O’Bannon seemed a little pessimistic. And in any event it was a price.
  Arnold Rothstein is the only man I ever encountered who was NO PRICE. When he stepped beyond his threshold he was out of the betting.

  
  
  There are no sacred cows in Runyon’s world. His work is unencumbered. Facts are facts, and they go a long, long way when telling a funny story. He work is witty; his style his own. And his daily reports, like baseball itself, remain evergreen.
  
  
• My Term at the Fed: An Insider’s View—The People and Policies of the Worlds Most Powerful Institution. By Laurence Meyer.


Meyer was a governor of the Federal Reserve from 1996 to 2002. He had a front-row seat for the Asian financial meltdown of the late ‘90s; the internet stock bubble; 9/11, and few other high-level economic events.

Meyer may be a good guy, he spends too much time patting his own back to get a clear idea on way or the other. The book’s saving grace is that it take the makes the Fed’s primary role—to keep employment high and inflation low—easy to understand and follow.

The is much discussion of the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU), which is the lowest the unemployment rate can go before inflation is triggered. There are high-level explanations of the formulas that are used to calculate NAIRU, and, as you would imagine, there is great collegial debate as to what the NAIRU number is. Meyer spends a good deal of time explaining his point of view, which is understandable it's his story after all, but in the end one is struck that economists are much like meteorologists. Both are forecasters who use incredibly complex mathematics and a less than complete understanding of the factors that influence the fields they measure.

The most interesting development around NAIRU came when the efficiencies spawned by more powerful computers that were loaded with more sophisticated distributed software program that were connected to one another on high-performance networks. The NAIRU number went down and caught the economist by surprise, which is curious, though maybe not because economists know much about math but know little about what constitutes everyday work save what is reported statistically. The efficiencies caused the NAIRU to drop without causing a runaway inflation. It was a very big deal for the dudes who measure and argue the cause/effect of NAIRU movement.

If your squeamish about the unemployment rate, stay away from this kind of book. Regular folks flourish or founder based upon unemployment. For economists, those lives are rounding errors as tick point on the NAIRU scale.

Read the book if you want quick insight into the Fed.


• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams.


I know, I’m 25 years late to the party. This is a nice recreational read, especially if you’re amused by understatement.

I know, they finally made the HGTG into a movie. Haven’t seen it.