If I were an editor

I would be very hard on a lot of manuscripts. As a result, fewer published books would fail to meet my standards. By the same token, a lot of authors would be really frustrated, and they would give up trying to meet my standards.

I thought of this when I received a review copy of Andrew W. Lo’s Adaptive Markets from Princeton University Press. Lo is highly respected and warmly regarded in the field of finance. He could write a book consisting of “Mary had a little lamb” written forward and backward 10,000 times and still get good blurbs and lots of library purchases. So as a publisher you don’t want to throw an aggressive editor like me at him.

But gosh. The introduction does not tell the reader anything about where the book is going. There is no conclusion to tell you where you have been. The middle reads like a transcript of every lecture he has ever given to first-year students or business practitioners.

This book makes me appreciate Sebastian Mallaby and Greg Ip all the more. In Foolproof, Ip gave us the distinction between economists as engineers and economists as ecologists. Lo speaks the language of ecology, yet on p. 371, he writes,

if there’s one single proposal that unambiguously moves us closer to a more stable and robust financial ecosystem, it’s to develop better measures of systemic risk.

Spoken like a true engineer.

There are a lot of fun stories in the book, and I imagine that would entertain a young finance student. But not me.

3 thoughts on “If I were an editor

  1. I would be very hard on a lot of manuscripts. As a result, fewer published books would fail to meet my standards. By the same token, a lot of authors would be really frustrated, and they would give up trying to meet my standards.

    1) Doesn’t market decide the standards? Yes most book don’t meet standards but if you can 1% of standards of the population that is still 3.2M people out there. That is not even going into global buyers. (Probably a growing portion here.)
    2) Isn’t this expensive to produce better but less books. And why do we need a stable ecosystem in writing? Sounds very anti-creative destruction to me. (As a big film buff, most Film Golden Ages (Europe 1960s, US 1970s, HK in late 1980s, there was a LOT of crap being made as well at the same time. Roger Corman made great contributions to film despite being only a B film-maker.)
    3) Even writers of great books produce a lot of mediocre and repeated stuff. Tyler Cowen is great writer but his Complacency Class reads no different than his other books.

    • 1. I’d bet you that the average libertarian could rattle off a longer and more specific list of “market-failures” than anyone else. And I’d bet we could more likely tell you exactly why they are market failures.

  2. Not necessarily. This also bears on extinction rates, keystone species, change and stasis. Evolution isn’t all about micro niches.

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