Quote of the Day

Here is a snippet from the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, a book with an endlessly fascinating take on money, debt, and markets over the long history of civilization:

Another way to look at this might be to say that the new age [1450-1971, the Age of Great Capitalist Empires] came to be increasingly uncomfortable with the political nature of money. Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just ab out everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud

I highly recommend Graeber's book for an alternative analysis of money, debt, and markets. You may not agree with his analysis, but he will help you broaden your understanding through his deep understanding of anthropology/history deeply rooted in 5,000 years of human civilization.

Interesting Article on Young Love Between Autistics

Here is a bit from a very interesting NY Times article that looks at two young autistic people negotiating the strange world of love and intimacy. You need to be aware of the basics of ASD to appreciate this article:

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.

Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.

But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soul mate.

From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.

...

She tolerated his discomfort with public displays of affection, though she pushed for more in private. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him.

“When I put my hand on your leg,” she said, “you put your arm on my back.”

...

Looking for clues to fix her new relationship, Kirsten began frequenting autism Web sites like WrongPlanet.net, where hundreds of messages a day are posted. “Eligible Odd-Bods,” read one. Another, “Are relationships harder for Aspies?”

In the library, she paged through autism guidebooks, few of which contained any information about relationships, not to mention sex. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack.

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

I love the odd connections this article brought up in me:

• The Jack Robison in the article is the son of John Elder Robison who has written a very interesting book on the autistic experience Look Me in the Eye.


• The brother of John Elder Robison is also a writer, Augusten Burroughs, who has written two books about his bizarre upbringing caused by the fact that his father was autistic and his mother suicidal. The first book was Running with Scissors which was made into a move. And the second was A Wolf at the Table which looked more deeply into his relatioship with his autistic father.


• These connections remind me of the "small world" phenomenon that was first researched by Stanley Milgram who is famous for his early 1960s experiments in authority.


• And these connections of course remind me of the famous science historian James Burke who had a very popular TV series called "Connections" and who wrote many books on the deep connections through scientific history.

The world is fascinating because it is all tied together by multiple connections. This wondrous fact makes learning so very satisfying. Not only do you get to discover the hidden connections, you find that these connections make a framework which makes learning new facts and connections so much easier.

I get utterly disgusted by religious fanatics who claim that "all knowledge" is captured in some millennia old "sacred text" that records the sketchy, ill-informed, and stuffed with magical thinking "explanation" of the world. The real world is much more fascinating. But religious bigots refuse to open their eyes and look. Very much like the famous scholastics of the Middle Ages who could interminably "debate" over how many teeth in a horse's head based on the various writing of ancient "sages" when in fact the solution lay at hand: go out on the street, open a horse's mouth, and count the teeth!

Jeffrey Kluger's "The Sibling Effect"

This book is an interesting mix of science reporting and autobiography. His topic is birth order and the effects that siblings have on each other. He uses is own quite interesting family to spice up the story with personal details. I found that fascinating.

The book will acquaint you with the major results on the biological and sociological effects of siblings on each other. It looks at genetics, sex, gender, birth order, and a bit of cultural history. It nicely mixes this up with a survey that runs through Kluger's life but nicely separates out issues chapter by chapter.

Here is a bit where Kluger is being grandly philosophical:

I may have been lucky in the siblings I got, and all six of us may have been lucky in the way we were able to parlay the challenges we faced into greater closeness and loyalty, as opposed to greater distance. But if there's anything my research and my own history have taught me, it's that in the overwhelming share of cases, our relationships with our siblings -- whether easy and loving or fraught and factious -- deserve all the care, tending, and watering we can give them. Nature, after all, plays for keeps. Any human life will have more than its share of pains and grief -- and it will end in death no matter what. And yet the life of anyone with a sibling begins with a sidekick and traveling companion who can be with you the entire way. Wasting that relationship is folly of the first order. It's true when we're kids, it's true when we're adults, and it's surely true when we're aging and alone. To the extent that this book has a mission, it's to argue for the sibling ideal -- and for better understanding and preserving those bonds.

I would recommend this as a fun and educational read for everyone.

I've previously reviewed his book Simplexity which was a much more serious review of science. This book doesn't put the demands on you for any real interest in science. You can read this book as a light "biography" with some interesting scientific bits thrown in. It is very entertaining, not in a purely "ha ha" way, but as an insightful look into relationships and family dynamics that I find engrossing. The book will lead you to some "aha!" moments.

Sylvia Nasar's "Grand Pursuit"

This book is an intellectual history of economics with a focus on a handful of names: Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice Webb, Irving Fisher, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Joan Robinson, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and Amartya Sen.

As you can see, those choices are idiosyncratic. Most modern economists would not include Marx, Webb, and Robinson since they are off in the dead end of Marxist "economics". But for me they are part of the spice of this book. This isn't a text to teach you economics. It is really more of a history of personalities and circumstances. The stories are delightful. The sketches of economics are thin gruel, so don't come here to understand economic theory. Come to savour history, personalities, and ideas.

What I found delightful is that the book reinforced my prejudices. Economics is not a "science". It is a liberal art with the pretension of science through its mathematicization of its arguments. The formalism doesn't make the models and arguments any more right. They do provide a bit more formal clarity but they also lead to obscurantism with dithering over details and ridiculous "simplifying" assumptions. I had a mathematician as a friend who made this point by arguing about cows by first stating "consider a sphere". Yep... mathematics does some wonderful leaps in simplification to make the mathematics "tractable".

Here are some snippets to give you a feel for the writing style:

Before resuming his journey north to the Scottish highlands, Alfred Marshall, a twenty-four-year-old mathematician and fellow of St. Hohn's College in Cambridge, spent hours walking through factory districts and the surrounding slums "looking into the faces of the poorest people." He was debating whether to make German philosophy or Austrian psychology his life's work. These were his first steps away from metaphysics and the beginning of a dogged pursuit of social reality. He later said that these walks forced him to consider the "justification of existing conditions of society."

In Manchester, Marshall found the smoky brown sky, muddy brown streets, and long piles of warehouses, cavernous mills, and insalubrious tenements -- all within a few hundred yards of glittering shops, gracious parks, and grand hotels -- that novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South had led him to expect. In the narrow backstreets he encountered sallow, undersized men and stunted, pale factory girls with thin shawls and hair flecked with wisps of cotton. The sight of "so much want" amid "so much wealth" prompted Marshall to ask whether the existence of a proletariat was indeed a "necessity of nature," as he had been taught to believe. "Why not make every man a gentleman?" he asked himself.

...

He took great pains to demolish Socialists' claim that but for oppression by the rich, the poor could live in "absolute luxury." England's annual income totaled about £900 million, he told the women. The wages paid to manual workers amounted to a total of £400 million. Most of the remaining £500 million, Marshall pointed out, represented the wages of workers who did not belong to the so-called working classes: semiskilled and skilled workers, government officials and military, professionals, and managers. In fact, an absolutely equal division of Britain's annual income would provide less than £37 per capita. Reducing poverty required expanding output and increasing efficiency; in other words, economic growth.

One of the points that Nasar makes is that modern societies organized around liberal economic principles has unleashed productivity and wealth. But as I read the above I keep picturing the billionaire tycoons on Wall Street and the masses in the street with their Occupy Wall Street protests. Sure there has been progress, but the economic injustice is still just as bad. The greed and indifference is there which exacerbates the pain. The fact that the billionaires can buy the politicians means that nothing will ever change. The fact that the rich are pushing to cut education and social services while cutting taxes on the rich as their "solution" to the current Lesser Depression is very depressing.

Sylvia Nasar's story points out that the same humbug and foot-dragging that blocked a real solution to the Great Depression was very, very similar to the humbug and foot-dragging of today:

Despite his financial straits, damaged reputation, and advancing age, the sixty-five-year-old Fisher seemed more energized than depressed by the economic calamity. In 1932 he published an extraordinary number of scientific papers and newspaper pieces. He bombarded the Hoover administration and the Federal Reserve with advice and organized other economists to do the same. His chief objective was to convince President Hoover to take the United States off the gold standard, if not de jure then de facto by having the Federal Reserve do nothing to prevent the foreign exchange value of the dollar from falling. He met with the bankers at the Federal Reserve to urge them to adopt an aggressive program to buy bonds from the banks and the public in order to pump money into the banking system. To his frustration, the "Federal Reserve men thought it would be 'safer' if they waited!" as he later complained. "That waiting, in my opinion, cost the country the major part of the depression."

In January 1932, Fisher attended a second meeting of monetary experts at the University of Chicago. This time, he organized a telegram urging the president to permit the federal budget deficit to rise, pump reserves into the crippled banking system, slash tariffs, and cancel inter-allied debts. Thirty-two prominent economists from Chicago, Wisconsin, and Harvard universities signed the statement, in which Fisher pointed out that Sweden, Japan, and Britain were recovering after going off gold the previous year. The signatories reflected the extent to which Fisher and Keynes's view of the crisis with its emphasis on its global nature, monetary causes, forecasts of its future course, and the need for concerted monetary intervention had gained adherents. On the other hand, theirs was still a minority view.

Sadly, today Obama ignores neo-Keynesian solutions. He shows himself to be uneducated about economics and has surrounded himself with the same fanatical deregulation libertarian economists who created this Lesser Depression. There has been absolutely no progress in economic "science" in 80 years. The same humbug and "morality play" rationalizing goes on to protect bondholders at the expense of the 25 million unemployed, the 10 million who are losing their homes, the youth who have given up on education because it is too expensive, and those nearing retirement who are desperate because their savings are exhausted. It is a social disaster, but Obama is acting like a modern Hoover and the 2012 Republican presidential candidates would make Hoover look like a bleeding-heart liberal. Tragic.

Sylvia Nasar traces out Keynes' thinking:

As the Great Depression dragged on, Keynes's faith in the effectiveness of monetary policy ebbed further. By the time A Treatise on Money appeared, he was beginning to pose a theory of the causes of unemployment. Cambridge undergraduates were his first audience. The nub of the new theory was that, as he put it in an article published in the American Economic Review in December 1933, "circumstances can arise, and have recently arisen, when neither control of the short-rate of interest nor control of the long-rate will be effective, with the result that direct stimulation of investment by government is a necessary means."

In a severe depression, prices fell even faster than interest rates. So reductions in nominal rates did not prevent real rates from climbing. Once nominal rates fell to zero, there was nothing further that the central bank could do to make borrowing cheaper or to ease debt burdens and thus to end the depression -- with incalculable political consequences, what Keynes called The Liquidity Trap. As he had once observed, "The inability of the interest rate to fall has brought down empires." Once monetary policy was rendered ineffectual, the only option for shoring up demand was getting money into the hands of those who could spend it.

...

As Herbert Stein, the economist, pointed out, Keynes asked a very different question from the one posed by Hayek and Schumpeter. In explaining depressions, in terms of the preceding booms, the Austrians were trying to figure out how the economy had gotten there. Keynes was less interested in the genesis of slumps than in the more basic puzzle of how high unemployment and slack capacity could persist for long in a free market economy with unrestricted competition.

...

Thus what made the General Theory so radical was Keynes' proof that it was possible for a free market economy to settle into states in which workers and machines remained idle for prolonged periods of time -- that there were depressions that, unlike the garden-variety ones, were not brief and didn't end of their own accord as a result of falling prices and interest rates, or, at an extreme, that free market economies tended naturally to stagnate even when there were idle workers and machines available. In such depressions, unfreezing credit flows through monetary policy didn't provide a sufficient stimulus, because even zero-percent interest rates could not tempt businesses to borrow while prices were falling and there was [no] reason to think that demand would recover. The only way to revive business confidence and get the private sector spending again was by cutting taxes and letting businesses and individuals keep more of their income so that they could spend it. Or, better yet, having the government spend more money directly, since that would guarantee that 100 percent of it would be spent rather than saved. If the private sector couldn't or wouldn't spend, then the government had to do it. For Keynes, the government had to be prepared to act as the spender of last resort, just as the central bank acted as the lender of last resort.

This is the same intellectual landscape that has policy makers hung up today. Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have been too timid in using monetary policy and now the only tool left is fiscal stimulus, but you have right wing nuts screaming about "inflation!" and "debt!". Obama is too timid to properly stimulate the economy and instead falls into the trap of Hoover and FDR in 1937 of worrying about deficits and debts. They ignore the ruined lives and the lost production that can never be retrieved while the country stays mired in a depression. The arguments of 80 years ago are lost to policy makers today because they are illiterate about history and economics. Oh, and they are blinded by their ideology, an ideology bought and paid for by the billionaire ultra-rich who are quite happy to leave the system just as it is, a system that has let them exploit it for billions in personal gain. This is a tragedy for the bottom 99%. The top 1% are laughing, but the bottom 1% are paying in ruined lives... and they will also pay through taxes to cover the lost monies and even provide the billionaire bonuses for the frauds and cheats who created the mess. Sorrows heaped on woes, and smothered with injustice.

This is a good read and it is highly relevant. This book will give you useful background to understand the economic arguments of today and the tragedy that today is a maddening repeat of the 1930s.

Michael Wallis' "David Crockett: The Lion of the West"

This was a fun read. The author is roughly my age and got bit by the same Disney-inspired Davy Crockett bug as me. He wrote this book to set the history straight. It is certainly less wildly romantic and adventurous than the Disney version. What I found saddest was that David Crockett fell into the same trap of poor money management and debt as his father. Crockett was a fun guy who certainly pulled his own weight, but he neglected his family and he had "big ideas" that led him astray. He couldn't settle down and prosper. For him the "main chance" was always to move to a new valley and start fresh with a big new dream. But rather than farm or run one of his small industries, he could disappear into the woods and hunt. That was his passion. And it was his downfall.

This book puts you right into the grubbiness of life in the early 19th century. It will knock the romanticism out of you. At age 13 Crockett ran away from home fearing a beating for skipping school. The hair raising adventures make for fun reading but they reinforce the harsh conditions of life back then. People today that grumble about "modern industrial society" need to be shipped off to the early 1800s to "taste" the real life of a pre-industrial economy.

This book removed the romanticism of Crockett's death at the Alamo. He was in Texas mainly to run away from his frustrations with a failed political career. He foolishly signed on to the Texas "cause" and promptly died in a hopeless seige of the Alamo. This was the result of his siding with the anti-Andrew Jackson faction among the revolting Texans. It was a completely avoidable death but he stuck with it and didn't complain, a sad end to a rough life.

I loved the bits that let you get a real taste of the early 1800s. I have relatives from that area and the kind of crazy Scots-Irish personality traits that Wallis draws reminds me of my relatives. It is funny how deep culture runs. Even today, the anti-science, fundamentalist religion of the deep South traces back to the immigrants to this area. They behaved stupidly then. They behave stupidly today. Poverty is endemic because they discount education and they end up short-sighted in their goals. The book touches very lightly on the slavery of the time and it doesn't go into much depth to explain the cruelty and double-dealing of the American invaders dealing with the native Indians. It is a tragic tale.

The book won't "teach" you anything. But it gives you an excellent insight into a corner of history and the nature of Americans then and now. I certainly enjoyed the book.

Ron Suskind's "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President"

I enjoyed this book. Usually I get bogged down and bored with these "behind the scenes" exposés. Too many details, too much in-fighting, no grand theme, no insight. But this book held my attention. It had a clear theme: Barack Obama failed. It appends a closing few chapters about the house cleaning in late 2010 and the idea that Obama had learned his lesson, was more humble, and would now be a "take charge leader". Well, we've had eight months since writer laid down pen to consider this "happy ending". Anybody living through the debt ceiling debacle knows that the last few chapters of Suskind paint a rosy fiction. Obama has not changed.

I've read quibbles over the "accuracy" of this book. That is surprising. Yeah, the book may get a quote a bit wrong here or there. I noticed some sloppiness in editing. The book was rushed and it is clear that it is stitched together from a large set of notes. But the theme of the book is solid: Obama failed.

What makes the book very interesting is "why did Obama fail?". He had a solid mandate, he became leader in a crucial time, he claimed to want to be the new Lincoln to lead his country out of a modern day "civil war" between right and left through deft compromise and "let us all sit down and reason together".

Suskind blames many people around Obama for the failure, but doesn't flinch for the core truth: ultimately it was Obama who failed. Obama chose the wrong people, he listened and debated with himself and equivocated when he should have acted. He allowed subordinates to derail policy. He fostered a White House where the mandate for action got lost, where egos bruised each other, and the needs of the nation got lost in petty politicking.

I would recommend this book to everyone. It confirms my view that Obama is "the new Carter", a nice guy who simply isn't cut out to lead. He is a smart guy, he gives a great speech, he has good intentions, but he isn't a leader. Worse, he carefully deceived the voting public with his "hope" and "change you can believe in" slogans and his life story. These led voters to believe that they were voting in "one of their own", somebody who understood the plight of the bottom 90%, and somebody who would go to bat for them. Instead, Obama is a centre-right politician more concerned with balancing the budget and keeping the Wall Street bankers happy than in reversing a 40 year drift toward the rich getting richer and the bottom 90% slowly getting poorer.

Here are some quotes from the book to give you a taste of it:

Just a month and a half into his presidency, Barack Obama's White House was slipping into a kind of dysfunction. In a way, it was not all that surprising that a president who had never managed anything beyond his own personal journey had responded to wild expectations, at a time of crisis, by grabbing hold of every intractable dilemma in sight. But the improvisational ebullience, and energy, Obama mustered in the first few weeks wasn't being turned into concrete actions or strategies. As the president tried to rise to the demands of his job, the White House was increasingly being directed by a back-channel union between two forceful men: Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers.

And:

By late March those choices were the stuff of fierce debate. The administration's domestic policy was fast becoming a debate society run by Larry Summers. Obama would sit on high, trying to judge if there was any shared ground between the competing debate teams that might coalesce into a policy. The larger question simmering beneath each busy day was whether his growing inclination to seek consensus in these debate tournaments was a model for sound decision making, a crutch to delay, or avoid, the decisions only a president can make, or a recipe for producing half-measures -- a pinch of this matched up with a scoop of that -- masquerading as solutions. After all, if the breadth of perspectives is wide enough to represent the fullest range of views, consensus i unlikely. If consensus is swiftly achieved, it probably means too few voices have been heard.

And:

Presidents are among the few mortals who are sometimes graced with chances to change a culture. Throughout a windswept March, the country had been working to dislodge some of the era's prevailing certainties about markets being efficient, about people -- economically, at least -- getting what they deserve, along with the concomitant belief that financial barons are brilliant and indispensable, and manufacturing executives are dinosaurs.

With the eyes of the country on him, Barack Obama ended the month by shielding Wall Street executives against these winds of cultural change, while he fired a man who had effectively managed four hundred thousand workers in their making of seven million cars a year -- without ever bothering to meet him. At the same time, he agreed to try to bail out Chrysler, and eventually GM, by adopting the practices and principles of private equity in the use of government funds.

Improbable combinations, blended solutions, the integrating of opposites.

This was the Obama method, in his life and in his work. But he hadn't gotten elected simply to search for this clever version of the middle ground. He's been elected at a time of peril to change the country's course.

I must admit I was hostile toward Rick Wagoner of GM, but Suskind's tale has turned me to see him in a more sympathetic way. I still feel he was an incompetent executive, but I do think he was brutally treated by Obama while the Wall Street fraudsters were coddled by Obama. GM and Wall Street were greedy. But Wagoner wasn't a manipulative fraudster. Wagoner got treated like a criminal while the real criminals get feted by Obama, protected, and paid handsomely. Life is more bizarre than one can imagine.

One of the guys presented as an evil manipulator was Rahm Emanuel. Here's a bit of a taste:

After listening to an hour of debate on the matter or what the outlines of reform should look like -- just like hour after hour of debates involving the president -- Emanuel took control of matters. "Okay, Time, what the fuck do you need here?"

Geithner, a bit stunned, paused for a moment.

"Well, a systemic risk regulator [someone to watch the landscape for systemic risk inside institutions], resolution authority [the statutory power to take down a problematic institution], and leverage [higher capital requirements to ensure that banks don't over-leverage themselves], Those three things."

Emanuel nodded, "Okay, let's throw in the consumer financial agency, and everything else can be flushed."

So it was decided. Everyone kind of shrugged. One participant in the deliberations thought about whether Emanuel had, in fact, simply made this decision, or whether he was just carrying out the wishes of the president, then concluded that "the president couldn't have decided those things and told Rahm what to do. At the start of the meeting, there were too many variables to choose from. You would have needed some sort of decision-making algorithm."

That isn't the vision of deliberation and wisdom one expects from high council in government. Suskind gives you a front row seat into the ugly reality. What is really scary is that it shows Obama as adrift and the underlings take over and run policy making for him.

This is where Suskind makes this point most emphatically:

"You know, Peter [Orszag], we're really home alone."

Over the past few months, Summers had said this, in a stage whisper, to Orszag and others as they left the morning economic briefings in the Oval Office. The topics varied: taxes, deficits, the economy, economics in general.

"I mean it," Summers stressed. "We're home alone. There's no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes."

No "adult in charge" of the world's mightiest nation at its time of peril? It bespeaks a crisis -- of a president overmatched, unable to fulfill the duties of his office, and a nightmare no one wants to acknowledge in daylight.

While Orszag wouldn't publicly affirm Summers's critique of the president's abilities -- saying later, "I don't want to go there" -- he wouldn't disagree, either. He sat in meeting after meeting where the president would cover the same issue, or controversy, or policy dilemma, and "relitigate" it, in the president's parlance, over and over. Decisions were left unmade; policies drifted without direction. It wasn't a matter of intellectual framing. The president seemed to grasp the nautreof key policy dilemmas, like a journalist, or narrator, or skilled observer. The problem was in guiding the analysis toward what a president is paid, and elected, to do: make tough decisions.

The book is a very long series of details about the Obama presidency and it is an indictment. He's a smart guy but he isn't a leader. Funny, George W. Bush was a "pretend" leader (he called himself "the Decider") but in fact was manipulated an cajoled into the "right decisions" by his éminence grise, Dick Cheney. Obama has no consigliere who manipulated strings to get things done. Consequently the Obama administration has drifted.

What does this say about the US political system? They put presidential candidates through a grueling multi-year contest to win office. This eliminates many who refuse to give up two years of their life to a quixotic quest for power. It also means that elections are over media savvy and endurance more than over any "leadership quality". In the background money is buying and selling "positions" which are invisible to the electorate. Is it surprising that America is electing "leaders" who come up short, very short, on real "leadership" qualities? Read the book and think about this issue.

Pierre Berton's "The Great Depression"

Pierre Berton is always a delight to read. His style is excellent. He melds broad history with personal detail to create a tapestry that maintains interest and gives a deeper understanding by blending policy with the effects of policy on real human lives.

This book is organized into chapters by years from 1929 to 1939 to tell the story of the Great Depression in Canada. It is a unrelentingly grim picture of the depression and the utter incompetence and indifference of political leadership to the savage effects of politicians that the rich elite on the lives of the 27% unemployed who struggled hard to keep body and soul together as year after year "hard times" ruined more and more of their lives.

The politicians simply never "got it". They never understood the depth of the pain and misery. They kept worrying about how to either deny relief benefits or to shuffle the costs from off their layer of government onto another. As well, the story shows how a weird ideological hatred for "commies" led the politicians to use the police to commit horrible crimes against the innocent. Even when they came down on real "commies" the brutal treatment by the police was all out of scope with any threat from the political agitators.

This is an ugly, raw, cruel portrait of a Canada so different from the Canada of today that I don't recognize it. This is a Canada that hates "ethnics" and paranoid about "commies". It is a state that is absolutely indifferent to suffering and a state that is never held accountable for its cruel treatment of those down and out through no fault of their own. It is a searing tale of political conniving to shred political rights in a mad hunt for "commies". The portrait of R. B. Bennett is one of a cruel rich man who simply refused to believe that the government should ever provide relief to the starving unemployed. Mackenzie King comes across as a cross between a crazed spiritualist/neurotic and a politician pettily scheming about his "image" while ignoring the real suffering of the people.

The only glimmer of hope is the bits about the founding of the CCF. But even here, the founder, J. S. Woodsworth, ends up being an idealist who fails to come to grips with the real evil of the Nazis and the need to face up to an impending world war.

Here are some bits from the book so that you can get a taste of the style and the focus on facts by Pierre Berton:

It is true that the Communists were using the unemployed for their own political ends.So, indeed, were the major parties. After his defeat, Mackenzie King viewed the unemployment crisis as a bonus for his own Liberals and a chance to get in a lick at Bennett. Although "sorry for the country's sake," he recorded on March 31 his satisfaction when told by Woodsworth and other Labour M.".s that things were far worse than they had been the previous year under a Liberal administration.

That the Communists were sincere is beside the point; after all, so was Hitler. The gospel according to Karl Marx made them just as blindly orthodox as their capitalistic opponents, who clung to the dogma of the balanced budget no matter what the cost in human suffering. Yet in the ranks of the Reds and, indeed, among the leadership there was also a sense of genuine outrage not unmixed with human compassion for those who had been felled by economic disaster.

Two topics covered by this book that I found especially interesting were laws used to suppress "dissent". One was Section 98 that banned "unlawful assemblies" and was wielded brutally. Even worse was the Padlock Law in Quebec that seized property when the police "found" communist literature, but was so broadly used that it was invoked to seize Protestant literature from an evangelizer. These laws were used in the most heavy-handed way and the broad public simply ignored the effect: rights and liberties were cast to the wind. Here's Berton:

Section 98 was in force for fifteen years. It was the government's big stick against radical thought because it made mere membership in an illegal organization convincing evidence of the political or economic system by force of violence, then every member was guilty. If you went to even one of its meetings, gave it money, spoke publicly in its favour, distributed its literature, or wore its emblem you were liable to twenty years' imprisonment. And contrary to British legal practice, you were held to be guilty until you could prove your innocence. Anyone who rented a hall to an illegal group was subject to a five-thousand-dollar fine. Anyone who printed its literature advocating violent political change, or who imported similar literature, could also go to jail for twenty years. In fact, anybody who advocated violence in this context, whether he belonged to an illegal association or not, could go to jail.

The treatment of suspected "commies" was brutal in Canada:

... it was not just die-hard communists who faced deportation from Canada under the Bennett regime. Anyone who had been in the country for less than five years could be deported as a public simply by applying for relief. That regulation covered not only the "undesirables" but also thousands of others who had been recruited to come to Canada in the twenties by a business-oriented community looking for cheap labour. The Canadian Manufacturers' Association had lobbied the government to broaden its immigration policy, and in 1926 the two major railways and the Canadian Bankers' Association quietly backed the campaign. In fact, until the Depression, Canada had not only welcomed newcomers, it had also wooed them and subsidized them with low rail fares and free land, especially in the West. The immigrants, in turn, had helped make the country prosperous. Now, with hard times returning, the government was callously prepared to throw them out.

Finally, this bit by Berton shows the priggish morality of Canada at that time. It is a story about William Aberhart, a teacher with fundamentalist religion, who rose to control the province of Alberta with his "Social Credit" philosophy:

Under the Canadian moral standards of the middle thirties, sex was held to be dirty and therefore not to be discussed in public, on the radio, or in the newspapers. William Aberhart had come up against the taboo in January when he told a joke in Calgary, in which he talked about the hard time he was being given by his critics.

"It brought to my mind," Aberhart said, "the story of the young lady in the maternity ward who was in agony. She asked the nurse if there was a young man in a brown suit and brown fedora outside in the corridor.

"The nurse said, 'Yes, I saw one there when I came in.'

"'Well,' said the girl, 'tell him that if this is anything like married life, the engagement is off.'"

That parable, inoffensive by almost any standards, got Aberhart into a heap of trouble. The Social Credit leader was assailed by complaints that he had told a "lewd" joke. Efforts were even made to take him off the air.

I highly recommend this book both for the sheer joy of the quality of the story told and for the history of Canada that it reveals.

James K. Galbraith's "The Predator State"

This was a surprisingly good review of the current mess the US is in. The book came from a challenge by James Galbraith's father, John Kenneth Galbraith, to his son to write on this theme saying that such a book would iconic for the age. This book hasn't become the defining book of our time, but it has clearly set out the liberal response to 40 years of right wing lies about economics and policy options for the US. I only wish that the key decision-makers in the US read this book to understand how we got here and what the way out is.

This book is a careful review of policies and ideology that has created the mess the US now finds itself in. It looks back to the Great Depression era to see clearly the role of government in getting a society out of this kind of mess. And it points out the key players and "wisdom" that has unleashed a "predator state" that is turning so many people's lives into such a mess. This is a "must read" for anybody wanting to understand the Lessor Depression and the fumbling pretense at "fixing" the current problems.

The book starts with a clarion call:

This book got under way right after Hurricane Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans, and the dispersion of several hundred thousand refugees across the American South, including to my hometown of Austin, Texas. It seemed clear immediately that Katrina had been the Chernobyl of the American system. That is, beyond the natural calamity and the human tragedy, it was -- like the Soviet reactor meltdown of nineteen years before -- a disaster that exposed and laid bare the fallacies of an entire governing creed.

Here is Galbraith taking on the 1980s voodoo economics:

Recall that the entire supply-side argument rests on perfectly functioning markets, including a "rational" response to tax cuts experienced by a handful of very rich people -- the marvelous marketplace that is supposed to operate in their minds. But if the markets do indeed work perfectly, we are compelled toward the following conclusion: public policy should not care at all about the supply of saving.

To see this, consider how the market for savings is supposed to work. To whom do our noble wealthy supply their saving? In the accepted story, they supply it to something we call the "capital market." To put it in concrete terms, lets us say a bank, or a broker, or perhaps a mutual fund. The capital market is an efficient mechanism for the allocation of resources: it transfers the funds from the saver to the investment project with the highest achievable rate of return (after taking account of risk) -- that is, from the capitalist to the entrepreneur. In a seamless process, there is first a necessary reward to the risk taker -- the big prize for seeing and taking a chance. And after that, the saver is rewarded: she earns the return associated with the investment and justified by her thrift.

But if a market is "efficient," it must allocate returns exactly. It must allocate them in full in relation to the quality of effort expended, the risk assumed, and the astuteness of investment judgement. The private saver -- the capitalist -- must get the entire return that is due to capital provided. Meanwhile the person executing the project -- the entrepreneur -- gets the entire return to risk. Between the two, they must get the entire return. That is what market efficiency means, if it means anything at all.

So what is left over for society? What do workers, or anyone else, get out of the process of accumulation? In the simplest, clearest, purest form of the market model, there can be only one answer to this question. Nothing.

Galbraith is quite good at cutting through the underbrush and explaining the broad strokes of the economy. Here is a bit from his look at the engine of inequality.

Thus, much of the mystery surrounding our understanding of "inequality" goes away once we recognize that the word covers two quite different aspects of the economy -- and neither of them is well explained by "supply and demand for skills." One of them is the inequality of pay: the major force affecting the larger working population. This form of inequality is substantially tied to employment and unemployment, and while it is increased dramatically in the 1970s and early 1980s, it also fell quite dramatically in the late 1990s. Higher demand for labor reduces inequality, while pay compression, aided by unions or minimum wage laws, also helps to reduce unemployment.

The other process is not about working people at all. It is about funds flowing from the financial markets through banks and brokers into technology and other hot sectors. This is source, rather than sink, for demand. In the tech boom, working people benefited because there were more jobs. But income inequality also went up because the incomes generated by the stock bubble flowed to a tiny handful of people, in a tiny handful of places. And the same was true in the next expansion, although driven by entirely different policies and favoring a different group.

...

What the information technology boom showed, and what the Bush Beltway Bubble has against shown, is taht public policy can move wealth around in spectacular ways. It can create oligarchs, and it can destroy. That being so, one can only expect that the beneficiaries, and potential beneficiaries, would pay close attention to the behavior of the state. They will even devote themselves to using and abusing the state, turning its instruments to their own purposes if they can. If the state is sufficiently large and sufficiently powerful, it may be that working those levers for the creation and consolidation of wealth is more tempting, and a better investment, than the complicated, tedious work of preparing products for consumption by the public at large, still less that of innovating new technologies for world markets.

He goes on the explain the large forces of history, the choices of Nixon to deal with the gold crisis, and the Reagan era Federal Reserve moving interest rates to near 20%, distorted the US economy, destroyed the manufacturing base of the Midwest, and set the US on the path to being a predatory state.

This is the Predator State. It is a coalition of relentless opponents of the regulatory framework on which public purpose depends, with enterprises whose major lines of business compete with or encroach on the principal public functions of the enduring New Deal. It is a coalition, in other words, that seeks to control the state partly in order to prevent the assertion of public purpose and partly to poach on the lines of activity that past public purpose has established. They are firms that have no intrinsic loyalty to any country.

Here is Galbraith's assessment of how the political left in the US lost its way:

Marxism used to be the hard-boiled left-wing dissident's creed, a doctrine founded on class conflict and the romance of working-class revolution. Unfortunately there were actual Marxist countries; "real existing socialism" took care of the romance. Meanwhile, Keynes and his allies in the progressive movement offered ways to reconcile the capitalists and the workers to avoid the calamity of revolution and the tyrannies that follow, through regulation and the management of total demand. But the price of progressive Keynesianism was big government: establishing countervailing power against the authority of private business. Free-market conservatives, once they recovered from the Great Depression, were inclined to reject that gift, preferring to take their chances with class conflict, and Keynesianism lost its leverage when the threat of Marxism disappeared.

Now we have a new liberalism, something called the Third Way, which consists of hewing as closely as possible to market solutions. If the presumption of modern conservatives is simple -- that markets work best when left alone -- this new breed of domesticated liberals puts a simple gloss on it: government can help. But the well-brought up modern liberal cautiously insists that in making the omelette, no eggs need be broken. The government should work unobtrusively, distorting as little as possible the outcomes that markets would otherwise achieve. Grand schemes for employment, distribution, infrastructure, or the environment are off the table; nothing is possible or permitted that would undermine the authority of the market in a fundamental way.

He then goes on to show that "markets" simply can't allot outcomes in a fair or reasonable way. They have a role to play in guiding business but not in social goals like education, welfare, employment, etc. He carefully shows that the idea of a "labor market" is a myth. Then says:

But if labor is not bought or sold in a "market for skills," how about, say, health care? What is "health care," and is it bought and sold in a market? Obviously not: health care is not any specific thing, but a label covering a class of goods and services, an enormously diverse class, adapted to the specific health condition of each individual patient. There is no unit of health care; if you draw a supply-and-demand diagram, there is no quantity to put on the horizontal axis and no price to record on the vertical axis. Health care is therefore not a commodity that is bought and sold at a given price on an open market. Nor is any medical procedure. In the overwhelming majority of cases, these are prescribed in one-on-one discussions between a medical professional following the norms and standards of the profession and a patient with extremely limited capacity to evaluate either the recommendations or the alternatives. ... There is not only no market in health care, there are no markets within health care either. The suggestion that "market forces" might be usefully deployed to regulate prices and quantities in this area runs into the basic difficulty that no such markets either do exist or could exist.

His prescription is to update Keynes and his father's view, published in The New Industrial State in the 1960s, i.e. use government to ensure a more prosperous and equitable society. He uses the Scandinavian countries as an example and discusses their policies that ensure an open economy but one that leads to widespread prosperity and a reasonable equality.

This book is a refreshing change from the "more of the same" (deregulation, cut taxes, shrink government) of the right and the hand wringing incompetence on the left. This book should be read by everybody. It lays the foundation for a saner, more prosperous future.

Lawrence Krauss' "Quantum Man: Richard Feynnman's Life in Science"

This is a good review of "the complete" Richard Feynman. It has better coverage of the science than more popular biographies. It doesn't break any new ground on the personality of Feynman, but that would be hard to do after a half dozen other biographies, especially Feynman's own autobiographical books.

What most impressed me about this book was Krauss' ability to demonstrate the widespread influence of Feynman's work. Sure he got a Nobel prize, but that didn't get the publicity and "public intellectual" stature that a lot of physics "greats" get. Instead, he is known more for his quirky personality. But Krauss takes the effort to show truly how wide and deep the influence of Feynman's work is on modern physics.

This book reinforces, yet again for me, what I like most about Feynman: a great, deep thinker, who remained humble and focused more on the science than on the glory. Too many scientists ascend to positions of "august sage" and produce nothing in their later years. Feynman was working until the day he died still creating interesting new science.

It is hard to pick anything that gives the flavour of Feynman, but I liked this bit from the book talking about Feynman's 1959 lecture to the American Physical Society "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom":

Feynman began his lecture by saying that some people were impressed by a machine that could write the Lord's prayer on the head of a pin. That was nothing. He envisaged first writing the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin. But, he argued, that was nothing, because one could easily do that with regular printing by simply shrinking the area of each dot used in half-tone printing by a factor of 25,000. As he argued, even then each dot would contain about 1,000 atoms. No problem, he imagined.

But even that was timid, he argued. What about writing all of the information in all of the books in the world? He performed an estimate for doing so that is amusingly similar to one that I did when I tried to consider how much information would be required to store a digital copy of someone for transporting, in The Physics of Star Trek. He argued that it would be easy to store one bit of information (that is, a 1 or 0) using, say, a cube of 5 atoms on a side, or a few more than 100 atoms. He also estimated there were about 10¹⁵ bits of information in all of the books in the world, which at the time he estimated to be about 24 million volumes. In that case, to store all of the information in all of the books in the world would take merely a cube of material less than one-hundredth of an inch on a side -- as small as the smallest speck of dist to the human eye! Okay, so you get the picture.

Feynman loved to calculate. He was a theorist, but one with an eye for detail and an insistence that theory connect with fact, that until you could calculate specific numbers that matched experiment, you didn't have real science.

The book is well worth taking your time to read. Everybody should get to know one of the great minds of the 20th century.

Richard C. Francis' "Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance"

This is an exciting topic and I had high hopes for this book. The book does include some wonderful "attention grabbing" stories of some biological facts that don't fit the traditional genetics story. It did introduce me to several areas of research where epigenetics his giving new insight into biology. But I felt the author could have provided more detail on the science and more a "lay of the land" review. The specific examples were interesting but without more background it is hard to appreciate them in the overall context of epigenetics as a scientific theory.

My lament may not be a fault of the author. I notice than when I look through the Wikipedia article on epigenetics I find much detail but not a solid sense of an over-arching scientific theory. I see many mechanisms discussed, but I feel the glue is missing, the stuff that makes these mechanisms all part of a coherent scientific theory. Maybe I'm asking for too much. But it feels as if "physics" is introduced as statics, dynamics, kinematics, etc. An assortment of subfields grouped under "physics". But what is the rational for physics as a scientific field and how do these subfields fit together into a whole? Presumably the glue and the coherent overarching theory is "epigenesis" but Francis' book doesn't make me comfortable that I understand this theory. I'm left seeing the trees but not the forest.

The author goes to great pains to make clear that epigenetics isn't just a new development in genetics. He wants to emphasize that the "genetics" in epigenetics derives from "genesis" and not "genes". It is a story of developmental biology. I especially enjoyed the section where he discussed "preformationism" and "epigenesis". I found this an excellent motivation for understanding why epigenetics as a new science is so important. It provides the scientific mechanisms to support epigenesis.

I found the material on "genetic imprinting" murky. He did labour mightily to make it clear, but I think I'm a victim of terminology. The word "imprinting" kept throwing me for a loop. There was nothing to imprint with imprinting. And it certainly has nothing to do with ethology's "imprinting". It is simply a deplorable lack of imagination in coming up with a technical term that adequately captures the concept.

The chapter on cancer and epigenetics was exciting. I can see great hope in dealing with cancer by changing the paradigm from genetics and disease to inter-cellular communication and control over gene expression.

He makes it very clear that the traditional story of genes are the blueprint and proteins are the resulting organism is far too shallow a story. The book makes it clear that something quite exciting is happening with discoveries of how inter-cellular communication is controlling gene expression through epigenetics and that the story of epigenetics is quite complex. I just wish he has expanded the book to cover more of the story.

I was disappointed in the book because it was written with a whiff of dry academic style. He needs to put more effort into using words to paint pictures and build up a story that can carry the average reader along. I found myself having to refer to the index far too often to keep straight terminology. Only specialists want to learn the opaque terminology of modern science. I'm happy to be acquainted with the words, but I need something more descriptive to hang my hat on. I need more of "tell me what you are going to say, say it, and then tell me what you just said to me" storyline so that I can get comfortable with new concepts and get confidence that I understand them.

You can get a sense of the dryness of the text from the postscript where he is reviewing the "themes" that his book covered:

The first theme concerns the nature of epigenetic processes: a form of gene regulation. Epigenetic gene regulation is long-term gene regulation, hence epigenetic alterations have long-term effects on gene behavior. Indeed, epigenetic alterations of gene behavior can be longer lasting than mutational alterations of gene behavior, epigenetic alterations of gene behavior are generally reversible.

I can vouch that the book supports the factual truth of all of the above, but you can see how turgid the style can be. That's a lot of dense prose that will put most readers to sleep with too much repetition of fairly opaque terms. You have to be motivated to want to wade through that kind of writing to understand what the author is trying to tell you. Sure, from an insider's viewpoint, all of that is obvious. But from an outsider's view there is that deadly repetition of $100 words labouring a point that is hard to discern.

I do recommend this book. It is an important field. You will find some interesting examples of epigenetics and get an appreciation of how it works. But it will mostly leave you desperate for a better text to more properly introduce you to the field. Something that goes beyond examples and presents a well rounded theory with all the examples safely embedded into a structure that makes sense of the field.

Michael J. Sandel's "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?"

I found this to be an excellent book. It posed thought provoking questions and walked me through various ethical standpoints. Unlike studying the ethics textbooks of my youth, this book was much more focused on real questions and applied principles much more clearly.

In my wasted youth studying philosophy, the texts on "ethics" were in fact more meta-ethics. They argued endlessly over what ethics could be, what ethical language could or could not convey, etc. They didn't actually dabble in the real world of action where choice is essential. This book is the kind of ethics text I would have loved to have seen back in the 1960s.

As he ends his book he broadens out the view of ethics. Here is his besst summary:

Three categories of moral responsibility

1. Natural duties: universal; don't require consent


2. Voluntary obligations: particular; require consent


3. Obligations of solidarity: particular; don't require consent

He derives the above from three traditions of moral thinking:

1. Kant's integration of morality, freedom, and reason into an ethic of "practical reason" that requires universal laws that treat individuals a ends and not means. From Kant's moral reasoning we get our natural duties but it says nothing of voluntary associations and collectives to which we belong.


2. John Rawls' refined liberalism with a kind of virtual "social contract" that requires you to judge morality by using a "veil of ignorance" to decide if you could generalize a principle to one where you were subject to its consequences. From Rawl's moral reasoning we get our principles of voluntary obligations that require us to be sensitive to others and the needs for equality.


3. Aristotle's teleological morality that requires ethical acts to be ones that "fit the true nature" of someone and which emphasizes the community in which one resides. From Aristotle's moral reasoning you get obligations of solidarity from being embedded in a community and the aspiration to be virtuous and fit the proper role in that community.

The above doesn't do justice to the book. It is rich with ideas and examples. It makes you wrestle with the author. I'm sympathetic to Sandel's desire to ground ethics in collectives, but I'm not happy with Aristotle as the theoretical foundation. I also have problems with Kant's metaphysical thrust of putting things just beyond the empirical world while to not be an idealist or rationalist.

I'm inclined to Sam Harris' project of trying to develop ethics from science. Sandel is right to reject utilitarianism as too simplistic. But the problem with most ethical thinking is that it picks principles out of thin air. Ethics needs to be grounded. Harris has a project to develop a "science of morality". From Wikipedia:

The science of morality is the controversial idea that morality can be prescribed only with the help of, and possibly priority of, the philosophy of the scientific method. This conception challenges traditionally held views both of morality and of science. This demands a philosophy of science and epistemological (theory of knowledge-based) justification that can deal with the "is–ought problem" (i.e."there are facts about what is real, but how do they ever become facts about what ought to be?"). The science of morality is a sort of ethical naturalism (moral facts are facts about nature) that challenges divine command and natural law-based moral justifications for first principles in ethics.

The wonderful thing about Sandel's book is that it makes you think. He maneuvers the reader to his point of view which left me a bit unhappy. But I was greatly impressed by the array of material he brought together and how wonderfully he weaved his story.

Money Fall Upwards

Dean Baker has a new book The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. It is available from his web site at the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

Money does not fall up. Yet the United States has experienced a massive upward redistribution of income over the last three decades, leaving the bulk of the workforce with little to show from the economic growth since 1980. This upward redistribution was not the result of the natural workings of the market. Rather, it was the result of deliberate policy, most of which had the support of the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Unfortunately, the public and even experienced progressive political figures are not well informed about the key policies responsible for this upward redistribution, even though they are not exactly secrets.

The book will give you insights, it will make you more intelligent, it will make your teeth shine bright white, it will make you more handsome/pretty, it will add 4 inches to your height. You really should read this book.

Here is his indictment of the current political "debate" about the economy:

For the most part, progressives accept the right‟s framing of economic debates. They accept the notions that the right is devoted to the unfettered workings of the market and, by contrast, that liberals and progressives are the ones who want the government to intervene to protect the interests of the poor and disadvantaged.

But this view is utterly wrong as a description of the economy and competing policy approaches. And it makes for horrible politics. It creates a scenario in which progressives are portrayed as wanting to tax the winners in society in order to reward the losers. The right gets to be portrayed as the champions of hard work and innovation, while progressives are seen as the champions of the slothful and incompetent. It should not be surprising who has been winning this game.
In reality, the vast majority of the right does not give a damn about free markets; it just wants to redistribute income upward. Progressives have been useful to the right in helping it to conceal this agenda. Progressives help to ratify the actions of conservatives by accusing them of allegiance to a free-market ideology instead of attacking them for pushing the agenda of the rich.

For the last three decades the right has been busily restructuring the economy in ways that ensure that income flows upward. The rules governing markets, written by the rich and powerful, ensure that this gravity-defying outcome prevails. The right then presents the imposition of rules that it likes as the natural result of unfettered market forces.

Dean Baker is calling for the gloves to come off and for progressives to bring the debate down to the real issue: class warfare. Enough "trickle down" economics. There needs to be an economy where those who do the real work get paid real wages and get to share properly in the fruits of production and especially in increases in productivity.

Rather than speculate or philosophize about economics, Dean Baker quickly gets down to specific examples:

While the bank bailouts were big news, there is no shortage of less-visible instances in which conservatives have long been eager for the government step in to support the interests of the wealthy. We'll quickly discuss seven examples here: continued support for too-big-to-fail banks, patent and copyright protection, restrictions on organized labor, corporate liability limitations, Federal Reserve monetary controls, trade and dollar policy, and housing policy.

Let me repeat:

You really should read this book.

Chris Impey's "How it Ends: From You to the Universe"

This is a fun survey of how things end from the death of an individual, to the death of humanity, to the death of a species, to the death of the biosphere, to the death of the sun, to the death of the galaxy, and finally to the death of the universe. Quite a scale and scope for an investigation. But it nicely brings many bits of information together and is quite informative.

The book is readable. The style is solid with only a few bits that drag. But I was greatly disappointed by the quality of the editing. Pictures were missing, textual errors slipped into the final print, and generally the quality was not what you would expect from a published book. When I wrote proposals to be read by at most a dozen people I put more effort into quality control than went into this book. It is shocking. Especially when a publisher can afford expensive tools to check for spelling and print errors and presumably pay to have the final copy proofread.

To give you a very small taste of the text, here's a bit from the section on the death of the earth & sun:

At least we know what we're facing. On a timescale of a billion years, we'll see the merging of the continents (again), a drop in the level of carbon dioxide to below the level needed to support life, followed by the oceans boiling, the surface baking and being sterilized, and then the eventual death spiral and disintegration as our planet falls into the Sun. Astronomers have seen the future and it's not pretty. In 2008, a white dwarf called GD 362 was found to have rocky debris orbiting it, the probably remains of shredded planets.

If you want a quick survey of the demise of you and your world, this book's for you. This is a fun romp through some real science about you and the world around you. It will excite you with some information that you probably don't know and will hopefully make you interested enough to follow it up and learn more. Science is infinitely interesting and informative. While I enjoy fiction, I find books like this are actually a more "gripping story" than most fiction. This stuff is real! And leading edge science is more mind-blowing than any fantasy you can read.

Tim Harford's "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure"

This is an excellent survey of adaptation as a strategy to deal with complex environments in which a top-down rational planning simply can't find solutions. There are many excellent stories, but this one bit speaks to me, a 1960s generation person:

When the US Army faced the 'disruptive innovation' of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army's hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, "I'll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war."

That ranks up there with the infamous statement by a US Major "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." as reported by Peter Arnett.

This book is richly illustrated with examples of how an evolutionary strategy can find a solution where managerial dictum or top-down planning fails miserably. Some of the best examples are from business.

He does a very good job of reviewing:

• The disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and how a bottom-up effort by rebellious colonels and captains finally changed the US military tactics off their dangerous track and toward a more successful approach.


• The regulatory failures and coupled risks that led a meltdown in a constrained "sub-prime real estate" market to the globe straddling collapse of financial markets in 2008. He walks the reader through the failure to listen to whistle-blowers and the reluctance to effectively change the banking rules to prevent another catastrophe.


• The mindless simplifications of a greenhouse gas enthusiast compared to the known complexities of trying to identify a proper "green strategy". He walks through a day's choices of "green alternatives" and shows why each and every one was wrong because the underlying reality is far more complex than the simplistic green enthusiast ever could imagine.


• He examines nuclear safety and shows how the various catastrophes were waiting to happen because the systems are designed with too much complexity and coupled failure modes.


• He looks at two big oil rig diasters, the Piper Alpha in July 1988, and the Deepwater Horizon in April 2010. He walks through the failure in design and safety systems. He shows why these were accidents waiting to happen.

I like his discussion of Philip Tetlock who did a scientific study of the ability of pundits, gurus, and consultants to provide accurate predictions of the future. In a previous post I reviewed Dan Gardiner's book "Future Babble" that explores this topic more deeply.

I worked in a company where they paid lip service to the idea that "there is no failure, just a learning opportunity" and that projects, especially in the R&D lab, should expect a high failure rate. But in reality, failures were punished, so creativity was suppressed and lessons really weren't learned. Tim Harford gives a glowing review of Google as a learning environment with adaptive engineering practices, but I'm cynical. It is hard for managers to accept failure. Corporations are always going to get atherosclerosis. The big old successful corporations are always going to fall to the young, rising whippersnappers.

I also worked closely with QA (Quality Assurance) people and watched them play their role. In theory they were the frontline defence against obfuscation and deception on the part of managers and teams that are failing but want to pretend that things are going teckety-boo. The org chart showed them reporting independently right up to the CEO to ensure independent and timely information about project problems. But in reality project managers had a "right" to demand issues first be heard by them and they could muscle most QA auditors into silence. Similarly, I was involved in a ISO 9000 initiative within the company and quickly discovered that most of our "learning organization" capabilities, such as our extensive audited written procedures, were in fact window-dressing. In short: it is hard to build and maintain a truly adaptive organization that uses evolutionary strategies for problem-solving. Humans don't like uncertainty and they love hierarchical organizations. I like the message in Tim Harford's book, but I'm sure it will get more lip service than real implementation.

There is much wisdom in the book, much to learn, I strongly recommend it to everyone. It will open your eyes to the complexity that is out there. It will stun you to realize how badly our engineered "safety systems" have failed. And it will give you an appreciation for a need for more experimentation and a healthy acceptance of failure as the technique for learning.

Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test"

This is another book about crazies by Jon Ronson. His interests and his writing style are unique. He loves to delve into borderline crazy people. His previous books on extremists and psychological warfare were fun reads and this one is as well. Purists will complain that there is too much Ronson in the story, but that is part of the charm of his writing style. He puts his enthusiasms and wacko personality into the storyline.

Part of the charm of Ronson is that he can present "the human side" of craziness. He can make eccentrics, or this case, psychopaths seem charming. That is important because we label people and loose the humanity once we pigeon-hole them. In reality, everybody is unique and even in the monsters there is some humanity. A book like this gives you a chance to both broaden and deepen your understanding of the extremes of humanity.

Here's a sample from the book:

Another [psychopath], Joseph Fredricks, was released from Oak Ridge in 1983 and withint weeks attacked a teenage girl with a knife and sodomized a ten-year-old boy. He was released again a year later and attacked an eleven-year-old boy. After being released four years after that, he headed to a mall called Shoppers World, where he abducted and raped an eleven-year-old boy,Cristoperh Stephenson. The boy wrote a note to his parents:

“Dear Mom and Dad, I am writing you this note.”

And then the note stopped.

When the police caught Fredericks, he showed them the boy’s body and said, “He was such a nice boy. Why did he have to die?”

He goes on to document how the penal system's misunderstandings of psychopaths meant they could manipulate the system, be back out on the street, and wreak more havoc. Since Robert Hare's research and his guidelines with the PCL-R, penal systems have been holding psychopaths indefinitely. That is good, but as this book points out, sometimes that means that people get caught in the bureaucratic system and are held even though they are borderline (no diagnostic is 100% and there is no clear demarcation between mad and sane).

Robert Hare's work is important because he's prodded researchers to find a fundamental physical distinction between psychopaths and normal people: they fail to have empathy, react to horror/pain, and have no ability to remember horror/pain. So they end up indifferent to others and see them as "robots" that can be played with. They are repeat offenders because they don't connect the punishment part with crime-and-punishment. Of all criminals, they have the highest recidivism rate.

Here's another bit from the book which I found to be funny, striking, and unnerving:

In the third office I saw a woman with a Little Miss Brainy book on her shelf. She seemed cheerful and breezy and good-looking.

“Who’s that?” I asked James.

“Essi Viding,” he said.

“What does she study?” I asked.

“Psychopaths,” said James.

I peered in at Essi. She spotted us, smiled and waved.

“That must be dangerous,” I said.

“I heard a story about her once,” said James. “She was intereviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.”

Yep. That's the problem with psychopaths. They just don't relate to normal human emotion. They can kill and feel no horror or fear. It just becomes an exercise in dominance and sadistic "play". People like Ted Bundy and Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo are truly dangerous predators. Getting them off the street and behind bars is very important. Understanding psychopaths can prevent people like Karla Homolka from manipulating the criminal system to her advantage.

I don't want to leave the impression that this book is all dark and gruesome. It isn't. It is mostly quirky and fun but with a serious theme running through it and Jon Ronson tries to give fair play to all viewpoints.

Chris Hedges' "Death of the Liberal Class"

I enjoyed this book as I fussed with it all the way through. Hedges makes very clear that he holds somebody like myself in low esteem. I count myself as liberal and progressive. Hedges has nothing but contempt for pantywaists who are not "real revolutionaries" like he is. But I look back over history and see so many altruists like Hedges who used their grand revolutionary rhetoric to allow them to "dispose" of inconvenient people. Stalin and Mao certain were "revolutionary" in their handling of those who didn't toe party line (which ended up being not a political theory but a personal psychopaths daily vacillations).

So, I enjoy the book for its walk down memory lane. But I don't trust a word from Hedges. I distrust his politics. I think real change comes via democracy bottom up and requires education and long time frames. He thinks "revolution" comes via an revolutionary clique who "know best" and have the steely nerves to impose their will on a recalcitrant people. They do this as they shower them with words treacly sweet about their concern for these people but the revolutionaries' actions prove they really care not a whit for real people. They love the abstract "people" that they can manipulate with their honeyed words.

Here is a bit where Hedges lets go his rant against Liberals:

The liberal class refused to resist the devolution of the U.S. democratic system into shat Sheldon Wolin calls a system of inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, Wolin writes, represents "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry." Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, replace decaying structures with new, revolutionary structures. They do not import new symbols and iconography. They do not offer a radical alternative. Corporate power purports, in inverted totalitarianism, to honor electoral politics, freedom, and the Constitution. But these corporate forces so corrupt and manipulate power as to make democracy impossible.

I reject the idea that the US is a totalitarian state. I don't think elections in the US are empty gestures. But I do believe any political movement that convinces people that they live in a deligitimated society and that elections are a useless fraud are asking for a society that blows up with revolutionary violence. History is pretty clear that almost every "revolution" fails to deliver the promises and all too often delivers a worse, a more oppressive state, than what it claimed to want to "fix". Hedges is literally playing with ideological dynamite and not warning his reader that taking this stuff too seriously could mean that his world can be blown apart and replaced by something much more grim. Further, Hedges completely rejects evolution in favour of revolution, but history shows that social movements that slowly but persistently fight for political change are the ones that truly deliver on their promises.

Here is an example of how he believes that Communism was wonderful because it provided as "sense of interconnectedness". Yep, all that hand holding in the gulag or in front of a firing squad, that's what Communism delivered:

The New Left that rose in the 1960s, was, as the historian Ellen Schrecker writes, "a fractured, deracinated movement that could never reconstruct the ideological and cultural unity of its predecessors or overcome its own divisions. Even today, what passes for the left, the identity politics that all too often segregates rather than unifies its adherents, lacks the sense of interconnectedness that disappeared with the lost world of American Communism." Protests rather than disrupt manufacturing or the systems run by the power elite, usually became, as happened in the protests during the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, a media spectacle. The left and the right played their roles before the cameras. Politics had become theatre.

I could throw similar ridiculous charges at Hedges "revolutionary history". The revolutionists of 1789 were not the same as 1848 or 1871, or the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century in the US, or the Wobblies of 1905-1925, or the CIO of the 1930s, etc. Every generation gets its own "revolutionaries". Hedges longs for the day when you seized "the factories". Guess what! The factories are gone. Hedges is nostalgic for a Communist past and workers seizing factories that don't exist.

Hedges is in a hurry. He is part of that doom-and-gloom club who are convinced that we are going to hell in a handbasket. This would be persuasive except this same lament has been around as long as humans have lived in cities:

Our environment is being dramatically transformed in ways that soon will make it difficult for the human species to survive. We must direct our energies toward building sustainable, local communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort. The liberal class, which clings to the decaying ideologies used to justify globalism and imperialism, which has refused to defy the exploitation of galvanize behind militants to halt the destruction of the ecosystem, has become a useless appendage. The decimation of our manufacturing base, the rise of the corporate state, and the contamination of our environment could have been fought by militant movements and radicals, but with these voices banished, there were no real impediments to the self-destructive voices of corporate power.

I don't buy this "end of times" pessimism. I've observed 6 decades and I can personally attest that the quality of life has improved, the air is cleaner, I'm pretty sure less people die of pollution now than in the past, and I'm darn sure that "global warming" is over-the-top fear-mongering like the 1960s "population bomb" or the swine flu will kill you or the bird flu will kill you, etc.

I find Hedges to be a luddite. His rant against technology and globalization is ridiculous. His mentor, Marx, made jokes about the idiocy of the rural life, but here is Hedges 150 years later waxing nostalgic for the small farm where work was so hard that most fled it for the "satanic mills" of the industrial age. I had great grandparents who were still rural and I know their life was much harder than their children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren. But that is the glorious life that Hedges wants to turn his militant revolutionaries out to fight so that we can all "enjoy" his particular vision of utopia. I wish "revolutionaries" would realize they have no right to tell me what I enjoy or don't enjoy. One thing I certainly don't enjoy: somebody sticking a gun in my face and force marching me back to a "rural life" the way Pol Pot did to the millions of Cambodians.

The book is full of factual material that is well worth reading (I particularly like chapter 3 on the first half of the 20th century). But I don't recommend the book because the poor reader has to be knowledgeable enough to separate the "true facts" from the political propaganda and half-truths that Hedges layers in. The "liberal class" isn't a class and it isn't dying. A liberal today would feel very uncomfortable in the company of a liberal from 1820. The world changes. Hedges cleaves to "eternal truths", the kind of utopian theory that bashes the sweet promises of radicals to bits and either leaves the world in the hands of psychopaths (Mao, Stalin) or leaves a wistful nostalgia for what could have been (the New Left, Fabians, Owenites). I'll stick to the later. They won't shoot your or put you in a gulag. Hedges is just another "revolutionary", i.e. a petty tyrant who wants to frog march you into their idea of "the good society". I saw enough of these self-important "revolutionaries" in the 1960s and 70s. And I've read enough about the 19th and 20th century to see that Hedges is just another fanatic who would impose his "vision" on people at the end of a gun if he could.

The book is worth reading, but be warned. Hedges is a far left crazy who, like a fundamentalist religious nut, thinks he has a special dispensation to impose his values on you. He completely misunderstands "liberalism" because it isn't the militant "revolutionary" that he wants it to be. Liberals believe in real freedom. Hedges believes he has the right to impose his "revolution" on you. He thinks liberalism failed because it hasn't come out with a "revolutionary program". But liberalism is founded on individual freedom, not collectivist repression. Hedges is so wrapped up in his top-down project to reshape society that he fails to recognize this.