Aaron has
277 books
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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
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| 0199740062
| 9780199740062
| 3.92
| 24
| Aug 29, 2012
| Oct 01, 2012
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The only thing that people like more than eating food is talking about food, and this history of the development of Mexican food offers plenty to talk...more
The only thing that people like more than eating food is talking about food, and this history of the development of Mexican food offers plenty to talk about. It covers the story of what I consider to be one of the best cuisines in the world, from its various origins in pre-Colombian Mexico, through its struggles to gain respect in the 19th century, and up to the present day as it has been globalized and reinterpreted both by Mexicans and by other cultures. It also offers up plenty of interesting analysis of the politics of food that will have you thinking about different cuisines in new ways. One of the main things this book should do is remind you of how fragile the concept of "authenticity" is when it comes to food. Mexico is not a monolith; different regions have entirely different traditions of cooking and relationships to what someone might think of as "real" Mexican food. Furthermore, many dishes were created at different periods in time by completely different people. Corn vs flour tortillas, beans vs no beans in chili, burritos vs tacos, hard vs soft shells, cheese vs no cheese, seafood vs red meat, etc., are all regional preferences, some of which result from the division of Mexico after the war in 1848. Are Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex styles not real Mexican just because they happen to have been created across an arbitrary line? What does it mean that iconic staples like tortas (created in the 19th century), fajitas (mid-20th century), or tacos al pastor (late-20th century), were innovated in large part by the French, Laredoans, and Lebanese immigrants respectively? What should Mexicans think about the fact that in Europe their cuisine is often seen as an American food, due to the fact that many restaurants were created by GIs after WW2? Questions like these have no right answer, but the answers we choose depend a great deal on our understanding of concepts like class and identity. Mexican food has never been a prestige food on the level of, say, French food, because Mexico has never been a prestige country, and some of the most interesting parts in the book concern the internal dialogues in Mexico about how to present "their food" to the world. Was their food an embarrassing relic of the impoverished Indians? A noble relic of the glorious Aztec past that represented the universalistic nature of La Raza Cósmica? A motley assortment of ingredients waiting to be Frenchified and thus made fit to be eaten by foreigners? The Maximiliano-era elite were the ones who set the tone by denigrating anything indigenous, while across the American border Mexican food was given the same contempt that poor Hispanic citizens were. While fetishizing poverty is silly, it's undeniable that people feel stronger emotional connections to what's seen as "food of the people" - thus some people's preference for things like corn tortillas, which you could just as easily could claim symbolize the (literally) grinding poverty of the rural women who had to spend countless hours pulverizing maize into masa by hand. The discrimination and harassment that Hispanic women faced in the US (see the section on the repression of female chili con carne vendors in Depression-era San Antonio) adds another dimension to the story. Modern capitalism and globalization has had ambiguous effects on Mexican food, which ties back into the question of authenticity. On the one hand, Mexican out-migration coupled with the rise of multinational corporations means that Mexican food has been able to reach a much wider audience than before. On the other hand, a lot of it bears a tenuous relationship to people's idea of Mexican food. Terrible food like Taco Bell, which sprang from the same Southern California soil as McDonalds, is an example of Mexican food blandified and homogenized, because the same agribusinesses that push out local businesses worldwide operate in Mexican food as well. However, who really wants to condemn Korean BBQ food trucks that offer tacos with kimchi or bulgogi quesadillas; aren't those an example of innovation and growth of both cuisines? The book also discusses the effects of trade agreements like NAFTA on farmers in poorer Mexican states like Oaxaca, who have often not done well; perhaps those farmers could follow the model of small-scale Italian or French food producers and try to get legal protections or economic assistance. Ultimately Mexican food does not and never really has "belonged" to Mexico or Mexicans, which in my mind is a net benefit to the world. The uncontrolled spread of New World crops like corn, chocolate, and chili peppers has benefited countless other cuisines, to the point where most people don't know how interesting it is that jalapeños end up in banh mi, or chocolate is seen as a Swiss specialty. That silent success may not give Mexican food the kind of cachet it really deserves, but I personally will be happy as long as I can continue to eat it.(less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Apr 2013
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Apr 09, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 0670024813
| 9780670024810
| 3.58
| 1,246
| 2012
| Dec 31, 2012
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This is a frustrating book to review. It touches on a lot of interesting subjects, but avoids discussing many of the most thought-provoking implicatio...more
This is a frustrating book to review. It touches on a lot of interesting subjects, but avoids discussing many of the most thought-provoking implications. It has sections of research picked almost randomly in support of alternately prudent and ridiculous opinions. It's heavy on analysis, yet it doesn't have many clear prescriptions at all. Its subject is vast, yet his focus is often very narrow. I liked many parts of it, but overall it's unquestionably a step down from his past 2, even though it clearly seems to be a more heartfelt book. In the grand continuum of popular science books, it's much closer to the "pop" end, and even given the fact that it's impossible to satisfy all types of popular science readers, I have no idea who the target audience is supposed to be. His subject is the cultural practices of several groups of traditional societies, and the lessons that us Westerners can learn from their practices. In a way it's a return to the first chapter of Guns Germs & Steel, but instead of asking "how did the West get so advanced?", he's asking "are there things we can still learn from the people we've out-developed?" It's a reasonable question, and anyone who has devoted any thought to the long-term effects of our overweight, overstressed, overmedicated, atomized modern lifestyles ("WEIRD" in his acronym - Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic) will find some value in his high-level survey of the ways that traditional societies handle various aspects of the human condition like conflict, child-raising, religion, diet, the role of the elderly, and the like. He tends to split his analysis into either anecdote-heavy descriptive passages that involve his pals in New Guinea, or slightly more rigorous conceptual sections that discuss things like the various functions of religion or the types of political changes that occur when societies grow from a few hundred hunter-gatherers to millions of specialized citizens. There's good stuff in both types of sections, but... (as usual, ignore the first half of any sentence that has a "but..." in it). My problem with the anecdotal sections is that though the narrative format is a good way to make your points more vivid, it's also a good way to make them less rigorous. It's all very well to tell people that "constructive paranoia" (minimizing risks through careful skepticism) is a helpful way to live, but even though he has some neat stories about mysterious forest sorcerers, almost dying in a canoe accident, and running around on remote mountain peaks, my reaction was basically "cool story bro" - are these either generalizable in any way to Western lives, or even anything more than an over-elaborate way to say "watch out for danger"? He also tosses in anecdotes that are simply absurd, like the one about the Kenyan who didn't like American toys because Kenyan toys were more interactive and better at encouraging mechanical creativity. Hence the global leadership and supremacy of Kenyan industry? Ditto again for stories about how much more isolating modern society is than than the constant communication and contact in traditional societies. This is certainly true, but it seems odd to package a criticism of solitary entertainment like TV, video games, or books in the form of a book which can only be appreciated by reading or listening to it alone. As far as the more data-heavy sections are concerned, I don't think any of the science is outright wrong, but I can see why this book annoys specialists in several scientific fields. Diamond picks really big topics, like The Role of Religion In Society, or The Effects of Increasing Scale On Societal Organization, and sums them up in a few pages of text and maybe a table or two. This is either admirable trans-specialty synthesis, or over-simplification on an epic scale, and the trend was increasingly towards the latter as the book went on. For example, late in the book he talks about the sharp decrease in global language diversity and the disappearance of many traditional languages. I personally am not very sentimental about languages in and of themselves, even English, and so his pathos-filled arguments for the preservation and continuation of languages with just a few thousand speakers didn't do much for me. Suppressing speakers of Breton is bad, I agree, and I think his advocacy of bilingualism is solid, yet the fact that all languages eventually change or die out doesn't really bother me in a metaphysical sense; that my nth generation descendants might be speaking SpaceMandarin instead of NeoEnglish is fine with me. Also, Diamond correctly points out that death rates from all kinds are much higher in traditional societies than modern ones: are there any evolutionary consequences to this? He doesn't say. Ultimately I wasn't very satisfied with the book. Certainly we should give more thought to whether the vast changes in lifestyle encouraged by modernity are really good for us in the long run, but I found the evidence that Diamond gave insufficient to conclude that New Guinean highlanders have much to teach us. What made Guns Germs & Steel and Collapse such good books to me was their rigorous sourcing, his broad synthesis of those sources, and the careful way his specific claims about imperialism and sustainability emerged from those things. This book is a decent overview of the cultural practices of some groups of traditional societies, but it feels like a huge let-down from those two works, simultaneously too lengthy and too unclear. Also, the airport frame story technique was almost intolerably Thomas Friedman-esque. Cut that stuff out.(less) | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Jan 2013
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Jan 21, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 0312429096
| 9780312429096
| 3.77
| 511
| 1998
| Sep 29, 2009
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I have a complicated relationship with contemporary American fiction. Actually, I flat-out despise most of it. Give me a period novel about Edwardian...more
I have a complicated relationship with contemporary American fiction. Actually, I flat-out despise most of it. Give me a period novel about Edwardian English gentlemen, Second Empire French coalminers, post-Petrine Russian nobles, or even Depression-era California fruit pickers, and I will be happy, but it seems like I loathe anything set in the modern United States. Why does the life of a person in the recent past seem so full compared to the bland epigones who populate our shelves? Such small characters, such vitiated lives, such small epiphanies. Charles Portis was right: "We're weaker than our fathers, Dupree. We don't even look like them." At the helm of the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, ordinary Americans are the least interesting people on Earth, yet the most willing to over-document their sluggish swirls through the stagnant pond that they call home. It's either self-indulgence or a simple absence of anything real to talk about. Another reason I get annoyed is that a lot of those kinds of novels make "consumerism" a theme, which I find incredibly boring. What is interesting at all about people consuming goods, talking about consuming goods, or thinking about talking about consuming goods? Nothing. How many novels have we been subjected to where authors try to make "points" about consumerism by including all of those things, lulling the reader into an ostentatiously branded coma so that no one catches on to the complete absence of any action or humanity that would interest a normal person with full control of their faculties? What in the name of God are you trying to SAY? Yet somehow Gain takes both of those themes that otherwise bore me and makes them great. It's two interrelated stories: one, the gradual growth amidst all the turbulence of American history of a small colonial-era soap-making factory called Jephthah Clare & Sons into Clare Inc., a Johnson & Johnson-esque corporate behemoth; and two, Laura Bodey's struggle against ovarian cancer in the modern-day town of Lacewood, IL, where Clare has a factory. As a big economic history nerd, I confess that I found the first story far more interesting for the most part. In long stretches of sometimes-overwrought prose, Powers has concocted probably the most engrossing life story of a fictional corporation you'll ever read (which may not be a crowded field). Parts of it were easily on the level with a real corporate history like Marc Levinson's superb The Great A&P, or a magisterial economic history like William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, which Powers clearly alludes to in the part set just prior to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Watching the fledgling soap company make its first deals, improve its production process, and slowly expand into other markets to eventually become a titan of industry is honestly enthralling; you can almost see Adam Smith nodding approvingly during the sections on how the various Clare family members improve their firm's ability to truck and barter. There are also plenty of great parts about the chemistry of soap (no really). Clare is intended to be both a parody of "better living through chemistry"-type companies, particularly as its story moves into the present-day, and also a serious study of how companies become both legal people and also "good corporate citizens", and enmesh themselves in our lives. Think of the sinister Bland corporation in Gravity's Rainbow, or Ambrose Bierce's definition of a corporation as "An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility", or Milton Friedman's infamous arguments in "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits" that companies have zero responsibilities to society beyond enhancing shareholder value. While Clare is presented as a fairly benevolent company, taking early Progressive-era steps to bring their workers on board with the company and prevent the labor troubles so typical of the era, it slowly begins to seem like Just Another Company, especially when the narrative gets to the 80s. What starts out as a hagiography subtly becomes a much more nuanced picture. This is made a little less abstract by Laura's story. She's a divorced mother of 2 kids who's seeing a married guy in her spare time. I expected to be bored stiff by her life, and initially I was, since she spends a lot of the beginning doing mundane ordinary complaining or snarking about consumer products, but Powers eventually won me over by giving her cancer, a time-tested method of increasing reader sympathy dating back at least to Charles Dickens. I've never had or known anyone close to me who had cancer so I don't know how accurate his depiction of it was, but it seemed pretty real and engrossing to me. While a lot of her story was used to present the reader with some Themes (e.g., the growth of Clare is implicitly analogized to the metastasis of cancer cells, the company's efforts to disavow any link between the chemical outputs of the Lacewood factory and the illnesses of the townfolk are contrasted with their equally assiduous efforts to seem like they Care About the Community), the changes in her relationships with her kids and ex-husband came off as genuine and moving. Powers also namedrops Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, a cool Walt Whitman poem. Overall I liked the book, especially the capitalist cheerleading parts, which I would definitely read more of. While the modern characters occasionally threaten to become as boringly loathsome as their counterparts in a Jonathan Franzen novel, Powers does about the right amount of tearjerking to make them relatable and sympathetic.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 2012
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Nov 25, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0156441802
| 9780156441803
| 4.03
| 258
| 1973
| Oct 28, 1985
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This was Stanislaw Lem's first collection of reviews of non-existent books, also known as "pseudepigraphy" because every stylistic tic clearly deserve...more
This was Stanislaw Lem's first collection of reviews of non-existent books, also known as "pseudepigraphy" because every stylistic tic clearly deserves its own distinct Greco-Latinate title. As with most disciples of Borges this student doesn't trump the master, but this was flawed even compared to A Perfect Vacuum, which I highly enjoyed. The main problem was that though these pieces are "funny", in that they are usually written to parody various styles of writing, they're not typically actually that amusing. The opening "Introduction" might be the best piece in the whole lot in a way, its supercharged bombast namedropping Linnaeus, John the Baptist, Bach, Heidegger, and the Book of Genesis in an entertaining way while also highlighting the uselessness of most real introductions. However, the humor quickly vanishes. "Necrobes" is about an artist who makes X-ray artwork out of porn, and is essentially humor-free. Same with "Eruntics", which covers the Lysenko-ish efforts of a scientist to teach bacteria to read, "A History of Bitic Literature", which reviews various styles of computer-generated literature, and "Vestrand's Extelopedia in 44 Magnetomes", a futuristic encyclopedia. These are mildly interesting, but might have worked better in actual sci-fi form instead of this pseudepigraphical sketches. The goal of the Borges style is to save a lazy author from having to concoct an entire story when all he really wants to do is write about an idea for a story, but even Lem's formidable literary pyrotechnics can't make these outlines interesting. The last story "Golem XIV", the longest section in the book, is the perfect example of that. It's purportedly the transcript of a lecture to humanity delivered by a hyperintelligent computer, framed by some commentary and background on the political situation at the time. Pages and pages of quite sophisticated verbiage about mankind, computers, evolution, intelligence, and reality rain over the reader, but even though Lem is deliberately making this as pretentious as possible for effect, the computer's dense theorizing doesn't have much of an impact, and it simply isn't as enjoyable as the more light-hearted literary parodies in A Perfect Vacuum. Lem should have made these ideas into full-fledged stories, his forte, because they simply didn't work too well in this format.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 2013
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Nov 22, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0140178244
| 9780140178241
| 4.23
| 3,081
| 1986
| Jun 01, 1993
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Cadillac Desert is a tremendous work of natural science, history, environmentalism, and politics, and despite it having dated somewhat since its publi...more
Cadillac Desert is a tremendous work of natural science, history, environmentalism, and politics, and despite it having dated somewhat since its publication, it should be considered required reading for anyone interested in those subjects, or who happens to live anywhere west of the hundredth meridian. It starts off by recounting the history of the exploration and development of the West, with a particular focus on John Wesley Powell, a fascinating figure in his own right. It then moves to the development and settling of the West, in particular the city of Los Angeles, the creation of new institutions to exploit and develop water resources, and the increasingly desperate and deranged water projects that were constructed at the behest of powerful groups who wanted to maintain the explosive growth of the region, and not always with the best interests of the citizenry at heart. An endless series of dams, diversions, and canals were constructed, as various Western states battled with their interest groups, each other, and the federal Bureau of Reclamation to obtain the water they needed to maintain their growth. The book closes with a discussion of the North American Water and Power Alliance, a water engineering project of such ludicrous scope - damming nearly every river in British Columbia and shipping the water to Los Angeles through transcontinental canals - that it would seem preposterous if not for all of the previous projects that came before it, and there's also an epilogue that shows the tangible consequences to salmon fisheries of interfering with the natural flow of water. It's an extremely well-written book that will teach you a lot about the West, but it's also a polemic that raises a lot of questions about how the West got to be where it is today, and as I was reading it I found myself thinking a lot about the political dynamic on display here. A big chunk of the West is a lifeless, waterless hellhole that has no business being settled at all, much less farmed for crops like cotton or rice. Yet time and time again, extremely right-wing officials went running to the federal government to build them more and more dams and canals with extremely dubious financial or environmental merits, sucking money and people away from perfectly habitable states. As you read 700 pages of this, it's almost enough to make you into a states' rights kind of guy. I'm not keen on that almost meaningless catchphrase at all, but I think most opposition to states' rights comes from Civil War-era social issues like the South's miserable record on discrimination. Would states' rights be more acceptable in a purely economic context, like Canadian provinces? Where would NYC be today if it hadn't had to keep shoveling money into stupid canals across Arizona that were a waste of space, a waste of land, a waste of power, and even more of a waste of water? Weren't the richer states of the Northeast subsidizing selfishness in the Southwest? Is the New Deal vision of infrastructure as progress, the TVAs and LCRAs, simply a mistake? Reisner has an excellent paragraph that makes this very point: "The irrigation farmers not only had come to expect heavily subsidized water as a kind of right, allowing them to pretend that the region's preeminent natural fact - a drastic scarcity of that substance - was an illusion. They now believed that if it turned out they couldn't afford the water, the Bureau (which is to say, the nation's taxpayers) would practically give it away. These farmers were about the most conservative faction in what may be the most politically conservative of all the fifty states. They regularly sent to Congress politicians eager to demolish the social edifice built by the New Deal - to abolish welfare, school lunch programs, aid to the handicapped, funding for the arts, even to sell off some of the national parks and public lands. But their constituents had become the ultimate example of what they decried, so coddled by the government that they lived in the cocoonlike world of a child. They remained oblivious to what their CAP water would cost them but were certain it would be offered to them at a price they could afford. The farmers had become the very embodiment of the costly, irrational welfare state they loathed - and they had absolutely no idea." To that end, I was also struck by the similarity between those farmers, who were often incredibly reactionary oligarchs in their states, and businessmen who make their money off of things like oil, gas, or railroads (and often these were the same people). Is there something inherent to natural resource extraction that encourages plutocrat behavior as opposed to, say, software development? I have an unprovable pet theory about how the different incentives that come from making money off of a rivalrous and legally excludable good like natural resources makes entrepreneurs more likely to be dickheads than someone who gets rich off of developing human capital, but even this weren't true, it's remarkable how the same people who Reisner quotes as saying "Contracts are made to be broken" if the result is cheaper water will lobby their Congressmen for taxpayer-subsidized boondoggles. Reisner again: "In the Congress, water projects are a kind of currency, like wampum, and water development itself is a kind of religion. Senators who voted for drastic cuts in the school lunch program in 1981 had no compunction about voting for $20 billion worth of new Corps of Engineers projects in 1984, the largest such authorization ever. A jobs program in a grimly depressed city in the Middle West, where unemployment among minority youth is more than 50 percent, is an example of the discredited old welfare mentality; a $300 million irrigation project in Nebraska giving supplemental water to a few hundred farmers is an intelligent, farsighted investment in the nation’s future." And that's another great aspect of the book, where it shows the perversities that this grand construction spree enabled in the federal bureaucracy itself. An astonishing percentage of these public works were built not so much to solve specific problems, but as part of a turf war between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. A dam could be used for flood control, irrigation, navigation/recreation, or drinking water, and there were tons of shell games between those uses so that one agency could steal a project away from the other. Bureau of Reclamation head Floyd Dominy, who was profiled a bit more sympathetically in John McPhee's masterful Encounters With the Archdruid, comes off as an evil civil servant version of LBJ in his ceaseless efforts to maximize his Bureau's budget and prestige regardless of how useless his dams were. He encouraged lots of cool scumbag behavior by Congressmen noted for it, like Jim Wright, the "Representative from American Airlines" who prevented Southwest Airlines from flying out of Love Field in Dallas to all but a few places just to protect American Airlines' headquarters at nearby DFW. Jimmy Carter was the only President to try to take on this system, and Congressmen of both parties and all ideological persuasions laughed in his face. Decades earlier, badass Senator Paul Douglas also tried to stand in the system's way, with a similarly depressing lack of results. And in a way, it is morbidly fascinating to read about all of the underhanded deals that went down to do things like make LA the metastasized monster it is today. If you've seen the excellent film Chinatown the basic story will be familiar, but it's still impressive to read about William Mulholland's corrupt deals with Joseph Lippincott and diabolical Robert Moses-esque plots to gain Owens Valley's water rights, build aqueduct, and expand the city all at once. Or to see how shady contractors like Bechtel began life with shady contracts to build Boulder Canyon Dam. Or to learn how otherwise iconic stars like Woody Guthrie were hired to propagandize dams for the government in the name of Progress. And on and on until you're confronted with what's more than an ideological dilemma, but an existential dilemma: what are these pharaonic structures doing to our civilization in the long run? Reisner mentions irrigating cultures like the Hohokam, the Sumerians, and the Egyptians, and how frail they ended up being. China wasn't yet on its dam-building tear in 1986 when the book was published, but he discusses the problems that the construction of the Aswan Dam had already had for Egypt, and how the country was likely to be forced to construct yet more gargantuan works to solve the problems of its earlier ones. He doesn't use this language, but it felt like a sort of Jevon's Paradox for water - each dam you build helps ameliorate groundwater depletion from dumb farming decisions, but that just ends up encouraging even more farming that ends up being a net loss: "illegal subsidies enrich big farmers, whose excess production depresses crop prices nationwide and whose waste of cheap water creates an environmental calamity that could cost billions to solve." In my city of Austin our aquifer seems like it will last a while, but it's always worth pondering the true sustainability of life on the wrong side of the Hundredth Meridian, and this book is one of the best at that you'll find.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Feb 07, 2013
| Mar 2013
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Oct 23, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0307264785
| 9780307264787
| 3.62
| 3,289
| 2008
| Jul 29, 2008
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Traffic as a phenomenon is full of irritating paradoxes. Driving faster can mean everyone drives slower. Building roads to relieve congestion creates...more
Traffic as a phenomenon is full of irritating paradoxes. Driving faster can mean everyone drives slower. Building roads to relieve congestion creates even more congestion. Redesigning roads to make them safer can cause more accidents. Putting up more warning signs means fewer of them get read. Trying to keep pedestrians protected from cars makes them less safe. Tailgating the car in front of you in a traffic jam does nothing to let you escape it. Traffic the book is an excellent in-depth study on driving and its effects on society that manages to both confirm a lot of my own driving prejudices and offer a lot of good insights into traffic congestion and a host of other related subjects. Vanderbilt talks about the history of traffic jams going back to the Romans and how modern technology is trying to stay one step ahead of the monster jams that modern technology helps create in the first place. Very readable and full of fun info. Quick takeaways, some of which should be obvious yet somehow aren't for a lot of people: - Don't tailgate, it's really unsafe and often causes people to actually slow down - Driving and texting/eating/anything in the car makes you way more likely to get into a wreck - In a traffic jam, drive a slow but consistent speed instead of stopping and going; you won't get out of the jam any more quickly but you will both save on gas and help out the people behind you - Late merging is the way to go, as it maximizes the use of space; don't get pissed off at people who zoom ahead of you, you didn't "own" a place in line - Support toll roads/congestion pricing/higher street parking fees; recognizing that the precious resources of road and parking space aren't free will help everyone in the long run even if it hurts your wallet up front - Stop thinking of roads as car transport devices only, there are lots of other types of transportation like bikes and pedestrians that have just as much of a right to be there as cars - Suburban sprawl is ruining cities and in very real ways making us poorer as a nation, encourage any and every policy to spur density and alternatives to driving you see If you're like me, you hate driving and try to do as little of it as possible, yet you still find the subject very interesting. Vanderbilt goes through a great tour of the many ways in which the rise of mega-commuting has warped our culture (e.g. we spend so much time in our cars that radio stations time their broadcasts to give you "driveway moments" that get you to stay in your car even after your trip has ended to hear the end of the segment) and the superhuman efforts of traffic engineers to shave even seconds off our journeys. Highly recommended.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Oct 2012
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Oct 19, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 0452288193
| 9780452288195
| 4.11
| 61
| Jan 01, 2006
| Feb 27, 2007
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Yet another Big History book, this one really pulled out in front of the pack for me and I think it's the best one I've read so far. First, there's no...more Yet another Big History book, this one really pulled out in front of the pack for me and I think it's the best one I've read so far. First, there's no better way to make me smile than with a reference to psychohistory, from my favorite sci-fi series of all time - Turchin compares his goal of scientifying history to Asimov's famous literary conceit right there at the very beginning of the Introduction. Turchin is serious about it though, offering a semi-mathematical framework for historical analysis he calls cliodynamics, which borrows methodologically from statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics. In English, that means he models the rise and fall of empires using equations that treat people as groups, and also account for chaotic behavior as well. This means that there's some population genetics lurking in the background as well. There is not actually any math in this book, however; this was a prose exposition of the equations that are all in his earlier Historical Dynamics, which I haven't read. There's still plenty of rigor, though, as he subscribes fully to Paul Krugman's sentiment that "The equations and diagrams of formal economics are, more often than not, no more than the scaffolding used to help construct an intellectual edifice. Once that edifice has been built to a certain point, the scaffolding can be stripped away, leaving only plain English behind." He starts out by asking how empires form, which he calls "imperiogenesis". The list of empires/countries/peoples discussed extensively include Russia, America, Germans, Arabs, England, France, Austria-Hungary, and of course the good old Roman Empire. He doesn't include exhaustive histories of each one, just enough to make his points and tie them back to the larger argument. I would have liked more detail on the non-European empires like Persia, China, the various Indian empires, or anything in the Western Hemisphere, but I think those would only bolster his thesis. He finds that empires typically arise on what he calls a "metaethnic frontier", in other words a boundary between two relatively different cultures (cf. the "us vs them" struggles in Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations). Thus the medieval Rus, ancestors of today's Russians, found themselves assimilating other nearby tribes in a desperate effort to fend off endless raids from the Mongols, and this gradual accretion of similar proto-Russian co-ethnics gradually built the kind of egalitarian, tightly-knit society that was capable of conquering the vast steppes of Siberia. In essence the Rus as a society unconsciously "learned" the social traits - trust, intra-group fairness, self-sacrifice for the group - that it took to be a successful empire, and other groups that didn't or couldn't develop those traits got swallowed up or annihilated. This is similar to how the Romans fought off the Gauls, Phoenicians, etc by gradually assimilating similar tribes like that Samnites and so on. He calls this level of collective solidarity "asabiya" after Ibn Khaldun's usage of the term in his Muqaddimah, his own attempt at a universal history, and ties it into Alexis de Tocqueville's and Robert Putnam's ideas of social capital. Every good theory of how empires rise should also be able to explain how empires fall, and his asabiya concept seems to do a decent job of explaining "imperiopathosis" as well. Asabiya is the glue of peoples, both a measure of general social capital and trust, and the thing that makes your average dude (it's mostly guys) willing to die in some wasteland hundreds or thousands of miles away from home in order to promote the greater good. He backs this up by bringing in some game theoretic/group selectionist discussion of how societies need a critical mass of moralists and institutions to discourage free-riders and cheaters, which encourages solidarity. Something that Turchin finds over and over again in history is that incredibly successful civilizations, after having built their empires, seem to be inherently unstable and prone to decay through loss of asabiya. While this sounds as unscientific as élan vital, it can actually be quantified in some ways. Basically, in a mature empire that no longer feels compelled to expand, the number of elites starts to slowly increase, both due to lower chances of dying in wars and due to the higher reproductive rate that being rich in an agricultural society allows for. Slowly, they shift from being leaders in society to being rent-seekers, and eventually they take so much of the pie that people aren't willing to trust in the civic institutions previous generations built. Eventually, a more vigorous society on the border gets its act together (in the case of the Romans, the Germans; for the Byzantines, the Arabs), and displaces the decadence that might still be numerically and technologically superior, but can't muster the will to resist. "Paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee, great empires die not by murder, but by suicide." So asabiya can be generated through struggles and trials that bind people to each other, and it can be lost through the lack of the same unifying pressures. The differing fates of north and south Italy are discussed towards the end of the book, why north Italy, while fairly rich, still has a social capital deficit compared to countries like France or Germany, while low-trust south Italy is an "asabiya black hole", as demonstrated by the presence of groups like the Mafia. This is reflected in the very interesting fact that Italy doesn't have large public companies like other first-world nations: "The largest Italian company, Fiat, is still family owned. The typical successful Italian company is a family-owned business with perhaps a hundred employees in Milan or Bologna. They occupy a variety of niches from fashion to high-precision machinery, and they are extremely successful at what they do. But they cannot break into certain international markets because they lack the advantage of size. And they cannot grow to a large size, because the Italians, even northern ones, can cooperate only in medium-sized groups. Is this why northern Italians historically could not get beyond medium-sized states?" Religion has an interesting place in Turchin's book; while religious disputes are not necessarily meaningful in and of themselves, they're another way that groups of people use to mark "us" from "them". After reading Diarmaid MacCullough's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, with its endless tales of violent disputes over completely arbitrary doctrinal issues like the filioque clause or if icons are kosher or whether to make the sign of the cross with two fingers or three, this seems very true to me. Turchin's ideas also interact pleasingly with a number of other Big History books I've read semi-recently. In no particular order/rhyme/reason: - He's a little dismissive of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel, saying that while the geographical determinism line of argument can explain trans-hemispherical imperial triumphs, it doesn't do a good job in the vastly more common cases where neighboring tribes with similar resources attack each other, like the Rus vs the Tatars or the French vs the English. This is true - Diamond might be able to explain the ultimate outcome, but how would that explain, for example, the asabiya-induced paralysis and chaos of the Incans after Atahualpa was captured? - He doesn't engage much with Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, which is a shame, because I still think that Tainter's (admittedly somewhat simplistic) ideas about the decreasing marginal returns on civilizational complexity are un-ignorable. Tainter is more resource-deterministic than Turchin, who allows more for human initiative in the way that societies can "choose" to lose internal cohesion by becoming more inward-focused, but I would bet that there's still something to Tainter's idea that there's a certain optimal size for societies given the resources available to them. - I think Acemoglu and Robinson should have cited this book in their Why Nations Fail, because there's a lot of overlap between A&R's ideas about extractive vs inclusive institutions and what Turchin has to say about how institutions can shift between the two poles due to external pressures or the lack of them. Republican Rome was much more inclusive for the average pleb during the parts of its history where it was under threat, lost inclusion for a long period during things like the Gracchi brothers' reform attempts, and then became more inclusive again after enough elites killed each other during the Julius Caesar drama to stabilize the empire. A&R don't have a good account for how dynamic movement along the inclusive/extractive scale can be, and Turchin's asabiya measure seems to include that. - Brian Fagan's The Long Summer talked about how the migrations of primitive humans (and therefore possible tribal conflicts) were driven in part by climate shifts that alternately opened up new lands and closed off old ones. Turchin showed that climate shifts didn't have much to do with the medieval French-English wars specifically, but it would be neat to see more quantification, and if there's a climate shift threshold over which a tribe could ascend to a higher (or maybe lower) level of asabiya in its need to find new lands and resources. Given that, per Tainter, the Mayans might have succumbed to environmental changes, it's reasonable to think that climate might be an input into asabiya. Climate change in our own day might have significant effects on political stability as well. - Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature talked a lot about changes in violence. I wonder if you could correlate intra-society violence to asabiya shifts. For example, the US right after WW2 was infamously homogenous and group-centered, with low levels of crime. This changed after the Sixties, and I don't think anyone would argue that there hasn't been a relative drop in the nebulous feeling that we're one big society of Americans. Is crime a good proxy for asabiya (e.g. the Northeast is rich and low-crime relative to the South, does that mean anything?), and does the recent relative drop in violent crime rates mean the US is getting stronger asabiya-wise? - Relatedly, I've read a lot of good books on inequality recently, like Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence. The parallels between pre-Revolutionary France or ancient Rome to the modern US in terms of the power of the wealthy are numerous and disturbing, although of course only valid up to a point. Still, how would a conservative (or a liberal, for that matter) apply the implications of this book to our current economic condition? Is rising inequality destroying Americans' ability to cooperate with each other? Overall this is a really interesting book, a definite Big History champion, and is also full of great factoids. I'll close with a fascinating quote from where he talks about how medieval societies like England tried to control elite overpopulation: "Lorcin found that in commoner families males outnumbered females by 13 percent. This pattern is just what we expect in a pre-industrial society where a substantial proportion of women died in childbirth. In noble families, however, the pattern was reversed—there were only 85 males per 100 females. In other words, there were 28 percent fewer noble males than we would expect if their mortality patterns were the same as commoners... The wills studied by Lorcin allowed her to calculate that during the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, the proportions of noble girls becoming nuns were 40 and 30 percent, respectively. Only in the second half of the fifteenth century did this proportion decline to 14 percent." Okay, one more: "Destruction of the great fortunes continued under the Tudors, who had it in for their over-rich and over-mighty subjects. The first two Tudors, Henry VII and Henry VIII, employed judicial murder with great effect, systematically exterminating all potential claimants to the English throne, who also happened to be among the richest landowners. Elizabeth I crafted a gentler method—a kind of “progressive taxation” scheme. When one of her subjects became too wealthy, she invited herself to his castle along with her whole court. After some weeks of dining and wining the queen and hundreds of her followers, the unfortunate host was financially ruined for many years to come, and was too busy paying off his debts to contemplate rebellion."(less) | Notes are private!
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Oct 02, 2012
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As far as I'm concerned Encounters With the Archdruid will always be my favorite work of his, because of the fascinating interaction between the chara...more
As far as I'm concerned Encounters With the Archdruid will always be my favorite work of his, because of the fascinating interaction between the characters in that book. McPhee really let their personalities take center stage there, and while The Control of Nature features excellent writing as usual, the focus is more on geological features than people. Since people are on the whole more interesting than rocks, this book suffered a little in comparison, though thanks to McPhee's tremendous talents he's still able to bring his locations to life. The Control of Nature is divided into 3 sections, and the overriding theme can be summed up as "people dealing with the consequences of building things where they shouldn't". Humans have tried to force rigid order on restless nature with dams, basins, and barriers since the beginning of recorded history, of course, but the stakes have only gotten higher over time, and our collective efforts to impose our will on the elements is plenty fascinating here even if the characters within the book are not. The first, longest, and best section recounts the history of the Army Corps of Engineers' struggles to tame the mighty Mississippi, with particular concern for the mounting danger posed by the Atchafalaya River and its increasingly attractive drainage basin. Over the centuries, people have built quite a civilization in one of the most frequently flooded swamps in the world, and it is the Corps' thankless task to protect that civilization, building ever-higher levees, locks, and dams in what frequently looks like a self-defeating enterprise. It seems almost impossible to balance the often-incompatible needs of the various interest groups of farmers, fishermen, and city dwellers as the Mississippi tries to flood and shift the way it's been doing since time immemorial. The inherent drama and hubris in the idea of containing a river like that from going where it wants is masterfully explored, and these lessons of the limits of simply piling up earthworks are more relevant than ever in the post-Katrina era. The second section is about Iceland's and Hawaii's struggles with volcanoes. While both island groups are essentially at the complete mercy of the lava gods, Iceland's more defiant attitude towards its eruptions makes for the bigger share of the section. The main action of the story is the struggle to save the harbor of Heimaey, a fishing village, from a lava flow via the high-tech method of pointing a bunch of water hoses at the lava to cool it down, plus building channeling barriers. It works. Iceland is right over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which guarantees it plenty of exposure to eruptions, and residents are constantly faced with the paradoxes inherent in residing on land that suffers from constant threat of immolation. I was surprised by how effective their "pour water on the lava" tactics were in the small scale, but sometimes there's only so much about millions of cubic meters of lava you can do. Hawaii has a much more fatalistic attitude, the reasons for which are not fully explored. The third section focused on Los Angeles' debris flows, which I hadn't realized was among the major hazards they had (at least compared to things like earthquakes), but it seems that the gradual elimination of natural fires in the chaparral scrub of the hills has generated an unhealthy cycle of brush accumulation --> incredible fires --> heavy rains --> mudslides. I found the people in this section the least sympathetic for some reason - somehow I can understand poor shrimpers living in Louisiana swamps despite the hurricanes and floods, or fishermen building on volcanic islands regardless of the occasional eruption, but a bunch of rich people building expensive houses in vulnerable arroyos and canyons leaves me feeling like they should know better, especially when the city governments have to build a bunch of catchment dams that the same people complain about constantly. Either live in the city or live in the woods, but that kind of halfway "naturish" development is a big drain on civic resources and is begging for the kind of disasters on display here. Is it hubris, or just dumb?(less) | Notes are private!
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Sep 03, 2012
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This is probably the best book I've ever read about a single bill. Grunwald does a magnificent job recounting the genesis, drafting, passage, and effe...more
This is probably the best book I've ever read about a single bill. Grunwald does a magnificent job recounting the genesis, drafting, passage, and effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus, an act so vast that not even its supporters fully appreciate the range and depth of its impact. The economics that prompted the bill's passage remain controversial in the political world, as do its contents, but Grunwald's evenhanded and fairly comprehensive reporting work should be essential for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion on the stimulus, and even to some extent "government spending" in general. The ARRA, one of President Obama's signature laws, was first proposed before he was even elected as both an extension of previous stimulus efforts and as the fulfillment of many of his campaign promises in the sectors of energy, health, education, and the economy. The economic reasoning behind the stimulus is important to understand, because members of the Republican Party, as recounted here, have had a "complicated" relationship with fiscal stimulus. According to mainstream economic theory, in a recession that features reduced business and consumer spending, it's a bad idea to either raise taxes or cut government spending, because that removes additional money from businesses and consumers, which only exacerbates the recession. By the same principle, it's a good idea to cut taxes and/or raise government spending to try to fill up the missing output gap, until businesses and consumers spend normally again, whereupon government spending and taxation can return to a more sustainable path. You would be able to judge the success or failure of this strategy either by seeing soaring interest rates on government debt, if the policy was too aggressive, or prolonged recession, if policy was too timid. These were Keynes' insights on fiscal policy during the Great Depression, and they've remained basically conceptually intact ever since; the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were in part promoted as perfectly Keynesian stimulus in response to the recession at the start of his term, and although there were questions about the proper distribution of the tax cuts, both Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that cutting taxes and raising spending, or at least not cutting spending, were the appropriate responses. The recession that began in late 2007 and really began to get bad towards the end of the 2008 Presidential campaign was even larger, and in the minds of both parties deserved a commensurately larger response, along with more active monetary policy. And to that end, the ARRA was designed, primarily by Democrats but also with Republican input, as a mix of tax cuts and increased spending which should have been acceptable in theory to Congressmen regardless of party affiliation. On the tax side, there were billions in credits for children, earned income, student loans, homebuying (important in a recession precipitated by the bursting of the housing bubble), energy use, energy use, and more. There was also the typical annual forgoing of scheduled adjustments made to the Alternative Minimum Tax as well as completely new cuts in the payroll tax, with the reasoning that increasing people's take-home pay was one of the most effective methods of stimulus. In an unfortunate preview of the bad press the stimulus would receive, that large payroll tax cut was specifically designed using insights from behavioral economics, which suggested that if people didn't realize they were getting a tax cut they would be less likely to hoard, as opposed to the Bush strategy of simply sending a check. This was satirized as "sending flowers to a romantic interest without signing the note", and indeed it would turn out that many people were under the impression that the stimulus included no tax cuts at all. On the spending side, one big area was aid to state governments, who were hit by massive decreases in tax review and, lacking the ability to deficit-spend, were forced to make large cuts in essential services. Beyond that, there were big expansions of Social Security payment and unemployment insurance, which were important in a crisis involving hundreds of thousands of net job losses per month as well as extremely effective ways to keep money circulating in the economy. Finally, there were a dizzying array of spending initiatives that were either campaign promises or requests from Senators and Governors: over $150 billion for health care, preserving Medicaid and encouraging much-needed improvements in medical IT. Over $100 billion for education, in aid to local governments to keep schools from shuttering, increases in Pell Grants, and in Race to the Top education reform. Over $100 billion in infrastructure, from highway/bridge repair to new high-speed rail initiatives to environmental cleanup to constructing new buildings to improving America's patchy, embarrassing access to broadband. Over $25 billion to energy, providing funds for weatherization, efficiency improvements, and smart grids, as well as seed money to start several entirely new renewable energy businesses with immense future potential (these sections, with Energy Secretary Steven Chu leading the way, are some of the best in the book). Almost $10 billion for science, with grants for NASA, NIST, NOAA, the NSF, the DOE, and more. The book covers such a dizzying array of potentially transformational projects in the stimulus, including plentiful profiles of stimulus-aid businesses, that it could almost be subtitled The Quiet Revolution. In constant dollars it was 50% larger than the whole New Deal, and it was condensed in one single bill instead of being spread throughout years. And yet, this bill passed with 0 House Republicans and only 3 Senate Republicans, ceaselessly denounced in conservative circles as a big-spending, waste-filled assault on freedom and a handout to Democratic interest groups. It's worthwhile to consider their objections. First of all, the purest, most classic examples of fiscal stimulus are "timely, targeted, and temporary" - narrow measures designed to address specific aspects of a recession very quickly and then fade away. The stimulus, however, also included plenty of measures that were "speedy, substantial, and sustained" - things like Race to the Top that, whatever their merits, were not really stimulus measures in the classical sense. Where were the Works Progress Administrations projects, the new Hoover Dams and Skyline Drives, the armies of newly employed workers? Secondly, the stimulus was so large that it seemed inevitable that there would be large amounts of waste and fraud; a nation which had just seen Bridge to Nowhere scandals should expect similar follies on a vastly grander scale. Third, the impact on the deficit could be so large as to seriously impair the credibility of the US dollar as a safe store of value, and these objections were being raised not only by Republicans but also by many Democrats, even some in the White House. Fourth, for all Obama and the Democratic Party's proclamations of bipartisanship, this was a bill that would fulfill liberal priorities and reward Democratic-leaning interest groups, what was the upside for a Republican who voted for a bill that would protect groups like public employee unions? I won't mince words: as Grunwald shows, these objections are basically horseshit, either cynical, hypocritical, or both. First, the stimulus came of age in an era where it's simply not possible to put massive armies of unemployed people to work making new Jones Beaches or Interstate Highway Systems. Labor-saving technologies mean more work can be done with fewer people, and the increased complexities of building mean that even "shovel-ready" projects can take time to get off the ground, and it definitely doesn't help when states like Florida or New Jersey cancel some of the biggest infrastructure projects like new rail tunnels or high-speed rail lines for purely political reasons. Second, the oversight provisions in the stimulus, including websites like recovery.gov that provided unprecedented transparency into specific projects and initiatives, meant that a vanishingly small amount of waste or fraud was uncovered, even using the most uncharitable definitions of waste or fraud conceivable. Third, not only has the stimulus' impact on the deficit been dwarfed by such items as the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the aftermath of the recession itself, but since the stimulus has passed interest rates on US public debt have fallen to the point where they are actually negative in real terms - investors are literally paying the Treasury money to hold public debt, even as Republicans demand higher deficits through yet more high-end tax cuts. Fourth, it's worth mentioning that the Republican Party had suffered an immense rout in the 2008 elections and remains unpopular even today. But even despite that, Republicans had incredible amounts of input into the bill, Senators like Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter in particular had almost carte blanche to arbitrarily insert or remove line-items in exchange for their vote. Their statements and actions - e.g. Rep. Paul Ryan's public denouncements of the stimulus yet quiet letters requesting more funds for his district - give the lie to the idea that they had any kind of principled objections to it. However unfairly, the stimulus seems unlikely to go down in memory as being as transformative as the original New Deal. Part of that is rose-colored glasses, as the New Deal was neither so highly-thought of by contemporaries or as unified a set of policies as it currently seems to us. Part is due to PR missteps by the White House, such as the infamous 8% unemployment projection, part is due to relentless partisan attacks and the new conservative system of epistemic closure, part is also due to particularly bad media failures, and part is due to the nature of the Recovery Act itself. So much of its infrastructure funding was spent on projects that didn't have the iconic stature of, say, LaGuardia Airport, but were badly needed nonetheless; Grunwald gives the distinction as "The New Deal had the world's largest dam. The stimulus had one of the world's largest dam removal projects", and there's another perfect example of the changed mentality later on: "Millions of fans watched Stanford defeat Virginia Tech in the 2011 Orange Bowl, but none of them knew that an aging transformer almost overloaded while feeding power to the stadium.... The problem was detected by Florida Power & Light's new smart grid equipment, which quickly diverted the electricity to healthier transformers, avoiding a midgame blackout." It's hard for people to think in terms of counterfactuals; "think of how much worse it could have been" never got anyone elected. Yet without the stimulus the US would be a poorer and less advanced country, and many businesses that are only just beginning to realize their potential would have been strangled in their cribs by a recession that didn't obey the laws of partisan combat. No one will argue that the stimulus was perfect: it wasn't large enough, it wasn't the political slam-dunk it should have been, some companies it funded like Solyndra and A123 have failed, unemployment remains high years after its passage, and there are plenty of arguments to be had about projects that it should have covered. But it was unquestionably bold and creative, and it will continue to help the economy immensely, years into the future, especially now that Obama has been reelected and the prospect of another period of Republican doldrums has been (mostly) averted. As Grunwald closes with: "We know if it worked. We just don't know if it matters."(less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 29, 2012
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This is frequently described as a book on common sense, which it is, but more importantly it's an investigation on human cognitive limits more general...more
This is frequently described as a book on common sense, which it is, but more importantly it's an investigation on human cognitive limits more generally and also a call to radically restructure the discipline of sociology in light of modern advances in technology. Sociology often gets made fun of in the hierarchies of academic disciplines, but Watts argues that there are reasons why sociology seems so vague and unscientific: not only are sociological problems very complicated in ways that physics problems like orbital mechanics are not, but in addition to the fact that only now do we have the ability to run experiments to truly test our long-held prejudices about ourselves and how society works, our problem-solving skills are themselves subject to those same prejudices. It's a tall order, and though inevitably the chapters pointing out problems are stronger than the chapters suggesting ways to do better, I think this is an excellent synthesis of a lot of good information and a solid guide to outlining future research directions. That human beings have cognitive biases is well-known, especially to readers of any Dan Ariely or Daniel Kahneman book, but the thing about them is that even if you know what they are and how they work, you're almost guaranteed to fall prey to them constantly anyway. "Common sense" is a powerful tool for navigating the complexities of life, but common sense is often just shorthand for a set of fallible mental shortcuts whose workings are almost invisible to us, and whose failures are only excusable by the fact that everyone else has all the same failures too. We use many heuristics to guide us through life, and those rules of thumb are often incoherent (Watts gives examples of proverbs that contradict each other like "look before you leap" vs "he who hesitates is lost"). This extends even down to the level of deeply held and supposedly universal beliefs about justice - when you play the ultimatum game or other simple exercises in game theory with people from different cultures, people behave in strikingly different ways due to cultural norms, and those cultural norms are themselves very difficult to clearly articulate or justify. His brief discussion of the extent to which what we think of as universal institutions like the market system vary dramatically throughout time reminded me a bit of Karl Polanyi's insights about how embedded capitalism is within culture and how unnatural in a way that is. But the main issue is that "common sense" simply isn't designed to solve the kinds of sociological problems we now find ourselves encountering. Here Watts goes on a brief tour of some sociocultural phenomena like performance-based financial incentives, and how baffling the evidence is that they do anything at all. Not only are the effects relative to your peers (i.e. a $10,000 bonus can still be disappointing if everyone else got $20,000), but they're also relative to where you were before, and the bar for what prompts additional effort can keep being raised. Even high-value bonuses in both relative and absolute terms can have little effect on performance if what's being measured is unclear or easily gamed (think teachers being paid more for student achievement or Wall Street bankers paid for paper profits), and yet even after mounds of evidence undermining the case for simple performance metrics, it is guaranteed that you will hear someone think that the "common sense" insight that paying someone more will automatically result in better quality is essentially irrefutable. Other examples are no less interesting. Watts poses some simple questions about the Mona Lisa: what makes the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Would the Mona Lisa's qualities have been apparent at 1700 when it was painted? What are the features that we currently consider it as having that no other painting does? Are there other paintings that share similar qualities, whether by da Vinci or someone else? Why aren't they as famous? Steady investigation shows that attempts to justify the painting's #1 ranking are either specious, examples of circular reasoning - "the Mona Lisa is the best because it has the qualities of the Mona Lisa [e.g. style, composition, brushwork, the smile, etc] and not something else" - or simply arbitrary, because as he shows, the Mona Lisa was not actually acclaimed with its current status as Best Painting Ever until a dramatic theft attempt in the early 20th century. The real reason it's the Primo Painting is basically that SOME painting has to be, and it really is arbitrary to some extent which one ends up with the top spot. This has dramatic implications for any field where ranking depends on somewhat subjective factors (i.e. almost all fields). Music immediately leaps to mind, and Watts relates experiments he's run where people are asked to rank random songs both independently and also with the ability to see what other people have ranked those songs. Unsurprisingly, herd behavior and "trendiness" arises immediately when the equivalent of a Billboard chart is introduced to the experiment, which is something I've noticed myself when using software like last.fm that provides statistics on the music I listen to. Social network technology can just as easily be used to reinforce traditional hierarchies as to eliminate them. People ending up liking things simply because other people like them, and the implication is that many universally acclaimed bands are acclaimed not so much for any intrinsic merit as simple network effects. The same logic, with the slight complication of timing, extends to other "why this and not that" cases like Facebook's success and MySpace's failure, Minitel and the Internet, VHS and Betamex, etc etc. A slight initial random push might be enough to one product the edge over another in the cumulative advantage race, and only retrospectively are people able to offer countless competing and equally arbitrary theories on what that initial push was. One implication of this line of reasoning that seems to disturb people is that a lot of life, including huge multi-billion dollar phenomena like why Harry Potter is so popular and not so many other superficially very similar YA series, is basically random. To put it another way, outcomes in a wide range of human endeavors that seem to depend greatly on human initiative follow simple statistical distributions that can also describe things like the outcomes of coin flips. What does that say about the common sense understanding of our own "specialness" or of our intuition that the world is divided into a few very influential people and many ordinary people? What does that say about our ability to predict the future to the extent that we follow strategies that leverage "specialness", as in trying to find "the next Harry Potter" or "the next Apple", or by trying to advertise to influential people in the hopes that they will influence their followers? After all, if you knew just the right social levers to push, you could do just about anything. Since we all know that special people are out there, waiting to be found, how do we identify their specialness and find them? The problem is that in many cases, the special people, or the levers of history, are only able to be identified after the fact. As an example, Watts picks on Malcolm Gladwell for trying to figure out why Paul Revere is so famous while a guy named William Dawes, who went on a seemingly very similar ride at the same time, is virtually unknown today. Gladwell says that Revere was a "connector", a man unusually well-suited to his task of warning all the people on his route as opposed to the undistinguished Dawes; Watts says that nothing about Revere's current fame was destined at all, and if their routes had been swapped there's absolutely no reason to think that we wouldn't have identical "one if by land, two if by sea" poems about Dawes instead. Revere was simply in the right place at the right time, and it was only after the fact that people decided there must have been something unusual about him and his place in such a dramatic event in US history. The same story holds true with music or books: every book publisher in the world would love to be able to find "the next JK Rowling", but all save the lucky one couldn't even find the original JK Rowling, who was rejected many times. To many ostensibly well-trained people, there just wasn't anything about her work that seemed to stand out among the countless manuscripts of fantasy young adult novels they read every year (related quick prediction: Rowling's new non-fiction novel is probably pretty decent, but has a 0% chance of ever being placed in the canon alongside her Harry Potter work). This is at root due to the fact that our brain is hard-wired to look for patterns and narratives even in realms where those metaphors are fundamentally inapplicable. History is another great example. Take the idea of the storming of the Bastille being a central event in the French Revolution, worthy of becoming the central national holiday of France. Could someone have known at the time that that particular event among all the chaos of the Revolution would have been so influential? Obviously not, but this means that all history is essentially a competition in storytelling, and that prediction in the Laplacian sense of perfect foreknowledge is impossible even if Newtonian physics were true. This notion has obvious relevance for important institutions like futures markets or business more generally. Rather than repeat myself, I'll just say that in the business sections Watts reiterates that people fall prey to all the same issues of mis-narrating history, learning the wrong lessons from the past, engaging in circular reasoning about why certain things are successful, believing that people are more special than they are, and assuming due to the halo effect that what is doing well now must have all sorts of other great attributes. (As a related note, David Romer had an excellent paper in 2006 called "Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Professional Football" discussing how coaches systematically fail to maximize their expected points by failing to go for it on 4th down, simply because there are prevailing irrational norms about what constitutes acceptable risk; this predates the infamous Patriots 4th-and-2 against the Colts in 2008 but is still worth reading). I'm not sure that all types of prediction are necessarily equal; off the top of my head, I would say that a book like The Limits to Growth, with its carefully-sourced numbers and logical formulae, should be looked at as a more credible forecast than a hedge fund prospectus. However, even if most attempts at predicting the future fail, and it seems best to just stick to simple models like always betting on the home team (which at a 58% success rate is within 3% of the best and most sophisticated algorithms you can concoct), there are important things you can do to reduce the failures, and hence resolve some of the issues raised in the rest of the book. It's not like you can act like the future is completely random; we have a drive to speculate for a reason. Here is where Watts is, predictably as it were, a little less helpful. Some useful sanity-check tools are aggregation of knowledge as opposed to relying on too few sources of information, encouraging experimentation rather than blindly staying the course, relying on local knowledge where possible rather on too much top-down direction (here Watts has a more level-headed take on this Hayekian principle than Tim Harford did in Adapt), and always trying to rely on measurement when rather than on intuition and "common sense" even if this is ultimately a somewhat Sisyphean goal. With that, Watts transitions to the Big Picture. Knowing that common sense can mislead us is all when and good, but what new principles can we use to guide us in the future? Societies are big and complicated things, and merely saying that we can't trust common sense isn't good enough, especially when it comes to subjects like justice and fairness. So Watts moves in the direction of Justice as Fairness, explicitly advocating a Rawlsian view of designing institutions to maximize equity, contra Nozick. I agree with him, and I agree that the concepts explored in the book support the idea that social institutions should be designed with the least-well-off in mind, as well as that the "lemon socialism" behavior of the wealthy lately of acting like you are a special person on the upside and a helpless victim on the downside is both offensive and unjust. Acknowledging that we are members of a society and not a million Masters of the Universe is an old insight, but well-placed here, because now that we are beginning to have the technology to measure and analyze trends and social movements in great detail and in real time, we are also beginning to be able to subject foundational questions of justice to statistical analysis. Alexander Volokh had a great law review article in 1997 titled "n Guilty Men" which analyzed different societies' takes on the concept of "it is better to let X guilty people escape justice than to let one innocent person be punished" - Watts would argue that we are getting to the point where we could try to actually calculate that normative value. Obviously that grandiose dream has many precedents - Watts mentions Auguste Comte, as one of many - and even more detractors. The idea that you could calculate something like justice seems absurd. Yet it certainly seems like more and more touchy subjects of the past are being re-examined with something approaching a scientific spirit. Dan Ariely and Michael Norton published a study in 2005 titled "Building a Better America-One Wealth Quintile at a Time" that polled people about income inequality that asked people what they thought a fair distribution should be. The results showed that most people, even rich people, supported a much more equal society than the one we have now. What role should that result play in discussions over redesigning the tax code? Is the only appropriate avenue for discussion about income during salary negotiations between each individual un-unionized employee and a hiring manager, or can/should we design broader institutions to better-implement more scientific notions of justice? These and many other questions that before belonged in the backs of philosophy and sociology books are finally able to be looked at with data, analysis, and experimentation - this book is a great overview of some good questions and hints of their answers. I'll be thinking about it for a while.(less) | Notes are private!
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Jul 25, 2012
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I remember, back when I was in college, participating in one of those classic college-style drunken debates with some friends about whether evolution...more
I remember, back when I was in college, participating in one of those classic college-style drunken debates with some friends about whether evolution was speeding up or slowing down. I argued, no doubt with some slurring of words, that that the increase in the complexity of life meant that there were more and more things for evolution to operate on, and that therefore evolution was speeding up. They argued the opposite, that evolution was fastest back when organisms were simple, and a change in allele frequency would have been proportionately larger as a percentage of the gene pool. Obviously from the sober light of day years later this was an argument over semantics, how we were defining the base unit of comparison, but I still sometimes encounter the equivalent opinion that evolution for humans has either slowed or stopped, backed by the contention that humans in particular are now somehow beyond the laws of natural selection governing the lesser inhabitants of the earth. Cochran and Harpending have a fairly slim popular science book that takes aim at that same misconception that bothered me, but while I agree wholeheartedly with their thesis that humans are not somehow exempt from evolution, I have a few qualms with the book. For the most part it reads like a counterpart to the frequently-cited Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, in that while Diamond spent a lot of time talking about how Europeans benefited from having more and better domesticable plants and animals and the like, he did not concentrate as much as he could have on how much of a two-way street that was, meaning the symbiotic nature of the evolutionary pressures humans were putting on those plants and animals. Put crudely, ancient humans spent a lot of time domesticating things like horses or corn, and since doing that gave groups which were successful advantages over other groups that weren't, you could look at that domesticating process as not only selecting future horses and corn, but also future humans who were better at at the domesticating process itself. One humanity realized that it had the power to manipulate its environment, that unleashed a self-reinforcing cascade of selective forces, which are not only still operating today, but could very well be speeding up. I agree wholeheartedly with this basic idea, and for the most part C & H do a solid if somewhat breezy job of explicating it. Their main sin (which of course is also a virtue in the popular science market) is that they are so confident in their theory of accelerating anthropogenic selection pressures that they seemingly incapable of devoting more than a few dismissive sentences to previous research or competing views. It makes the book livelier and more readable, but you can't help but be a little suspicious of the result. So you will have controversial sections like the opening one on possible interbreeding between ancient homo sapiens and Neanderthals that are very interesting and seem to make compelling logical sense, yet to a layman deliver an impression of either non-engagement with or the passing over of broad swathes of scientific work. That comes with the pop-sci territory though, and since I'm not a genetic historian, I will give them a pass on the question of accuracy. At its core, this book is about the self-domestication of society, a process which has been going on for several thousand years, but over the past few millennia (and the past few centuries in particular) had dramatic effects on human behavior. Scientists like Steven Jay Gould have assumed that humans have been mostly unchanged for the past few thousand years, but Cochran and Harpending strongly disagree, using analogies like the rapid changes in species like dogs and data on specific subgroups of humans with unique selection pressures (more on that later). It's impossible to overstate the dramatic effect that the invention of agriculture had on homo sapiens. It was a complete game-changer in terms of sustenance, culture, warfare, and our relationship to the environment. There's a good discussion of subtleties in the Malthusian trap, the theory whereby any increase in food production is quickly eaten up by the resulting increase in population. This is true in broad terms, but the quantitative and qualitative difference in lifestyle that agriculture provides is the catalyst for an immense speedup in the churn of genes. It upsets the balance between deaths from conflict, disease, and starvation (pestilence, war, and famine, if you want to get Biblical about it), which matters from a selection standpoint. Groups of humans that master agriculture will not only be better fed, but they will have enough surplus to devote to increasing the complexity of their civilization as well as having different immune systems due to contact with livestock and other animals. C & H speculate that the dramatic expansion of Proto-Indo-European-speaking tribes might be due to the advantages conferred by lactose tolerance, and there's also the familiar example of the contrast between European colonization of the Americas thanks to diseases like smallpox and the failure of the same (except in South Africa) due to lack of resistance to malaria. Where the book gets the most controversial is in claiming that this process of adaptation is having effects within several human generations, aiming squarely at Gould's contention in books like The Mismeasure of Man that the basic hardware of humanity hasn't changed much in the past few tens of thousands of years. I can certainly agree that it seems like there's been an increase in traits favoring abstract reasoning since the Bronze Age. The human environment we find ourselves in today is simply not like the small scattered settlements of a few thousand years ago, and as witnessed by the dramatic explosion in diversity of species like dogs that undergo rapid, determined selection pressures, it's perfectly possible that we have been consciously or unconsciously breeding ourselves in particular directions that favor success in modern society. Modern society might also create many avenues for misusing those traits of abstract reasoning and logical deduction (endless fan-wiki pages on obscure TV shows are a good example of these faculties gone awry - this is on a surface level identical to doing real knowledge work, but is completely sterile), however it seems reasonable to say that, Idiocracy aside, smarter people might have a definite reproductive advantage in environments that reward cleverness over the long haul. Does that mean that we could see groups of people today who are measurably smarter than others? To be as blunt as the final chapter, are groups like Ashkenazi Jews or East Asians simply smarter than "generic" Caucasians, as seen by their greater average IQ scores and disproportionate success in fields that demand high cognitive complexity? To be even blunter, by that same reasoning does that imply that groups like sub-Saharan Africans or aboriginal Australians simply less smart than "generic" Caucasians? Cochran and Harpending, to their credit, present this contention with as positive a spin as you could expect, casting this investigation into potential genetic differences between groups as an opportunity for more research and possible positive gene therapy rather than as justification for something like apartheid or a Brave New World society. Certainly nothing in an acknowledgement that some groups might have a higher mean IQ than others implies any kind of justification for racist policies any more than acknowledging that an individual might have a higher IQ than another does. But given the high temperatures that accompany any research that even glancingly appears to support eugenics or racial determinism (witness the shameful "Wilson, you're all wet" treatment that E. O. Wilson received), plus all of the well-known historical failures of pseudo-scientific intelligence testing, I'd like for further studies and for books that don't seem so flippant. I don't believe we have anything to fear from further research into the genetic basis of human intelligence - far from it. Let's just make sure we proceed with a little more rigor than I did as a drunken undergraduate.(less)
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Wilson is such a poetic guy that you almost hate to disagree with him based on prose style alone. Seriously, his sentences have the sorts of graceful...more
Wilson is such a poetic guy that you almost hate to disagree with him based on prose style alone. Seriously, his sentences have the sorts of graceful rhythms that you associate with British authors that have had an expensive classical education, which makes reading him enjoyable even if, as many seem to feel, he's completely wrong. This book is a typically Wilsonian exploration of the human need to find meaning in our lives that's based on biology but aims at culture. He's never liked C. P. Snow's famous division between hard science and "soft studies", so in his introduction, he used Paul Gaugin's famous painting "D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous" ("Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?") as an example of the type of questioning that occupies most philosophy, art, and culture, and, while acknowledging the power of the fruits of these artistic labors, dismissed them as being unable, on their own, to answer those questions. As he's famously said in the past, in one of those imperious statements that tend to polarize readers, most historical philosophy is essentially worthless, being based on "failed models of the brain", and in his view only the techniques of modern science, with their tradition of rigor, empiricism, and dismantling dogma, can deliver even partially true answers to the Big Questions. The most controversial aspect of the book, from a scientific standpoint, is that after a lifetime of championing kin selection, the current mainstream view of how evolution operates, Wilson has now decided that group selection is the way to go. Essentially he's arguing that eusociality, the collective, collaborative interactions characteristic of humans and ants among very few other species, is the key to understanding ourselves, and that requires understanding where it came from along with a new understanding of evolution. So there are very thought-provoking discussions of humans and ants wrapped in a troubling heresy. In humans, he traced our current dominance to the lucky confluence of a few necessary preadaptations that separate us from our protohuman ancestors and relatives. These are: dwelling on land (even brilliant cetaceans can't develop fire); large body size (tiny creatures just can't get brains large enough for general-purpose intelligence); grasping hands (far superior to claws and fangs for manipulating tools); bipedalism (freeing up our hands to interact with the world more); diet (meat, though hard to hunt, is rich in energy); fire (duh); and division of labor (this is a fascinating link that deserves a book of its own - is Adam Smith-style division of labor itself a source of intelligence, or merely a product of it?). You may have noticed that very few of those attributes are true of ants; hold that thought. He immediately pivoted towards declaring kin selection a failure and declaring that group selection was a necessary component of a multi-level theory of evolution. I confess that at first I simply didn't understand how he was able to reach that conclusion. As discussed by writers like Richard Dawkins in his excellent The Extended Phenotype, a huge amount of incredibly complicated behavior that reaches all the way up to the level of an organism's interaction with its peers can be explained by the interactions of genes and only genes; there simply is no group-level counterpart of a gene that can be inherited or replicated, and though epigenetic artifacts like memes seem to behave in analogous ways on a "higher" level, they are merely the products of combinations of genes and don't necessarily have a "real" existence independent of the individuals that create them. Cultural markers like religious affiliation, language, sexual practices, sporting traditions, economic arrangements, or conventions on which side of the road to drive on may look like they are the group-level equivalent to genes because they get passed on to succeeding generations, seem to have an effect on the fitness of the groups that practice them, and undergo gene-like mutations and alterations, but they are at base mere phenotypes, and no appeal to "top-down" processes like group selection or "superior culture" are needed to explain them. The "centrifugal force" of between-group conflict and "centripetal force" of in-group altruism that Wilson devotes much of the book to discussing are, in the mainstream view, no different, and so I had some trouble enjoying the (very interesting and well-written) Out-of-Africa chapters thereof because I was constantly wondering when Wilson was going to circle back around and fully explain his bombshell. There were many points where he brings up evidence that seems like trouble for his group-selection theory, such as when he uses the example of the full competence of Australian aboriginal children brought up by white families - if the 45,000 genetic divergence of native Australians and modern white Australians is able to be so easily overcome by upbringing in a particular culture, how does that disprove the theory that cultural differences are essentially interchangeable epiphenomena of our overwhelmingly similar genes? He cited an insight from the great cybernetician Herbert Simon about the fact that human societies are decomposable into nearly discrete sub-systems shows the advantages of division of labor to a hierarchical society, but mere complexity is not in itself a sign of a qualitatively different type of evolution; Simon himself had a bit in his pioneering The Sciences of the Artificial where he discussed how complex behavior can be merely the result of complexities in the environment, and not in the system directly. For example, Modern France is much more complex than the France of 1500 AD, but any kind of group evolution would have to work on what seems to be implausibly fast levels to have any role in this, and the fact that groups can descend to much lower levels of complexity (e.g. post-Fall Romans, Easter Islanders, the Mayans) without any noticeable changes in the genetic makeup of the populations made me skeptical that group selection is anything other than the interface of genetic epiphenomena with the outside world. It took until the ant chapters for me to really come to terms with his thesis, maybe because I had fewer preconceived notions and was more open to his theory when it was put in terms of ants rather than people. He explained two criteria for eusociality: first, every eusocial species typically has large investments in nests, with the corollary that some percentage of individuals never leave the nest; second, each eusocial species also has a division of labor, with the corollary that some individuals labor for the good of the collective instead of for direct personal gain. Thus bees have their hives with attendant workers and soldiers, while humans have cities with the same, and this kind of multi-generational investment and specialization ("capital accumulation" and "career paths", in human terms) give individual members of the collective/polity more advantages than if they were simply fending for themselves and had to begin each generation from scratch. This reframing of traditional Adam Smith-style economics is both banal and pretty clever, and it reminded me of Paul Krugman's short essay "What Economists Can Learn from Evolutionary Theorists" on the similarities between neoclassical economic models and their biological counterparts in population simulations and so forth, in that it showed the interesting conclusions you can get by broadening your scope to include other disciplines. The ant sections are also where Wilson made the clearest preparatory arguments for his group selection thesis by going over the analogous preadaptations that insect species went through in order to develop eusociality: fortified nest sites, protection against predators, and the presence of some incremental advantage to being in a hive versus being solitary. The one bright line appears to be the emergence of a distinct worker caste. With that discussion of the nature of eusociality, Wilson then turned to why individual selection seemed unable to explain it. The distinction between the gene as a unit of heredity and the gene or individual as the unit of selection, phenotype plasticity (the tendency for identical genes to have different phenotypes depending on environmental circumstances, such as humans having distinct fingerprints even though we all have the same finger genes), and the puzzle of why some eusocial species are diploid versus haplodiploid formed the main platform for the discussion of Hamilton's inequality, which is at the heart of kin selection theory. Stated briefly, "rb > c, meaning that an allele prescribing altruism will increase in frequency in a population if the benefit, b, to the recipient of the altruism, times r, the degree of kinship to the altruist, is greater than the cost to the altruist." This had always seemed very reasonable to me, and it still does, though Wilson spent a great deal of time going over its theoretical and empirical shortcomings. As a layman I'm obviously not qualified enough to fully judge his conclusions, but I did not see a real falsifiable prediction in the book: is it actually impossible for something like a sterile worker caste to evolve using the principle of kin selection? There was a lot of talk about the failings of kin selection in simulations, yet it seemed like the actual proof was left to an appendix that never arrived. Furthermore, it seemed like he was only interested in the question of which type of selection was correct as a way to talk about eusociality, which seemed like putting the cart before the horse. The way he discussed it, eusociality is to individualism roughly as multicellularism is to unicellularism, which makes sense on an analogical level, yet the book just plain needed more about group selection to back that up. However, his discussion of eusociality was awesome, and seemed full of good insights. Much much more could be written about group and individual forces, and the sections that talked about how they interacted in terms of culture were really good, especially when he mentioned art or religion. His insights on how much of art is merely patterns that excite the pattern-recognition systems of the human brain are not new, but the argument gains new meaning in the context of the social purposes of art and what artistic endeavors do for group solidarity. His closing contention that space travel is a harmful, expensive mirage annoyed me as a science fiction fan and as someone who thinks that space travel is a logical next step in the long-term evolution of Earth life, but that ending aberrance shouldn't detract from the fascinating meditation on the true nature of our species and its ultimate destination. These sentences in particular touch on a very important theme in all politics: "[A]n iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies." Wilson may not have definitively answered the question of Where Are We Going?, but I would love for some further discussion from him, and from the other geneticists who oppose group selection, yet have not given eusociality the kind of treatment it gets here.(less) | Notes are private!
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Jun 22, 2012
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The Discoverers is a genial, readable, welcome overview of some of the major scientific discoveries in human history, linked together by theme, and a...more
The Discoverers is a genial, readable, welcome overview of some of the major scientific discoveries in human history, linked together by theme, and a good candidate for "best book that should have been one of my textbooks in high school but inexplicably wasn't". Boorstin is apparently a generally strong historian, having written several other acclaimed works like the 1974 History Pulitzer winner The Americans, and if that one was anything like this it should be a great read. The Discoverers takes a strongly narrative approach to its scope of inquiry, which endeared it to me. It's divided into four main sections: Time, which discusses the inventions of the calendar and clock; The Earth and Seas, which recounts the refinement of mapping, geography, and exploration; Nature, which covers astronomy, medicine, and physics; and Society, which wraps up the modern era as an age where people have studied themselves and their works in unprecedented detail. These general topics are related to the reader through the stories of the explorers and scientists who uncovered new lands and new knowledge, and Boorstin's smooth writing style and talent for both panoramic surveys and detailed explanations should make the content stick in the mind a bit better than the somewhat disjointed style of most textbooks. I like the way that he treats the "story of progress" as the stories of people, both because he's a great humanist, sensitive to the struggles of people to shrug off constraints of ignorance and see a little farther, and also because that way he's better able to impart just how difficult those struggles were. The overall lesson is that progress is very difficult: people's prejudices - be they the spontaneous generation, geocentrism, the threefold world map - are almost always seemingly reasonable and justifiable by simple inspection, and it takes a lot of deep thinking and hard work to advance the frontiers of knowledge. Boorstin is able to incite both sympathy for the inhabitants of the old worlds and admiration for the pioneers of the new worlds, while returning again and again to a sentiment we would all do well to remember: "I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever." Well said. Here's hoping that more people read this book, both to celebrate the great scientists and adventurers of the past, and keep in mind that spirit of discovery.(less) | Notes are private!
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I read this in tandem with Charles Murray's Apollo, and it suffered mightily in the comparison. Judging from the glowing reviews of this book that are...more
I read this in tandem with Charles Murray's Apollo, and it suffered mightily in the comparison. Judging from the glowing reviews of this book that are out there (and its Pulitzer Prize for History for 1986) I might the only person whose primary reaction to this very broad, extensive, and well-sourced "Political History of the Space Age" was that it could have used some perspective, but that's life. Before I start complaining, let me describe the work: McDougall's subject here are the changes that the United States and the Soviet Union underwent as a result of the Space Race, with particular emphasis on shifts in the civilian-military relationship and how the decision to be #1 increased the role of the government as a setter of national priorities as opposed to the people/the market/the prior way of doing things. It's an ambitious subject, and for the most part the book is filled with a wealth of fascinating detail about the struggle for space superiority. The sections that cover the Soviet side of the story in particular are a great exposition of the benefits and the dangers that a command economy can pose when it comes to scientific research, the latter of which can't be emphasized enough. Interestingly, McDougall discovers that in some ways the Soviet terrors and purges did not seem to materially hamper their space program as much as might be thought, due to the great emphasis they put on closely-related military projects like nuclear weapons. Even more interestingly, McDougall pokes some big holes in the common perception that the early space race was initially largely between "our Germans" and "their Germans" - the Soviets had plenty of talented engineers and scientists of their own, as demonstrated by their highly effective tanks and rockets. However, since the USSR did not have the equivalent of NASA, a civilian agency, their space program was even more influenced by their military than was the American program, and hence had even greater problems articulating peaceful goals and interacting with the world at large. I was also highly engaged by the way that the US used "space dividend" technological advances as diplomatic tools to head off the Soviets through trade deals with other countries, as well as the discussions about international cooperation and demilitarization of space, and also how the space race began to spread to other nations like France. However, I can't rate the book very highly overall, and my main issues can be summarized thusly: it's biased, it's sensationalist, and it doesn't settle any of the questions it raises because McDougall doesn't really understand them. Let's take those one at a time. First off, let me say that whatever your position on the timeless philosophical question of "can history ever truly be objective?", I think we would all agree that there's a difference between the kind of inevitable forced subjectivity that comes from having only limited space to write, in other words bias due to the limits of space and time, and the kind of subjectivity that comes from trying to force facts into a narrative. To a certain extent this second kind of bias is just as inevitable as the first (after all, if you just wrote a collection of facts unordered by any kind of higher logic, that's basically the opposite of a history), but in choosing the precise narrative - what to emphasize, what kind of higher principle animates the past events, what to make of changes and discontinuities - you've always got to make sure you're not artificially tying down some loose ends that are actually part of a bigger tapestry. McDougall has issues with this. It's always a bad idea to read history through the lens of your own political leanings, but when you encounter histories this soaked in ideology you almost can't help mentally recoiling. Plainly put, McDougall has a bad case of Eisenhower worship, and this ended up unraveling most of the appeal of the book for me. Now, if you are an Eisenhower fan, then you'll be silently cheering as you read the twentieth time he gets portrayed as a sage visionary and misunderstood guardian of America's most cherished and time-honored values. If, like me, you regard him as very prescient when it came to things like the dangers of the military-industrial complex but not exactly out in front when it came to solutions to problems of poverty, racism, or other the complex social issues that came to the forefront during these times, then you see McDougall's constant belittling of people who had different ideas than Eisenhower as what it is: bias. It's fine to be conservative, and it's fine to write a history from a conservative perspective, but it doesn't help anyone to mislead your readers by artificially stacking the deck in favor of your heroes. McDougall does this in a few different ways, most irritatingly by giving the impression that different positions held by different people at different times were really unified factions, thus allowing wise statesman Eisenhower to calmly steer the country past these chattering herds of loons. Even worse, this is frequently done in that dismayingly dense, convoluted academic style of quoting critics citing summaries of positions being disparaged by yet other people, layered over with links of strawmen. One example is the discussion of the changing role of the federal government in education in response to Sputnik. McDougall is trying to show that people were "cashing in on the Cold War alarm to sell the notion that government money was a panacea for all variety of deficiency" as a prelude to validate his later support of Eisenhower's attachment to the existing system of primarily state and local funding against those meddling do-gooder liberals who will arrive during the Great Society period a few years later. He starts by claiming that John Dewey's Progressive Education was the "reigning philosophy" of American schools but that it "came under attack". In lieu of actually describing it, he simply quotes the later attacks of James Killian that Dewey's system supposedly advocated "education as a sovereign remedy for all our social problems" as well as the contention of the unnamed author of And Madly Teach, whatever that was, that Dewey proposed "the same amount and kind of education for all individuals". He then tacks on still more completely unrelated criticisms of public education in general from more unnamed "social progressives" worried about racial discrimination and then "Cold War pragmatists" that want "excellence to be set apart and cultivated". McDougall solemnly concludes after this almost indecipherable mishmash that these people had "Opposite emphases, but the same solution: more federal direction and subsidy". Now, it should be obvious that those people had nothing to do with each other, so he can't legitimately conclude that any of those people would have advocated anywhere the same solutions to their various concerns as the others. In addition, I've never heard of anyone claiming that money from the feds would solve all problems ever in the history of the world. That this kind of analysis is pretty much the only game in town for nearly 500 pages means that the work reads largely like a debate between McDougall and his strawmen, and not really a debate between the views of any real people at all. This impression is enhanced by his near-inability to simply tell you what someone said without also telling you what you should think about it. An example is when he slams the New York Times as having "little interest in accurate reportage" for a 1959 headline of "US Space Program Far Behind Soviets", mere pages after reproducing a table from National Security Council memo NSC-5814/1 saying exactly the same thing! Maybe looking back you can confidently sneer at the Times, but back then it wasn't so obvious what was going on with the USSR at all, and like in countless other cases in the book, they get lots of snide commentary and 20/20 hindsight. I get that this is a political history, meaning that it has to concentrate on what people were saying at the time (which frequently means cataloging all sorts of errors and lies), but this determined effort to cheerlead for Eisenhower and his idea of America is the framework for the whole book, and is transparently not good history. This is why I thought it could have used more perspective: McDougall continually champions the old, pre-New Deal/Great Society of thinking, and makes much of our transition or saltation into "technocracy" (a vague term that isn't ever clearly defined, but seems to mean a sort of managed capitalism oriented towards goals managed by the central government), but while the space race might be one of the clearest modern examples of the fight between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian visions of America, he never really makes clear that this conflict is as old as, well, Jefferson and Hamilton. Indeed, pretty much every society in world history has had conflicts about how much power to allocate to their central government, or which projects they'd like it to undertake. Is it really so hubristic or unprecedented to ask "If we can put a man on the moon...?", especially when it had such dramatic success? McDougall's inability to come to really come to terms with this broader perspective on why people actually advocate for more or less government involvement in big social prospects lead him finally into the morass of the last two chapters, which I frankly confess I found to be almost meaningless swamps of jargon and religious philosophizing. How can a writer with his ability and poetic sensibility get so totally lost? Maybe it's just me, and I've completely missed the insights McDougall uncovered, but by the end of the book I'd come to the conclusion that he was just playing with words in order to comfort himself about his own sentimental attachment to the pre-Apollo era and inability to come to terms with progress. Maybe that's just the definition of a conservative. All I know is that while there's plenty of good stuff in the book, it comes with a lot of baggage. (less)
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What a superb history. After finishing it, I found that it did several things that I liked. First of all, it stayed true to its title and concentrates...more
What a superb history. After finishing it, I found that it did several things that I liked. First of all, it stayed true to its title and concentrates tightly on the Apollo Program only, tracing its journey from the creation of NASA in the late-50s post-Sputnik panic to the splashdown of Apollo 17. Secondly, it focused on the engineers who designed and guided the Apollo rather than either the astronauts who flew it or the politicians who oversaw it - this was a side of the story I'd never heard about before and ended up being fascinated by. Thirdly, it was told mainly through interviews, which both gave it an extremely strong and skillfully-conveyed narrative, and grounded it concretely in actual facts and events, making it much more powerful than a book told only through archival research or secondary sources. What I took away from it is a strong sense of heroism, which is a much-abused word, but seems like the only appropriate one for the group of men who where given an impossible job and ended up doing it almost perfectly in a dizzyingly short amount of time. A mere decade after the creation of NASA, the US space program went from a collection of exploding rockets and second-place finishes to placing human beings on the moon, something that even to a hardened science fiction fan like me still doesn't quite seem real and gets only more incredible after reading the litany of technical challenges that had to be overcome to do it. As The Onion memorably put it, "Holy Shit, Man Lands On Fucking Moon" - these guys did that! However, just as interested as I was by the technical difficulties - engines larger than any before, guidance systems more precise, mechanical systems more complex - I was also captivated by the way that the men themselves talked about the organizations they worked for and how they were run, the ways in which their managers channeled and refined their energies into this superhuman endeavor. In a sense, the only real secret to building a good organization, be it a large corporation, a public agency, or a small team, is recruiting the right people and then managing them appropriately. This trick is so difficult than an entire sub-sector of the publishing industry is devoted to it, but check out the advice Charles Murray gave in an interview on the 20th anniversary of the book's publishing to someone who wanted to duplicate the feats of the Apollo Program: "Disband NASA. Bulldoze all the centers. Identify a couple of hundred guys at Marshall who are obsessed with rockets and keep them. Choose forty-five people from Langley and Lewis - half of them space nuts, and half of them people whose supervisors want to get rid of them. Give them a mission and a lot of money and stand back." To see the paradoxical combination of freewheeling engineering creativity and serious detail-oriented procedural adherence is very illuminating, and I'm sure this era of NASA will be a staple of business books for decades to come, both in its allowance for creativity and initiative and in its ability to deal with crises like the Apollo 1 fire or the explosion in Apollo 13's oxygen tank. Maybe it's simply impossible for that combination of attributes to be sustained forever, in the same way that every society or company or group of people seems to have a golden age that lasts for a brief time and then can never be recaptured. Certainly the era of moribund bureaucracy that NASA is currently trapped in seems like a cruel parody of the time period in this book, where people set about turning fantasy into reality with a sense of purpose, determination, and even joy. In that same interview, Murray has another thought-provoking, fairly pessimistic comment about the limits of efforts to replicate projects like this: "Apollo, like the Manhattan Project, proved that humans are capable of extraordinary feats in unbelievably short periods of time, but only if five conditions are met: The people doing the work have to have a concrete goal. They must have a sense of urgency - because of a specific calendar deadline in the case of Apollo, or beating the Germans in the case of the Manhattan Project. The concrete goal has to be technological, not social (we just don't know how to change human behavior on a large scale). The people paying for the work must be willing to spend lavishly. And, most importantly, the people paying for the work must get the hell out of the way of the people doing the work." I'm not certain that he's completely right about the social aspect of the goal (despite their slow pace and often high costs, initiatives like anti-racism, the war on poverty, increased access to health care, gay rights, or feminism have achieved astonishing things in what seems like a very short time in world-historical terms), but it's worth pondering that bit about standing back and letting engineers design their dreams without interference from the world around them, even as everyone acknowledges the many fruits of the space race. Is that the way we want to run our big national priorities, the moon projects of the future (even Kennedy had to be convinced that space was really a priority, and Johnson was all along the bigger visionary)? Well, as Joe Shea, one of the most important managers in the program recalls, the question is "You really want to go there?" Sometimes you have to trust in people, and trust in the project you've set for them. The cost-effectiveness of going to the moon has always been under debate, and the story told here won't necessarily change your opinion either way, but if you want to know how it was done and who did it, you can't find a better history.(less)
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| 4.00
| 6,586
| 1997
| Jan 17, 1999
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The beginning sections of this book on consciousness, visual perception, cognitive structure, and how the structure of language can illuminate the way...more
The beginning sections of this book on consciousness, visual perception, cognitive structure, and how the structure of language can illuminate the way that the brain actually processes information are excellent, and worth the price of the book right there. In particular, I don't think you will find many more interesting discussions on how seeing works than Pinker's description of why so many people are frustrated by Magic Eye diagrams (personally, I've always despised them, and now I know why!). As a hardcore work on intelligence those parts don't reach the heights of Marvin Minsky's godlike book The Society of Mind, as few books by mortals can ever hope to, but they're still quite good. The later sections of the book, however, are much less focused and seem to be more about social structure - i.e. the interaction of many minds - than about the mind, per se. I suppose they're justified because most if not all social behavior can be explained as epiphenomena of the way that our brains are wired, and he did find ways to ground things like incest taboos to the evolutionary explanations he brought up in the first few parts, yet I kept wishing he would go back to talking about all of the neat things psychologists have learned about how to fool our systems of perception and what that says about the brain rather than snarking about academic debates over gender roles. As a side note, I can't help but think that Pinker must have been a huge hippie back in the 60s and 70s, and is working out some issues with that part of his life in his works. The Family Values chapter in particular is rife with a peculiar mix of open contempt for the peace-and-love sentiments of stuff like John Lennon's Imagine, along with heavily qualified semi-assurances that the stifling conservative cynicism that John Lennon was opposing is equally misguided and not supported by any natural or biological laws. Pinker never contradicts himself, exactly, you just definitely get the impression that maybe he had recently found some pictures of himself in bell-bottoms or something and is trying to exorcise some bad memories through popular science non-fiction by taking a "the answer is in the middle!" half-stance. It definitely doesn't have the same sense of scientific rigor that the first half of the book did, anyway. Thankfully he expanded the better parts about the history of violence into his recent excellent book The Better Angels of Our Nature (which still has some questionable hippie-bashing, yet is still a cohesive work on its own). Overall I would recommend to inhale everything up to the Hotheads chapter, and then afterwards try to keep an eye out for buried gems like his discussion of the brain's mysterious relationship to music, which is a nice complement to full-length books like Daniel Levitin's The World In Six Songs. Overall quite good.(less)
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| 4.04
| 4,665
| 1993
| Apr 29, 2003
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I might have rated this more highly if I hadn't just come off a spate of reading very similar and slightly better works that incorporate much of its c...more
I might have rated this more highly if I hadn't just come off a spate of reading very similar and slightly better works that incorporate much of its content in pithier form (Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, though those were both written afterwards), yet its central metaphor of sexual selection as arms race is compelling enough that I finished it alongside the superior Dennett and Pinker books anyway. The "red queen" of the title is derived from the famous character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass who at one point tells Alice that in her world, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in place. Life is similar, in that hard-won evolutionary advantages are obsoleted almost instantly as competitors adapt to keep up - the book is about how sexuality is used both on a macro level between species, as a gene-shuffler that can provide a leg up over parasites and asexual organisms that are forced to evolve a bit more slowly; and on a micro level within species, as males and females choose different game-theoretic strategies to maximize reproductive fitness. Obviously we're most interested in human sexuality, so the book does not disappoint in its exploration of titillating topics like adultery, incest, homosexuality, polygamy, promiscuity, age differences, dimorphism, fashion, and communication, with plenty of comparisons to analogous behavior in the animal kingdom. There's also plenty of pages on whether all this exciting behavior is due to nature or nurture, which I did not find to be as well-written as Dennett or Pinker's very similar sections in their books (strawmen start popping up in conjunction with loaded subjects like feminism, though this happened somewhat in Pinker's book as well); readers who aren't idiots will be unsurprised that Ridley falls into the sensible "it's both, to some degree, depending on what you're talking about" camp. I found the red queen idea to be a an illuminating metaphor and I enjoyed Ridley's take on sexual selection, even if as a work specifically on evolutionary biology it didn't rise to the level of Richard Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype, which I consider to be one of the best books existing on the subject, but since I read it right next to books that seemed to recapitulate most of its insights in fewer pages I'm not sure I would recommend it above either. It was a better-written treatise on human sexuality than your average porn, though, that's for sure.(less)
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| 3.90
| 1,665
| Mar 01, 2012
| Mar 20, 2012
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Maybe I'm weird, but to me it's a compliment to describe a book as reading like a well-written college textbook. Of course, this isn't a normal book -...more
Maybe I'm weird, but to me it's a compliment to describe a book as reading like a well-written college textbook. Of course, this isn't a normal book - being yet another burden on the already-groaning shelves in the Why the First World Is Awesome sub-sub-genre of Big History, it's an attempt to deal with issues of development and democracy familiar to political science undergrads, and hence would fit in well on a syllabus - yet it is quite readable, if somewhat repetitious. The basic idea is straightforward: rich first world countries got that way through a process of centralization, political liberalization, and economic liberalization that allowed for ordinary people to participate in all aspects of society without the threat of either anarchy or tyranny; countries that aren't rich have typically gotten stuck on the first step (like Somalia), or more commonly the second step, with autocratic governments that treat their citizens and resources as their own private ATMs and actively resist modernization to the extent that it threatens their monopoly on power. Instead of being inclusive, they are exclusive, and while Acemoglu and Robinson deploy the two terms quite liberally, this idea is quite reasonable. There are of course a number of competing theories to explain international disparities in wealth; a brief list might include Jared Diamond's theories of geographical advantages, Francis Fukuyama's thymos, Max Weber's Protestant work ethic, the Mandate of Heaven, Aristotle's constitutions of the polis, assorted other religious and cultural hypotheses, and of course good old-fashioned racial cheerleading, examples of which you can procure at your leisure from your local White Nationalist Reading Circle. I think Acemoglu and Robinson are on to something important, but I have issues with the way that the book is written, namely that certain examples, such as poor African countries, appear over and over, while some examples that would theoretically be quite illuminating, such as Canada vs the US or China vs India, do not get raised at all. Anyone trying to Explain It All with their own home-grown version of Isaac Asimov's psychohistory eventually gets confronted with the maddening amount of contingency and chance (the outcome of a battle, the sudden death of a king, an unfortunate storm) that overturns any number of "shoulds" in a theory, yet I think that on the whole the idea of inclusion vs exclusion is quite powerful and seems to get us "most of the way there", in that while it would be tough to argue that the US is richer than Australia because its political or economic institutions are more inclusive (a laughable notion), it would certainly seem to explain quite a bit about the US compared to, say, Mexico. Certainly it seems to cover comparisons such as the prosperity of North Korea and South Korea, Nogales in Mexico and the Nogales in the US, and the US South and the US Northeast. However, in addition to the authors and theories listed previously, I wished that Acemoglu and Robinson had engaged with four more. Firstly, Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations has quite a bit to say about interest group politics and the logic behind how various groups can treat a society as more desirable to steal from than to contribute to; Acemoglu and Robinson sort of deal with the complexities of faction in a scattered fashion, but seem to define their axis of inclusivity-exclusivity primarily in terms of a central authority only. Secondly, Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution has quite a bit to say about why the French Revolution took the path that it did, and given its importance, any attempt to use it as a prototype for other countries trying to deal with extractive institutions or the iron rule of oligarchy should ponder its lessons about how it is and is not unique in the history of revolution. Thirdly, Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal has an extensive section showing how economic inequality can be driven by political inequality - more specifically, the Republican Party's capture by plutocrats has been a major contributor to not only a return to pre-New Deal ideas about the role of labor but also about citizen participation in government - this two-way interaction of political and economic forces in societies could have used more exploration. Fourthly, Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies makes a powerful case that societies' political and economic institutions are determined primarily by the energy available to them, and that the form of government a particular country has is more an effect than a cause of any particular level of wealth inequality; this is similar to the weak environmental determinism of Jared Diamond but more broad in that it predicts certain dynamics in the shift from long-term to short-term thinking that would seem to have been a natural fit for this book. I guess I'm being tough on this already well-researched book for not being even more well-researched precisely because I agreed so much with its thesis and was looking forward to what could have been the "one book to rule them all" in terms of theories of development. It's a compliment to the authors that so much of it seems obvious, because societies are willing to put up with what seems to us "modern enlightened folk" like astonishingly dumb institutions for a shockingly long time, and at bottom I don't think that most Americans are too much smarter or more virtuous than the unlucky denizens of the many poor countries chronicled herein. Furthermore, I think that the framing of inclusivity versus exclusivity hits precisely on a major political idea that divides liberals from conservatives in many contexts and in many different time periods - certainly the modern liberal project has embraced inclusion as gospel. The book is definitely worth a read for the mini-histories of countries like Botswana that are unlikely to be familiar to many readers, and it deserves to be taken seriously by anyone interested in comparative political economy or, to borrow a phrase, "the wealth of nations".(less)
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May 07, 2012
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| 4.12
| 507
| Mar 15, 2012
| Mar 15, 2012
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Bell Labs was probably the most important scientific institution of the 20th century. Check out this list: transistors, semiconductors, microwave towe...more
Bell Labs was probably the most important scientific institution of the 20th century. Check out this list: transistors, semiconductors, microwave towers, digital transmission, satellites, radio astronomy, information theory, quality control, fiber optics, undersea cabling, CCDs, cell phones, video phones, pulse code modulation, lasers, Unix, and the C programming language. Every single one of those inventions, discoveries, technologies, or scientific fields was either birthed or midwived at Bell Labs, which at the height of its reputation counted 1,200 PhD holders among 15,000 employees. Seven Nobel Prize-winners worked and researched there, more than at most universities. It was a research laboratory without peer, freed from the short-term pressures of quarterly bottom lines. Instead of research being limited to direct applicability to existing products, Bell Labs scientists created new products, entire industries, and much of the modern world. Nowadays, Bell Labs exists as a shell of its former self, having been repeatedly merged and spun off like drops of quicksilver. Having worked for both Alcatel-Lucent and AT&T, I was interested to read the story of Bell Labs, both for my own curiosity and because its path from greatness to irrelevance says a lot about America. There are three main layers of story told in this book, and each will appeal to a certain type of reader. The first is about a few of the more famous of the personalities at the Labs, like Shockley or Shannon, and their work; the second is about the history of AT&T as a company; and the third is about the way that the Labs were affected by the changes in the country around it. For the first layer, Gertner wisely focuses on the most prominent of the scientists while still trying to provide a sense of the scale of the Labs and how their work fit into the Labs' mission as a whole. For example, he tells the story of William Shockley, who shared the 1965 Physics Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for his work on the transistor. Both the early creative parts and the later stagnant, racist parts of Shockley's life story are told in brief but dense pages, and the reader is given a great deal of insight onto how collaborative scientific research actually works, as well as a decent outline of the technical differences between the point-contact transistor that Bardeen and Brattain invented, and Shockley's superior junction transistor. Shockley's attempts to one-up his own teammates to grab more credit for the invention of the transistor are nothing new, of course, and it says a lot about the quality of people at Bell Labs that people like Bardeen were able to not only cope with the kind of erratic behavior that Shockley brought there, but to rebound and win a second Nobel Physics Prize. Picking the right people was a big factor in the Labs' success, and as the parts recounting the idiosyncratic ways that the various recruits chose to use their travel money to hitchhike or wander to the Labs show, sometimes the right people are the ones with complementary quirks. Even the famous building in Murray Hill was designed to encourage interaction between all kinds of people, so that random encounters with colleagues from any department might spark an unusual insight. On a side note, it's interesting how many of the people profiled came from tiny rural towns; the Labs were a great magnet for talent, helping to turn obscure nobodies from tiny towns and universities into powerhouse researchers and raising the games of people who were already brilliant. This process of rising in the ranks is integral to the second layer of the history. For most of its existence AT&T had a tripod-like structure, with manufacturer Western Electric producing equipment, AT&T Long Lines raising money through its near-total monopoly on lucrative long distance service, and Bell Labs spending money through long-term research. Many of the most important people in this history of the company spent most or all of their professional career at the company, and while this strategy has the well-known side effects of managerial inbreeding and risks of stagnation, the flip side is the potential for remarkable stability, which was essential for the multi-decade planning horizons that the company operated on. Indeed at times the company's solidity resembled a kind of priesthood or alchemist's guild, conducting experiments and conjuring forth wonders without regard for their creations' abilities to make profits or, just as often, to threaten core portions of AT&T's business model. To return to the example of the transistor, Gertner ably relates how research on it (and the related work on semiconductors in general) immediately obsoleted decades worth of expensive work on vacuum tubes. This might have worried some companies (think of Kodak and its ruinous reluctance to embrace digital technology at the expense of its core business), yet AT&T congratulated its team and immediately began to integrate this new invention into its network and system. Even better, and this is where the third layer of the book comes into play, it provided samples of its creations to companies like Fairchild and Texas Instruments, who promptly made the billions that AT&T did not. I found this to be the most interesting aspect of the Labs' story, because by acting more as a public research laboratory than as part of a private company Bell Labs hurt AT&T as much as it helped them. Partially this unusual arrangement was due to onerous restrictions placed on AT&T by the federal government; forbidden to it were entire extremely lucrative industries, chiefly data processing, communication between computers, and the actual selling of phones and terminals (the company got around this by "leasing" its equipment to customers and vigorously suing people who attempted to attach other devices to its networks). In some ways AT&T was one of the most dominant monopolies ever to exist, to the extent that even famous corporate titans like Standard Oil paled in comparison, yet by locking AT&T out of so many fields the government ended up cultivating a curious sort of public spirit and creative independence at Bell Labs that seems very foreign to companies today. What's the best way to fund innovation? Public grants to universities? Private sponsorship? Prizes? To some extent each has its merits, and it's possible to argue that even if AT&T hadn't sponsored all that research itself that several smaller companies might have done the work instead. After all, enough physicists headed back into the private sector at the end of WW2 that it would have been unusual for technology to stagnate without the helping hand of Ma Bell. Yet something about the concentration of all that talent makes even the titanic efforts of companies like Xerox, Microsoft, or Google seem slight. Maybe there just isn't a replacement for throwing billions of dollars at hundreds of PhDs, and if the government isn't willing to do it in these times of austerity and recession, who will? Even Bell Labs felt the impact of the Great Depression to some extent, and it was protected by one of the mightiest companies on Earth with a legal monopoly on communication; who could have taken its place then, and who would take its place now? Gertner suggests that the only modern analog of an organization like Bell Labs would be the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and that only a serious project to to tackle the problems of clean energy would be close to the kinds of challenges the Labs faced, yet good luck proposing to fund those projects commensurately; you would have better luck proposing sending people to Mars. It's a curious fact that even as society has gotten richer in recent years, it's felt like innovation has slowed in all but a few gadget-focused areas. Perhaps this is just an illusion thrown up by our ever-increasing expectations of what The Future owes to us, but I do genuinely think that the pace of improvements in some fields has slowed or plateaued. Has progress simply gotten harder, or do those pictures of the abandoned Bell Labs Holmdel facility, and news articles about Alcatel-Lucent's defunding of basic research spending mean that in some way America has made deliberate choices to retreat inwards, and to dream smaller dreams than generations past? In the words of John Pierce, leader of the Bell Labs team that developed the communications satellite Telstar, "It is clear that we build for the day and not for the ages, and what we build has a community and functional rather than an individual character." There's simply no replacement for the talented individuals, the generous environment they need to work in, and the confident exploratory spirit towards science that characterized Bell Labs at its best. The world is a worse place for its passing.(less) | Notes are private!
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| 052138673X
| 9780521386739
| 4.13
| 177
| May 27, 1988
| Mar 29, 1990
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This is a tough book to summarize, both because it's so dense and well-sourced it reminds me of grad school, and because it tackles a bunch of big, ab...more
This is a tough book to summarize, both because it's so dense and well-sourced it reminds me of grad school, and because it tackles a bunch of big, abstract questions, like what makes societies fail. What does it mean for societies to fail? Here Tainter analyzes many of the ways that groups of people can completely fail to maintain the complicated but fragile webs of interaction that separate us from animals (trade, governance, food production, resource extraction), with examples from the Mayans, Romans, Hittites, Babylonians, and many more. His basic thesis is that human societies are really problem-solving organizations (e.g. the wheel reduces travel time, agriculture reduces vulnerability to famine, steam power increases mechanical capability, sewer systems reduce plagues), and civilization is nothing more than overlapping layers of complex problem-solving networks, skills, and technologies. At low complexity, adding more layers of doers, thinkers, and paper-shufflers makes society more productive and everyone better off, but each additional layer takes energy, and eventually you run into the law of diminishing marginal returns, meaning that after a certain point society becomes paralyzed under the weight of its own corporate and governmental bureaucracies and can no longer adapt to changing conditions like resource shortage, environmental change, economic shifts, or external threats. The implications for modern society are many and thought-provoking. I really can't do this book justice in terms of its scope and analysis, but if you liked Jared Diamond's works (Collapse cites this a bunch), check this out pronto.(less)
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Apr 12, 2012
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| 0374514313
| 9780374514310
| 4.19
| 2,222
| 1971
| Oct 01, 1977
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I found this book to be riveting; both a nature travelogue and an applied ecology seminar in one slim volume. Sierra Club director David Brower is the...more
I found this book to be riveting; both a nature travelogue and an applied ecology seminar in one slim volume. Sierra Club director David Brower is the Archdruid, a man who uses the word "conserve" the way Carl Sagan used "billions". He's a die-hard environmentalist with a gift for PR who fights a never-ending battle against the government, developers, miners, and even humanity at large in his quest to keep as much of America as possible out of the reach of man forever, and McPhee – whose writing talent is truly impressive – allows Brower and his nemeses to explain themselves and their views on nature at length in flawless, crystalline prose. Whether sparring over mining the Glacier National Park with geologist Charles Park, or settling Hilton Head Island with developer Charles Fraser, or damming the Grand Canyon with bureaucrat Floyd Dominy, Brower's unstinting defense of the wilderness touches on issues of conservation vs. preservation that become more relevant every day. His fervent devotion to the outdoors is nearly religious (hence the book's title), but so heartfelt and understandable, given the irreplaceable natural wonders he's fighting for, that by the end of the book I was practically cheering for him even though his antagonists were just as thoughtful and compelling as he was. Though the book is lightly infused with that peculiar 70s nature mysticism, in a world where Louisiana steadily washes out to the sea and the Everglades dwindles by the day to the size of a mud puddle Brower almost seems more reasonable now than when the book was written. Very thought-provoking, and McPhee is an absolutely superb writer.(less)
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| 076790818X
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| 4.16
| 81,585
| Jan 01, 2003
| Sep 14, 2004
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This was a fun treatment of a difficult subject: the background behind scientific knowledge in, well, basically every field. When you think about it,...more
This was a fun treatment of a difficult subject: the background behind scientific knowledge in, well, basically every field. When you think about it, science has an interesting relationship to our species. For one, the whole enterprise is essentially based around telling us that things we thought were true for good reasons are actually lies; it can actually increase our ignorance rather than our knowledge. For another, the rules of the scientific method that you have to follow to make a legitimate discovery use logical processes that are very new to our brains, probably within the last few thousand years. And finally, even learning about it is difficult, since humans are programmed to respond to narratives that are simply not present in physical laws; everyone who learns advanced math has to train themselves to accept abstract knowledge without the benefit of the interpersonal stories that form the rest of their relationship to the world. Bryson, who wrote this book after realizing that he had absorbed almost nothing from his formal science education, tries to place stories and fun back into science and does a great job of relating the connections between concepts and the people who discovered them without pandering to the audience or getting too tabloidish. This is absolutely not a replacement for actually knowing anything about science, but it does make you appreciate how little we know about the world and the contributions scientists have made.(less)
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| Aug 31, 2004
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Sometimes you read about people who seem almost unreal. Too smart (Isaac Newton), too inventive (Lord Kelvin), too dominating (Alexander the Great), t...more
Sometimes you read about people who seem almost unreal. Too smart (Isaac Newton), too inventive (Lord Kelvin), too dominating (Alexander the Great), too dedicated (John D. Rockefeller); they seem like fictional characters, too superlative to exist in the same everyday world that actual people do. Paul Farmer is one of those people who manages to both inspire you and make you feel like a complete waste of carbon atoms at the same time: a genius doctor whose personal mission is to cure horrific diseases in third world countries with an inhuman effective combination of genius diagnostic skills, limitless personal nobility, and tireless effort. The book concentrates mostly on his efforts to eliminate tuberculosis from Haiti, but along the way the author gradually reveals that he does this stuff all over the world, from Russia to Peru to America, and it almost seems like his crusade is to banish disease from the entire planet. It also seems like he'll actually succeed too, due to sheer willpower and a bottomless well of humanity. I read this book right after the Haitian earthquake, and in between feeling bummed that this guy was accomplishing thousands of times more good in the world than I do I also felt bummed that so much of his Partners in Health agency's work in the country was undone. Still, this was ultimately a very positive and life-affirming book about a genuine hero, I promise you won't feel like a slothful amoeboid for too long afterwards.(less)
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| Jun 27, 2006
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Easily one of the most intensely researched popular science books I've ever read (it's right up there with Jared Diamond's works in terms of endless f...more
Easily one of the most intensely researched popular science books I've ever read (it's right up there with Jared Diamond's works in terms of endless footnotes and works cited), this is an impressively sweeping overview of the history of a dozen of the world's major languages and language families that manages to be interesting even when he's talking about stuff like the developmental similarities between Chinese and ancient Egyptian, or how people decided to use ancient languages like Akkadian and Sanskrit as lingua francas, or why Dutch didn't catch on as a colonial language. I personally find language history and usage fascinating (nerd alert), so maybe not everyone will find this book as cool as I did, but this was one of those books where I learned something new on basically every page and enjoyed doing it. Ostler's ability to synthesize vast amounts of research is awe-inspiring, and his obvious love for certain languages (he has a real crush on Sanskrit, in particular) carries over to the subject material in ways that only the best authors manage. He has some really interesting insights on all sorts of things, like why Germanic tribes managed to conquer half the Roman Empire but didn't impose their languages anywhere whereas the Arab conquests only a few hundred years later led to permanent linguistic change across almost all of their territories, and his ending discussion of the evolution and future of English is probably worth the price of the book right there.(less)
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| 0307269930
| 9780307269935
| 4.06
| 1,207
| 2010
| Nov 02, 2010
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This book is divided into two parts: the first 300 pages, which is a high-level history of how a common cycle of innovation and monopolization has man...more
This book is divided into two parts: the first 300 pages, which is a high-level history of how a common cycle of innovation and monopolization has manifested itself in various communication/information industries like radio, movies, television, telephone, cable TV, and the internet. Then there's the last chapter, which is Wu's What Is To Be Done? moment where he suggests a possible regulatory regime that will protect the public interest in these network technologies while still allowing for sufficient innovation and invention. The history section is about as good as you could expect with such a broad range of industries to cover, with plenty of interesting details about the inventors, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who have battled over control of what we now regard as public infrastructure nearly as essential as roads or sewage. He identifies what he calls the Cycle, common to all network technologies since the telegraph, whereby a small-time inventor comes up with a new gadget that allows people to consume or distribute information (it could be multiple inventors - simultaneous inventions are surprisingly frequent, and the difference in success and fame between an Alexander Bell and an Elisha Grey is often as much a matter of luck or corporate backing as technological merits), threatens an established interest with a stake in an old communications paradigm, and makes the steady climb from plucky underdog to overbearing behemoth until the next game-changing inventor comes from nowhere to challenge the incumbent and start the whole process over again. Since a large part of my professional career has involved AT&T in one way or another I was anxious to read the story of one of the largest and most entrenched monopolies of all time. Wu delivered an abbreviated but still fascinating account of how what used to be just another company came to be The Phone Company, its quest for "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" on the one hand underwriting the tremendous research of Bell Labs and on the other consolidating more power over people's ability to communicate with each other than any company in history. He also gave great overviews of the stories of companies in the other industries; I particularly enjoyed the sections on the vicious struggles in the movie industry, and though he didn't make the parallels to the modern video game industry that I've discussed with friends in the business it's a great exposition of the nature of cartels and how they can impose censorship as bad or worse as that of a government. All told, the historical part of the book is great, and very convincing in its suggestions that all these related technologies are in some sense destined to undergo Schumpeterian cycles of innovation, disruption, consolidation, and stagnation as new business models supplant old ones. The controversial part, though, is the final chapter with Wu's attempts to outline how we can protect ourselves from monopolies while still enjoying the fruits of companies which would very much like to be monopolies someday. Designing a good regulatory regime is a classic attempt to square the circle, and Wu himself comes up with many examples in the first part of the book how various agencies like the FCC have been co-opted to serve the interests of the businesses they were supposed to be restraining. Since this problem is of course hardly unique to the telecom industry, it's not really surprising that he ends up proposing a tripartite Separations Principle that's more akin to inflexible rule-based proposals (e.g. a discarded plan in drafts of the Dodd-Frank Act to simply place hard caps on the size of large banks) than discretionary agency-based proposals (e.g. an actual provision in the Dodd-Frank Act to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police bank actions). The first part is temporal separation, which means to restrain established players in an industry from devouring infant entrants, as in the Justice Department's battle to prevent Microsoft from crushing Netscape by using the incumbent advantages of Internet Explorer. The second is functional separation, and he gives the example of preventing movie studios from directly owning the theaters that show their films. The third is regulatory separation, which he defines as removing the potential for regulatory capture by giving the government the power only to check private actors, never to aid them. It should go without saying that in the brief form in the book, this Principle seems at a glance to be hopelessly vague and unworkable; let's use Google as an example. What kind of neutral standard would allow for Google to integrate its Android operating system and Chrome browser with its Google TV platform yet forbid AT&T to give affiliated content higher bandwidth priority on its uVerse internet service (i.e. the opposite of net neutrality)? Similarly, a rule to restrict the ability of Disney to morph into the vast entertainment conglomerate it is today would surely also hamper Google's ability to purchase products like Maps or YouTube. And what kind of "check, not aid" actions, if any, should the government take in situations like Google's copyright struggles with publishers over its attempts to broaden its Google Books database? I'm skeptical that Wu's admirably clear principles could be simply turned into a working and beneficial regulatory scheme. This isn't really his fault given the size of the book compared to the daunting complexity of modern corporations and the fluid nature of boundaries in network technologies, but it's disappointing that such a perceptive critic of monopoly power proposed such underwhelming solutions. He should write a longer book on that subject; I would eagerly read it.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 17, 1993
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| Oct 25, 2011
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Behavioral economics is "in" right now, partially as a result of the weakness of the economics profession in recent years, and partially because psych...more
Behavioral economics is "in" right now, partially as a result of the weakness of the economics profession in recent years, and partially because psychologists have stopped practicing Freudian incantations and started uncovering amazing details of how human beings actually think and behave. Kahneman's research into the division of consciousness between the fast-acting and unconscious System 1 and the more high-powered but lazy System 2 is recounted in this alternately fascinating and horrifying exploration of the unconscious. After reading this lengthy catalog of flaws, biases, and lacunae in our overworked brains, you'll be amazed that civilization exists at all, given the myriad ways that the snap judgments of System 1 get taken on faith by System 2. You'll also be disturbed that there doesn't seem to be an easy to way to fix the fragility of your everyday processes of judgment. Even the smartest person has the same ramshackle collections of neuron clusters as everyone else, and even this summary of the pioneering research that Kahneman and everyone else has done opens with the frank admission that he's susceptible to the same cognitive limits as everyone else. Knowing may be half the battle, but that still leaves a good bit for future study and action.(less)
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| 3.89
| 1,987
| 1998
| Mar 30, 1999
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Wilson made his name in ants, as a rock star entomologist who made seminal contributions to the understanding of one of the most successful species of...more
Wilson made his name in ants, as a rock star entomologist who made seminal contributions to the understanding of one of the most successful species of all time. It must not have been challenging enough for him, because this book is all about the unity of knowledge, where he tries to both explain why past attempts to bridge the divide between the arts and the sciences have failed (his verdict: they were based on "failed models of the brain"), and to chart out a new path for the synthesis of the human and nonhuman studies by basing them in the techniques of the natural sciences, which might be, to borrow from Churchill, "the worst way to study the world, except for all the others". As a science fan, I really enjoyed his clear-eyed appraisal of why science has been successful in doing what it does, but even a more poetically-inclined person will like his appreciation for the arts, his elegant writing, and his graceful and generous demeanor.(less)
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| 3,115
| Jan 01, 2011
| Oct 04, 2011
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The 20th century was famously soaked in blood, but it turns out that it may have been the most peaceful ten decades in human history. Pinker's basic t...more
The 20th century was famously soaked in blood, but it turns out that it may have been the most peaceful ten decades in human history. Pinker's basic thesis is that over any time span, at any level, human beings have gotten unprecedentedly less violent, to the point where even the worst pockets of violence on the planet today would barely qualify as average in past eras, to say nothing of the the expansion of tolerance and reciprocity to entirely new areas due to the many revolutions in racial/gender/sexual equality. It's a book that has to be read to be believed, both because of the depth of its argument and because of the horrifying details on just how awful to each other people used to be. Unlikely as it may seem, humanity might actually be progressing.(less)
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