Review: Democracy Awakening

 Democracy Awakening is Heather Cox Richardson's history book with an emphasis on recent history (from 2016 to 2022) and a deep perspective on American history and context. The recent history part of the book is a good reminder of how quickly Trump moved to consolidate power and try to dismantle democracy and delegitimize elections, and how he quickly used the authoritarian playbook to great effect:

Trump purged officials who accepted the findings of the Intelligence Community from his administration. He replaced Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates, a well-regarded former Republican senator who maintained that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. Trump also fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, replacing him first with Sessions’s loyalist chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who became acting attorney general without Senate confirmation, and then with William Barr, who had been President George H. W. Bush’s attorney general when Bush pardoned those involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Barr took office on February 14, 2019, just as Mueller was finishing his report. Before letting anyone else see it, Barr spun the document as a complete exoneration of the president. The media repeated his misstatement. In fact, Mueller’s report established that Russia had illegally intervened in the election to benefit Trump and that the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller publicly complained to Barr about the spin he had put on the report, but it was too late: Trump crowed that he was exonerated, and his supporters not only bought it, they accepted it as proof that the institutions of government were persecuting their president. Barr then appointed his own investigator, John Durham, to prove that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had hacked the election (the investigation closed in 2022 without any proof of those allegations).[10] Republican lawmakers helped Trump’s disinformation campaign, using their positions to mislead the public and legitimize his lies. House Republicans, especially those in the right-wing Freedom Caucus, along with a bloc of right-wing senators, backed the president. Since the Republicans controlled the Senate, their chairing of key committees helped them legitimize his allegations. Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, and Rand Paul of Kentucky echoed Trump in calling for investigations of Democrats. (kindle loc 1612)

The look back into history further away from  the present day presents some much needed optimism. The history of the American republic has been one of imperfect equality and ideals, but also that the citizenry does eventually opt for freedom over oligarchic rule. She points out that the arguments used by right-wingers have always been used by slaveholders to deny women or black people the vote, and it's always been the task of ordinary people to fight back:

it is ordinary Americans like Harriet Beecher Stowe turning her grief for her dead eighteen-month-old son into the story of why no mother’s child should be sold away from her; Rose Herera suing her former enslaver for custody of her own children; Julia Ward Howe demanding the right to vote so her abusive husband could not control her life any longer; Sitting Bull defending the right of the Lakota to practice their own new religion, even if he did not believe in it; Saum Song Bo telling The New York Sun that he was insulted by their request for money to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty when, three years before, the country had excluded people like him; Dr. Héctor García realizing that Mexican Americans needed to be able to vote in order to protect themselves; Edward Roberts claiming the right to get an education despite his physical paralysis; Stormé DeLarverie, the drag king who was identified with the first punch at the Stonewall riot that jump-started the gay rights movement. (kindle loc 2418)

Much of the description of the pre-civil war era sounds very familiar:

 To maintain their power, southern leaders made common cause with southern men who defended local government, and for whom opposition to the federal government had become the core of their political identity. In the 1840s, when northern leaders began to try to stop the expansion of slavery through federal law, southern white leaders insisted that such action was an attack on democracy, which they were coming to define as states’ rights. By the 1850s, southern leaders had narrowed that definition of democracy even further. They insisted that the Framers had never intended for democracy to mean that voters got to influence policy; they could merely vote to change their leaders. Indeed, they argued, the Framers had set up the system so that it could never come under the sway of a mob. Federal lawmakers could do nothing that was not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution; the Framers had limited the government so it could do nothing but protect property. Even if an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted the government to do something more expansive, it could not...Leaders outlawed possession of books and pamphlets that questioned the slave system—those that urged solidarity among poor white men as well as those challenging enslavement—and they provoked violence against those they called agitators. By closing off access to factual information, enslavers could use the media, churches, society, and politics to spread their worldview first in the South and then nationally. Their worldview was taking over the country. In the 1850s, Southern elites who controlled the government of their states took over first the Democratic Party and then, through it, the Senate—where each state had two seats regardless of population—and the White House. Control of those two institutions meant they also took control of the Supreme Court. (kindle loc 2818-2828)

 The book is a quick and easy read, and provides much perspective on the chaos of the present day. It's going to be a very uncomfortable next few years, but despair never provides any solutions, and Richardson's book provides a much needed reminder that it is possible to fight for democracy and a government of the people, by the people, and for the people:

In 1858, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience: “I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments . . . are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. . . . Whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” (kindle loc 2789)

 

Review: American Prometheus

 American Prometheus is the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and apparently the inspiration for the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie. I picked up having recently read the story of the Atomic Bomb and the Hydrogen Bomb, and I expected to already know most of the highlights. But since those other books didn't cover Oppenheimer in detail, I decided it would be worth it to get a good understanding of how Oppenheimer lead the effort on the atomic bomb.

In some sense, I was disappointed, because the book didn't cover much of his success as an administrator. Part of it is because the authors aren't particularly interested in engineering management (the Manhattan project was effectively a huge engineering project). What it did cover in detail was Oppenheimer's political activities in Berkeley and his dalliance with communism, but of course, that was because American Capitalism in the 1920s and 30s were so bleak:

By 1935, it was not at all unusual for Americans who were concerned with economic justice—including many New Deal liberals—to identify with the Communist movement. Many laborers, as well as writers, journalists and teachers, supported the most radical features of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. And even if most intellectuals didn’t actually join the Communist Party, their hearts lay with a populist movement that promised a just world steeped in a culture of egalitarianism...There was a lot of talk and not much action, which frustrated Frank. “We tried to integrate the city swimming pool,” he said. “They just allowed blacks in Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then they drained the pool Thursday morning.” But despite their efforts, the pool remained segregated. (kindle loc 2621-2631)

When I got to the part where Oppenheimer took on faculty roles at both Caltech and Berkeley, I was finally intrigued. Oppenheimer took a very deliberate and targeted approach in his teaching:

Oppenheimer thought that no one could be expected to learn quantum mechanics from books alone; the verbal wrestling inherent in the process of explanation is what opens the door to understanding. He never gave the same lecture twice. “He was very keenly aware,” Weinberg recalled, “of the people in his class.” He could look into the faces of his audience and suddenly decide to change his entire approach because he had sensed what their particular difficulties were with the subject at hand. Once he gave an entire lecture on a problem he knew would pique the interest of just one student. Afterwards, that student rushed up to him and said he wanted permission to tackle the problem. Oppenheimer replied, “Good, that’s why I gave the seminar.” (kindle loc 3354)

He even laid traps for his students:

 One day when Weinberg was in Oppenheimer’s office, he began rummaging through papers stacked on the trestle table in the center of the room. Picking out one paper, he began reading the first paragraph, oblivious to Oppie’s irritated look. “This is an excellent proposal,” Weinberg exclaimed, “I’d sure as hell like to work on it.” To his astonishment, Oppenheimer replied curtly, “Put that down; put it back where you found it.” When Weinberg asked what he had done wrong, Oppenheimer said, “That was not for you to find.” A few weeks later, Weinberg heard that another student who was struggling to find a thesis topic had begun work on the proposal he had read that day. “[The student] was a very genial, decent man,” Weinberg recalled. “But, unlike a few of us who enjoyed the kind of challenge that Oppie threw out like sparks, he was often baffled and nonplussed and ill at ease. Nobody had the courage to tell him, ‘Look, you’re out of your depth.’ ” Weinberg now realized that Oppie had planted this thesis problem for this very student. It was a distinctly easy problem, “But it was perfect for him,” Weinberg said, “and it got him his Ph.D. It would have been difficult for him to get it with Oppie if Oppie had treated him the way he treated me or Phil Morrison or Sid Dancoff.” Instead, Weinberg insisted years later, Oppie nurtured this student as a father would have treated a baby learning to walk. “He waited for him to discover that proposal accidentally, on his own terms, to pick it up and to express his interest, to find his way to it. . . . He needed special treatment, and by God, Oppie was going to give it to him. It showed a great deal of love, sympathy and human understanding.” The student in question, Weinberg reported, went on to do distinguished work as an applied physicist. (kindle loc 3364)

I certainly don't remember any of my professors at grad school being so kind-hearted! There's a good explanation right there was to why he was held in such high regard amongst physicists even though he never won the Nobel prize --- his social skills were outstanding. In one story, he listened to a conflict between two groups, and at the end of the listening session summarized the problems as discussed in such a way that the solution was obvious to both groups. That required both technical and social acumen, as well as a willingness to listen. Some of the best engineering managers I've ever worked with have this talent. The book explains:

He rarely gave orders, and instead managed to communicate his desires, as the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled, “very easily and naturally, with just his eyes, his two hands, and a half-lighted pipe.” Bethe remembered that Oppie “never dictated what should be done. He brought out the best in all of us, like a good host with his guests.” Robert Wilson felt similarly: “In his presence, I became more intelligent, more vocal, more intense, more prescient, more poetic myself. Although normally a slow reader, when he handed me a letter I would glance at it and hand it back prepared to discuss the nuances of it minutely.” He also admitted that in retrospect there was a certain amount of “self-delusion” in these feelings. “Once out of his presence the bright things that had been said were difficult to reconstruct or remember. No matter, the tone had been established. I would know how to invent what it was that had to be done.” (kindle loc 4205)

Of course, the movie isn't going to be about being a great engineering manager. Most likely it will cover his political destruction in the hands of Lewis Strauss, leaving him never the same again. Even then, the book didn't stop telling me things I didn't know, such as that he spent many of his last years at St. John, the island in the Caribbean that's part of the US Virgin Islands, owning a boat and sailing it often (he was an able sailor), and that his brother, Frank Oppenheimer, was the founder of the San Francisco Exploratorium, one of the first participatory science museums in the world. (Frank suffered even more for his dalliance with communism than his brother did, derailing a promising career in academic physics and having to become a cattle rancher for a while)

Needless to say, the book's well worth reading. Recommended!

Review: The Righteous Mind

 The Righteous Mind is divided into 3 parts. The first two are at the very least enlightening and gives you plenty to think about, and the last part unfortunately falls into the "bothsidesim" that has aged particularly badly since 2012, which was when the book is written.

The first part is pretty straightforward: humans aren't rational. Our rationality and reasoning abilities are frequently used for post-hoc analysis and self-justification as to why we did the things we were going to do anyway, whether it was reprehensible or moral behavior. This isn't particularly controversial, as anyone who has tried to get a kid to do the right thing will tell you --- the smarter the kid, the more reasons he will come up with as to why what he did was the right thing, irregardless of the actual rightness of the behavior. What's interesting is that what it takes to change people's minds isn't reason, but affection, admiration, and mutual respect:

When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants (that’s the social persuasion link in the social intuitionist model) or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants (that’s the reasoned persuasion link). (pg. 79)

The second part of the book is an exploration of humanity's good behavior. The author uses a phrase - we're 90% Chimp and 10% Bees. The idea here is that chimps don't normally cooperate with each other, and 90% of the time we behave like selfish primates. But then there are some triggers that get us to all bind together into a team or group or religion, and then humans are capable of cooperating to a high degree, like bees. There's a part of the book where Haidt explains the aggressive egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies:

It’s not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls “reverse dominance hierarchies” in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It’s uncannily similar to Marx’s dream of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”)34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It’s a great example of how “innate” refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it’s a mistake to look at today’s hunter-gatherers and say, “See, that’s what human nature really looks like!” (pg. 199)

 His theory therefore is that the egalitarian instinct evolved relatively recently. I'm not so sure I buy that. In any case, Haidt points out how you can deliberately trigger the "hive switch" on humans:

Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity.49 A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.50 There’s nothing special about race. You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies. (pg. 277)

This explains, by the way, why corporate programs to increase diversity ironically also increases latent racism --- the training to make people aware of diversity ironically erodes the hive switch and therefore makes the company less cohesive. The reduction of cohesiveness not only makes the company less effective, it also creates a backlash because the people comprising of the company no longer view themselves as part of a whole. People who might otherwise have bought into the human hive now rail against wokeness instead.

Haidt points out then, that the role of religion isn't an accident. It binds communities together in ways that secular shared values do not:

It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.31 Why doesn’t sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.”32 But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.33 (pg. 298)

This is an insightful and probably accurate view of society. You'll read this book nodding along to this part. The final part of the book (and really, the author couldn't help but insert it all over the book) is the note that liberals rely only on the caring portion of human morality, and ignore the other pillars (he calls them tastes) of society. This leads to the conclusion that liberals can't see what conservatives view as important, such as "traditional values" and the view of sacredness.

The problem with this criticism of liberalism is that it completely goes against the past few centuries of human history since the enlightenment in Europe! There was a time when human slavery was viewed as normal. In all traditional societies, women were frequently treated as property. Haidt mentions a time when he visited India and came back with a strong sense of what made Indian tradition strong and how he came away with respect for the traditional cultures and values of that society. He doesn't mention attending a funeral where widows were expected to burn themselves in the cremation pyre of their dead husbands. He doesn't mention the traditions of feet binding in Chinese society. Haidt protests against this by quoting Isaiah Berlin:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrestled throughout his career with the problem of the world’s moral diversity and what to make of it. He firmly rejected moral relativism: I am not a relativist; I do not say “I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps”—each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false (pg. 367)

But in vain. We all know that fascism is wrong, but it's also very clear that in recent years, that's what the "moral right" has adopted. It seems that after reading this book, I've come to agree with the New Atheists --- that religion is a blight on humanity and if we are to survive we must kill it dead. It's very clear even from the evidence in the real world that the enlightenment-dominant societies are the ones thriving, and the fundamentalist Christian societies (whether it's the Muslim countries in the middle east or the red states in the USA) are the ones doing the most poorly in terms of lifespan, happiness, or even pure economic productivity. It might be that the liberal politicians need to find ways to attract those voters, but if they don't, it's clear to me that if Haidt's theory of group selection was true, the liberal tribes are going to outperform the conservatives by a lot!

Review: What We Owe The Future

 When I first heard about What We Owe The Future, I thought that longtermism would be easy to explain and the book wouldn't have much to offer. I was wrong. One of the earliest parts of the book talks about how unlikely our current present with by discussing the contingency of slavery abolition. It turns out that it was an unlikely sequence of events that created the abolition movement, and unlike the right-wing conservative view, the elimination of slavery was a true act of altruism, not driven by economics whatsoever:

at the time of abolition slavery was enormously profitable for the British. In the years leading up to abolition, British colonies produced more sugar than the rest of the world combined, and Britain consumed the most sugar of any country.85 When slavery was abolished, the shelf price of sugar increased by about 50 percent, costing the British public £21 million over seven years—about 5 percent of British expenditure at the time.86 Indeed, the slave trade was booming rather than declining: even though Britain had abolished its slave trade in 1807, more Africans were taken in the transatlantic slave trade between 1821 and 1830 than in any other decade except the 1780s.87 The British government paid off British slave owners in order to pass the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which gradually freed the enslaved across most of the British Empire.88 This cost the British government £20 million, amounting to 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual expenditure at the time.89 To finance the payments, the British government took out a £15 million loan, which was not fully paid back until 2015. The economic interpretation of abolition also struggles to explain the activist approach that Britain took to the slave trade after 1807...from 1807 to 1867, enforcing abolition cost Britain almost 2 percent of its annual national income, several times what Britain spends today on foreign aid; political scientists Robert Pape and Chaim Kaufman described this campaign as “the most expensive international moral effort in modern history.”91 If the economic interpretation were correct, such activity would have been unnecessary because the slave trade would have been on its way out anyway... “antislavery organizing was odd rather than inevitable, a peculiar institution rather than the inevitable outcome of moral and cultural progress.… In key respects the British antislavery movement was a historical accident, a contingent event that just as easily might never have occurred.”...If the United States had instead remained part of the British Empire, Britain might have been more reluctant to jeopardise its uneasy relationship with the United States by taking a divisive action like abolishing the slave trade.124 The plantation lobby would also have been bigger in a still-united empire. Finally, Brown notes that abolitionists in France struggled because they lacked the opportunities and status of those in England. Because abolitionist thought grew in France around the same time as the French and Haitian revolutions, abolitionist thought, Brown argues, became linked with violence and strife.123(kindle loc. 1088-1208)

To me, that understanding of the history behind the anti-slavery movement  by itself justified reading the book. The book is overall very optimistic --- it views the future of humanity as being very bright, and that nearly everything you can do to ensure that humanity survives and has a benevolent future is justified.

If the rest of the book was of this nature I think I would have no hesitation endorsing the thoughts behind the book. However, pretty soon after this discussion the book veers into ultra-right-wing libertarian thinking. For instance, the author asserts that it's a moral duty to have more children, despite the increased carbon emissions that having a child in a developed country generates. The theory is that one more somewhat happy person makes the world better off, even if it causes the immiseration of the rest of the world by creating carbon emissions (which the author happily admits will affect climate for hundreds of thousands of years). He delves into population ethics, and somehow comes to the conclusion that a world with say, 10,000 very happy people (call these the Koch brothers and the Elon Musks) and 10 billion somewhat unhappy people, is a better world than a world with 1 billion happy people, just because there are more people who would rather have been born than not to have lived. In other words, the philosophy behind the author's population ethics completely justifies slavery and the highly inequitable world we live in. To me, that's crazy talk!

There's a lot of concern about long term economic stagnation. Once again, the idea here is that the way out of that is to keep increasing the number of people in the world, since more minds being available to solve problems will create more innovative solutions. This approach completely ignores the fact that it doesn't matter how many minds are born --- if your societal approach eliminates the possibility of good education and the possibility of contributing to solutions rather than creating problems, then the increased population probably is more likely to cause the ultimate extinction of humanity than to contribute to the long term survival of civilization. The author even admits that pre-industrial hunter gatherer societies actually were better nourished and had more free time than agriculturists, and perhaps even lead more fulfilling lives than the average citizen of more modern societies working 40-80 hour weeks and having zero paid vacations.

Thankfully, I don't think I have to spend a lot of time debunking the effective altruism movement. Folks like Sam Bankman Fried have pretty much exposed that movement as full of people using questionable approaches in order to justify unethical behavior. This book veers into that and even though it's been published less than a year ago, has already shown that it doesn't age well.

Nevertheless, you should always read books that you disagree with just in case you're wrong. In this case, the book itself is well written and a good way for you to test yourself against its moral conclusions. Even if you disagree, it'll give you lots to think about.

Review: Politics is for Power

 Politics is for Power is an indictment of something I've been guilty of: treating politics the way sports fans treat sports, reading about it, sharing articles on social media, but not actually doing very much. It makes for a very uncomfortable read, but as the title of the book says, if you actually want to achieve political power you actually have to get off your ass and out of the house and do something:

The petitions with large numbers of signatures were primarily addressing legitimate policy concerns, but minor ones. Petition-gathering organizations such as MoveOn see the same phenomenon. Saving dolphins generates enthusiasm among petition signers. So does demanding funding for PBS and NPR. Aid to the poor? Not so much. Schaffner and I looked closer at the White House data. We obtained the zip code of every petition signer, which we linked to the income level of their neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, people in wealthy neighborhoods were more likely to sign online petitions than those in poor ones. More surprising is that those in wealthier neighborhoods were especially likely to sign petitions if the petition was about issues that were frivolous and narrow. Academics refer to this behavior as postmaterialist. For citizens whose material needs—food, shelter, health—are met, politics can be focused on frivolous and nonmaterial issues. Politics can be more of a game. (kindle loc 1016)

 When people quit Facebook, nobody likely calls them up or sends an email to convey concern or disappointment that they are no longer offering their political hot takes. The relationships are not serious enough that anyone would care to make such a call. That no one is relying on you is a great sign that the activity you are doing is a shallow hobby. (kindle loc 1711)

 Eitan Hersh's thesis is as follows: most people really don't care about politics --- all you have to listen to any interview with a typical voter to discover how incredibly uninformed they are, and how much the nuance or detail of public policy matters to them. Historically, political parties have gotten the loyalty of the electorate by doing things that matter to them --- getting them jobs, solving day to day problems in the community, and doing things like getting them healthcare. If you ever wonder why people in the middle east, for instance, support the terrorist organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslin Brotherhood, it's because their local organizations provide services:

Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood, all of which provide health and education services in addition to a political agenda. To ordinary people who don’t care much about politics, these groups say, “We care about you. We support you. When the time comes for a vote or a protest, be there for us.” In the story from Egypt and the Arab Spring, the leaderless resistance groups stood no chance in an election against the Muslim Brotherhood, which built a brand not just based on an ideology but on a commitment to community service. White nationalists are figuring this out, too. As I mentioned in the book’s introduction, the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina was out in 2018 offering assistance to opioid addicts.19 When your ideology is as noxious as the KKK’s, you won’t win many supporters on your policy views alone. But you may win supporters if you show people you care about them. And if you show voters empathy and take care of people and the mainstream parties aren’t doing the same, maybe you’ll get some converts to your cause. (kindle loc 3161)

The author covers the history of the decline of such machine politics in the USA, where the parties got hollowed out as the electorate got wealthier and needed less help, and the top level political leaders decided that the local chapters can embarrass them by holding beliefs that contradict the national platform:

Top-down leadership retains control so that no local can go rogue and embarrass the national organization. Top-down unions, according to labor scholar and activist Jane McAlevey, recruit leaders based on “likability and charisma … [the] ability to speak with the media and chair meetings,” characteristics that aren’t particularly meaningful to trust-building with workers. McAlevey argues that unions have collapsed in part because they’ve lost sight of local workers’ potential for grassroots leadership. (kindle loc 2908)

 If you've ever volunteered for a phone bank, you'll know that the experience is shallow and doesn't feel right --- you're given a script and a bunch of phone calls to make and after you're done you're given some more. You feel like a telemarketer after all is said and done and there's no linkage to your political goals. Hersh says this is by design. The donation-oriented approach encourages this, but doesn't retain an on-the-ground organization to carry you through unexciting elections. The way around this is to provide services or to do deep canvassing, which makes less dedicated people uncomfortable, since you have to actually listen to people:

The idea of approaching a citizen who is not knowledgeable or interested in politics and focusing on listening rather than talking, or focusing on serving the material needs of the voter, feels dirty, in part, because any side can do it. We saw that in the previous chapter: the most pernicious political organizations offer services in exchange for political support. It feels dirty because politics, to hobbyists, is about ideas more than it is about power. Even if hobbyists think their side has the best ideas and ought to be in power, the thought of approaching people who don’t know anything about politics and saying, “Vote for my party because we are going to take care of you in these concrete ways,” is exactly like the kind of dirty transactional politics that they want to avoid. To the retired social worker I failed to recruit, even offering voters an empathetic ear felt dirty and transactional. (kindle loc 3315)

 Hersh suggests that the antidote is to go out and organize your community and try to provide basic services. Even in rich wealthy communities:

Ture and Hamilton write, “One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters has been that they are reluctant to go into their own communities—which is where the racism exists—and work to get rid of it.” Fast-forward fifty years from that book, when I sit and read through public comments arguing against low-income housing development in well-to-do communities, saying that new developments will “change the character of the town,” and when I see little or no organized effort in privileged white communities to support lower-income housing, I know what Ture and Hamilton were talking about. (kindle loc 3232)

 At the top level, that means the wealthy donors funding the parties have to be willing to give up control instead of pouring money into largely ineffective campaign ads to make themselves feel good. This will be a tough thing to do but given the asymmetry in politics between the two party if the Democratic party wishes to succeed it's the only way to go:

For a political party or wealthy political benefactor to do what I am suggesting—shifting resources to goods and services and hiring local organizers—requires them to empower local people, which means they will not maintain tight centralized control. This is sometimes hard for them to stomach. Empowering local organizers comes with risk. Leaders who hire local organizers need to know how to find good people, how to train them, how to empower and monitor them. If done well, this can be much more effective than any top-down approach, as I have suggested in the stories of organizers in this book. But do not confuse my endorsement with a claim that it is easy to pull off. If donors and parties want to do something more effective than silly campaigns ads, which have, at best, tiny effects on politics, they need to take some risks and do harder things. (kindle loc 3436)

 Unlike Democratic donors, Republican donors typically support politicians whose policy priorities align with a wealthy person’s financial interests. The donors can view donations as an investment. When Schaffner and I asked max-out donors why they made their contribution, many more Republicans than Democrats said that a very or extremely important reason for their gift was that the politician could affect the donor’s own industry (37 percent of Republicans versus 22 percent of Democrats). This asymmetry puts Democrats at a disadvantage. Not motivated by their own bottom line, Democratic donors instead have to be motivated by ideology, issues, or even by the entertainment value that a donation provides. For entertainment value, state legislative races and other low-level offices don’t offer donors much. Maybe this is a reason that over the last decade, Republicans more than Democrats have invested in the offices that, however small and unexciting, are the key to congressional redistricting and consequential state policies. (kindle loc 1312)

This is by far the most important and uncomfortable book I've read this year about politics. If you're a typical college educated reader who cares about politics, the book will make you squirm in many places as you realize how much of your time was misspent when you could actually be doing something else more effective. It doesn't mince words and is brutally honest about what it would take to gain political power. If you really want your side to win, the amount of hard work required is daunting. But I agree with Hersh that it is the only way to gain enduring political power. The alternative is shallow movements that fail or create political vacuums that will invite the folks who're willing to do the hard work to win:

Consider the Arab Spring.8 The Arab Spring is the name of a series of revolutionary movements that started as antigovernment protests in 2010. The Arab Spring started in Tunisia and spread through Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, and to a lesser extent in other countries. By all accounts, social media played an important role in coordinating the protests, telling activists where and when to gather, transmitting information about where and when to send medical supplies and food. The Arab Spring failed nearly everywhere. The aftermath has been called the Arab Winter, a wake of death, destruction, and capsized rickety boats that carried now-drowned refugee children. The Arab Spring was a tragedy...In Egypt, for instance, protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square spurred elections, which was a major victory—after a mere eighteen days of protest, the country’s leader of almost thirty years stepped down. But the secular movement in Tahrir Square had no leaders, no ability to organize, and no capacity to mobilize voters. The liberal energy that spurred change lost the elections to an organized party, the right-wing Muslim Brotherhood, which was eventually forced out of power by a military coup. Activists with an Internet connection could crumble a government but could not build one in its place.9 To do that, you need a hierarchy of leaders from low-level people willing to knock on thirty-five doors to middle-level organizers to higher-level leaders with a plan. In short, you need an organization. In Egypt, the protesters never had that. (kindle loc 2509-2516)

This book is a call to action and an indictment of most of us in the (upper) middle class. I highly recommend it.

Review: Dying of Whiteness

 Dying of Whiteness is a difficult book to read. At a deep level, it's about the recent reversal of life expectancy  in the white working class population in the United States in recent years, which is an unprecedented in the developed world. But it's clearly also a particularly political book because of the author's dedication to pursuing root causes down to the deep level.

The book's primary point is that by blocking progressive reforms, the white population in the US doesn't just hurt those minorities, but end up hurting the white population. Because the white population outnumbers the minorities (still) by large amounts those same  policies end up hurting more white people in aggregate than the minorities that are much hated by those who voted for those policies.

When I began to sift through the statistics for gun injury and death in Missouri, I quickly realized that the primary victims of gun mortality were not criminals or inner-city gang members, as the NRA and some politicians implied. Rather, as gun laws were liberalized, gun deaths spiked… among white people. This was because white Missourians dominated injuries and deaths via gun-related suicides, partner violence, and accidental shootings—and in ways that outpaced African American gun deaths from homicides. (page 12)

When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools that their own kids attend, or make other decisions that might feel emotionally correct but are biologically perilous, these politics are literally asking people to die for their whiteness. Living in a state or a county or a nation dominated by a politics of racial resentment then becomes a diagnosable, quantifiable, and increasingly mortal preexisting condition  (pg. 18)

The book then goes on to provide chapter after chapter of statistics, information, and cross-state comparisons between various red states with different policies as well as comparing red states with blue states.  The numbers are compelling and irrefutable. The book also contains many interviews with the very same people who've lost loved ones to gun suicides for instance, but nevertheless because of their social context, cannot bring themselves to vote for more gun regulation or gun control. The same would go for healthcare.

Here were men who depended on assistance for stents, antibiotics, operations, or oxygen tanks decrying the very networks that potentially provided lifesaving help. Their expressions of whiteness and white anxiety seemed in so many ways to work against their own self-interests; to live free and die sooner. Importantly, though, these lower-income men were not the only groups I led that linked a rejection of the price of health care expansion with ideological concerns about losing racial privilege or having to pay for racial or national others. To a degree, similar concerns arose in every single group of white men. (pg. 152)

 What's amazing to me is that those same people completely lack self-awareness, voting for policies that deprived not just them, but their children of reasonable care:

we’ve been lifelong Kansas Republicans. My great-grandfather on down. Didn’t matter how qualified the Democrat was, we could not vote for a Democrat, just wouldn’t do it. But then working in the schools has changed what I think. I’ve been to public school board meetings and seen a parent who was actually on oxygen screaming out against Medicaid expansion or money to the schools. One very wealthy family really believed that there should be no public education, that each child ought to receive what the state is going to apply toward education, and then the free market will take care of it. At the same time, they had a significant high-needs child that we were educating that no one else in that type of model would have ever educated, and they were really upset because that child aged out, was going to turn twenty-two, and no longer receive any of the services provided by our school, and they just couldn’t understand why we would not continue, (pg. 230)

The book tries its best to end on an optimistic note, but it fails. While Kansas did pull back from completely defunding public education, and human beings are notoriously bad at weighing long term benefits vs short term costs:

 Were the causes of the subsequent health effects anything but politically induced, they would have been the subject of any number of public health campaigns. Beware Budget Cuts: The Silent Killer. But because austerity tied to political ideologies, its pernicious effects were far harder to discern for people on the ground. All the while, the amount of money people saved on their taxes was rendered moot by all kinds of hidden costs. Tax cuts provided moderately lower bills at the end of the year, but at the expense of underfunding key elements of the state’s infrastructure—and at the expense of long-term well-being (pg. 258)

This was a depressingly hard book to read, but explains a lot of political behavior. The cold comfort is that the population voting this way is killing themselves slowly, but that's not good news for those of us who may end up living in the Republic of Gilead. 

Review: Paradise Falls

Paradise Falls is a book about a section of the town of Niagara Falls known as Love Canal. It was the site of chemical dumping by the Hooker Chemical. The story revolves around the women who lived in their area and the health effects, as well as the activist movement they started to get remediation. In parallel, we get a view of the Superfund program and its founding, as well as the politics around it, much of which was very new to me.

It is astonishing to me how evil the bad actors in the story were. For instance, the health commissioner of New York State at that time, David Axlerod, not only refused to admit that the site was dangerous (even with high levels of dioxin found near the house where one of the kids died), but actively pursued a vendetta against one of his staff who was helping the neighborhood women collate and collect statistics about the medical problems of the folks who lived in the area.

The CEO of the company that owned Hooker Chemical, Hammer Amaud, himself was also quite evil:

When he faced criminal charges in the mid-1970s for making $54,000 in illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon—and attempting to conceal the donations by making them in the names of other people—Hammer made sure Nizer was standing next to him in court. The well-known lawyer helped keep Hammer out of prison. Noting Hammer’s advanced age and declining health, a federal judge sentenced him to probation for his illegal donations and ordered him to pay a mere $3,000 fine—the Armand Hammer equivalent of loose change found between the seats of the family car. Now the wealthy oilman was apparently hoping that Nizer could pull off a similar trick with Joan Malone and Luella Kenny. The goal: negotiating a truce before the shareholders’ meeting. Occidental didn’t want them to come. (kindle loc 4569)

 The story does have a happy ending. It takes years and the damage to the residents were considerable, but eventually the government buys out the residents' housing and relocates everyone. Even so, the science isn't fully settled, and David Axlerod was never made accountable for pursuing his vendetta against his staff.

Even worse, the Superfund law has been gutted (by the Republicans of course), and there's no question that if something like this happened today it'd be much harder to get the government to do the right thing. It's quite clear that polluters making a lot of money still have more political power than most of its victims.

You should read the book. It's unpleasant but the issues in it are very real.

Review: A Natural History of the Future

 A Natural History of The Future is an ecologist's view of the world, and it's the best introduction to ecological thinking that I've read. The idea that Rob Dunn has, is to introduce the reader to laws of the natural world (that are patterned after the laws in physics) that describe certainties about the biological/ecological world that enable us to predict what will happen over time.

The introduction is great, pointing out that the first research done into organism classification and thinking happened in Sweden. Sweden was unusual in that the diversity of life was actually very low, and the very human bias made the original ecologists focus on things that they cared about, like plants and animals, when much of the biomass of the planet actually exists in the form of insects and micro-organisms. The result was that when Terry Erwin visited the rainforest and collected specimens, he found 1200 new species living in just one type of tree. This blew people's mind, basically noting that the number of unclassified species far out-number the classified species on the planet.

The rest of the book covers these laws, such as the law of escape, which is that when an organism escapes its natural predators and parasites, it will multiply and thrive. He points out that humanity in the temperate zones effectively escaped their predators such as malaria, hook worms, and other parasites, and ominously notes that our warming of the global environment is expanding the range of those parasites and their agents (mosquitoes). The liberal in me notes that in the USA the first places to suffer the re-emergence of those agents are Texas and Florida.

There's the law of evolution, with the most prominent example being antibiotic resistance amongst microbes. Here, the prognosis for humanity isn't as bad as you might imagine. It turned out that the agricultural companies producing transgenic crops have a solution: plant the transgenic crops next to sacrificial non-transgenic crops. The pests and parasites that prey on the crop would preferentially feed on the non-transgenic crops, diluting the gene pool of any transgenic-resistant crops and preventing the rise of widespread transgenic resistance. Of course, capitalistic farmers would not heed those prescriptions and within a few generations those transgenic crop pastures would turn into hotbeds of transgenic resistance. 

All in all, the book is full of great concepts, new ideas, and a very good perspective that no matter what humanity does, we might well remove ourselves and our mammalian friends from the planet, but life on the planet will not be wiped out. He points out that there are already microbes that thrive in extremely hot, acidic, and salty conditions and cannot wait to take over the planet once humanity has made the atmosphere and ecosystem more friendly to them.

Very sobering and well worth your time. Recommended.

Review: How Democracies Die

 How Democracies Die was published in January 2018, two years before the January 6th, 2020 insurrection. I mention this because if you read this book, you're getting a rosy-eyed view of the prospect for American democracy, while a realistic view would note the events after January 6th, and realize that things are far worse than what this book describes.

The book has a major thesis, which is that the main guardrails of democracies isn't the constitution, the institutions, the rule of law, or the practice of elections. The main guardrails are social norms that cause political parties to respect the conventions of a democratic society to practice forbearance, not using every tool available to legally win, but respecting the spirit of elections.

Well, from 2016-2020, the USA elected a norm-breaking president. But the authors point out that even  before Trump, the Republicans have long been on a path to delegitimize the opposition, and are now at a point where any election they didn't win is declared to be fraudulent. If things continue down this path, the authors predict that there's a good chance that an authoritarian takeover of the American government is imminent. The authors point out previous instances in history (such as the events prior to the civil war) of breakdown in society, and point out that the compromises that gave Americans back a civil democracy were achieved by agreeing to deny civil rights to minorities and maintaining white supremacy as the policy for the country.

Is there any hope that American democracy can recover? The authors say yes:

A refounding of America’s major center-right party is a tall order, but there are historical precedents for such transformations—and under even more challenging circumstances. And where it has been successful, conservative party reform has catalyzed democracy’s rebirth. A particularly dramatic case is the democratization of West Germany after the Second World War. At the center of this achievement was an underappreciated development: the formation of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) out of the wreckage of a discredited conservative and right-wing tradition...The rebuilding of German conservatism, of course, followed a major catastrophe. The CDU had no choice but to reinvent itself. The question before Republicans today is whether such a reinvention can occur before we plunge into a deeper crisis. Can leaders muster the foresight and political courage to reorient what has become an increasingly dysfunctional political party before further damage is done, or will we need a catastrophe to inspire the change? (Kindle loc 3122-3148)

I don't know about you, but that slim hope is just grasping at straws. If it took defeat during a major war and having the country divided up by foreign powers to get the German right-wingers to become reasonable people I'm not hopeful for the future.

Well, the book's a downer, but you'd have to be blind and not paying attention if the events of the past few years haven't alarmed you. In that sense the book's well worth reading.

 

Review: Premonition

 In the opening to Premonition, Michael Lewis claims that he wrote the book intending to find malfeasance behind Trump, but discovered that the bigger story was that Trump was just "a co-morbidity" at best. I think he way over-sold this conclusion.

The book focuses on Charity Dean, California's deputy head of Public Health. The reason she wasn't the head of the department was because she was white and blond, and Newsome apparently wanted a woman of color in charge because of concerns about racial justice. It's quite clear that in the world of politics, being the best person for the job isn't good enough, and Dean was continuously being asked to back-pedal her conclusions or make it look like her boss's work. My sympathies (and yours too) are of course with the technically competent person who's not allowed to do the right thing.

the state’s personnel management was bizarre. “There was something seriously awry,” Markovich said. “Everyone I called about Charity tells me she walks on water, and it was pretty clear that she was running the show but, like, wait a minute, she’s the assistant health officer? She’s not the head health officer? Where’s the head?” He asked around and learned that the head health officer was a woman named Sonia Angell, but he never met her. “It started to be impossible to miss,” said Markovich. “This is the biggest public-health crisis ever, and she’s nowhere to be found.” (Kindle Loc 3827)

But the rest of the story isn't really about how Trump wasn't part of the problem. It was quite clear that for instance, Bush actually thought about pandemics and at least asked someone to write up a plan. And in fact, the whole concept of social distancing was thought up by a white-house driven initiative, and the book includes a story about how that group overcame resistance within the CDC and got social distancing accepted as one of the tools for pandemic control, along with school closures and other measures. This was huge, and a clear example that government can come up with ideas.

The rest of the book takes potshots at the CDC for its inability to take risks and manage pandemics, which I might agree with, but again, the solution for that is to fix it and put risk-takers in charge. Instead, we get paragraphs like this:

He’d been born in Poland and moved to the United States as a child. He had memories of Poland as a communist regime, and of the total breakdown of the government’s ability to be useful to its citizens. What he saw in the local U.S. public-health offices remined him of public services in Poland, but before the collapse of communism. “Poland now is not like this,” said David, after seeing the inside of a U.S. public-health office. “Poland now is more functional. Eastern Europeans are tough and kind of not shocked by a failed state. But these are the symptoms of a failed state.” (Kindle Loc 3605)

 To be sure, the past couple of years have shown that US governments are incredibly deficient in many ways. But to get to this point took about 40 years of constant Republican propaganda about how "government isn't the solution, government is the problem." And even then, it was quite clear that states like California and Washington did manage to avoid the worst of it --- that was, until California's right-wing citizens got antsy about the social distancing. Make no mistake, I think the ridiculous lockdowns that shutdown beaches and public outdoor spaces were insane, but again, the solution there isn't fewer scientists in government!

The book ends with Charity Dean leaving her job in government to do a startup:

Once she’d become a public-health officer, she’d imagined an entire career in public service. Now she did not believe that the American government, at this moment in its history, would ever do what needed doing. Disease prevention was a public good, but the public wasn’t going to provide anything like enough of it. From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay. (Kindle loc 4206)

The saddest part of that is that if everyone competent in government thought like this, we'd be in a worst state. We need more institution building, not less, and as Obama once said, "Private companies can and should pick the customers they serve, but governments cannot!"

The book is as well written as any Michael Lewis book is, and has all sorts of great stories in it that makes it well worth your time. Just read it carefully, keeping in mind Lewis's agenda.

 

Review: The Sum of Us

 The Sum of Us has a pretty non-controversial thesis - that the world we live in is not a zero-sum world, that when we introduce benefits like Universal Healthcare, Paid Vacation for everyone, Sick Leave, not only do the poor people have better lives, even the wealthy people have better lives as well!

What's challenging, of course, is that since the 1970s, that's not been the dominant narrative, and so for the past 50 years, we've been reversing course on that. Today, the USA is nowhere close to better health and equity metrics compared to any of the other developed Western Nations.

The book does a good job of tracing what happened, in a slightly less depressing recap of events told in Democracy in Chains. Many communities had public swimming pools that were denied to black people, and of course when the courts ruled that non-whites had a legal right to the pools, rather than open them up to everyone, those same communities decided to fill in the pools or sell them to a private organization that could turn it into a private swimming club. (There was one in Sunnyvale, and I never even thought about why it was a private swimming club) As a result of that, not only are there fewer public American swimming pools, the pools that are left over are a far cry from what you see in other western Democracies, in spaciousness, facilities, and of course, water-slides.

The same obviously went for public schools, which of course, always struck me as insane that were funded by local property taxes, but McGhee points out that the white communities that run the school districts kept drawing and redrawing the school districts to keep the population of the school district white and wealthy. The irony, of course, is that (again, correlation is not causation) white students who do attend a more diverse school actually do better. (Again, it could be that parents who're willing to not segregate themselves are usually highly educated and so their kids would do well in school --- but this just illustrates that desegregation wouldn't have hurt those wealthy public school districts!)

The list goes on and on, and it's pretty depressing, but the last chapter of the book discusses how there's been recent community building in Maine, helping get rid of anti-immigrant, anti-non-white attitudes, and successfully passing medicaid expansion by ballot initiative, showing that the process can be reversed.

It's a great book, though tough going because of the many depressing sections. But well worth reading. Recommended.

Review: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

 Deaths of Despair has a simple, unique thesis. The thesis is that the cost of healthcare and private health insurance has gotten so high that it has basically broken American capitalism for most people not in the top 1%. The argument goes as follows: when health insurance exceeded somewhere $12,000/year, the cost of hiring a low paid worker becomes so high that you might as well outsource all that to another company that essentially treats their workers like crap and don't provide significant benefits. This not only reduces the wages of that janitor, it also completely eliminates the path by which the mailroom person becomes the CEO of the company --- that pathway is completely blocked, and now you've permanently pushed the uneducated workers into a separate caste.

The talented kid who, for one reason or another, did not get educated to his or her ability can no longer work his or her way up from being a janitor to being a CEO, because the janitors and CEOs work for different companies and live in different worlds.25 There is a world of the more educated, and a world of the less educated; no one in the latter has hope of joining the former. Perhaps most crucially, the outsourced workers are no longer a part of the main company, they do not identify with it, and, in the evocative words of the economist Nicholas Bloom,26 they are no longer invited to the holiday party. They cannot find pride, meaning, and hope in being a part—however humble—of a great enterprise. (kindle loc 2805)

The net result is that those are the people most likely to experience pain, get prescribed addictive opoids, and then never get out of it and eventually kill themselves (either explicitly with guns or through overdose, etc)

The authors argue that the traditional Republican callout of the people caught in this trap as "lazy" and "gaming the system so they get money without working" is false:

We are sure that there are people who manipulate the system to their own benefit, but given what has been happening to pain for less educated people, and given how closely those patterns match deaths of despair, we suspect that the malingerers are relatively few. (kindle loc 1527)

That these people die means that they're crying out for help, not being lazy. The authors point out that the US is unique amongst all developed countries in having these problems:

Less educated workers live in a much more hostile world than did less educated workers of half a century ago. Much of this hostility can be seen not only in the United States but also in other rich countries. Wages and working conditions have deteriorated in several of them; they too have experienced a decline in manufacturing in favor of services, slowing rates of economic growth, and a decline in unionization. But these other countries do not face the costs of the American healthcare system, and they have much more comprehensive systems of social protection. None has seen wage stagnation for as long as has the United States. All of which could explain why we do not see epidemics of deaths of despair across the rich world. (kindle loc 4183)

The book is well argued, and contained many great points that made me highlight part after part from the book. It's well worth the time, and provides a much needed rebuttal to books such as Hillbilly Elegy,  which mostly blame the victims of poverty for being lazy. Recommended.

  

Review: March Trilogy

 March: Trilogy is the story of the Civil Rights  movement as told by the late John Lewis. I've already read about much of this in Master of the Senate, but this graphic novel (broken into 3 books for no apparent reason) provides details that only an insider can.

The first big detail was how much training, preparation and selection went into selecting the civil rights protesters. This was not a mob of angry volunteers, but people seriously inculcated in the art of non-violent demonstration, and prepared to put their bodies and lives on the line. The SNCC would actively tell people not to join if they couldn't discipline themselves into not fighting back.

What I didn't know also was the separation of the SNCC (John Lewis's organization) from the SCLC, which was associated with Martin Luther King. The two groups did coordinate actions, but did not always see eye to eye on when to demonstrate. Finally, the description of Malcolm X and what he saw his role in the movement was interesting, though again, the book did not dwell on it or discuss its implications.

I would not have found this book without the help of the Black Lives Matter movement, but having found it, thought it was a great way to tell the story. The art is well done (all in black and white), and many scenes bring home the horror and violence of the segregationists of that period. I've often wondered if the non-violent movements for both India and the Civil Rights movement only succeeded because they weren't up against a truly implacable enemy like the Nazis, but reading this book reminded me that there's no difference between the segregationists, the Nazis, and the modern Republican party.

Recommended.

Review: The Nordic Theory of Everything - In Search of a Better Life

 The Nordic Theory of Everything is Anu Partanen's personal journal of her transition to the USA from Finland. It's a good example of how I can agree with everything in a book but still find it wanting, mostly because Partanen approaches everything from a logical explanatory fashion that would work if everyone operated on rational, timeless ethics, but didn't study history.

If you haven't been living under a rock (or maybe if you're just one of those Americans without a passport), you know that most of Western Europe (and especially the Scandinavian countries) have living standards that exceed that of the United States. These include 5-6 weeks of paid vacation, a national healthcare system that means no medical bankruptcies, free college, paid parental leave (for both parents!), gun control laws that means your kids don't get shot at school, great public transit systems, excellent schools, and a generally less financially stressed out life. Partanen takes it upon herself to explain the principles and logic behind those policies, and how they benefit the citizens at large of those countries, while costing less than the American way of doing things.

I agree with all of her logic and explanations, and thoroughly understands why she would miss all the best parts of Finnish society while being thoroughly stressed out by the craziness that Americans accept. But she does all this without explaining why the US is the way it is: a history of racism. Many American counties shutdown their public swimming pools rather than desegregate. Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Warren county chose to shutdown public schools rather than desegregate. When a people are so concerned with "the others" getting what they've been getting that they would rather their kids lose public schooling, no amount of rational pontificating is going to persuade them that giving everyone healthcare is a good idea.

When Obamacare was rolled out, liberals expected that states would expand Medicaid to help their uninsured citizens. But many states (you can guess which easily by looking at any chart of red vs blue states) chose not to expand Medicaid and decided to leave their poorest citizens (colored or white) uninsured instead.  Kansas, for instance had attempted to pass Medicaid expansion several times but failed.

Without an understanding of the history, you end up with a book like Partanen's. Completely correct, logical, and agreeable, but without explanatory power. If you don't know anything about European social democratic systems, the book's great. But if you already do, this book won't do anything for you. Read Democracy in Chains instead.

Reread: Cosmos

 I checked out Cosmos from the library in the hopes of reading it to Bowen. To say that the book and the TV series was influential in my life and shaping my thoughts as an adolescent is an under-statement. The book's telling of the story of Hypatia, for instance, has haunted my thoughts and understanding of the price scientists and truth-seekers have paid for their unswerving allegiance of the truth.  Sad to say, Bowen got bored after I read him the story of how you could use sticks to measure the size of the Earth, but I found myself getting sucked in the book again.

It's a truism that science moves on, and one would expect that books written decades ago are obsolete today, but to my surprise, Carl Sagan picked such a good job picking topics and materials that are timeless and resistant to obsolescence that the book still reads well. Perhaps the only fault I might even consider picking on is the Drake's equation, where today we know that most stars close to the center of the galaxy are likely to have been sterilized constantly by the presence of supernovas nearby and wouldn't be able to harbor life, but doing the math even reducing those numbers by a third doesn't really make a huge difference in the end result.

But what comes through even more is how poetic the book is, and how much the book is a paean to the scientific endeavor and the sense of wonder it brings:

We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. Think of the Sun’s heat on your upturned face on a cloudless summer’s day; think how dangerous it is to gaze at the Sun directly. From 150 million kilometers away, we recognize its power. What would we feel on its seething self-luminous surface, or immersed in its heart of nuclear fire? The Sun warms us and feeds us and permits us to see. It fecundated the Earth. It is powerful beyond human experience. Birds greet the sunrise with an audible ecstasy. Even some one-celled organisms know to swim to the light. Our ancestors worshiped the Sun,* and they were far from foolish. And yet the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars? Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernel of awe. (Kindle loc 4021)

Even the final chapters, written near the end of the cold war about the threat of nuclear extinction, still reads relevantly today: 

The chief danger of adopting a credible pose of irrationality is that to succeed in the pretense you have to be very good. After a while, you get used to it. It becomes pretense no longer. (Kindle loc 5400)

 If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies? From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: to preserve the lives and well-being of the citizens of the planet. Should we not then be willing to explore vigorously, in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental redesign of economic, political, social and religious institutions? (kindle loc 5452)

In today's post-truth society, the ethos of science and scientists is under attack more than ever.  But Sagan still reminds us that science is the framework that lifted civilization out of the dark ages, and that of the essential properties that have made it far different from the philosophy that came before:

it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. (Kindle loc 5516)

 In the final chapter, you can hear the pleading in Sagan's voice, begging scientists not to abandon public discourse, for fear that the story of Hypatia would become a common-place one. And today, we need it more than ever before. For me anyway, this is a much needed reminder after reading the biography of Enrico Fermi.

Recommended

Review: The Hype Machine

 I read The Hype Machine hoping to find some answers about social media and how it was used to destroy democracy. I did learn a few things, some of which you probably already knew, about the lies spreading and being more easily clicked on and read and believed than the truth:

Abnormal trading volume rose by 37 percent over the three days following the publication of real news articles and 50 percent more following the publication of fake news articles relative to real news articles. In other words, investors reacted to fake news even more strongly than to real news. The reactions were more pronounced for smaller firms and for firms with a greater percentage of retail (as opposed to institutional) investors. Fake articles were clicked on and read more often than real articles, and trading volume increased with the number of clicks and times an article was read. (Kindle loc 685)

I learned the technical term for measuring the effectiveness of a social ad, "lift", which basically measures the influence and ad has for changing your actions. This is more subtle than you might think, since for instance, an ad that's shown to you that confirms your biases and reminds you to buy something you would have bought anyway doesn't contribute to lift.

What the book does not provided are easy answers. At no point does the author Aral come to a conclusion as to whether the Russians succeeded in throwing the 2016 election to Trump. He does not that the amount of lift a campaign of that size, if targeted properly at the right voters in the right places, would decide the election:

“the proportion of misinformation was twice that of the content from experts and the candidates themselves.” When they calculated whether a state had more or less Russian fake news, they found that 12 of 16 swing states were above the average. They concluded that Russian fake news was “surprisingly concentrated in swing states, even considering the amount of political conversation occurring in the state.” Although more than 135 million votes were cast in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, six swing states (New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) were decided by margins of less than 2 percent, and 77,744 votes in three swing states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) effectively decided the election. (kindle loc 778)

He notes that a society that can converge onto the truth is wise, and clearly we do not live in such a society:

They called societies that did so “wise.” They found that a society’s network has one simple and complete characterization of wisdom—one requirement for being able to arrive at the truth. And that is that it does not have, in modern vernacular, “influencers.” As Golub and Jackson wrote, “Disproportionate popularity is the sole obstacle to wisdom….Having agents who are prominent, causes learning to fail, since their influence on the limiting beliefs is excessive.” Societies without wisdom lack “balance,” meaning some groups have disproportionately more influence than others and may not pay sufficient attention to the rest of the world. Sound familiar? This is the world we live in, where Barack Obama and Donald Trump have 110 million and 67 million Twitter followers, respectively. Where Kanye West has 30 million followers and follows 300 people. (Kindle loc 4496)

Basically, societies where a few influencers lead and a bunch of followers follow without thinking for themselves will lead to a polarized society where truth loses value and arguments are meaningless because nobody changes their minds. Unfortunately, like many researchers and media people, Aral commits the mistake of "bothsidesism" when clearly one side has gone mad while the other still has some grip on reality. 

Another interesting phenomenon is how protest movements in recent years appear to gain viral momentum only to disperse with no impact on policy or lasting change:

Zeynep Tufekci’s book Twitter and Tear Gas provides a comprehensive deep dive into how social media has changed social movements. Her thesis, backed by stacks of research, suggests that protest movements enabled by technology rise rapidly but often sputter at their zenith. At the precise moment they make headway and capture the world’s attention, they experience what Tufekci calls “tactical freeze”—an inability to adjust tactics, negotiate demands, and push for tangible policy changes. What causes tactical freeze? The rapid mobilization that the Hype Machine enables is typically accompanied by leaderless, ad hoc decision making and a shallow organization that develops without much early planning. (Kindle Loc 4769)

This is in contrast to the social movements that brought lasting change in the past, which erupted into protests only after years of organizing, training, and discussing how to bring about that change. So social media has corrupted even basic functions such as the ability to organize and protest and bring about change.

he very technology that enables protests can be co-opted by the governments they oppose. In 2019, for example, the Chinese government used disinformation on social media to disrupt the Hong Kong protests and to change the domestic and international perception of the protesters by exaggerating the harm caused to bystanders. The Chinese government is suspected of hiring as many as 2 million people to insert propaganda into social media; the political scientist and statistician Gary King and his colleagues at Harvard estimated that they fabricate and post about 448 million social media comments a year toward this end. In Russia, Putin’s allies simply took over VK and squashed protesters’ online presence. As the stories of modern protests make clear, the Hype Machine enables social mobilization but in a fragile way. (Kindle loc 4779)

Is there any hope? Aral suggests that breaking up Facebook, for instance, isn't as useful as forcing Facebook to allow competitors to reach into its network and integrate with it. This would generate true competition. In this case I think Aral commits the usual media mistake of ignoring the fact that by forcing Facebook to spinoff Instagram and WhatsApp and then implementing the forced integration API at arms length (and allowing competitors to access that same integration) would immediately also provide competition where there was none.

All in all, I think the book is worth your time --- but be careful of Aral's conclusions. I don't know if his intentions are pure (he certainly spends many words in his book promoting himself and his relationship with Facebook which enabled him to perform experiments on Facebook users at scale and collect data), but he seems altogether too protective of Facebook's monopoly for me to take anything he says at face value.

 

 

 

Review: The Price of Peace - Money, Democracy, and the life of John Maynard Keynes

 I picked up The Price of Peace thinking it was a biography of Keynes, the economist and scholar, but I got something much better, which was a biography of the man's ideas and its evolution and adoption (and lack thereof) over time.

I've long held that macroeconomics and Keynes' approach is a lot more challenging to understand than microeconomics for the same reason that quantum mechanics is a lot of more challenging than Newtonian physics. Your daily life and routines, whether as a child, householder, or manager and CEO are constrained by budgets, income, and spending. Yet at the aggregate level, those are not the constraints involved --- governments can run deficits indefinitely (and frequently do), and policy is driven largely by the sentiments of the people involved.

The key insight that Keynes brings to the equation is the debunking of money and markets as being fundamental:

Money, moreover, was not a custom developed by local traders for convenience but a sophisticated tool of rulership that had emerged simultaneously with other developments of the state, including written language and standardized weights and measures. Smith and other thinkers had been led astray by confusing the development of coinage with the invention of money. Coinage, according to Keynes, was “just a piece of bold vanity…with no far-reaching importance”;42 money had existed in “representative” form much longer. Its real significance was as a “unit of account”—the demarcation of debt and “the legal discharge of obligations,”43 which governments had been maintaining in ledger books (Kindle Loc 3623)

 Keynes thus came to see economic history as a fundamentally political story—the tale of riches conquered and surrendered by political powers as empires rose and fell. Economics, by extension, could not be a bloodless scientific investigation into unshakable laws of nature but only a set of observations about trends in human political arrangements. Economics as a field of study had to adjust to the social behavior of human beings, which might very well change over time. (Kindle Loc 3644)

The Treatise, then, was an all-out assault on the intellectual foundations of laissez-faire. There was no such thing as a free market devoid of government interference. The very idea of capitalism required active state economic management—the regulation of money and debt. Keynes had also defined the aim of economic policy: to set the foundations of an exciting intellectual culture. (Kindle Loc 3668)

One of the big ideas I took away from this book is the history and context of Keynes. It's quite clear that if democracy does not deliver rising prosperity and better standards of living due to market gyrations and machinations (which is largely driven by government policy), then usually it's not markets that lose legitimacy (people live with markets every single day!) but democracy. The rise of dictators in the period between World War 1 and World War 2 was largely because of impoverishment and the loss of legitimacy of democratic governments to solve the economic problems of the masses, rather than an inherent cultural problem with people's attitudes. (The same Germans who fought for Hitler also built an amazing post-war economy)

I found myself highlighting huge swaths of the book:

 The General Theory is a dangerous book because it demonstrates the necessity of power. It is a liberating book because it reframed the central problem at the heart of modern economics as the alleviation of inequality, pivoting away from the demands of production and the incentives facing the rich and powerful that had occupied economists for centuries. It is a frustrating book because it is written in novel abstractions, argued in convoluted sentences and dense equations. And it is a work of genius because it proves a simple truth that, once offered, seems obvious: Prosperity is not hard-wired into human beings; it must be orchestrated and sustained by political leadership. (Kindle 4868)

The material abundance of the Gilded Age had sown doubts in Keynes about the supposed scarcity of resources, but it was the ravages of the Depression that made him certain the old order had it wrong. Clearly the trouble was not a shortage of production. Crops were rotting in the fields while children went hungry in the streets. Producers were not cutting back because they couldn’t afford to meet the high wage demands of workers; laborers were roaming from town to town, desperate for any work at all. As he wrote in the opening chapter, “It is not very plausible to assert that unemployment in the United States in 1932 was due either to labour obstinately refusing to accept a reduction of money-wages or to its obstinately demanding a real wage beyond what the productivity of the economic machine was capable of furnishing.” (Kindle Loc 4927)

Creating large amounts of savings at the top of society did not bring about higher levels of investment. The causal arrow pointed the other way: Creating large amounts of investment caused higher levels of savings. And so “the removal of very great disparities of wealth and income” would improve social harmony and economic functionality. (Kindle Loc 5138)

the market, he argued, was not a reliable statement of society’s preferences, and it could not invisibly guide a polity to salvation. The market simply failed to deliver a host of real social goods that the public enjoyed, particularly art. The things that make life meaningful—beauty, community, a vibrant and multifaceted culture—all required collective, coordinated action. “Our experience has demonstrated plainly that these things cannot be successfully carried on if they depend on the motive of profit and financial success. The exploitation and incidental destruction of the divine gift of the public entertainer by prostituting it to the purposes of financial gain is one of the worser crimes of present-day capitalism.”52 (Kindle Loc 5152)

The history is also pretty good, explaining to me why the English got universal healthcare while the USA didn't (largely because Keynes was involved), and noting the conflict between American interests in the war and British interests.  There's a great discussion of the feud between Keynes and Hayek (long overblown), and clearly the success of Hayek was because he was politically acceptable to the wealthy people who wanted to fight the rise of Keynesian policy and economics.

What surprised me most about the book was that Carter didn't end the book even after Keynes death, but went on to describe the post-war purges that affected the careers of many economists and the rise of neoliberalism brought about by Clinton and Obama and their economic advisors. (Rubin, Krugman, DeLong, et al all come in for a pretty good drubbing)

The book is relevant, and has great explanatory power, even as it largely shies away from a full description of the Keynesian concepts, does provide an excellent roadmap to the delegitimization of democracy we've seen in the past 2 decades. The lessons are pretty clear - either policy has to be developed that raises the standard of living for all Americans rather than the top 1%, or more of what happened in 2016/2020 will continue to happen. You need to read this book.

In 2008, Joseph Stiglitz calculated that if the $48 trillion global economy were simply divided among every one of its inhabitants, a family of four would receive $28,000, high enough to end poverty in every country, including the United States, with its relatively high cost of living.39 In 2018, with an $85.8 trillion economy and 7.5 billion people, the global economy produces $11,440 per person, more than $45,000 for a family of four. The economic problem of humanity is no longer a problem of production but of distribution—inequality. (Kindle Loc 9706)

The European Central Bank and the IMF, in cooperation with the government of German chancellor Angela Merkel, demanded that countries in crisis reduce their budget deficits through fiscal austerity, inducing devastating recessions in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and most famously Greece. The economic ruin brought about by that project—the destruction of local industry, soaring unemployment, stingier social safety nets—has energized neofascist political parties, which now threaten the political establishment in some countries and have been effectively absorbed into mainstream conservatism in others. From Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Italy’s Matteo Salvini to France’s Marine Le Pen to the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson to America’s Donald Trump, this is an era of far-right demagoguery unseen since the 1930s. (Kindle Loc 9721) 

Why has Keynesianism proven to be so politically weak, even among ostensibly liberal political parties and nations? The Keynesian bargain of peace, equality, and prosperity ought to be irresistible in a democracy. It has instead been fleeting and fragile. Keynes believed that democracies slipped into tyranny when they were denied economic sustenance. Why, then, have so many democracies elected to deny themselves economic sustenance? 

Perhaps the type of social change he envisioned can be achieved only through the moral quagmire of revolution that he ardently hoped to avoid. Certainly the American experience does not inspire confidence. The greatest American victories for democracy and equality—the end of slavery in the nineteenth century and the defeat of fascism in the twentieth—came at the end of a gun. This is a dark time for democracy—a statement that would have been unthinkable to U.S. and European leaders only a few short years ago. It took decades of mismanagement and unlearning to manufacture this global crisis, and it cannot be undone with a few new laws or elections. (Kindle Loc 9728-9736)

Review: Post-Truth

 Mike Sojka recommended Post-Truth as a quick short read that explains the Trump era. It is indeed a quick read and covers many topics of interest to current events, tying them together in ways that I've never seen before.

The book was published in 2018, so it covers the events of the 2016 election, but predates the existence of COVID19. McIntyre points out that the era of news being supposed to be accurate is actually an anamoly:

for most of its history the news media has been partisan. Pamphlets were political. Newspapers had owners with business interests and other biases. Indeed, has this ever really changed? Yet we feel entitled to objectivity and are shocked when our news sources do not provide it. But have we been supporting this expectation of fact-based nonpartisan coverage with our dollars? Or really—before the election woke us up—even paid close attention to what was being lost? It is easy to blame technology and claim that “these days it is different.” But technology has always had a role in fake news. (Kindle Loc 1540)

 He points out that the blatant lies being told by the Republican side isn't about misinformation per se:

the goal of propaganda is to build allegiance.42 The point is not to communicate information but to get us to “pick a team.”43 To the extent that Trump is using some of the classic techniques of propaganda (stirring up emotions, denigrating critics, scapegoating, seeking division, and fabricating), Stanley warns that we may be headed down the path of authoritarian politics. The goal of propaganda is not to convince someone that you are right, but to demonstrate that you have authority over the truth itself. When a political leader is really powerful, he or she can defy reality. This may sound incredible, but it is not the first time we have heard echoes of this even within American politics. Remember when Karl Rove dismissed critics of the George W. Bush administration as part of the “reality-based community”? Rove then followed up with the memorable (and chilling) observation that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. (Kinde Loc. 1639)

McIntyre also traces the history of how the media fell into the trap set by the conservatives, by  giving equal time on the air to both sides as though there's any legitimacy to the anti-science movement (intelligent design, anti-vax, and now public health):

it serves the interest of those who are engaging in deception to succumb to the idea of false equivalence. When we say “a pox on all your houses” we are playing right into the hands of those who would have us believe that there is no such thing as truth. (Kindle loc 1693)

He even tracks back the post-truth era to the post-modernist attack on science in the form of science wars. Now, my personal belief is that the scientists won a resounding victory in the science wars after Alan Sokal definitively showed that post-modernist criticism is intellectual garbage, but the techniques used by the post-modernists were then quickly adopted by the right wing in its approach to confusing the public about "Intelligent Design" and then later on, the Anti-Vax movement.

Is there any hope of exiting the post-Truth era back to an environment in which truth is valued and there's a shared understanding of facts? McIntyre offers some hope:

The media stopped telling “both sides of the story” about vaccines and autism once there was a measles outbreak in fourteen states in 2015. All of a sudden, the facts of Wakefield’s fraud made better copy. One could almost see the TV hosts’ anxiety over their earlier complicity. Overnight, there were no more split-screen TV debates between experts and skeptics. False equivalence no longer seemed like such a good idea once people started getting hurt. (Kindle Loc 2436)

 empirical evidence suggests that the repetition of true facts does eventually have an effect. Recall here the research of David Redlawsk et al., which we briefly discussed in chapter 3.8 In the subtitle of their paper, they ask the pertinent question, “do motivated reasoners ever get it?” They acknowledge the work of Nyhan, Reifler, and others who have shown that those in the grips of partisan bias are strongly motivated to reject evidence that is dissonant with their beliefs, sometimes even leading to a “backfire effect.” But are there any limits to this?...although misinformed beliefs can be quite stubborn, it is possible to change partisans’ minds when one “hits them between the eyes” over and over with factually correct information.11 It may not be easy to convince people with inconvenient facts, but it is apparently possible. (Kindle Loc 2452-2465)

Unfortunately, as noted above, this book was written pre-COVID.  In the light of recent news reports about how COVID19 patients deny the existence of the coronovirus right until death, I'm not nearly as optimistic as McIntyre is. But at the very least, McIntyre points out that you cannot allow a lie to persist unchallenged, and that's something we need to do more of. It seems that Randall  Munroe was right after all: