A passage from Part 6, chapter 18 of Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminds me of more than one person I met during my years in Washington:
The visitor was Bitski, who served on various committees, frequented all the societies in Petersburg, and a passionate devotee of the new ideas and of Speranski, and a diligent Petersburg newsmonger—one of those men who choose their opinions like their clothes according to the fashion, but who for that very reason appear to be the warmest partisans.
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Posted in Books, Literature, Political Animals, Uncategorized
Peter Moore – Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World
The Endeavour is the famous ship that discovered Australia under Captain James Cook. This book tells the story of the ship, rather than that voyage. Cook’s voyage was not the Endeavour’s first. It began life in 1764 as a private ship named the Earl of Pembroke, and was purchased by the British Royal Navy in 1768.
Cook’s voyage is the meat of book. Moore tells the story well, though his purple prose sometimes borders on the ridiculous. As long as the reader doesn’t take Moore too seriously as a prose stylist, he is an excellent narrative historian. The Australian voyage has its ups and downs, and the ship’s near-destruction on the Great Barrier Reef is especially gripping. Moore also gives ample time to describing what Maori life was like around the time Cook put in his appearance, and how strange it was for both cultures when they met for the first time. Primary source descriptions of the wildlife they encountered and how Cook’s crew dealt with them are another strength of the book.
Cook’s journey was not the end of the Endeavour. After returning to England, the ship made voyages under less famous crews to the Falkland Islands. It also, surprisingly, saw action in the Revolutionary War on the British side. By this time Endeavour was an old ship, and not exactly a desirable assignment. Even after undergoing extensive repairs and another name change, to the Lord Sandwich, it was still no prize It was still able to sail across the Atlantic, but ended up being intentionally scuttled off the Rhode Island coast in an unsuccessful attempt to blockade the Americans. Its wreckage is still in a cluster somewhere near Newport harbor.
Richard P. Feynman – The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
Feynman’s view on women are, shall we say, rather dated. And some of the material also appears in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”. But this collection of speeches and articles has both entertainment value and educational value. Feynman valued working smart as much as he did working hard, and he had some ingenious shortcuts, as well as shortcuts for finding mental shortcuts. His views on pedagogy and education are also refreshingly open-minded. Some structure is good, but too much does harm.
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Christopher Hibbert – The Borgias and Their Enemies, 1431–1519
A history of the Renaissance family famous for its corruption, intrigue, and decadence. It begins with papacy’s move from Avignon back to Rome, but mostly as a setup for all the naughty bits that would happen once the Borgias became cardinals and popes. Their rise was somewhat improbable; the Borgias were originally from Castilian Spain, and nearly all popes were expected to be Italian.
Beyond those notes, Hibbert doesn’t take a great deal of interest in the Borgia’s greater historical context and significance. He does note that the Borgias gave commissions to famous artists including Botticelli. The Medici family and the religious fanatic Savonarola put in cameos; they were not on good terms with the Borgias.
Hibbert is instead more interested in the Borgias themselves, and one can see why. Politics, simony, sex, murder, incest allegations, orgies, corruption, bribes, illegitimate children, and more provide plenty of page-turning stories. Hibbert might have gone further in developing the personalities and motivations that animated the famous triumvirate of Rodrigo, Cesare, and Lucrezia. Why did they act as they did? How did they fit into the larger picture of Renaissance Italy? Did they help or hinder its achievements? Did their antics play a role in fomenting the Reformation’s reactions against papal excess? Readers will have to look elsewhere for anything beyond passing stabs at these deeper questions.
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Posted in Books, History, Uncategorized
Steve Brusatte – The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
A history of the dinosaurs organized chronologically rather than by theme, and in my opinion, better than Brian Switek’s still-quite-good My Beloved Bronosaurus. Brusatte shares Switek’s mostly endearing fanboy enthusiasm for his subject, and recounts a few stories of meeting and even working with some of his idols.
Brusatte traces dinosaurs’ origins back to the Permian extinction, and more clearly differentiates the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. One thing that comes out of chronological approach is that evolution doesn’t have a clear direction. Things change, but not necessarily for better or worse over time.
The Jurassic’s apex predator was the Allosaurus, and the Cretaceous’ was the Tyrannosaurus Rex. They had their differences, and Brusatte does an excellent job describing them, and tracing back their family tree—they are more cousins than a direct lineage. T-Rex’s direct ancestor was likely a mid-Jurassic dinosaur that weighed about 100 pounds, and grew into its niche after the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary created an opening for a large apex predator.
Another fun insight has to do with dinosaur breathing. The large sauropods such as the diplodocus, brachiosaurs, and Argentine titanosaurs could exceed 100 feet in length and required an enormous amount of energy. Not just to maintain their bulk, but to grow it. It likely took just 30 or 40 years for a sauropod to reach full size. By contrast, humans can take nearly 20 years to grow from a similar starting point to perhaps 6 feet. This required eating about 100 pounds of food every day, which required a massive, and efficient respiratory system to provide enough oxygen to burn all that fuel and power the digestive system—all while constantly providing enough oxygen for cells from head-to-tail.
Rather than lungs such as we and smaller dinosaurs share, sauropods evolved a different kind of lung found in today’s birds. We breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Sauropod and bird lungs extract oxygen on the inhale as well, but extract a second round of oxygen on the exhale as well, making them more efficient. This allowed sauropods to meet their needs. This design is also lightweight, which is why birds use it—it’s easier to fly with less cargo.
Sauropod bones were also relatively less dense. While not hollow, they did feature hollow chambers and air pockets inside—not quite like a honeycomb structure seen in high-tech aircraft material designs, but serving the same purpose of preserving strength while minimizing weight. If giant lumbering sauropod dinosaurs had not evolved adaptations to their niche in both respiration and bone structure, today’s graceful hummingbirds may never have evolved as we know them.
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Ian Kershaw – The Global Age: Europe 1950-2017
Kershaw is best known as a historian of Nazi Germany, and the author of the definitive two-volume Hitler biography. More recently, he has turned his focus to modern Europe more generally. This book concludes a two-part series. The first, gloomier half is To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949; this volume is rather sunnier.
Major themes early in the book include the fall of the Iron Curtain and rapid nuclear armament, along with all the tension and unease those developments caused. I was previously unaware of the scale of post-war migration to escape socialism. East Germany lost about 2 million people to West Germany during the 1950s, with an average of 2,300-2,400 people escaping daily until the Berlin Wall was finished in 1961.
As the book goes on, the reader realizes how deep the scars of 20th century’s first-half tumult run. The very reason for the formation of the European Community and its various iterations on up to the European Union was to prevent another world war. In line with thinkers from Montesquieu in the 18th century on up to Cordell Hull in the 20th, have argued, close trade and economic ties help to maintain peace. Economic integration will make war so costly that no country would dare attempt another round of Napoleonic conquest or, more to the point, a Third Reich.
This argument is deeply felt throughout the continent at a visceral level, something most American observers don’t see. The EU’s agricultural and regulatory policies have few defenders, but then those aren’t the EU’s raison d’etre. Understanding that dynamic is essential to understanding the Brexit debate and other debates about the EU’s future. It does not hinge on a socialism-vs.-markets debate. For most of the debate’s participants, it is instead about nationalism-vs.-cosmopolitanism, or more fundamentally, how best to prevent another World War II.
Even the Cold War was largely an echo of World War II. Most of the continent was overtaken by one of two forms of totalitarianism; communism just happened to be the one that lasted longer. In the post-war Stalin and Khrushchev years, the Soviet bloc was a feared nuclear enemy, requiring NATO and extensive U.S. involvement to keep it at bay.
But as time went on, Brezhnev-era political sclerosis took its toll while the more market-oriented West grew. The Soviet threat became gradually less scary and less stable. By the Gorbachev era, the thinking went from how to deal with nuclear fallout to how to deal with the political and economic fallout from communism’s coming collapse. An American reader might see the Europe-Russia relationship under Yeltsin as a little bit like the dynamic between the Griswold family and Uncle Eddie in the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies.
Kershaw is more of a political historian than a social one, so everyday life for ordinary European people is not the focus here. Music, fashion trends, and art are mostly cordoned off into separate short chapters throughout the book, roughly one per decade. If you want to know what it was like to live there during this period, go elsewhere. But Kershaw is excellent at identifying larger historical themes and seeing how they interact and play out. Kershaw is also a talented prose stylist; this book reads quickly and easily enough for the reader to forgive its 700-page length.
Kershaw also clearly lacks substantive background in economics. He shows this in his frequent use of the term “neo-liberal,” which has no coherent definition. It is nearly always used as a pejorative, though Kershaw’s usage ranges from neutral to mildly negative, further adding to the confusion. In discussing trade issues, Kershaw adheres to the balance of payments fallacy, which would flunk him out of a freshman introductory economics course.
He also does not grasp that John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman’s differing monetary policies share a common conception of the quantity theory of money. They part ways on the ought, not so much the is. In addition, Kershaw cites Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom as Friedman’s statement on monetary theory. That book contains just one chapter out of thirteen on monetary issues. Friedman’s 800-page Monetary History of the United States, coauthored with Anna Schwartz, was his definitive work, the leading cause of his Nobel Prize, and is hardly obscure.
So long as one takes Kershaw’s attempts at economic theory and policy analysis as seriously as they deserve, this is an excellent survey of a neglected area of history that is impacting everything from today’s Brexit debate to trade relations with the United States to how Europe will deal with the rise of China as a major power.
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Posted in Books, History, International, Uncategorized
Tyler Cowen – Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
Big businesses are not perfect, and Cowen gives several examples. This is not a hagiography. Instead, Cowen argues that most people underestimate the amount of good that big businesses do. They make possible affordable communications, books, culture and art (and the supplies needed to make them), transportation that expands employment options for workers, safe and diverse food supplies, architecture, and more. As with many of Cowen’s books, it reads quickly and easily, almost a little too much so. When he offers the occasional insight, take a minute longer than he does to ponder it. This has been received as the prolific Cowen’s best book in some time, and I agree with the sentiment.
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Posted in Antitrust, Books, Economics, Uncategorized
David Neumark and William L. Wascher – Minimum Wages
A comprehensive literature review covering more than 100 studies. Neumark and Wascher also discuss findings in their own work. Overall, they find that minimum wages have small disemployment effects. As a poverty relief measure, they are also not as effective as other measures such as straight cash or the Earned Income Tax Credit. In part this is because minimum wages often miss their intended target; many minimum wage earners are disproportionately young people who still live with their parents in households well above the poverty level. Minimum wages also increase inequality among low earners. People who keep their jobs often get a modest raise. But companies will dump their lowest-skilled workers and take on fewer part-time workers, which includes many women with young children who want to help make ends meet. They find similar effects in reviewing research on other countries including Canada, the UK, Mexico, Brazil, and much of Latin America.
Surprisingly for such a thorough book, Neumark and Wascher leave out a long list of non-wage tradeoffs that come with minimum wages. They address hour cuts, hiring freezes, price increases, lower profits, and unintended income distributions. But they mostly leave out benefit cuts, workplace conditions, stricter break and vacation policies, job perks such as employee discounts, free parking and meals, and other possible tradeoffs. These are difficult to measure with any method besides surveys, which are notoriously unreliable. As a result, there is little to no empirical research on these tradeoffs, even though economists, legislators, and pop culture have acknowledged their existence for decades.
As result, most minimum wage literature focuses on employment, which is easier to measure. It is also the most drastic tradeoff employers can make, which is why they go to great lengths to avoid doing it, preferring other tradeoffs that are unfortunately harder for outside researchers to measure. This “tyranny of metrics” effect has lowered the quality of the minimum wage debate on both sides.
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Posted in Books, Economics, Minimum Wage, Uncategorized
Gabriel García Márquez – Love in the Time of Cholera
Compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude, this book has a much lighter feel. It is almost like a farce at times, though a little more jaded. A a mix of bemused weariness with a touch of nostalgia might be a better description. The book’s lack of epic drama, heartbreak, and tragedy stands in intentional contrast to its title. Marquez had plenty of gray hairs by the time he wrote this book, and he looks on the younger characters’ passions with a bit of an “I remember those times, but don’t always miss them” kind of smile. In line with Márquez’s famous magical realist style, lovesickness in this book is sometimes literal, manifesting itself as a physical illness with symptoms similar to cholera.
The main characters are a young couple who part before they can marry, and a young doctor who the woman meets afterwards and has a loving, mostly happy marriage with. Fifty years later, after the doctor/husband passes away, the former couple, now elderly, meet again. He claims to have stayed loyal to her all that time, but this turns out not be true—and how.
Much of the book recounts the various romantic foibles the three had throughout their lives, some serious and some not, with a mix of amusement and wistfulness. A particularly amusing character is a parrot who taunts the doctor. An excellent example of Márquez’s brand of magical realism, the parrot sometimes talks as though he understands what the doctor is saying and is capable of holding human-level conversation, but other times seems like an ordinary bird.
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Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children of Ruin
A big part of the process of modernity is widening one’s circle of concern. People have always looked out for themselves and their family. As trade grew, people’s circle widened from the tribe to include one’s trading partners, whether in a farm-and-village dynamic or including long distance traders. As the scale widened, people had to be more accepting of people who dressed differently, spoke different languages, and worshipped different gods. The process is not over. In the last 70 years or so, the circle of concern has grown to address racism, homophobia, transgender rights, and more. The proper size of one’s circle of concern is at the heart of today’s debates over issues such as LGBT rights, trade, and immigration. Animal rights activists are even trying to expand the circle of concern to other species.
What does the circle of concern have to do with a science fiction novel? A lot. In Children of Time, the first book in this series, a botched attempt at seeding an alien planet with Earth life leads to an advanced civilization of spiders and ants, instead of the intended apes (a literal barrel of monkeys burns up while entering the atmosphere). The nanovirus-enhanced intelligent spiders and humans eventually become allies, widening their circles of concern to include two very different sentient species.
This book is the sequel; I do not know if further volumes are planned in the series. It introduces a race of nanovirus-enhanced octopi as well as an alien life form that is something like a slime mold. Where the first volume was evolution-themed, this volume is about psychology and consciousness. It is more interested in exploring and understanding how different species think, feel, and communicate. It as though Tchaikovsky is expanding Adam Smith’s circle of concern as broadly as he possibly can, and seeing what happens.
Tchaikovsky’s spiders communicate through vibration and touch, and are unable to hear human speech. Both spiders and humans come up with all kinds of translators and ways to understand each other, and though their friendships are sincere, some differences are too vast for them to comprehend. Also of interest is the spiders’ own gender disparity, in which males are discriminated against and discounted as inferior, mirroring our own species’ issues. The spiders have even been making progress in recent generations, with male spiders advancing to prominent scientific research positions, though workplace politics are touchy.
The stars of this book are nanovirus enhanced octopi, who ancient humans seeded on one of two habitable planets in a different star system than the spider planet from the first book. Tchakivsky researched the subject, and the octopi in his book are impulsive, emotional, factional, and quick to change their minds as their emotions explore different sides of an issue. Not being able to use speech like humans or vibrations like spiders, octopi instead communicate by changing colors. Different feelings are automatically expressed in different colorations, which they are unable to hide. They almost literally wear their emotions on their sleeve, and their intellectual deliberations are plainly visible.
Also putting in a turn is an alien life form with a collective consciousness, kind of like an intelligent slime mold or a bacteria with a long collective memory and the ability to interface with and control other organisms. This lets Tchaikovsky explore a whole other form of consciousness, of which we don’t have any examples on Earth.
The plot throws these very different consciousnesses together and lets them try to sort out who is on who’s side, how to overcome communication barriers, and try to come to some kind of understanding. The extent to which they can succeed requires a circle of concern rather greater than most people on Earth have today.
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Posted in Books, Literature, Philosophy
Inertia Wins! 