Category Archives: Books

David Quammen – The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

Posted on April 9, 2019 | Comments Off on David Quammen – The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

David Quammen – The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

A book on evolution that is causing some waves. In standard Darwinian evolution, genetic traits and mutations are passed on to the next generation only if they affect gametes—sperm and eggs. This is called vertical evolution. A mutation in someone’s skin cells, for example, is non-heritable. Lamarckian evolution, long since disproved, posited that such things could, in fact, be passed on. Some Lamarckians even posited that things like memories or learned aversions could be genetically passed on from one organism to another.

This turned out not to be true. But as scientists are now discovering, there actually is a mechanism for genetic change during the same generation, and a way to pass genetic information horizontally from one cell or organism to another during the same generation, rather than vertically through the generations. This is not Lamarckian evolution in the old sense, but it is conceptually related.

The key to this horizontal evolution is in the large swathes of junk DNA in every organism’s genomes. These lengthy patches don’t activate any traits or seem to do anything. A few do, but most don’t. The new thinking, since 1980 or so and still being tested, is that much of our junk DNA, though not all of it, does not come from mutations. It comes from retroviruses that invade cells and merge with local DNA.

This happens all the time throughout the body. Such mergers are usually genetic gibberish and do nothing. But occasionally the additional code can accidentally cause new characteristics to emerge. But these aren’t passed on to descendants unless they happen to hit the lottery by merging not just with a gamete, but the rare gamete that ends up being fertilized. Despite odds of less than one-in-a-trillion-trillion, these lightning strikes have happened often enough that retroviral junk DNA makes up a sizable portion of every plant and every animal’s genetic code, though the process has taken about two billion years. It’s a good the odds of this happening are so small, otherwise our DNA would be almost endless by this point!

This revelation, especially as concerns non-gamete cells, may someday have significant medical applications, from HIV treatment to cancer. The line between viral diseases and genetic diseases may be a blurry one. But it is too soon to tell, and Quammen could go a bit further in tamping down speculation. Lamarck isn’t vindicated, but he wasn’t entirely wrong, either.

Quammen explains, far better than I can, that this discovery has profound implications for our place in the tree of life, and even the very shape that tree takes. All life is even more deeply interconnected than we already thought. Quammen also tells the story of how this theory of horizontal evolution was thought to be quackery just a few years ago, but is rapidly becoming mainstream thinking among evolutionary biologists. Much of the research happened in Wisconsin, where I was born, and in Illinois, where I now live, which is a nice little coincidence.

Note, however, that horizontal evolution does not displace traditional natural selection over generations. It adds to it.

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Posted in Books, Science

Unintended Consequences of Voting

Posted on April 8, 2019 | Comments Off on Unintended Consequences of Voting

From p. 92 of Randall Holcombe’s 2018 book Political Capitalism: How Political Influence Is Made and Maintained:

Voting is the best way, from the elite’s standpoint, for the masses to participate, because each individual vote has essentially no impact on the outcome of an election, so voters are provided with the illusion that their participation determines the election outcome, which reinforces the perceived legitimacy of government.

Voting has practically no impact on policy outcomes. Even small local elections rarely have one-vote margins where a given person’s vote would be decisive. It’s so rare that it makes the news when it does happen. Voting’s instrumental value requires many decimal places to accurately express. But voting does have significant expressive value.

People genuinely feel good about participating in democracy, and get value from signaling their participation to others. Some people also get value from shaming people who do not vote. There is nothing wrong with most of that. But most people would benefit from a more accurate understanding of how much a person’s vote impacts election and policy outcomes. As Holcombe points out, this would make people less easily mollified by reform agendas that end at lip service.

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Posted in Books, Elections, Political Animals, Uncategorized

The Trouble with Bureaucracies Isn’t Recklessness

Posted on April 5, 2019 | Comments Off on The Trouble with Bureaucracies Isn’t Recklessness

A brilliant observation from p. 359 of Frank Knight’s 1921 book Risk, Profit, and Uncertainty:

The real trouble with bureaucracies is not that they are rash, but the opposite. When not actually rotten with dishonesty and corruption they universally show a tendency to “play safe” and become hopelessly conservative. The great danger to be feared from a political control of economic life under ordinary conditions is not a reckless dissipation of the social resources so much as the arrest of progress and the vegetation of life.

The last century or so has proven Knight correct, on everything from the precautionary principle being applied to chemical and environmental regulations, to risk assessment of new products, to much of what OSHA and CPSC do, to government dietary guidelines, to the larger nanny state movement.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Nanny State, Uncategorized

Dalton Trumbo – Johnny Got His Gun

Posted on April 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Dalton Trumbo – Johnny Got His Gun

Dalton Trumbo – Johnny Got His Gun

The protagonist wakes up to find that he cannot see or hear. He is unable to move beyond slightly wiggling his body, but he is not paralyzed. He soon figures out he has also lost both arms and both legs. He cannot walk, or hold or touch anything. He can feel that he is also missing his nose and most of his jaw. He cannot smell, taste, eat, or speak. He is being fed through a tube, and can feel that his face is being hidden by a mask. It sometimes itches, but he cannot scratch it, or ask anyone else to. He does not remember how he got wounded. His last memories are of combat during World War I, but doesn’t remember being in imminent danger before waking up.

The whole book is his train of thought as he figures out his situation. He oscillates between wakefulness and dreams—most vividly when he feels the pain of his still-healing side wound being gnawed at by a furry, wriggling rat. The pain, helplessness, and terror he felt seemed absolutely real. But he later believes this was just a dream, and sticks to that story.

Now and then he thinks back to his childhood and teenage years in Colorado. He once accidentally broke his father’s prized fishing rod as a boy. His father, a good man, took it well and soothed the child’s dread. When he grew old enough to work, he took to outdoor jobs a long train ride away, and met a girl he wanted to marry, taking the train back home to visit her when he could sneak away.

He has no way of telling whether weeks, months, or even years have passed in his new state. He does not what country he is in. France? England? Somewhere back in America? He does not know if his family knows what happened to him, if they have visited, or if his girlfriend has moved on. He does not know if his body was able to be identified. He learns to tell by feeling vibrations from footsteps when nurses come and go, and can even tell them apart by gait.

Near the end of the book he learns to communicate in Morse code by nodding his head in dots and dashes, and feeling dot-and-dash pats in response on his torso. His doctors or nurses, or whoever is looking after him, inform him they cannot do what he asks, because it would be against regulations.

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Posted in Books, Literature

Roger Koppl – Expert Failure

Posted on April 4, 2019 | Comments Off on Roger Koppl – Expert Failure

Roger Koppl – Expert Failure

Koppl uses the role of experts to explain the difference between approaching social problems from the top down, versus from the bottom up. Koppl defines an expert as anyone who is paid for their opinion. This is not tied to any credential, degree, affiliation, or any objective measure of knowledge. If someone sees fit to pay you for your opinion on something, you’re an expert on that something. For Koppl, experts play a crucial role in the economy and in the political process. But they should not be given too much power.

One way to do this is through competition. Experts should not be given a monopoly or any guild-like structure that limits competition. Certifications and credentials are useful, and they rightfully impact an expert’s perceived credibility. But they should not be mandatory; schooling and education are often very different things. Allowing an open competitive process in markets for experts will help the fields evolve the best way to signal credibility, and as knowledge and professional consensus evolve, send out the old in favor of the new. This brings to mind the stuffy old adage about science advancing one funeral at a time.

Koppl also offers a quality intellectual history not just of expertise from a bottom-up perspective, but the entire spontaneous order tradition from Bernard “Fable of the Bees” Mandeville’s cynicism to Adam Smith’s idealism, to Hayek’s wide-ranging advancements in emergent order theory. Not the easiest read, but sticking with it pays large dividends.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Philosophy

Alexandre Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo

Posted on April 3, 2019 | Comments Off on Alexandre Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo

The classic tale of revenge. I’ve been making an effort to read more literature, and Dumas is a natural author to include in that project. He was one of the most popular novelists of his day, basically the equivalent of Stephen King or John Grisham in ours. This novel has some cheesy moments, the characters aren’t particularly nuanced, and plausibility is not its strong suit. But the imagery, atmosphere, and sense of adventure make up for it. This isn’t King Lear, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s more about feeling and spirit than being highbrow.

Like many novels of its day, The Count of Monte Cristo was first published in serial format. Asu such, it has more cliffhangers and sudden reveals and plot twists than one would expect in a more deliberately constructed narrative. But its famous scenes are famous for good reason. And now I get many cultural references I did not before, which is another plus.

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Posted in Books, Literature

Alexander Solzhenitsyn – In the First Circle

Posted on April 2, 2019 | Comments Off on Alexander Solzhenitsyn – In the First Circle

Alexander Solzhenitsyn – In the First Circle

Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is about a nationwide prison camp system, the gulag, with millions of prisoners that persisted for decades. His most famous story, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is the story of one solitary prisoner over a single day. In the First Circle sits in the between. It is about a small group of zeks, or political prisoners, in a relatively cushy camp outside Moscow.

In the First Circle‘s title is an allusion to Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which reserves the first circle of hell for good people who predated Christ or otherwise didn’t fit into the Christian worldview. Its residents are spared the tortures of the inner circles, but they are in hell nonetheless. The zeks are well aware that they have comforts that prisoners in Kolyma or Lublanka could only dream of. They are still miserable. Regular references to banned literature such as Dumas comingles with dreary Soviet prison routines in a way that perfectly illustrates this tension between privilege and imprisonment.

The First Circle is fiction, but heavily autobiographical. Solzhenitsyn was a gulag survivor, and the protagonist is modeled after himself. The most heartbreaking scenes are during the family visits between separated prisoners and their wives and children. They are just a few miles apart, close enough to have monthly visits. Yet the distance between them is so great the zeks might as well be in Siberia. One couple even contemplates divorce because a zek’s pariah status stains his wife’s social standing and career opportunities.

There isn’t much in the way of plot, but that isn’t the point of the book. It focuses more on the distance, and longing, the mingled joy and sorrow of small comforts, and the pointless rules and cruelties that have become these men’s lives. Solzhenitsyn also gives chapters to the zeks’ wives and children, and Stalin himself even puts in an unflattering appearance, which was unprecedented when this book was published.

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Posted in Books, History, Literature, Uncategorized

Frank Knight on Behavioral Economics

Posted on March 29, 2019 | Comments Off on Frank Knight on Behavioral Economics

Or at least it nudgier side. This is from nearly a century ago, long before the current behavioral economics field began. Knight, like any good economist, agrees with behavorialists in rejecting perfect rationality as a reliable guide to human behavior. But behavioralists go too far when they move from is to should.

From p. 182 of 1921’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit:

A large part of the critics’ strictures on the existing system come down to protests against the individual wanting what he wants instead of what is good for him, of which the critic is to be the judge; and the critic does not feel himself called upon to outline any standards other than his own preferences upon a basis of which judgment is to be passed.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Uncategorized

Robert H. Bork – The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself

Posted on March 29, 2019 | Comments Off on Robert H. Bork – The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself

Robert H. Bork – The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself

Probably the most influential book ever written on antitrust policy, though it has its flaws. I analyze several of its arguments in an upcoming paper; I’ll try to remember to update this post with a link when the paper is out.

From its Progressive Era beginnings, antitrust law was dominated by lawyers who disdained economics, and it showed in the quality of their policies and court decisions. During the Depression and the New Deal, President Roosevelt mostly abandoned antitrust law in favor of government-approved, or even government-managed cartels, in a similar disregard of economics. This model was mostly abandoned after World War II, when regulators resumed antitrust enforcement. Prosecutions reached record levels by the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Around that time, a new law and economics movement was underway, especially at the University of Chicago. Bork was one of many scholars who were part of it, along with Aaron Director, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, Richard Posner, and many others. They proposed, instead of attacking the Brandeisian “Curse of Bigness,” moving to a consumer welfare standard. Under this thinking, big isn’t automatically bad. Antitrust measures should only be taken if it can be proven that a company is causing consumer harm. Bork wasn’t the first to make this argument, but he was the most influential, and The Antitrust Paradox remains the most widely cited book on the subject, by friend and foe alike (this writer is somewhere in between).

Bork and other consumer welfare standard advocates, while an improvement over Brandeisian populism, don’t get everything right, at least in my view. Better to get rid of bad policies altogether than simply use them less frequently, as Bork favors. But his compendium of case law, economic reasoning, and legal history is immensely useful regardless of one’s priors. While not the breeziest of reads, Bork does occasionally show some flashes of wit, such as when he compares the Robinson-Patman Act’s attempt to control prices to a baseball player who might be a lousy hitter, but balances it out by also being a poor defender.

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Posted in Antitrust, Books, Economics, Law, Uncategorized

Sarah E. Bond – Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean

Posted on March 28, 2019 | Comments Off on Sarah E. Bond – Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean

Sarah E. Bond – Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean

It reads like a dry Ph.D thesis, but interesting nonetheless. Roman commercial taboos mostly centered around the body. Actors and singers had low social status not for being lowbrow, but because they were selling their bodily abilities for money. Even town criers were held in social contempt for selling their voices. Funeral workers were disdained for handling dead bodies—though this pre-germ theory taboo probably made sense for public health. Tanners’ dirty work—leathermaking process involved urine—kept them in low esteem. Moneymakers, in particular the workers who physically smelted and minted the coins were in a weird place, simultaneously shunned and held close to the emperor, and were forbidden to marry women from higher social classes. Cooks and other food workers were also held at arm’s length. They were still necessary, especially the ones who worked for the upper classes Bakers had especially low status, for the more pleasure their food gave, the more disdain they were given.

This ancient, nearly universal disdain for commerce ties into Deirdre McCloskey’s thesis about what caused modern prosperity. Cultures that disdain commerce and wealth remain poor. Those that value it prosper. The particular values and taboos vary from place to place, and there is a large subjective element—some of Rome’s seem strange to us, just as ours would seem strange to them.

But negative views of such earthly things as money and bodies had predictable results. While rich for its time due to its large trading network, Roman per capita GDP was roughly one thirtieth of today’s, and the pace of technological improvement was slow. Roman body taboos likely played into its disregard for individual human beings, from the Roman legions’ harsh discipline to gladiatorial combat to astonishingly high levels of everyday violence.

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Posted in Books, Economics, History, Uncategorized