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| 0060929170
| 9780060929176
| B00A2KEDKQ
| 4.26
| 613
| Dec 1997
| Jan 01, 1998
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it was amazing
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This history book is the great man theory of history taken to the extreme, perhaps the ultimate example of trying to understand a country through the
This history book is the great man theory of history taken to the extreme, perhaps the ultimate example of trying to understand a country through the lives of its leaders from the conquistadors to the 1990s. While Mexico is right next door to us, as a Texan I only learned of its history very tangentially, via compressed descriptions of Santa Anna and elementary school trips to the Alamo. Krause presents Mexico as both a parallel nation to the United States in its efforts to forge a distinct identity from a multi-ethnic population, as well as its own unique world in how its rulers attempted to ride or direct the currents of ideology according to their own interpretations of the national destiny (which coincidentally often overlapped their own destiny). I actually learned about major figures like Santa Anna, Benito Juarez, Profirio Diaz, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and more in the context of their goals and backgrounds, along with how they related to each other. While there is not much in the way of descriptive statistics here, that is an extremely minor complaint given that this is a series of biographies; the only real gripe I have is that the book is nearly 30 years old and I would love to see a current edition covering the post-PRI era. After finishing this book, I think it is almost criminal that Americans aren't given a better understanding of Mexican history, especially as the demographics of our countries become ever more closely entwined, and the unfortunate tendency of presidential power towards caudillismo makes a clearer place for itself in our politics as well.
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| 069120862X
| 9780691208626
| 069120862X
| 4.16
| 250
| May 23, 2023
| May 23, 2023
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it was amazing
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This is probably the best single-volume history of Chilean economic policy from Allende onwards out there. A half-century after Pinochet's coup on Sep
This is probably the best single-volume history of Chilean economic policy from Allende onwards out there. A half-century after Pinochet's coup on September 11th, 1973, his ensuing horrific military dictatorship in Chile is typically only ever referenced in the US in the context of someone vaguely complaining about neoliberalism, that most all-encompassing yet indescribable of modern political typologies. I love pointless definitional debates about what that term "really" means as much as the next guy, but every once in a while it's nice to step back, put the nitpicky logomachia on hold, and reflect on what actually happened: how what had formerly been an unexceptional middle-of-the-road Latin American backwater dodged the twin threats of both a socialist meltdown and brutal authoritarianism to gradually become the richest country in the region. Edwards, who as a 19 year-old college student actually worked in Allende's price control directorate, discusses the economic policy advocated by the "Chicago Boys" of the title, the US-trained and influenced economists primarily responsible for guiding the Chilean economy during the many periods of political turmoil after the coup, surprising me with the well-documented conclusion that neoliberalism actually worked out fairly well for Chile. I picked up this book because 2023 was the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup, but by a mysterious coincidence I finished it the day before the much-anticipated death of all-time scumbag Henry Kissinger; surprisingly, and against what I had previously assumed, it turns out that Chile might be one of the few countries in the 20th century whose internal troubles he didn't either cause or make worse. This is important because, as Edwards frankly acknowledges in the very first paragraph, Chilean neoliberalism's chief criticism and "original sin" in the popular imagination is that it was enabled by the dictatorship after the coup. Edwards exonerates Kissinger and the US for Chile's economic difficulties in general, as supposed smoking guns like the "make the economy scream" memo didn't lead to any actual US action; and Allende's overthrow and suicide in particular. While the US might not have liked Allende, and we unquestionably did provide at least some minor support to earlier efforts to prevent his inauguration after he became the first democratically elected Marxist head of government in world history, the coup and his death seem to have been an essentially homegrown affair caused by the his Unidad Popular government's comprehensive economic ineptitude: "[The Church Committee] concluded that the CIA was involved in an early attempt to keep Allende from becoming president (General Roberto Viaux's 1970 plot). After reviewing thousands of confidential documents and cables, however, the committee determined that there was no evidence supporting the view that the CIA was directly behind the September 11 coup d'état. Even if doubts remain on the extent of the CIA's support to Pinochet and his coconspirators, it is clear that, as Foucault and Rosenstein-Rodan, among others, have noted, Allende's economic policies were a failure." The book's first section provides a great deal of background context for Pinochet's coup. Even though the book is primarily about post-Allende policy, to understand the Chicago Boys' policies it's important to understand where they were coming from: a collapsing economy with supply shortages, runaway inflation, capital flight, and plummeting real wages, directly caused by the transition to socialism and all of the usual pathologies that you see in the other countries which have tried the same thing. Allende was elected by a tiny plurality in 1970 but tried to govern as if he had a much larger mandate, at first pursuing some seemingly unobjectionable social welfare policies but quickly getting more ambitious and running off the rails, his Vuskovic Plan rapidly causing mass disruption and prompting multiple coup attempts (which, ironically, Pinochet actually helped to foil). Edwards got a fascinating inside view of how poorly the socialist transformation process can be run when he worked in the Allende administration as a teenager doing price controls. It's worth quoting his experience at length: "One of the most damaging aspects of Unidad Popular's economics program was the surrealistic system of price controls. Maximum prices for over three thousand goods were determined by the Dirección de Industria y Comercio (DIRINCO; Directorate of Industry and Commerce), under the assumption that in every one of those industries there was monopolistic power and companies abused their clients. I personally know how bad, arbitrary, and harmful the system was, because I was there. As a nineteen-year-old college student at the Universidad de Chile, I was offered the position of assistant to the director of costs and prices at DIRINCO. The unit oversaw every controlled price in the country and had the legal authority to determine whether a price increase was authorized. The position gave me unusual power, as I assigned price adjustment requests to the different accountants who worked in the office, and I kept the director's appointment book. On more than one occasion I was told to misplace a file, or to move it to the top of the pile, or to assign it to a given employee who was sympathetic to one view or another. In 1973, with inflation moving toward the 700 percent mark, prices authorized by the directorate became outdated within a week or so. New requests were immediately submitted, and the directorate promptly denied them. Any first-year student would have predicted the results of this viciously circular process: massive shortages and a thriving black market for all sorts of goods, including such essentials as sugar, rice, coffee, cooking oil, and toilet paper. But the political authorities believed that a strong hand was needed to deal with price gouging promoted by the "enemies of the revolutionary process."" Edwards wisely doesn't waste much time on the typical bad-faith attempts to claim that this wasn't Real Socialism, or that if it was, its failure was actually all the US or capitalism's fault. He divides post-Allende economic reconstruction into 3 time periods of differing policy regimes as various sets of policymakers (not all of who were influenced by the University of Chicago) rotated in and out under Pinochet and his successor center-left and center-right democratic governments: - 1973 - 1982: "incipient neoliberalism". Remove price controls, reduce trade barriers, pursue "shock treatment" to fight inflation, deregulate industry, re-privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises. - 1982 - 1990: "pragmatic neoliberalism". Implement more measured market systems, attract private investment, expand the export sector. - 1990 - today: "inclusive neoliberalism". Transition to democracy, remove harmful fixed exchange rates, encourage capital inflows, pursue as much free and open trade as possible, deepen now-mature market systems. While the over pro-market direction is clear, there was more variety under the hood than might be assumed in all of these different policy regimes as Chile became more or less reformist, more or less nationalist, and so on. One crucial element that cannot be ignored is that throughout all of them was a profound concern for the poor: even during the confused early Pinochet years, where the economy was still nearly as bad as it was under Allende, social expenditures were increased, extensive anti-poverty programs were pursued, and public access to health and education was greatly expanded as a top priority. This inarguably left-wing focus is one of the things that make discussing neoliberalism so tortuous: not only were all of the so-called neoliberals completely unaware of the term until many years later, to a man the Chicago Boys all rejected the label and claimed that they were trying to implement a West German-style mixed social market economy. Without adopting a blunt rule like "socialism is when the government does something, and the more the government does the more socialist it is", the distinction between "virtuous socialism" and "perfidious neoliberalism" is so muddled that it's better to just focus on the actual policies themselves. To that end, Edwards is now a well-regarded economist in his own right, and so thankfully most of the book is devoted to in-depth discussion of Chilean policymaking debates over all three neoliberal phases, with occasional cameos from luminaries like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Al Harberger where relevant. There are long sections on fixed vs flexible vs floating exchange rates, individual accounts vs pay-as-you-go pension reform, the right degree of privatization vs nationalization for various sensitive state owned companies (the military had strong opinions about many public services and key firms, particularly the lucrative cash cow copper giant CODELCO), and how to safely raise taxes up to normal levels in order to develop normal state capacity (Chile still only collected 21% of GDP in taxes in 2022 vs 31% for the average OECD country), with major areas like health, transportation, and education receiving brief but detailed explanations of what the policy goals were and how well they were achieved. Importantly, the Chicago Boys themselves, who were essentially college students and young economist PhDs from the two major universities in Chile, with a few visiting Americans, seem not to have had any connection at all with Pinochet's horrific human rights abuses, let alone approval or endorsement. It might seem obvious that economic advisors aren't responsible for everything their government does (to use an American analogy, Ben Bernanke would be one of the last guys you'd try to pin George W Bush's Guantanamo Bay crimes on), but you still see people attempt some variant of a "Pinochet did something called neoliberalism, therefore calling something neoliberalism means it's Pinochet" syllogism (never mind that most neoliberalism occurred after he had stepped down) or blame Milton Friedman for the regime's actions even though basically all he did was tell them to stop overvaluing their currency, so it's nice to get the actual story. "Neoliberal" as a leftist political swear term meaning essentially "right-wing" was born from exactly this historical episode, and while I personally would not have implemented all of the specific policies that the Chicago Boys did, on the whole I came away impressed by their achievements and sympathetic to the constraints they were working under. Neoliberalism worked out pretty well for them! And yet Chileans themselves were not happy with neoliberalism. In the 1980s Chile had roughly the same per capita GDP as Costa Rica and Ecuador at approximately $4,000 USD; 50 years later it had more than sextupled to over $25,000 USD, which was now 40% more than Costa Rica and double that of Ecuador, but discontent was such that the country experienced massive riots in 2019 that led to the election of far-left President Gabriel Boric and several rounds of constitutional reform in order to repudiate neoliberalism, the Chicago Boys, and Pinochet. Edwards discusses the grievances cited by some of the primary protest groups, which are fascinating to an American stepped in intra-left disagreements: while Chileans appreciated the enormous reduction in poverty and creation of general prosperity that neoliberalism had delivered, they were concerned about perceived inequality, as well as more specific issues like student loan debt, toll roads, free trade agreements, and other policies that, though they were enacted by successive left-wing governments, were deemed to have the unacceptable mark of neoliberalism upon them. Inequality is hard to define and even harder to measure accurately, so Edwards puzzles through why Chileans were so focused on it given that statistics like the Gini coefficient and various OECD indexes gave contemporary Chile relatively good marks on inequality, especially relative to its peers. True, the Chicago Boys had consistently disdained the idea of reducing income inequality for its own sake, but that was done in order to focus on reducing poverty, which they had unquestionably succeeded at to a spectacular degree, propelling the poorest Chileans to a standard of living ever higher than the equivalent deciles in the rest of Latin America. Edwards explores a number of possible hypotheses for this disconnect, including that Chileans were also concerned about less quantifiable concepts like social inequality (referring to "quality of life, social interactions, access to basic services, the nature of interpersonal relations, and the degree of fairness (perceived and real) of the political and economic systems"), which a veteran observer of Occupy Wall Street will find illuminating. As far as the other grievances are concerned, Edwards points out how curious it was that constitutional reform was demanded as a means to address them, since not only was there was no constitutional barrer whatsoever to, for example, reforming the college funding system or changing how roads were financed to eliminate tolls, but the 1990 Pinochet constitution, though originally adopted under a dictatorship, had been regularly amended over the years without issue. The primary spark for the protests is commonly held to be the October 2019 decision to hike metro fares by 30 pesos ($.04 USD); in a post gilets jaunes/Arab Spring world, we are no longer so surprised that seemingly mundane events can trigger vast cascades of public outrage, but demanding a new constitution in order to save a nickel on a bus pass (or adjust tariff rates, tweak pension funding, etc) seems a bit excessive. It seemed that way to Chileans too, as the eventual anti-neoliberal reform proposal ended up so overburdened by leftist wishlist items (e.g. granting constitutional rights to nature itself) that it was overwhelmingly rejected as this book went to press in September 2022, and in May 2023 a right-wing constitutional convention was elected to write a more conservative draft, which itself was also voted down in December 2023 as of the writing of this review. However much Chileans disliked what they called neoliberalism, they evidently disliked the alternatives even more. By the way: what is neoliberalism; more relevantly, what did Chileans think it was? Edwards defines it in the Introduction as "a set of beliefs and policy recommendations that emphasize the use of market mechanisms to solve most of society's problems and needs, including the provision and allocation of social services such as education, old-age pensions, health, support for the arts, and public transportation", or more briefly, "neoliberalism is the marketization of almost everything". He supports this with an appendix discussing the Colloque Lippmann and the Mont Pelerin Society, as well as Michel Foucault's approving lectures on neoliberalism and his admiration for Gary Becker, one of the archetypal Chicago economists, including his accusation that the proper blame for the Chilean coup lay on the Marxist ineptitude which had made it necessary. Each country has its own unique spin on even the most seemingly general ideologies, and as mentioned, the primary issue for most Chileans seemed to be a lack of attention to inequality: "Certainly the fact that neoliberals believe that the market provides the most efficient way of delivering social services does not mean that they ignore social conditions or the plight of the poor... What is true, however, is that for neoliberals the main goal of social policies is reducing (eliminating) poverty through targeted programs rather than reducing inequality. Income distribution - either vertical or horizontal - is not a priority." This seems like a fair criticism of neoliberalism even if you disagree with it; some people just don't trust the outcomes of market processes (and rightly so, in some cases). The ultimate origins of people's fundamental attitudes towards how markets embody, reflect, or subvert moral values are beyond the scope of this book review (for a good overview of this debate, see Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski's excellent Markets Without Limits), but as Edwards ably shows, the Chilean experience demonstrates that at least one type of neoliberalism was responsible for a sustained and successful program of eliminating deep poverty, and while marketizing various aspects of society doesn't guarantee success, center-left politicians can safely ignore leftists and right-wingers who attempt to conjure the specter of Pinochet as an excuse to avoid thinking deeply about the lessons to be drawn from what was and is a flawed but quietly triumphant ideology. Further reading on Chile and related economic subjects: - A more detailed analysis on the alleged US "invisible blockade", concluding that Chile did just fine destroying its economy on its own, thank you. https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/05/21/... - Chile is also often brought up as an example of the "Washington Consensus", which has done much better than its detractors often claim, though of course no single policy is guaranteed to succeed. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... - Much more detail on Milton Friedman's two visits to Chile and the fairly mundane economic advice he gave. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa... - In light of the Chilean debate on inequality, Auten and Splinter's brand new article "Income Inequality in the United States" shows less income and wealth inequality than is commonly asserted using more accurate calculations. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi... ...more |
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| 0882958143
| 9780882958149
| 0882958143
| 2.93
| 41
| Jun 1983
| Jan 15, 1983
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liked it
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The Progressive Era is one of those hazy periods in the general American historical memory that doesn’t receive a lot of attention nowadays, even thou
The Progressive Era is one of those hazy periods in the general American historical memory that doesn’t receive a lot of attention nowadays, even though it was hugely consequential and has a number of intriguing parallels to the current moment, so I decided to refresh my understanding of the time period with this brief bibliographic survey from acclaimed Woodrow Wilson scholar Arthur Link. That hazy remembrance is partially because the titanic drama of the World War 1/Great Depression/World War 2 decades immediately following tends to overshadow the comparatively boring episodes of administrative reform between the McKinley and Wilson administrations (though there was plenty of war and economic unrest then too), and also because it’s harder to sum up what progressivism was about, since it was about so many things, and driven by so many different types of people. In one section, Link enumerates several strands of progressive reformers: - Western and Southern rural farmers - The WASP middle class - Ministers, lawyers, and professors - Businessmen and professionals - Doctors, engineers, scientists - Rich elites - Immigrants and ethnic groups in urban areas In other words, basically everyone in America at the time was interested in reform of one kind or another, so to the extent that the progressive era was ever an even vaguely coherent thing, you can think of it as a general reaction to the explosive growth of the nation during the Gilded Age as existing institutions came under strain due to corruption, crime, labor unrest, racism, ethnic struggles, economic turbulence, poverty, illiteracy, alcoholism, disenfranchisement, pollution, and so forth. Each group had its own agenda items it wanted to make progress on, and varying ideas about how to make said progress, so the primary mechanism was in creating new institutions of administrative control along with new means for providing public feedback to those institutions. If that sounds a little abstract, it is, but between new institutions like the Federal Reserve, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federal Trade Commission; new democratic mechanisms like party primaries, initiative, recall, and referendum; and new movements like immigrant groups, labor unions, suffragists, and social reformers, it’s fair to see this period as not merely a prelude to the New Deal and Great Society, but as a distinct set of responses to distinct social needs, even if incomplete and prematurely truncated by the forces of reaction in the Roaring Twenties. At the same time, not all of the progressive initiatives were unalloyed goods, and there is much to be said about the racist, nativist, xenophobic, eugenicist, etc strains in the progressive forces, which bears directly on any attempt to analogize or draw lineages between those movements and ones today. To that end, Link closes with a passage of great relevance to our modern era of impatience with the increasingly creaky machinery of American governance: “That the urge to impose social control often overshadowed the desire for social justice is another example of the distinction between the rhetoric, intentions, and results of progressivism. In their language and appeals, the reformers commonly gave greater weight to justice than to coercion, while in their actual methods they tended to rely on controls. The progressives often failed to recognize the degree to which the aims of justice could be neglected in the actual administration of a reform. Often, as well, the means which progressives used simply failed to achieve what had been expected of them. Today we are far more conscious of the limitations of progressive techniques than were the reformers of the early twentieth century. It is significant, however, that while the progressives’ methods of trying to bring justice and order to an industrial society have been criticized, even repudiated, they have not been replaced by a fundamentally different means of social reform.” ...more |
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| 0815739281
| 9780815739289
| 0815739281
| 3.95
| 372
| 2022
| Feb 22, 2022
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it was amazing
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Even though I am a homeowner, and thus in theory safely insulated from the vicissitudes of America’s housing affordability crisis, I don’t think it’s
Even though I am a homeowner, and thus in theory safely insulated from the vicissitudes of America’s housing affordability crisis, I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to ignore how expensive housing has become. I am a firm believer in what economists Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood once aptly termed “The Housing Theory of Everything” - I think that there is no better way of tackling many of the US’s current social issues like crime, homelessness, climate change, inequality, cultural stagnation, and more at a single stroke than by returning our broken housing market to the prices of the 90s - it’s all downstream of how high the rent is. If you had to recommend only one book to someone unfamiliar with the issue that summed up the whole debate over the housing crisis, from causes to mechanics to potential solutions, this would probably be it, because even though housing is an incredibly complex and contentious subject, Schuetz ably lays out the historical background, explains the terms of the debate, explores the various analytical frames often encountered, discusses possible solutions, and evaluates them in an even-handed yet rigorous way. Based on watching what’s happened in my hometown of Austin, I have become a solidly committed YIMBY/neoliberal who believes that the primary solution to what is clearly a deliberate decades-long engineering of a housing supply shortage in all cities at all income levels is to liberalize our broken single-family exclusionary zoning system by allowing us to simply build more housing. Unleash the cranes and bulldozers and don’t stop until everyone has a place they can afford to live, is my view, although I’m not opposed to including social housing or targeted rent subsidies/cost controls as part of the solution. However, I think even more market-skeptical or change-averse folks would find a lot of value in her analysis; even her chapter titles have a pleasant, common-sensical apothegmatic punch to them that should be unobjectionable across most of the normal ideological spectrum: - Housing Sits at the Intersection of Several Complex Systems - Build More Homes Where People Want to Live - Stop Building Homes In the Wrong Places - Give Poor People Money - Homeownership Should Be Only One Component of Wealth - High-Quality Community Infrastructure Is Expensive, But It Benefits Everyone - Overcome the Limits of Localism - Build Better Political Coalitions Around Better Policies All excellent points, although of course actually solving the crisis is much easier said than done. Politics being what they are, even small steps forward encounter massive resistance from incumbents and rent-seekers, and even minor victories can take a long time; as I write this in July 2023 Austin just took the first step in the right direction since the collapse of our attempt to rewrite our zoning code a few years back by voting to allow more missing middle housing and stop requiring extra parking everywhere. It won’t fix everything, but it’s progress. A better world is possible! This book is not the last word on housing, but following her prescriptions to unravel the mess we’ve gotten ourselves in one step at a time would be an excellent starting point. ...more |
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| 0465019595
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| 0465019595
| 3.96
| 1,914
| Sep 06, 2022
| Sep 06, 2022
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it was amazing
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I’m sure you’ve seen those charts of historical world GDP per capita: almost perfectly flat for 99% of human history since the dawn of time, rising gr
I’m sure you’ve seen those charts of historical world GDP per capita: almost perfectly flat for 99% of human history since the dawn of time, rising gradually only in the 19th century, and finally turning nearly vertical by the present day. That line represents humanity’s gradual escape from the grinding poverty of our prehistoric past into a world of, if not plenty, at least some, and if not for everyone, at least more and more, and explaining its shape - not just how but why it went from flat to exponential, changing the story of our species from questions of bare subsistence and survival to wealth and abundance - is one of the central questions of both economic history as well as any progressive politics of the future. Now, to fully describe the economic history of the entire planet over even a single year is an impossible task, let alone the “long 20th century” of 1870 to 2010, but if any mortal could even dream of such an Olympian feat, it’s DeLong. This stretch of time, from 1870 - when globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation appeared - to 2010 - the trough of the Great Recession - is populated with many disputatious characters and diverging trends, but DeLong sees the overarching narrative as a conflict between Friedrich Hayek’s market capitalism and Karl Polanyi’s social justice, refereed by John Maynard Keynes’s mixed economy, reaching an apex in the postwar mixed economies and shambling to a nadir after the Great Financial Crisis. And yet even that nadir represents a fantastic triumph of human achievement, vast numbers of people lifted out of poverty and even into luxury, and we can be confident that the story’s not over yet, even if we never reach the promised land. I’ve been reading DeLong’s econ blog for nearly 20 years, enjoying all the preview snippets of this magnum opus he would from time to time, and it was well worth the wait.
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| 1623493412
| 9781623493417
| 1623493412
| 4.67
| 3
| Nov 18, 2015
| Jan 04, 2016
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it was amazing
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I have a great deal of fondness for the humble public agencies and institutions that have gradually transformed the historically pleasant but occasion
I have a great deal of fondness for the humble public agencies and institutions that have gradually transformed the historically pleasant but occasionally unlivable backwater of Austin, Texas into the 11th biggest city in the US. It’s hard to appreciate now, but it used to be a fact of life that each year there was a very real chance that by the end of the rainy season the only way across the Colorado River might be by boat. Far from being the “seat of empire”, in historian Jeffrey Kerr’s phrase, Austin was at the mercy of some of the worst flash floods in North America, until FDR helped establish a state public agency modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring some order to the area, and thus the Lower Colorado River Authority was born. It’s difficult to make the life story of a New Deal-era public agency thrilling, per se, but Williams does an excellent job recounting the politics behind the LCRA’s creation, its often contentious relationship with the Texas state government, and its struggles to fulfill its mission in an area with many times more people than were here when it was founded (a true victim of its own success). It may be that no man can serve two masters, but public agencies like the LCRA are expected to balance several conflicting goals of flood control, power generation, agricultural irrigation, recreation, and land reclamation and development simultaneously, without stepping on any toes or making any important politicians look bad. Speaking of which, LBJ of course looms large in the LCRA’s history, as he was instrumental to both promoting the agency as well as using its powers to serve his own ends, but the real stars of the show are the humble bureaucrats in charge of building the dams, power stations, roads, and parks that make Central Texas what it is today. I would have appreciated a bit more on LCRA’s relationship with Austin Energy, since even though the LCRA is headquartered in Austin it is not the power or water utility for essentially the entire city, but perhaps Williams exercised some discretion over what I’m sure could be a touchy subject. Regardless, this is basically a perfect specialty history, with plenty of great pictures and stories from the past. ...more |
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| 080909536X
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| 3.82
| 57
| Jan 06, 2009
| Jan 06, 2009
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it was amazing
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Anyone who has passed high school US History is beyond tired of the “What caused the Civil War?” question, but “What political and economic factors ma
Anyone who has passed high school US History is beyond tired of the “What caused the Civil War?” question, but “What political and economic factors made the Civil War inevitable?” is still a worthy topic of interest. If you have read Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men chronicling the formation of the Republican Party then you’ll be familiar with the political background, while James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom devotes a good number of its pages to the social context; this book presents the economic side of the story, analyzing how changing patterns of production, transportation, and trade in the disparate regions of the country gradually polarized the formerly ideologically incoherent national Whig and Democratic parties into implacable opponents, making some sort of conflict unavoidable as the North and Midwest boomed while the South stagnated. While not an economic determinist in the mold of Charles & Mary Beard, Egnal presents reams of data showing how the explosive growth of the Midwest (particularly areas adjacent to the Great Lakes) contrasted with declining soil fertility in the South, permanently upsetting the delicate regional balance of power and established coalitions in Congress. Peter Turchin’s Ages of Discord had a fascinating section trying to apply Structural Demographic Theory to explain why the Civil War had to happen in the 1860s specifically and not the 1850s or 1870s; Egnal agrees that the Southern plantation owner class who controlled the region’s politics were presented with the grim but inescapable choice of either forcing the issue with the North in the waning moments of their strength, or meekly accepting terminal decline relative to the rest of the country. The implicit lesson that those who run a slave economy often become slaves to that economy themselves in turn is well-taken. PS: it’s not cited here, but Mario Chacón & Jeffrey L. Jensen's 2019 paper "The Political and Economic Geography of Southern Secession" is a great supplement to this book. ...more |
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| 1398510394
| 9781398510395
| unknown
| 3.91
| 5,707
| Sep 07, 2021
| Sep 07, 2021
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really liked it
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It's unfortunately quite common to read takes in Western media along the lines of "China's government is bad, but look at how much more effective they
It's unfortunately quite common to read takes in Western media along the lines of "China's government is bad, but look at how much more effective they are than us at X", where X is economic growth, poverty reduction, infrastructure, or something else that involves "getting things done". Xi Jinping has spent an enormous amount of effort to cultivate this impression, but it's important to keep in mind that anything multiplied by 1.3 billion is going to be a large number; the sheer size of China will make even anemic per capita GDP growth look quite large in the aggregate, so you have to peek behind the curtain to see what's really going on. China of course genuinely has made impressive strides in recent years, but just as all really convincing lies depend on their adjacency to real kernels of truth, so too should we be skeptical that one of the most rigorously stage-managed governments in the world is being honest about its economic statistics (in fact just a few months after I finished this book Xi Jinping delayed the 2022 Q3 GDP numbers until after the Party Congress). Judging by this book Shum was near enough to China's major power brokers to see an eye-watering amount of corruption and malfeasance. The writer Tanner Greer once wrote a fascinating essay "Everything Is Worse In China" about how weird it is as a resident of China to see Americans complain about hot-button issues like corrupt elites, political correctness, out of control bureaucrats, and so on, and then hold up a (mostly imagined) version of the Chinese model as superior. Meanwhile, as Shum’s example of the redevelopment of Beijing’s airport shows, in real life China’s economy is more often overseen by figures who are more like a combination of Robert Moses and Boss Tweed. The theme of James Fallows’ 2013 book China Airborne was that for China to break out of the middle income trap that so many other countries have fallen into, it will have to reform many of the governance issues that Shum explores in detail. Of course, any time you are promised a peek behind the curtain, you have to be careful that the show isn't still ongoing, but Shum's account is well-corroborated enough by events to be trusted as a captivating look at a system that is a peculiar mix of all-powerful and quite frail. ...more |
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| 4.17
| 166,579
| Jun 26, 2018
| Jun 26, 2018
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did not like it
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Imagine a guy arguing with his girlfriend by simply repeating "you're too emotional" for a few hours, and that's DiAngelo's book in a nutshell. One of
Imagine a guy arguing with his girlfriend by simply repeating "you're too emotional" for a few hours, and that's DiAngelo's book in a nutshell. One of the most depressing things about racism, apart from its immorality, injustice, etc., is how stupid it makes us all. I don't know how else to explain the popularity of this cynical, predatory cash-in, other than that emotionally-charged subjects like race remove our ability to think critically. Scam artists like DiAngelo claiming to palliate racism through word games, sophistry, bad history, and gimmick corporate seminars should remind us of medieval physicians waving leeches at us to treat an imbalance of the humours, but here we are sending her book up the charts in a desperate effort to avoid real work about racism and systemic inequalities. A rational society would think twice about the incentive structure behind DiAngelo's business model - a white person paid thousands of dollars an hour to tell other white people what the correct opinions about minorities to have are - but an increasingly bureaucratized America addicted to rebranding its social problems as HR issues will naturally turn to familiar corporate solutions like this. Anyone who's had to sit through mandatory training knows that it's easier to just turn off your brain, let this stuff wash over you, and check the box marked Training Complete at the end: who wouldn't rather do that than real work? This book is short, repetitive, and written at bozo level, so if you are a white American who's feeling lazy, then buying and reading it might be a fairly cost- and time-effective alternative to activism, independent thought, self-education, or, god forbid, actually talking to a person of color. Like many people, I came across this book just after the George Floyd protests. I think active anti-racism is incredibly important, and anyone with a conscience should be disgusted and outraged not only by specific instances of police brutality, but about the entire social system behind events like that. We have an obligation to each other and ourselves to speak up when something is wrong, and there's absolutely no shortage of work to be done. Part of that work is self-education, which is why I have such a viscerally negative reaction to this vile little tract, which DiAngelo frankly admits is not designed to convince open or even closet racists to be less racist. Quite the opposite - its goal is to convince well-meaning white people trying to be not-racist that in fact they were actually racist all along without them having known it. This is a strange tactic if your goal is to reduce the overall goal of racism in a society, but DiAngelo's real goal is to maintain her lifetime sinecure of bullying hapless victims in corporate workshops with carefully constructed trap-door arguments about privilege that are impossible to engage in good-faith dialogue with. You solve no problems by giving DiAngelo a single penny, whether by buying this book (I didn't) or ponying up for one of her seminars. When you get right down to it, DiAngelo's efforts to focus all attention on your individual thoughts and behaviors and none on America's broken laws are exactly identical to all the tedious debates you hear about whether it's fair to force people to not use plastic straws, when meanwhile fossil fuel plants are burning billions of tons of CO2 a year. If you actually care about climate change, then it's a complete waste of time to guilt-trip people about straws - you should be helping to get clean energy laws passed (and given that people of color are disproportionately affected by climate change, you'd be doing even more good). Go donate money to sustainable energy groups! But then there wouldn't be any money left to pay a straw fragility consultant thousands of dollars an hour to lecture you about how even if you don't use straws at all you're still destroying the planet, and as it turns out strawmen are DiAngelo's entire business model. ...more |
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| 0521485851
| 4.11
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| Feb 24, 1995
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really liked it
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The pre-Columbian Aztecs are a tough people to really know, not only given their own tendencies towards self-glorification, but also because the syste
The pre-Columbian Aztecs are a tough people to really know, not only given their own tendencies towards self-glorification, but also because the systematic Spanish attempt to eliminate the existing structure and memory of Aztec society in order to replace it with something more palatable and familiar was successful, and therefore scattered records and summarized codices are in large part all we have. Clendinnen has written a very sympathetic, very detailed attempt to capture what Aztec society felt like for the average person - warriors, priests, merchants, women - and to recreate as much as possible of the world that was lost. This means that her interpretive efforts are therefore more than a little speculative in many parts, yet she does a magnificent job of conveying the appeal of the culture while not downplaying the miserable relationship the Aztecs had with their neighbors, in particular the grim horrors of their most infamous ritual practice. One of the interesting things about the Aztecs is how different their attitude towards empire was than that of natural comparisons like the Romans. From their founding as the "Triple Alliance" union of the city-states Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlateloco in 1428, they fought nearly continuous wars against nearby cities until the Spanish conquest in 1521, but instead of aggressive expansion and incorporation of subject peoples in order to increase their strength for the next war, they preferred to merely acquire fealty from the enemy nobility and exact regular tribute. There might be several reasons why the Aztecs did not have the same urge to imperiogenesis as other civilizations: James Scott's book Against the Grain argues in part that grain cultivation is uniquely well-suited to despotism, and perhaps corn is less so; or perhaps the mountainous terrain in central Mexico is more similar to Greece, which also remained hard to consolidate for a long time, than the easy plains of Italy, making lasting conquest more difficult (though compare against the Incas to the south). There was a good chapter in Peter Turchin's Ultrasociety that explored how the nearly impassable mountains of Papua New Guinea allowed just enough contact between tribes to permit warfare, but not enough to make lasting conquest feasible. This did not encourage peaceful coexistence: the near-constant low-level warfare was less deadly in any given clash than in, say, a typical Roman battle, but there were far more of them, and so overall mortality in war was higher in a society of small-scale villages then in large-scale complex societies. Clendinnen emphasizes the almost nonexistent unifying forces at work in the imperial hierarchy: It is worth taking time over this oddly based polity, crucial as it is for an understanding of the city's workings, as for the process of its final destruction. Tenochtitlan was no Rome, despite the magnificence of its monuments, the steady inflow of tribute goods, and their spectacular consumption in a state-financed theatre. Subjugation did not mean incorporation. There was no significant bureaucracy in the Mexica 'empire', and few garrisons either. Marriage alliances linked the leading dynasties, while lesser local rulers were typically left in place and effectively autonomous, at least for as long as their towns delivered the agreed tribute to the imperial city. Even in those rare cases when the defeated ruler was killed, the dynasty was usually allowed to survive. But if local rulers spent months in the Mexica capital, they did not thereby become Mexica, and when their military contingents were called on to fight for the Triple Alliance they did so under their own leaders and banners. The 'empire' was an acrobats' pyramid, a precarious structure of the more privileged lording it over the less, with those poised on the highest level triumphant, but nervously attentive to any premonitory shift or shuffle from below. The human sacrifice is of course the most famous form of tribute the Aztecs demanded, like Theseus and the Minotaur on a much larger scale. Sacrifices were done as triumphs after a successful military campaign, as commemorations of important events like the ascension of a new ruler or the completion of a major temple, or to propitiate the rain god Tlaloc as part of the regular rotation of harvest festivals like Tlacaxipeualiztli, Etzalqualiztli, Ochpaniztli, and Panquetzaliztli. About this practice of human sacrifice, which is rightly the become the main thing people know about Aztec culture, perhaps the only thing that can be said is that those unhappy victims had plenty of company, as Aztec culture was pretty brutal even for Aztecs: When the spoils of war and the tribute from other towns subject to the conquered overlord city came into the hands of the Mexica ruler, he chose to distribute them not to the collectivities of the calpullis, but to specially distinguished warriors in the form of offices and titles, with attendant privileges and worked lands, so, it is said, creating a nobility and a bureaucracy at a blow. Warrior arrogance always commanded a wide social space in the city. Given their reward-by-privilege expectations and their systematic elevation over lesser men, extortion was always a tempting possibility. From time to time it was discovered that warriors had levied an unofficial tribute on the town, 'perchance of chocolate (cacao), or food'. Such gross invasion of the prerogative of the state invoked the punitive violence of the state, and Mexica state justice was summary, brutal, public, and often enough lethal. Most offenders against Moctezoma's laws died most publicly, with the marketplace the favoured venue, where adulterers were stoned or strangled and habitual drunkards had their heads beaten in by Moctezoma's executioners. Fun stuff. Clendinnen is careful to note that, as with all societies, vicious cruelty lived alongside warmth and humanity, and she works as hard as she can to convey the magnificent grandeur of the Aztecs. The read can judge for themselves which aspects of Aztec culture were most affecting, but by the end of the book, as the Aztec's neighbors and subjects joined with the Spanish to destroy their vampiric clench, I still felt for them, though not too much. The Spanish had plenty of admiration for the Aztecs as builders and administrators, and indeed as Clendinnen points out, it is telling that one of the laments written after the Spanish conquest is really mourning for the city more than it is for the people: Broken spears lie in the roads; we have torn our hair in our grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls are red with blood. Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas, and the walls are splattered with gore. the water has turned red, as if it were dyed, and when we drink it, it has the taste of brine. We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe walls, for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead. The shields of our warriors were its defence, but they could not save it. ...more |
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it was amazing
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This second volume of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, covering chapters 33 to 63, was just as awesome as the first. The breathless pace of the action s
This second volume of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, covering chapters 33 to 63, was just as awesome as the first. The breathless pace of the action seems to move faster than the story, as each chapter is still crammed with detail, and so it's often hard to judge how much time is passing within or between scenes, but the expansion of the storyline to include the real beginnings of the infamous division into three kingdoms unfolds in a logical and seemingly inevitable way, one stratagem, double-cross, and blood oath at a time. Despite the inclusion of the most epic battles yet, it's a study in decision and indecision as well, as more powerful warlords like Liu Biao and Sun Quan risk repeating the fate of Yuan Shao in the face of Cao Cao's relentless ambition. It starts off with Cao Cao consolidating the north, his son Cao Pi marrying Yuan Shao's widow Lady Zhen, and ends with Liu Bei riding off west into the Riverlands to found his own kingdom, but there's seemingly entire books in between. This volume made me think more about the problem of leadership, specifically of how the characters attempt to enforce or encourage loyalty. This has been one of the underlying themes of the book from the very beginning, of course, but it's in this stretch of the story that the Emperor fades into the background and the three kingdoms begin to solidify, and loyalty is no less important in the destruction of one regime than in the creation of another. In an environment like the collapse of the Han dynasty, where there's a nominally all-powerful Emperor but in practice a nearly unlimited amount of autonomy for essentially independent petty warlords, individuals are confronted by an extra layer of moral choice that informs their actions. How should one balance allegiance to the sovereign with filial duties, and obedience to liege lords against an oath sworn to brothers? Watching the many characters grapple with their moral compasses in the face of all the momentous decisions they make in life-or-death situations each chapter is a real pleasure, even if they're unsure of the right course themselves, and even through Luo's determined editorializing between the Big Two. Liu Bei, the hero who, we're continually told, draws men to him through his virtuous nature and noble deeds, has the same problem of winning his own place in the world as his duplicitous antagonist Cao Cao, who's universally derided as a crafty yet corrosive force, yet it's often difficult to see a principled difference between them. For example, towards the end of the volume, at a crucial moment in the balance of power between the north and the south, Zhang Song travels to Cao Cao near the end to offer him the vitally strategic area of the Riverlands, but he gives up because they're each too stubborn and prideful, and he simply offers the territory to Liu Bei instead. This momentous decision is presented as right and proper, a result of the magnetic attraction of Liu Bei and repulsion of Cao Cao, yet it's not so different than Pang Tong's disagreement and reconciliation with Zhang Fei, and in fact it's also quite similar to the many minor instances where a governor will surrender a town, or a general will defect at the end of a battle, and the decision to reward or execute them for their shift in fealty seems arbitrary rather than appropriate. There's probably literature out there on how Confucianist or Legalist ethics, or prestige and dominance leadership styles, could be formulated in game-theoretic terms, and how each individual conundrum of whether to keep an oath or do the most expedient thing fits into a coherent framework of morality; ultimately I decided to just sit back and enjoy my suspense and outrage cycles as the two decided whether the latest hapless provincial commander would be rewarded for switching sides or beheaded for his treachery as the circumstances above and beyond him shifted. The real breakout star of this volume isn't Liu Bei or Cao Cao, however, but Kongming. The legends of his sagacity are so great that Liu Bei travels three times to convince him to come work for him, to the consternation of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, whose jealousy at Kongming seeming to supplant them in Liu Bei's heart is a nice bit of character development. And the legends are true! If ever there was a character calculated to delight and entertain audiences, it would be the Sleeping Dragon, an impossibly clever advisor who can concoct ruses subtle enough to fool even Cao Cao and has a handy ability to summon up powerful winds to aid in battle. My favorite example of his ridiculous skill was the scene where Sun Quan's henchman Zhou Yu wants to offer Liu Bei a sham marriage to Lady Sun in order to take him hostage and force him to surrender the strategic province of Jingzhou, which Liu Bei was dragging his heels on relinquishing after the death of his kinsman Liu Biao. This is a dangerous trip for Liu Bei, but no worry: Kongming not only arranges matters so that Liu Bei keeps Jingzhou, but that he successfully marries Lady Sun for real, via the hilarious mechanism of literally giving general Zhao Zilong three sacks with instructions to open each one at the right time to get Liu Bei out of each of Zhou Yu's traps. The buddy comedy friendship between Kongming and fellow wizard Pang Tong is also a real highlight, as each occasionally drops in to make fun of the other before revealing their latest scheme. Of course, Kongming is far more famous for his deceptive prowess at the Battle of Red Cliffs, which takes up a substantial portion of this volume. Once again I was left marveling at the skillful pacing and ingenious plotting: almost more space is devoted to the feints, deceptions, and betrayals leading up to the battle than to the action itself, and yet as Cao Cao's ill-fated expedition to conquer the south is left routed and shattered, thanks to Kongming's wheels-within-wheels ploys and last-minute conjuration of an east wind, you are never lacking for excitement. You're almost spoiled, too, since right before that is an equally-exciting chapters-long running fight as Liu Bei's retreating army and mass of villagers try to cross the Yangtze for safety in the south, and Cao Cao's forces are only barely held off in the Battle of Changban, where the (in my opinion underrated) Zhang Zilong makes one of his many clutch saves by rescuing Liu Bei's son against great odds (and not for the last time). The heroism and dramatic tension don't let up for a bit, and while there are many points where the ratio of clearly fictional "how could he have known?" strokes of impossible genius against more plausible Nth dimensional chess moves that real people might make gets a bit much, it's all so much fun you don't mind for a minute. Now's no time to stop reading. ...more |
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Jun 06, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0691188831
| 9780691188836
| 0691188831
| 3.62
| 677
| 2019
| Apr 16, 2019
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liked it
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I was predisposed to agree with Muirhead and Rosenblum's main thesis (roughly that "the relatively unmoderated chaos of the internet has allowed Repub
I was predisposed to agree with Muirhead and Rosenblum's main thesis (roughly that "the relatively unmoderated chaos of the internet has allowed Republicans to spew more bullshit faster than ever before, accentuating a general crisis of confidence in institutions") before even reading the book, but reading their argument at length gave me a bit more to chew on. I'm not sure that the "new conspiracism" of the subtitle ("a conspiracy theory without the theory") is really so different than the old-school conspiracy theories they use as a comparison, since both "conspiracy" and "theory" are not so easily defined, and it's often hard to see a real distinction between stupid things people believe now and the stupid things they've always believed. However, I do think there is a good case that something has changed about how controversies are treated in the media, which allows for stupid beliefs to persist and even flourish in a way that they haven't been able to before, and therefore the sheer volume of persistent conspiracy theories that's accumulated has poisoned the well of public discourse. Muirhead and Rosenblum have impeccably logical explanations for how Donald Trump et al's style of habitually repeating malicious lies destabilizes institutions in a negative feedback cycle, and even though "cranky right-wing idiot" is a familiar archetype across both American history and the world stage, the fact that someone of his caliber was able to be elected President says more about our rotten institutions than it does about him. They're predictably less useful on the solutions front, but they're hardly alone in that. Their thesis is that there is a difference between "classic" conspiracy theories and the "new conspiracism". Classic conspiracy theories identify an event or state of the world, posit an explanation for that event or state, and tie that explanation to a political theory. For example, JFK wasn't randomly killed by Oswald the lone nut, he was deliberately assassinated by the Mafia over RFK's prosecution of organized crime, or by the CIA over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or by LBJ over his ambition to be President, and the resulting change of administration either directly or indirectly benefited the parties involved (they also have the fantastic example of the Declaration of Independence as a conspiracy theorist document, which is both hilarious and also a little goofy). In contrast, the new conspiracism is just an endless series of unfalsifiable negative assertions, where it's basically irrelevant if any specific claim happens to be true. Pizzagate is a representative example, where prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are supposedly running a child sex slavery ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizza joint as fronts for a global network of Satanic elites, and the most maximally tortured possible reading of Podesta's hacked emails are used to find coded messages that confirm a worldwide human trafficking network and all these other nefarious deeds. If any particular detail doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny, there's always another "but what about THIS?!" accusation that, unless exhaustively disproven, serves as yet more proof that Hillary Clinton and company are Sandusky crossed with Dahmer raised to the power of the Rothschilds. So their main distinction between the new conspiracism and the old is that conspiracy theories are now unkillable, and in fact oddly nihilistic, since their proponents don't actually expect anyone to do much about these supposed crimes (e.g. QAnon adherents have to invent ever more elaborate explanations for why all these people are not in jail if they're so obviously guilty, whereas independence was the "solution" for the American revolutionaries). Instead of being able to say "actually, John Podesta's risotto recipe is just a risotto recipe, therefore it's not evidence of a sex dungeon in a pizza restaurant, therefore Hillary Clinton is probably not running a pedophile ring" in the same way as you used to be able to say "actually, the single bullet explanation is consistent with how JFK and Connally were seated relative to each other, therefore it's not evidence of multiple gunmen, therefore there probably weren't any shooters other than Oswald", the hapless normal person attempting to respond to this stuff will always be confronted by new accusations of vile perfidy with proof perpetually just over the horizon, an endlessly wearying vista of fever dreams to beat back. The rise of the internet has propelled this new conspiracism from the fringes to the center of our discourse, allowing unscrupulous figures like Donald Trump to rise to power on a tidal wave of bullshit, since we're all drowning in information and our pudding-like brains will just accept whatever confirms our prior beliefs, and even if in theory the left and the right should be equally susceptible to nonsense, right-wing new conspiracism is aimed directly at institutions themselves, which furthers even more the sense of a world adrift without any adults in charge. Stated in that way their distinction sounds reasonable, but I'm skeptical if there's a true difference, or if the internet has just presented us with far more information to have to analyze while simultaneously destroying our attention spans and critical thinking skills. It's hard to say that new conspiracy theories like Birtherism or the products of the Arkansas Project are different and more unkillable than JFK conspiracy theories when the JFK conspiracy theory industry is still alive and kicking after over 50 years (the conspiracy merch vendors outside the Sixth Floor Museum all stand by their products). To their detriment, Muirhead and Rosenblum never try to actually define what the "unit" of a conspiracy theory is, so we can't really say if conspiracy theories have gotten more elaborate or implausible or unfalsifiable over time. Matt Taibbi once had a great article called "The Hopeless Stupidity of 9/11 Conspiracies" mocking the bizarre mental contortions required to even begin to make sense of the supposed 9/11 plot (which M & R oddly classify as an old-school conspiracy theory), but it's obviously never been the case that most people actually write down every step of the whole chain of logic in their pet theory from the very beginning, they'll just take it for granted that someone else has already done the legwork and build on that foundation. These days adherents share increasingly inscrutable conspiracy memes with each other on Facebook, but I'm sure the John Birch Society's tracts and pamphlets were not much different. I grew up watching The X-Files, an incredibly prescient show which they somehow don't cite even once, and watching it gave me appreciation for how fun it is to spin lurid tales of shadowy conspiracies, as well as how little sense most conspiracies make once you start looking at them critically, but even then, an overarching conspiracy that's incoherent as a whole can look very plausible on the day by day or episode by episode level. All of this is in novels like Foucault's Pendulum, but another example of that's near and dear to my heart is Alex Jones. Back when I was in high school, he had yet to make his unfortunate transformation from Austin's "lovable local nutcase" into a nationally infamous deranged hoax promoter, and I would sometimes listen to his radio show for kicks on my drive home from school. Alex Jones would think nothing of having a rant about how global warming was obviously fake and a UN plot to steal our freedoms and make America a fascist socialist police state segue smoothly into a rant about how global warming was actually all too real and would be exploited by crony capitalist elites like Bill Gates and the Bilderbergs to get third world countries hooked on GMO foods and surveillance technology. To a rational outsider, the coexistence of plainly incompatible conspiracy theories like that should give you pause - perhaps either hypothesis might be true, but both can't be true at the same time, and if someone persists in this simultaneous contradiction for too long, the safe bet is to discount their whole belief system entirely. And yet for many people, the opposite happens, and each individual pseudo-fact becomes just another data point that they can plug into their own private X-Files, drawing their personalized conspiracist constellations atop the infinite sky of suspicious stars. After all, all conspiracy theories exist on a continuum of plausibility, and, unfortunately sometimes conspiracies are actually real. Pizzagate isn't real, but what about Jeffrey Epstein? Oswald may have been a lone gunman, but isn't it true that he had an enormous number of truly odd and questionable connections to important figures of the day, and hasn't the US supported exactly these kinds of shadow coups abroad? The whole world is a Pynchon novel that we're all trapped in, and when you start linking individual theories together there's no end to the mischief you can cause. A semi-normal person who started out believing in "plausible" conspiracy theories like the Clinton Foundation stuff and was predisposed to right-wing tribalism could easily be gradually led into the swamps of Pizzagate and QAnon, never to return, no matter how vigorously the original entry point was debunked, because once they cross the Rubicon everything they read just feeds into the unshakeable conviction that "Hillary Clinton is part of an evil cabal". A diagram of the supposed "Clinton body count" victims might look crazy to an outsider in the same way that the central conspiracy of The X-Files doesn't make much sense if you try to write the whole mythology out on paper, and yet at the same time the idea that Hillary Clinton has had dozens of people directly murdered is an effectively impossibly daunting mountain to scale for the brave soul who's trying to deprogram their Fox News-poisoned relative, especially when they won't trust any outside sources of information. The problem of "epistemic closure" is another depressing facet of this phenomenon, perhaps the main one. Julian Sanchez first applied the philosophical term to politics in a 2010 blog post titled "Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance" which has held up extremely well, even down to his specific example of how conservatives tuned out reality when the rest of the country objected to their being pointlessly cruel to a teenager (liberals are of course not immune to this tendency either, but it's obviously nowhere near to the same degree). There's a few books out there - Anna Merlan's Republic of Lies, Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public - which delve more deeply into the logic of the collapse in public trust in media figures, but it's hard to see a good way out of this based solely on mass media literacy. Centralized big media companies have well-known flaws, but the solution to ossified corrupt hierarchies probably shouldn't be random people with blogs, except that it probably also shouldn't be unaccountable algorithms deciding what's trustworthy and what's not. The ceaseless, self-reinforcing rage storm that gets called "populism" is incompatible with a pluralist society, yet populist leaders (invariably grifters who feed on the stupidity of their supporters, as in Trump) just start to delegitimize any sources of disproof, since as the saying goes "you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into". Muirhead and Rosenblum effectively have no solution to our political structure circling the drain, beyond general calls to stand up for democracy and institutions, but I didn't really expect them to solve the result of decades of of determined efforts to build a right-wing alternate reality machine in a <200 page book. Last year Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux won an award for their paper "A 'Need for Chaos' and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies", which bears directly on this problem. Their conclusion was that a big motivator for people who just really love stupid conspiracy theories was economic stagnation, which gets translated into a general "some men just want to watch the world burn" mentality. So theoretically a better economy coupled with electoral reform coupled with enforcement penalties for bad actors à la House Democrats' proposals in HR1 will somewhat reduce this poisonous conspiracism, except that ironically conspiracists also love voting for right-wing con artists who won't do anything at all to aid the economy and will in fact just entrench themselves further to use the levers of power to steal from the public commons. I think the best solution is to support liberal/progressive/left-wing political candidates who will break the stranglehold of the elites, but that's a lot easier said, even if a lot of people are saying it too, than done. ...more |
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Apr 18, 2019
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| 4.33
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| 1360
| 2001
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it was amazing
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I'm not sure if the term "epic fantasy" applies to this work, since the standard line is that it's "70% history, 30% fiction", but whether it's shelve
I'm not sure if the term "epic fantasy" applies to this work, since the standard line is that it's "70% history, 30% fiction", but whether it's shelved in "epic fantasy", "historical fiction", or even "magical realism", it's undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of literature. It's almost overwhelming in how full of everything it is: the whirlwind of characters, the unyielding pace of the action, and the seamless integration of so many little human details and emotions that give the many side-plots and minor characters a resonance far out of proportion to their brief page time. Like with all great literature, even those diversions are pure pleasure thanks to clever storytelling. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, each analeptic or proleptic excursion adds valuable depth and context to the main narrative, and the consistent treatment of the ways that individual honor, personal loyalty, and political duty overlap and conflict continuously give each and every decision by the main characters a real weight. Luo's account of the struggle to build a new world out of the decay of the old is as powerful as any modern work I can think of. My edition of the Moss Roberts translation is split into 4 volumes for ease of reading. This volume begins with the immortal incipit "Here begins our tale. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." and the oath in the peach orchard between Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei, and ends with Cao Cao's defeat of Yuan Shao at the battle of Jizhou (chapter 32 out of 120). You could spend a long, long time exegizing every aspect of the novel - its elastic grounding in the historical record and subsequent authorial "improvements"; its biases of heroism and colorations of personality that turn these real people into Homeric archetypes; the slight supernatural touches like the summoning of convenient storms, fatal hauntings of vengeful ghosts, or complex portents and astrological divinations; the way the actions of individuals recapitulate the recurrent patterns of imperiogenesis and imperiopathosis in Chinese history - but a few specific observations came most readily to mind as I finished the first quarter of the tale. First, imperial power is a fascinating contradiction here. As the saying goes, "civilizations die from suicide, not by murder", and the slow disintegration of the Han dynasty amid the famines and religious fervor of the Yellow Scarves movement (interestingly, this colored clothing rebellion will be echoed several times more at similarly turbulent junctures in Chinese history) is reminiscent of a hollow, gradually rotting tree. While the Emperor's authority is nominally unlimited and he commands (nearly) universal respect, in practice the various warlords, rogue generals, and aristocrats seem to rule with complete independence, and the actual personage of the Emperor is treated somewhat like the puppet Roman Emperors after the Crisis of the Third Century (which by historical happenstance took place only a few decades after the events here), meaning that control of the military is paramount, and to be a successful general is almost synonymous with being a potential imperial claimant yourself. Many years later during the Yuan dynasty, in fact just as Luo was writing the collection of plays that this novel was compiled out of, someone coined the saying that "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away" as a way of highlighting how notional autocracy and practical independence can coexist simultaneously in the vastness of the Chinese landscape when a failing dynasty surrenders power to the court bureaucracy and a succession of generals. Military strategy is also pretty thought-provoking, both for its realism and for its more whimsical moments. Many novels, even ones that make real efforts at military realism, often skimp on mundane details, like the importance of supply line logistics, the need to post sentries at night, how important the disposition of your troops are in pitched battles, or the finer points of besieging cities. Often lazy authors will describe their heroes as strategic geniuses, but leave the actual demonstrations of their acuity up to the reader's imagination. Not here! All the ingredients of military prowess are on full display, with Cao Cao in particular shown as a true mastermind of deception and consistently able to turn seemingly any setback into an opportunity thanks to his cleverness and willingness to listen to sound advice. The sheer quantity of his cunning feints and countermoves would be truly impressive even if they weren't (mostly) based on real history; both his wit and his opponents' foolishness are very convincingly rendered, as Luo also faithfully depicts the many ways that superior forces can be defeated by a leader's ill-timed vacillation, inconvenient bouts of drunkenness, stubbornness and inflexibility, or by just plain better tactics and superior hustle. The flip side is that all of the major characters are all invincible superheroes with plot armor that would make the most hack fanfiction writers blush. Take a drink every time one of the protagonists kills an opponent with a single mighty blow, or fights through a crowd of enemies miraculously unscathed, or gets out of a jam by the impossibly convenient arrival of reinforcements just in the nick of time, and in just a few chapters you will be drunker than Zhang Fei himself! It's one of the fictional scenes, but when Guan Yu slays a series of six generals on a single journey to reunite with Liu Bei, it feels like you're reading a novelization of the Dynasty Warriors video games, which are based on this material, and not the other way around. Even when a main character finally dies, it's invariably in a protracted, grandiose boss battle. And yet somehow the comic book-like action sequences, or the occasional appearances of magic, never feel out of place or untrue to the broader story, as malefactors like Dong Zhou appear and then are vanquished according to the inscrutable dictates of the heavens as well as the familiar laws of villainous peril and heroic resolution. And thanks to Luo's consistent editorializing to let you know who's good and who's bad, the main characters are all memorable and sympathetic to the point where you can't help but get emotionally invested in their fates like the worst kind of nerd fanboy. Luo's obvious cheerleading for Liu Bei and his oath-brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei comes off as almost charming, even though I can't be the only person who got a bit sick over how exaggeratedly noble and virtuous Luo makes him appear at every opportunity. And by the same token, Cao Cao really doesn't seem like as bad a guy as Luo tries to paint him; not only is he the smartest guy around and sincerely reluctant to seize the throne illegitimately, he consistently tries to persuade his enemies over to his side and forgive their past enmities whenever possible. His occasional ruthlessness is of the "it's all in the game" variety, and his "big transgression" of honestly taking credit for killing the deer on the royal hunt when the Emperor missed it is so laughably petty that, when the rest of the imperial court flipped out, I wanted him to just take power right then and there. We're reminded that the Han dynasty is rotten and corrupt every single chapter; might as well let someone with some talent take the reins. I'm firmly on Team Cao Cao, for now at least. I can't imagine anyone reading this far and not continuing to the next volume as quickly as humanly possible. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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May 2019
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Apr 03, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0996139540
| 9780996139540
| 0996139540
| 4.11
| 389
| Sep 2016
| Sep 2016
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it was amazing
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If anyone can claim to be making Isaac Asimov's dream of psychohistory manifest it's Turchin, who has done more work to create a truly scientific and
If anyone can claim to be making Isaac Asimov's dream of psychohistory manifest it's Turchin, who has done more work to create a truly scientific and predictive theory of macrohistorical patterns than probably anyone else. While this is of course impossible in the strictly Asimovian sense of being able to tell exactly when major crises will arise - and unlike Asimov, Turchin does not even pretend to then be able to present timely solutions via hologram - this book makes a convincing argument that we can discern real lessons about general trends in societal upheaval, while still humbly emphasizing how difficult it is to make even modest predictions about the future. Unfortunately, as the title unhappily alludes to, Turchin's prediction is that the 2020s will be even more unpleasant than today, an era of strife that echoes previous periods in history where the existing social order proved unable to accommodate internal divisions, and the political system could not easily resolve these tensions due to elite greed and status-hoarding. While not Marxist in analysis or conclusion, Turchin's Structural-Demographic Theory broadly aligns with the notion that the rich and powerful have diverted too much of society's wealth and privilege towards themselves, and general wage stagnation combined with class immobility is already having dangerously destabilizing effects on our cultural norms. Even though the book's prognosis is negative, it's just as high-quality as Turchin's other recent works, which collectively form one of the most impressive oeuvres in contemporary social science. The idea that societies have semi-regular patterns of crisis and stability is thousands of years old; Polybius' anacyclosis model in The Histories predates the Caesars, and the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms famously begins "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." However, since as a rich post-Industrial Revolution nation we have escaped a simple Malthusian equilibrium that would lend itself to the easy use of closed-system dynamics, you have to get more a bit more complex in order to discern any kind of cyclical trends in American history. Picking the right variables can be extremely difficult and frankly, some of the choices Turchin makes come off as questionable; when he was describing how in addition to the steady multi-century Structural-Demographic Theory sine waves of peace --> complacency --> conflict there are also 50-year "fathers and sons" cycles, I was reminded of cargo cult science like the Dow theory model of stock prices, where you hallucinate a bunch of overlapping variable-length "patterns" of main movements, medium swings, and short swings on top of a bunch of random-walk price data in order to derive whatever trendlines look most convincing to your investors. Turchin does his best to avoid pareidolic numbers games, but his well-intentioned attempts to find proxies for inherently squishy concepts like "cooperative social mood" for SDT - measures like "visits to national parks and monuments" or "relative frequency of the phrase 'corporate greed' according to Google Ngram" - have the unavoidable air of arbitrariness, even if he does make a good case that they're measuring something real. Still, once I got over my quibbles with his exact choice of indices, his basic theory seemed unimpeachable. The highest level of the model is simple: the Political Stress Indicator = Mass Mobilization Potential x Elite Mobilization Potential x State Fiscal Distress. Each of the right-hand terms is then composed of a few variables: - Mass Mobilization Potential combines measures of real wages, urbanization rates, and the relative proportion of young (20-29 years old) people in society - Elite Mobilization Potential combines elite income and intraelite competition for important governmental positions - State Fiscal Distress combines national debt relative to tax revenue, and popular + elite trust in the ability of the government to service the debt and in institutions more generally That's it! Or nearly it, because some of the components depend on a few other variables (e.g. real wages are determined by labor supply vs demand, which is also affected by immigration levels and the birthrate and so on). It's a bit more tractable than a gigantic matrix of 330 million Lotka-Volterra equations, or the unreadably long Prime Radiant from Foundation, and though it seems almost impossibly oversimplified (no separate measures of religious sectarianism, racial strife, technological stagnation, etc?), Turchin is able to justify most of his choices well by connecting each part of the model to social science literature that I happen to agree with. The historian Arnold Toynbee had a famous line that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder", and in Turchin's view, societies have an amazing ability to create problems for themselves due to selfishness, interpreted broadly. So if you've read Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, you will agree that economic inequality is reinforcing partisan polarization as the Republican Party moves ever rightward in response to the wishes of its donor class; per Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics, our elites have gradually gotten greedier and treat our country as being more profitable to steal from than invest in; as Mark Ames' Going Postal documented, workplace shootings are a frustrated response to the decline of unions and corresponding increase in the worker-as-serf labor model; and so on. This might seem like standard left-wing/progressive/labor liberal analysis, but if you've read anything about social network analysis (Duncan Watts' Everything Is Obvious... Once You Know the Answer) or cultural multilevel selection (Joe Henrich's The Secret of Our Success), or even Turchin's own prior books on asabiya like Ultrasociety, it's hard not to nod along to descriptions of how cooperation within a society can break down over time: "These four mechanisms, (1) competition between groups, (2) competition within groups, (3) cultural distance between competing groups, and (4) cultural homogeneity within groups are not the only processes that can affect the spread of cooperation norms. However, these four processes are interesting because historical evidence suggests that all of them play a role in trend reversals during secular cycles, and because they happen to be connected by one of the most important formulas in multilevel selection theory, so in a certain sense they are just four aspects of a single, more fundamental mechanism." I think even a conservative would agree that Democrats and Republicans right now check off all 4 of those points: they're competing intensely with each other for control, there are vicious intraparty struggles, they're far apart from each other on many issues, and they're purging moderates/dissenters via litmus tests. The key point is that they are doing all of those things to a far greater degree than they have in the past, and with no sign of abatement. Even though you can find examples of people writing "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" about essentially every year since the beginning of time, there are plenty of social indicators that are showing worsening conflict and increasing unhappiness with how our theoretically vast prosperity is actually experienced. It probably won't get better either: vital programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are under continuous attack, and the fiscal irresponsibility of the Republican Party is actually starting to look pretty good to left-wing proponents of Medicare For All or Universal Basic Income. Why worry about paying for useful social programs if Republicans don't feel they have to pay for their wars or tax cuts for the rich? We're not quite into the 70s radical era chronicled in Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage, with a climbing murder rate and open domestic terrorist violence, but steady background problems like housing unaffordability, wage stagnation, career precariousness, and so on have become foregrounded, because in the same way as the middle and lower classes are being squeezed, the American elite has worked to close itself off, and so frustrated would-be elites have amplified the struggles of the population at large as inequality and social immobility move up the ladder. It might not be fully appreciated that many of history's most famous revolutionaries have not been actual poor or working class people, but upper-middle class bourgeois types who leveraged popular discontent into mass movements in conjunction with their own personal grievances. Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao - while they all might have felt genuine sympathy and identification with the lower classes, it's fairly easy to imagine that if the ruling classes had just bought each of them off with a relatively nice government post early on, they might have remained inside the system more or less happily without engaging in violent class struggle. There are many historical examples of this "closing of the patriciate" when there aren't enough elite positions to go around, and indeed the popular caricature of a contemporary Democratic Socialist of America member devoted to the destruction of capitalism is a liberal arts graduate who can't use their expensive college degree to reach the station they think commensurate with their self-identity. This is not to say that they don't have perfectly legitimate problems or that their grievances aren't as real as anyone else's, but it's an important component of Turchin's model, and I think of reality, that when there are more potential elites than elite positions available, that those frustrated elite aspirants will turn against the system more effectively than a prole would. They're certainly much more capable of upsetting the system than the stereotypical laid-off factory worker or fast-food employee who is barely keeping their head above water and doesn't have time to go to rallies and meetings and whatnot. And on the other side, those lucky elites who got in while the getting was good feel little or no broader loyalty to the society that they wield their power in, which explains why so many of them are such awful and craven apologists for a status quo that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. Relative positioning is hugely important to people, and the most common way to resolve this conflict is... conflict. Now, surely not every single period of internal strife in every country in every historical period is due to the fact that the Marx of the day had idle hands, but Turchin convincingly applies Structural-Demographic Theory to the broad arc of American history, and he analyzes events like the Civil War in ways I had not thought of before. He doesn't deny that the Civil War was fought over slavery, but he does raise the question of why war became unavoidable in 1860 specifically. It's one thing to say that the Compromise of 1850 was "good enough" for another 10 years of peace, or suggest that by 1870 the North would have been too industrially powerful for the South to attempt secession, but Turchin's theory is capable of connecting the Civil War backwards to the Era of Good Feelings and then forward to the Gilded Age in a way that aligns neatly with more orthodox explanations like those of Eric Foner while still showing that immigration patterns, urbanization trends, and elite fragmentation made the 1860 election particularly volatile in a way that 1840 or 1880 was not. Every era has its own problems, but to get an all-consuming crisis like the Civil War, it takes a very particular confluence of internal contradictions, and even those other factors like "states' rights", nullification, or tariff disputes can easily be reinterpreted as intra-elite arguments over distributing wealth and power. I was struck by the difference in partisanship between then and now, however; Foner's excellent book Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men described the coalescence of the Republican Party out of a whirlwind of competing parties, but these days more of the struggle is within the two major parties rather than between them and the constellation of minor parties like Turchin describes, perhaps due to more sophisticated party organizations and a more entrenched Duverger's Law: "As David Potter notes, in 1854 voters were presented with a stunning array of parties and factions: Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers, Republicans, People's Party men, Anti-Nebraskaites, Fusionists, Know-Nothings, Know-Somethings, Main Lawites, Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindoos, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells, Adopted Citizens, and others. This fragmentation was a remarkable change from the situation 40 years before. During the Era of Good Feelings, after the demise of the Federalist Party, there was only one significant political party in the United States. Even when Democratic Republicans split into Democrats and Whigs, parties represented not ideologies but interests and support for specific leaders. The 1860 presidential election, by contrast, was a four-way race, in which Abraham Lincoln got only 39.8 percent of the popular vote, with candidates from other parties receiving 29.5, 18.1, and 12.6 percent." One major criticism of SDT that I had was how immigration fits into the model. Immigration was at historic lows during the 1960s and 70s, which were a time of violent social upheaval and the decoupling of wages from productivity growth. Immigration is higher now, but for the most part immigrants are fairly positive for America (they commit fewer crimes than natives, start more businesses, bring better foods, etc) and seem to be used as easy scapegoats rather than truly being actual causes of dysfunction. Turchin ties high immigration to labor oversupply, and therefore to the wage stagnation part of the Mass Mobilization Principle, but while there might be a few visible instances of immigrants lowering wages in a particular sector, like H1-B programmers in Silicon Valley, those sectors are often actually the most supportive of increased immigration, and the areas most opposed to immigration are stereotypically places like Iowa where immigrants not only don't compete with natives, they're absolutely crucial to the agricultural sector and to rural society more generally. The relationship between immigration and political instability seems more likely to be via the channel of greater ethnic diversity lowering general public trust, although even there, the places with the most immigrants (i.e. big cities) typically like them the most, and it's the low-immigrant areas who produce the angry ranting nativist politicians. Either way I think immigration has more complex effects than are being captured in his model, though to be fair I couldn't honestly say that I believe that raising immigration empirically produces greater political stability, especially if I think of international comparisons and the global rise in nativism. Maybe the suggestion that the more the US absorbs Latin American immigrants the more we will develop a Latin American society has some uncomfortable truth to it. But even if Structural-Demographic Theory may not be completely accurate to the level of Hari Seldon, in the main I think he has captured the dynamics of this "Age of Diminished Expectations", in Krugman's phrase, in a provocative and useful way. Certainly this book is far more readable, and more empirical, than anything Marx wrote, thanks to Turchin's careful grounding in the cliodynamic data of SESHAT and use of familiar scientific models from other disciplines, but as Robert Fitch once said, "vulgar Marxism explains 90 percent of what happens in the world", and a lot of Marxist concepts would fit in comfortably here. Of course, his prediction that the 2020s are going to be even nastier than the 10s were is a real bummer, and he doesn't even pretend to offer solutions - the collective action required to reorient ourselves to the common good is exactly the thing being eroded by elite overproduction, popular immiseration, and our likely imminent fiscal crisis - but it took us a good while to get into our current gridlock, and short of the vanguard of the proletariat violently overthrowing the bourgeoisie, which is a cure worse than the disease, it will take a while to get out of. Nobody likes the "hey guys, all let's work together!" type of liberalism, but here are my quick thoughts on ways that the Political Stress Indicator could be lowered, divided by components: - Mass Mobilization Potential: Medicare For All to reduce health costs, curtail zoning restrictions to reduce housing costs, institute a points-based immigration system, encourage unionization to increase wages and job security, consolidate welfare programs under a UBI, guaranteed jobs program, bring down college costs via increased state support and reform of alumni donation and endowment policies - Elite Mobilization Potential: institute proportional representation and greatly expand the House, eliminate/disempower the Senate, pass anti-corruption measures like HR1, implement Elizabeth Warren's codetermination proposal, actually prosecute elite criminals, expand meritocratic advancement systems and elite accountability mechanisms more generally - State Fiscal Distress: tax rich people a lot more by whatever means necessary, shift to less regressive taxation methods like Georgist land taxes, enhance macroeconomic stability via Federal Reserve policy reform Maybe it's not possible to solve every societal problem permanently, especially inherent ones like elite corruption, but there's no reason not to try. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Mar 2019
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Mar 12, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0415737346
| 9780415737340
| 0415737346
| 4.11
| 99
| Aug 31, 2015
| Aug 31, 2015
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really liked it
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I had an extremely polarized reaction to this book. Its central question - how exactly does money relate to morality? - is incredibly important, and i
I had an extremely polarized reaction to this book. Its central question - how exactly does money relate to morality? - is incredibly important, and its answer - if you may do something for free, then you may do it for money - is elucidated in a clear, convincing manner I've never seen anywhere else. I can't say that I fully agree with all of Brennan and Jaworski's arguments, but the main idea itself, that it's not immoral to buy or sell something for money unless it's also immoral to get or give it away for free, is worthy of a long ponder. Indeed, even though this book is clearly written from a libertarian perspective, you often encounter its central argument coming from "the left" in a surprising number of areas, even from those who don't subscribe to the infamous label "neoliberal", so it probably isn't all wrong. The notion that commodification introduces ethical problems is nearly universal, but lots of things are or were universal without being correct, and I think the logic here is strong enough that it's worthy of being promoted to the default view, in a John Stuart Mill sense, where the burden of proof should generally be on the side of market opposition and that we shouldn't restrict markets unless they can be shown to cause harm. However, the authors fail to convince in several specific areas where they don't engage with empirical evidence, such as when they try to argue that it should be legal to buy and sell votes, and their disengagement with many obvious real-world counter-examples means that even though I find the basic idea extremely compelling, much of the book falls into "nice in theory but maybe not in practice" territory. One of the best running gags in Philip K Dick's Ubik, one of my favorite science fiction novels, is how awful a completely commodified future could be. Point of sale transactions are everywhere, and there's a great scene where the main character has to pay the door in his apartment to pass through it; without enough change to pay the door, he grabs a knife to start unscrewing it while the door threatens to sue him. Ever since I read it I agreed with the unspoken anti-capitalist logic: some things can be monetized out of great necessity, but by default market transactions are alienating and impersonal, and to pass through a door without paying is the very nexus of free and freedom. Yet after reading this book, I think there's a different lesson to be had: it's not that paying for doors is somehow wrong (after all, it costs money to make a door, thousands if not tens of thousands of people pay for door installation without a second thought every single day, and essentially all of us have paid for doors directly or indirectly via rent or mortgage payments), it's just that the micropayments model is inappropriate for doors for exactly the same reasons that Clay Shirky explained made it inappropriate for websites way back in 2000: transaction costs make many small payments far more inconvenient than a single simple door purchase. That's not the same thing as saying that doors shouldn't cost money, still less that buying and selling doors is immoral, and the authors expand on this basic idea and run with it for 200 pages. They outline 7 dimensions of market manner, and argue that many objections to markets are really objections to particular combinations of market manners, when other combinations would be perfectly fine. Those 7 dimensions are: 1. Participants (buyer, seller, middleman, broker, etc.) 2. Means of exchange (money, barter, local currency, bitcoins, gift cards, etc.) 3. Price (high, low, moderate, etc.) 4. Proportion / Distribution (how much each party gets) 5. Mode of exchange (auction, lottery, bazaar, co-op, etc.) 6. Mode of payment (salary, scholarship, tip, charitable contribution, etc.) 7. Motive of exchange (for-profit, public benefit, cost-recovery, non-profit, charitable, etc.) A socialist would immediately respond that even the mundane door market you find at Home Depot is still inherently immoral for the same reason that all markets are immoral: the exploitation and alienation of worker labor is wrong, full stop. I'm not a socialist and I disagree with that analysis, so a more interesting debate to have in my opinion is how the decision to buy or sell something affects our understanding of its "inherent" worth, given the failure of alternative models like the labor theory of value (as they astutely point out, "Marx thought that the value of the product was determined by the value of the labor that went into the product. On the contrary, it’s closer to the truth that the value of the labor that goes into the product is determined by the value of the product"). Libertarianism is hardly a less controversial framework than socialism for analyzing value, of course, but one benefit of neoclassical economics, or whatever you want to call the logic behind capitalism, is that it gives us perhaps the closest thing to a true utilitarian methodology we've yet discovered to compare the worth of things to different people, and the more you go looking for examples of seemingly "purely moral" situations where markets have not only not corrupted morality but improved people's lives the more you find. Karl Polanyi's fascinating The Great Transformation argued that markets have social contexts, and that even though the gradual introduction of markets irrevocably transformed the communal peasant societies of Europe into the liberal capitalist societies we see today, that there is no such thing as true laissez faire because you cannot truly separate a marketplace from the people in it, who act to protect themselves from its negative aspects. But are the downsides of markets inherent to markets as a whole, or only particular marketplaces where the 7 dimensions have been combined inappropriately? The Ubik door scene shows that it's possible to make door shopping into a completely normal and mundane part of life rather than a nightmarish dystopia, but there are plenty of other examples of where creating markets in things that were previously off-limits is not only normal but good. One of Brennan and Jaworski's go-to examples is life insurance, particularly for children. In a world where life insurance doesn't exist, putting a price on the life of a child by means of paying a monthly premium to a company that will cut you a big check if the child dies sounds incredibly immoral and outrageous, if not like a perverse incentive for infanticide. However, in a world where life insurance is normal, it's opting out of life insurance that seems, at best, like a personal idiosyncrasy, whereas insuring your child is the adult and responsible thing to do. Furthermore, proposals to make the payouts of the gigantic life insurance system called Social Security stronger, and to bring more people into the gigantic health insurance system called Medicare, are not only perfectly orthodox left-wing ideas, they're supported even by socialists! So it's tough to argue that putting a price on human life is wrong in all contexts (note that paying for Medicare via payroll taxes instead of monthly premiums does not change the logic here), and it's easy to show that pricing human life can actually make us more careful and aware of each other. Remember that the idea is that markets don't introduce immorality where there was none before, so while it's still possible to have callous individuals and even murderers in a universally insured population, if they would have committed their murders anyway then it's hard to argue that insurance made them do it. And while murders for insurance money do of course happen, I think most people correctly see that scenario as an extremely rare perversion of an otherwise well-functioning system, and would hardly welcome the abolition of life insurance to "solve" that problem. In that spirit, the authors group moral objections to commodification into 7 types, with the seventh having three forms: 1. Exploitation: Markets in some good or service - such as organ sales - might encourage the strong to exploit (to take unjust advantage of) the vulnerable. 2. Misallocation: Markets in certain goods and services - such as Ivy League admissions - might cause those goods to be allocated unjustly. 3. Rights Violations: Markets in some good - such as slaves - might violate people's rights. 4. Paternalism: Markets in some good or service - such as crystal meth or cigarettes - might cause people to make self-destructive choices. 5. Harm to Others: Markets in some good or service - such as pit bulls or handguns - might lead to greater violence. 6. Corruption: Participating in certain markets - such as buying luxury goods for oneself or Disney Princesses for one's daughters - will tend to cause us to develop defective preferences or character traits. 7. Semiotics: Independently of objections 1-6, to allow a market in some good or service X is a form of communication that expresses the wrong attitude toward X or expresses an attitude that is incompatible with the intrinsic dignity of X, or would show disrespect or irreverence for some practice, custom, belief, or relationship with which X is associated. Three form of this: - The Mere Commodity Objection: Claims that buying and selling certain goods or services shows that one regards them as having merely instrumental value. - The Wrong Signal Objection: Claims that buying and selling certain goods and services communicates, independently of one's attitudes, disrespect for the objects in question. - The Wrong Currency Objection: Claims that inserting markets and money into certain kinds of relationships communicates estrangement and distance, and is objectionably impersonal. In many cases, it seems like the fundamental objection is not the exchange of money, but the thing itself, and the most classic example of the intersection of money and morality where the typically "left" position is to support commodification is prostitution. Again, a perfectly consistent socialist position is that sex work, like all work, is fundamentally exploitative, but in practice, support for the legalization of exchanging money for sex is hardly a right-wing or exclusively libertarian idea in America today, and there are many impeccably leftist organizations attempting to alter prostitution regulations to protect workers or to organize them into unions to increase their bargaining power (i.e. to increase their wages, among other things). It's hard to see how legalizing prostitution harms sex workers relative to the status quo, and likewise, if a government were to suddenly criminalize a previously legal prostitution market, I don't think we would see that as helping or empowering them either. Any use of those 7 moral objections about worker safety, consumer protection, power imbalances, or even sexual morality against a market for sex work has to grapple with the fact that most of them apply equally to the current absence of a market for sex work. The argument of "if you may do it for free, you may do it for money" is that there is no moral dividing line between a consensual one-night stand and a consensual visit to a prostitute, and that the addition of money doesn't in and of itself turn something that was okay into something that's not okay or vice versa. That seems correct to me, and it tracks with a similar argument about money in sports: at one point Olympic athletes were lauded as the same kind of "noble amateurs" that NCAA athletes are today; now no one blinks at Olympic athletes being firmly embedded in commerce, and it seems inevitable that college athletes will someday be paid as well, since it's the lack of payments to players which is the exploitation there. Brennan and Jaworski have many similar examples. I don't want to sound unabashedly positive about the book, because I'm not. They insist correctly that empirical evidence should be the standard, but evidence is mighty scanty in the book itself, and their attempts to sum up vast fields of research in just a few "some studies say" paragraphs in order to argue for more markets are often spectacularly unconvincing. There's a bit on how paying for college admissions is just fine that feels particularly ill-timed in light of the "Operation Varsity Blues" admissions scandal, and at various points they weigh in on such weighty topics as whether markets necessarily "solve" racism or sexism, or whether school choice/vouchers have reduced costs without sacrificing quality, or whether it's a good idea to introduce tiered pricing for adopted babies based on their race and market demand, etc, in a manner that's anything but empirical. Does private industry or the government build better roads? A smart person could think of all sorts of philosophical rationales for one or the other, or even a combination of the two, but the fact that there is not a single obvious answer in the real world should make you skeptical of claims to be able to produce definitive public policy guidelines based on pure logic alone. These digressions are especially frustrating because strictly speaking they have nothing to do with the book's core thesis whatsoever. A government department building a road via tax revenue is in practice not much different than a private contractor building a road via bonds backed by expected future toll revenue, and though I agree that things like congestion pricing, which is a market for space on the highway during rush hour, would be helpful, it's not like you don't have underpaid women/minorities, failing charter schools, or discriminatory restaurants in the real world. The nadir of their style of argumentation is in chapter 19, which is about vote-selling. Specifically, Brennan and Jaworski hope to show that, using the same "if you may do it for free, then you may do it for money" theorem which has served them so well so far, since it's totally fine for us to attempt to persuade each other to vote a particular way using words, that it is therefore perfectly kosher to take the next step and simply allow paying people to change their vote or stay home. Politicians already compete for votes in a market-like manner, voters in safe states already sometimes "trade" votes with voters in swing states, and spending money on campaigns is already often enough to make the difference in close elections, so let's just go ahead and legalize the outright purchase of votes. A lot of the heavy lifting in this chapter is done offscreen, by way of references to The Ethics of Voting, another of Brennan's books (he thinks that since most people are fairly uninformed, they shouldn't vote), and since it's boring to dive too deeply into artificial theories of voting on Justified True Beliefs wherein I the rational actor attempt to translate my ethical convictions into policy outcomes via the ballot box based on mechanistic cost-benefit incentives, I'll refrain. Instead I'll just say that their thought experiment involving Ignorant Ignacio, Careless Carla, and Lackadaisical Loren to "prove" that buying votes is fine given the existence of stupid or lazy voters is wholly unsatisfying, and the complete absence of engagement with literally any political science literature is so brazen as to be almost comical, and in fact when I read this chapter I was in danger of throwing out the whole book in a rage despite agreeing with so much of it. I don't care if you think Citizens United was a good or bad decision, or if you think George Soros is better or worse than the Koch brothers, or how much public choice literature you have or haven't read, or if you do or don't generally trust politicians - anyone can set up a trolley problem where the moneyed elite being able to buy elections is good, actually, but reading about literally any corruption or election fraud scandal in history should be reason enough to pause when someone says that abandoning the democratic franchise in favor of giving powerful interests even more power will work out just great, trust me. Imagine using and trusting this system for even something as trivial as American Idol winners and it's laughable. Not even the Libertarian Party would choose to run its party primaries in this manner, allowing anyone with enough money (gold bars?) to simply purchase the nomination. It's like they read libertarian pundit PJ O'Rourke's quip that "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators", and thought "yes, more of this". Now, Brennan and Jaworski are perfectly aware of reactions like mine, and the final section of the book is devoted to why I'm wrong to have strong negative emotional reactions to insane proposals to legalize vote-fixing. Once again, in the most abstract terms their analysis makes perfect sense: time and again in history, people have said that markets are bad, and yet after markets were introduced, they turned out to be just fine and indeed irreplaceable. Douglas Irwin's excellent book Against the Tide recounts how weak arguments against the concept of free trade have been unkillable for thousands of years no matter how many times they're refuted, and Brennan and Jaworski are going for the same sort of thing here with respect to introducing markets in general. Disgust is a strong but unreliable guide to morality, and organ sales are a good example of how deadly emotion-based thinking can be - we laud an individual who donates a kidney to help out a stranger, but a real market in kidneys and other organs would be vastly more efficient, and we shouldn't let urban legends or sci-fi dystopias scare us out of saving many lives via market mechanisms in the same way as we shouldn't eliminate insurance systems because of lurid but extremely rare tabloid murders. So they are correct, in a sense, that my occasionally incredulous reactions fit into a general reactionary pattern, and that since I and many other liberals happily donate money to political campaigns to get our desired outcomes achieved via electoral success, it could theoretically be cheaper for us all to just cut out the campaign middlemen and simply pay our fellow citizens directly to vote our way. Well, maybe. I feel bad concluding that "the authors are correct in a general sense yet incorrect in specific examples for reasons that I won't explain", so I will instead say that they include enough great examples of how markets not only don't corrupt virtues but enhance them to earn them a place in my mental toolbox regardless of the CITATIONS NEEDED sections, particularly with their taxonomies of market dimensions and moral objections to markets. They're absolutely right that we shouldn't think that store-bought flowers for a loved one are worse than garden-grown flowers, or that pet owners who have bought their pets from a store love them any less than owners who were given their pets by friends, or that managing demand by charging higher prices is less moral than creating giant queues (the BBQ joint Franklin in my city of Austin is infamous for forcing people to waste their time in 4-hour lines because Aaron Franklin refuses to either raise his brisket prices or expand his capacity beyond his personal control). In fact, one of the examples that they used in their own book, where they sold various levels of acknowledgements in a tiered pricing model, was disarmingly funny enough that it also seemed profound: if the concept of meaningful, heartfelt acknowledgements isn't ruined for everyone by a few authors deciding to auction off inclusion instead of following the typical spouse/children/parents pattern, what else could safely accommodate this model? Quite a lot, it seems, because one of the major advantages of capitalism is that it can transform zero-sum conflicts into positive-sum transactions. Just perhaps not quite as many transactions as they claim. ...more |
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| 0813589401
| 9780813589404
| B01LYTFII9
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really liked it
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"Cultural appropriation" is a hot topic these days, a great example of how frustrating debate in the 21st century can be. An emotionally-charged subje
"Cultural appropriation" is a hot topic these days, a great example of how frustrating debate in the 21st century can be. An emotionally-charged subject with unclear boundaries and varying definitions that has deep implications for capital-letter topics like Authenticity, Identity, Ownership, and Power is an ideal engine for producing negative-sum arguments that leave everyone more angry and less enlightened than they were before. For my own edification I thought it would be helpful to read something about cultural appropriation that fit the concept into a more analytical framework. Scafidi's central ideas - group cultural property as an analogue of individual intellectual property, and cultural appropriation as an analogue of copyright infringement - are a much more useful way of thinking about the latest controversies over food, fashions, music, and so on than what you usually read. In addition to providing lots of interesting examples of cultural exchange, both good and bad, and across many types of cultures, Scafidi offers proposals to both protect sensitive aspects of culture as well as promote cultural innovation, which is an exceptionally difficult balance to strike even within a single culture. Like with many things in life, familiar concepts like respect, openness, and dignity are perhaps more important tools for this debate than any particular abstract theory of property rights, but I wish everyone who's tempted to write or read yet another clickbait article about cultural appropriation in the era of ubiquitous memes, remixes, and adaptations would read this immediately. Cultural appropriation has never had a clear definition. This is perhaps unavoidable, given the incredible sociological complexities of cultural identity, but it would be really useful to have a straightforward way to distinguish the undisputedly unfair cases of Western countries refusing to return plundered Egyptian artifacts from the vastly more numerous but far less harmful and even amusing instances of infamously lame suburban white kids using black slang they heard on a hip hop album to seem cool to their friends, if only for the sake of our collective blood pressure. Is it worth caring about appropriation at all, or is not caring just a sign of privilege, itself an extremely controversial subject? What if cultural appropriation is actually good and necessary for both individual and cultural growth, and complaints are merely illegitimate demands for power? What if it all depends on filling in every single one of the blanks every time Person A uses Element B from Culture C to make Artwork D which appeals to Group E? Even if cultural appropriation is real, and bad, does anyone win if art is not created? Scafidi's main contribution to this debate, for me, was in starting from the comparatively clear perspective of property rights. "Why can a country-music writer demand royalties from performers she has never met, while an Appalachian folk musician cannot?" We have had legal regimes, in one form or another, that have handled instances of one person ripping another off for hundreds of years. Concepts like real property, personal property, and intellectual property (the clearest precedent for a notion of cultural property) have long traditions in every legal system around, and we generally know where we stand when it comes to purposeful individual creations. There are of course shades of complexity - a standup comedian who copies a joke hasn't committed a crime but can expect career repercussions due to informal norms about craftsmanship - but a news story about one musician accusing another of plagiarism rarely rises to the level of major public debate unless, paradoxically, the alleged offender has stolen something that no one person owns. Steal an individual riff or melody and you'll simply end up in court; steal a broader musical idiom or genre and you'll end up in an ocean of vitriol (my personal favorite example was when Iggy Azalea was accused of "vocal blackface", a hilarious phrase no matter your opinion of her music). Protections for purposeful individual creations are fairly well-understood, but as Scafidi shows, the often-accidental, usually-anonymous creations of a culture come with all kinds of amorphous obligations and encumbrances that can in fact reverse the logic we normally use for deciding what's okay and what's not. Think about overly restrictive copyright law, which is rightly seen as a tool of control by large corporations that unfairly discourages innovation and nets them money by keeping things out of the public domain long after they should have been released. How many jokes about the absurd copyright status of "Happy Birthday" have been made before the song was finally, mercifully, freed to the world? It's at the boundaries of cultures where this gets more fraught: a white American doing another take on the Cinderella folktale is legally fine as long as they don't use Disney-specific imagery, and in moral terms, perhaps they're even heroic as an individual creator proudly defying a greedy megacorporation. But, if that same person were to do a similar take on Ye Xian, the Chinese equivalent of Cinderella, that would strike many people (of many cultures) as different in some vague but important way. This is where one major weakness of most debates on cultural appropriation becomes unignorable: most examples you read about are too parochial and America-centric to be very useful for thinking about the broader logic of cultural exchange. As Scafidi puts it: "Assimilation to American life has traditionally involved the loss of non-Anglo cultural characteristics in order to conform to a mainstream norm, which is perceived as the absence of ethnic culture. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, educated, healthy, straight males from reasonably affluent Mid-Atlantic or Midwestern backgrounds allegedly have "no" accents, eat "normal" food, wear "regular" clothes, play "popular" music, engage in the "usual" pastimes, share "common" opinions, and have "ordinary" tastes." There are countless articles that implicitly or explicitly use this framework to treat white Americans as all-powerful active appropriators and other groups or cultures as passive appropriatees, watching helplessly as their hard-won cultural products like music/food/slang/mannerisms are absorbed and retransmitted without any acknowledgement of the source, let alone remuneration. It's tough to argue with those pieces because they're often true, and they happen all the time. Scafidi's introduces the idea of the "identity tax" that members of a non-WASP group have to pay to be accepted in America (think gabagool and Mafia imagery for Italians, sombreros and tequila for Mexicans, etc). However, outright cultural theft - in that important legal sense of one person taking something that belongs to another person away from them - is such a minuscule proportion of all cultural exchange that reducing the billions of interactions between different people that occur every day all over the planet to the moral equivalence of an actual crime is neither accurate nor useful. To return to the Cinderella/Ye Xian example, organizations like the World Intellectual Property Organization have had great difficulty implementing protocols like the "National Laws on the Protection of Expressions of Folklore Against Illicit Exploitation and Other Prejudicial Actions" because everything is difficult to measure. How much harm is inflicted by a white American using another country's folktale as creative inspiration? Who is harmed, current Chinese people, or the nameless Chinese storytellers of the past who collectively developed Ye Xian one detail and plot twist at a time? If the harm is current, are Chinese people in China and Chinese-Americans harmed equally, or in some other proportion? What would restitution look like, and how would it be distributed? What if the white American used some elements from Cinderella, some from Ye Xian, and also some from Tấm Cám, the Vietnamese equivalent? What if it was a religious text and not a folktale, or if it was contemporary food, or music, or dress? What if this person were half-Chinese themselves, or Chinese-American, or black American? And so on. Breaking the issue down in such a calculated fashion might seem flip, but given the attention that Disney movies and their like play in the broader culture, examples like that neatly illustrate the potentially unbounded complexity of the concept of cultural appropriation, and why so many people decide that the easiest, safest, and fairest way to handle these complicated questions is to avoid them entirely by declaring that cultural appropriation doesn't really exist, and that everything not adequately covered under the existing copyright regime is fair game for everyone. Problem solved! This is one reason why cultural appropriation debates get stuck so quickly: if you think that any aspect of any culture belongs to everyone, then arguments to restrict its use of some cultural element, or even require acknowledgement that it's being used, can feel like lawyering on someone else's behalf, with no remedy readily available or even possible. Especially because a "culture" can be basically anything, in sociological terms, and it's often difficult for someone to know when they're treading on sensitive ground. Of course, this does not apply to people knowingly mocking another culture, but it's precisely because there aren't clear boundaries between what's public and what's private - or what "private" even means - that discussion becomes so fraught. Scafidi's proposal to make all this easier is to recognize cultural property as a new type of intellectual property. Three things are needed to make this work: - The idea of individual ownership should be extended to groups (cultures), who would then have group ownership of cultural products, though with more fair use exceptions than is traditionally allowed. "Intellectual property at common law is a protected category of intangible ideas embodied and reproduced in tangible form, while cultural products are the frequently unprotected expressions of shared values or experiences that are created and reproduced by a source community in either tangible or intangible form." - Time limits on protections should be altered, perhaps extended to the life of the source community, or made renewable periodically. "In order to preserve the flow of creations and inventions into the public domain, especially in light of the longevity of source communities, the exclusiveness of ownership should be established in rough inverse proportion to the duration of protection, taking into account the relative cultural significance of particular artifacts or rituals." - Since many of the most cherished aspects of culture are not tangible, the requirement for cultural products to have a tangible form should be removed. "While individual or defined groups of authors and inventors generally anticipate embodiment or reduction of their work to tangible form prior to its legal recognition, cultural groups may have longstanding preferences and practices regarding intangibility and orality." Furthermore, once those definitions are established, the protections given to cultural products should be broken into four categories, with distinctions between commodified and noncommodified, and public and private, depending on what sort of cultural product is under discussion: - Noncommodified + private (example: Native American ceremonial dances): Enhanced trade secret-style protection - Noncommodified + public (example: open source software): Copyright/patent-style protection - Commodified + private (example: objects used in religious practice, like menorahs/rosaries): Copyright/patent-style protection - Commodified + public (example: most cultural food/dress/music): Registered mark-style "Authenticity mark" protection All of this should immediately prompt many questions and arguments, but I think at the abstract level of a proposed solution, it's a fairly sensible extension of a system which has worked, more or less, for a long time. It makes the dilemma for those who would restrict cultural appropriation explicit: it's possible to set up a system to punish unauthorized cultural exchange, but at the cost of bringing all of this into the Western legal system, with the attendant explosion in legal activity and costs, not to mention vast numbers of new gatekeepers and authorities and the almost-certain reduction in useful cultural exchange to come. It's not quite as simple as setting up a big dial to turn the level of cultural exchange from "high" to "low", but it's obvious that the more layers of lawyers you add to something, the more difficult it will then be. Scafidi cites Ronald Coase's theorem, a staple of law school classes, that given a neutral system to bargain in without excessive transaction costs, individuals will generally reach the most productive and Pareto-efficient equilibrium of property regardless of initial distribution. We don't live in that neat frictionless theoretical world, but would we actually prefer to live in a world where it would be possible to sue someone for inventing a fusion cuisine, or a musician would owe royalties to an entire nation for their folk songs, or take an actor to court if they played someone of the wrong sexual orientation/ethnicity/background? You could prevent Scarlett Johansson from starring in Ghost In the Shell, but Lin-Manuel's Hamilton might not even be written. Black hip hop artists could benefit at the expense of Eminem, but norteño musicians might depend on the whims of polka enthusiasts. An "inauthentic" hot chicken joint could be trapped in the same legal thicket as a humble Korean taco vendor. And so on. Scafidi herself is scrupulous throughout the book in her choices of examples to illustrate how cultural appropriation can harm vulnerable groups, but she also discusses how some level of cultural exchange, even if intended as appropriation, is essential for tolerance and indeed progress at all. The "melting pot" cliché, as tiresome as it is, endures because it captures both the notion of separateness and incorporation, and while it's very easy to dismiss the calls from someone at the top of the pyramid to members of more vulnerable groups to surrender ownership of the very aspects of their culture that define their identity, at some point, as much as it rankles, loosening the grips of exclusivity helps everyone in much the same manner that putting the "Happy Birthday" song in the public domain helps everyone. And while there will always be those who misuse cultural exchange to highlight divisions, it's vastly more common to see people using what's in front of them to create something new. Besides, let's keep in mind that it's hardly a given that the current power structure will last forever, and it's entirely possible in 200 years that we'll have a completely different cultural hierarchy where white Americans are not on top; any proposed new system of rules for cultural exchange should account for this to avoid burdening future artists, musicians, and creators with the hangups of the past. I don't support Scafidi's proposals - to put it crudely, you have to accept that when the concept of pizza is given out to the world, someone is going to put pineapple on top of it - but others might, and she should be commended for so clearly laying out the options in front of us. ...more |
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Jan 2019
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Jan 19, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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| B079RLXFYB
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| 3,408
| Aug 21, 2018
| Aug 21, 2018
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liked it
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If you've listened to any of the podcast, you know exactly what to expect from the book: jokes, bile, leftism. Not all of it works, but of course you
If you've listened to any of the podcast, you know exactly what to expect from the book: jokes, bile, leftism. Not all of it works, but of course you probably wouldn't be voluntarily reading this unless you were actually a fan of their acidic radicalism. But even a Democrat like me who's only listened to a few episodes would agree that much of their criticism of mainstream liberalism is inarguably correct: the Democratic Party sucks, no question. The show punches well above its weight class in terms of the leftist zeitgeist (although to be fair when it comes to podcasts this is not as hard as it seems), and so it's an important window into how our discussion of politics is evolving, in a particular segment of the electorate that is tired of the crimes of mainstream parties and media, sick of endless compromise, but struggling for coherent solutions and suspicious of the same folks who brought us the original problems to begin with. Even though you'll look in vain to find any real prescriptions here - "why are you expecting serious political advice from a group of leftist comedy podcasters?" is the obvious question - this kind of perspective from outside the political system is essential in order to have an honest, moral debate about politics within the system. Plus, the Onion/Something Awful-ripoff jokes are still usually funny. This book is fine, read it if you like the show. But I want to spend some time talking about the Iraq War, because both the book and the show would be incomprehensible without first understanding the long shadow cast by that moral failure. The Iraq War is why I'll never vote Republican, why I didn't vote for Hillary Clinton in 2008, and why many still couldn't vote for her in 2016. At age 34 I don't think I'm alone in my thinking, and even younger progressives have to grapple with the fallout of many prominent Democrats failing that moral test and giving in to the Republican urge to war. If you're a liberal, what do you do with the inescapable knowledge that many of the politicians and pundits that define your party and your ideology voted to support the completely unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands? The cowardice of Clinton, Kerry, and so many others has come to define liberalism for leftists, offering a crystal-clear example of the ethical bankruptcy of compromise-first liberalism, and it presents a real problem for anyone interested in a system of politics that can beat the hate/fear/greed of the right. The contempt that Chapo has for mainstream Democrats is amply deserved, and I won't make excuses for those Democrats who voted for that stupid, senseless, evil war. But, as I read the many long sections of the book making fun of the Diet Evil tendencies of liberalism, recognizing that the Iraq War vote was the prism through which all of liberalism was being viewed, I realized that it's important to understand the structural reasons that encouraged Clinton etc. to make such an obviously dumb vote, since this sort of thing happens again and again in all sorts of contexts. Exactly why did all of these people, routinely pilloried by their enemies as far-left extremists, supinely acquiesce to these transparent lies and indeed actively defend them, to the bafflement of actual far-leftists? The historian Adam Tooze once laid out a fascinating explanation for why the German Social Democratic Party decided to support funding for World War 1 (bear with me here, it's the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day and it's on my mind), and though the phrase "It's time for some game theory" is beyond parody at this point, adapting the 2 x 2 decision matrix in Tooze's lecture 14 of his WW1 series to the Iraq War is surprisingly revealing. On the show Chapo correctly pays a lot of attention to the media because media perception is often reality (indeed, they fulfill the role of the media themselves for their listeners in the same way as the much-reviled Daily Show did), and the credulous, self-important, and hawkish press, deciding that it truly represented "public opinion", played an important role in shaping incentives for the Iraq War: - If Democrats vote Yes and the Iraq War is a success: Democrats are on the winning side and hopefully seen as strong, righteous, and loyal supporters of victory in the War on Terror; surely Republicans will never attack our patriotism again! - If Democrats vote Yes and the Iraq War is a failure: This is kind of what Democrats like Kerry were actually saying afterwards in 2004, like "you didn't send enough body armor, or bomb the right targets, or pay enough attention to Afghanistan", in the hopes that voters would prefer slightly more competent warmongers. - If Democrats vote No and the Iraq War is a success: Democrats would look unpatriotic to the Beltway press, the ultimate horror. Plus, even though winning the Gulf War obviously didn't re-elect George HW Bush, theoretically the American people love winners, and so not being a loser is all that matters. - If Democrats vote No and the Iraq War is a failure: Hey, don't blame me! Without their fingerprints on it, Democrats look like geniuses, even though according to the popular press only hippies were against the war, and can you really trust someone who isn't willing or even eager to slaughter foreigners? So from the perspective of prominent Democrats like Clinton or Kerry, petrified of being accused of being insufficiently willing to bomb foreigners, voting No offered only political downside, while voting Yes would, at the very least, claim you would have bombed foreigners better in some hopefully unspecified way, thus allowing you to be dubbed Serious by the people who mattered (i.e., not the foreigners in question). Setting aside the genuinely enthusiastic Democrats, who are thankfully now almost entirely gone, pure political self-preservation was the rule for the remainder. This calculus of cowardice applies to many situations throughout our history, but the poor SPD does look somewhat better in the historical rear-view mirror: Germany was not actually the bad guy in WW1; defeat in that war would have been, and actually was, far worse for Germany than the US just wasting trillions in Iraq; and by participation in the "patriotic truce" of Burgfriedenspolitik the SPD hoped to gain some much-needed political reforms as opposed to the nothing that Democrats got in exchange for their votes. I completely sympathize with anyone who won't forgive Democrats. Sometimes politicians fuck up, and people die, and no rebrands or glitzy ad campaigns can erase those dead people, and the knowledge that elected politicians are actually afraid of what some circle-jerking idiot news dispensers decide is consensus should give you incandescent rage. I think that's a worthwhile exercise to go through, because, for all Chapo's completely valid criticisms of mainstream liberalism, like many leftists their response to these hard truths about American politics head-on is essentially limited to jokes. Yeah, a huge percentage of the population is simply awful, the press is not anyone's friend, the system is rigged, the support of elites is usually all that really matters, we're surrounded by freaks and mutants. All of that is true, and yet a turn to irony socialism and podcast radicalism would not actually avoid any of those obstacles or address any of those problems. Take the press, for example, and how bizarre it is that so many idiots are paid to pontificate on politics at all while wielding enormous power to destroy careers, gatekeep out new voices, and set the agenda. Gary Hart's 1988 Presidential bid was destroyed in a media frenzy over a picture that is laughably tame by today's standards. Howard Dean yelled funny in 2004 and that was it; Kucinich couldn't even get off the ground. Hillary's emails. Donald Trump can barely complete a sentence and he's shown rambling and openly lying for hours at a time, the press eagerly rolling over for it, countless gigantic scandals immediately forgotten, but simultaneously there's no such thing as too much sneering at liberals, and leftists might as well be in a different galaxy. The Cillizzas of the world make doing the right thing very hard, and as satisfying as it is to imagine all of those people in gulags, it's just not going to happen, so how do you work within that awful system? It's like Keynes' famously brilliant "Trotsky On England" book review, and what makes Robert Caro's works so fascinating. I'm writing this just after the 2018 midterms, which gives both liberals and leftists ambiguous takeaways. Some left-wing candidates did better than centrists, but others did worse. Many states voted for very progressive policies, while simultaneously electing awful reactionaries in landslides. Important media outlets continued to be worthless, because for them it's all a game, and it doesn't really matter who won. What should non-Republicans learn from this election? This is a book of jokes ("Sir, this is an Arby's drive-thru"), but Chapo can't provide a satisfying answer of how they or DSA or anyone else who wants to work around the shambling hulk of the Democratic Party and our rotten electoral system would be able to do better systematically, to avoid the incredibly powerful incentives for good people to do bad things, to have 2018 look like 2006 in another 12 years (remember when the prospect of Speaker Pelosi portended unspeakable Jacobin horrors to come?). It's immensely frustrating that socialism, of all possible ideologies, seems to have all the moral energy behind it, given what a dead end that is, but perhaps encouraging socialists to participate in the Democratic Party is the only way to keep it grounded. Compromise is not a principle, as they so ably point out, and Robert Frost's line about how "A liberal is a man who won't stand up for his own side of the argument" means that sometimes a party drunk on appeasement needs a sober friend to take the keys away. It would be truly depressing if this was the best political system we could possibly hope for, but since we're stuck with it for now, we might as well laugh along the way. ...more |
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Nov 2018
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Nov 13, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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| 080701429X
| 9780807014295
| 080701429X
| 4.37
| 754,433
| 1946
| Jun 01, 2006
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really liked it
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This is one of those "everyone has read this" classics that contains a lot of hard-won wisdom, and whose insights are worth reiterating even if you've
This is one of those "everyone has read this" classics that contains a lot of hard-won wisdom, and whose insights are worth reiterating even if you've read similar books about therapy or happiness. It's two books in one, and the relationship between the two is interesting even above and beyond their contents. The first half is an extremely moving portrait of the horrors of his time in several WW2 concentration camps, and like a non-fiction equivalent to Varlam Shalamov's fictional Kolyma Tales, Frankl's near-death experiences are made even more powerful by his calm, detached narration. His dry descriptions of the camp, the guards, and the lives of the prisoners are set against the grim absurdities of his near-helplessness at the chance events which determined whether someone lived or died, and those physical struggles are contrasted with his emotional striving to find something to live for, the spiritual sustenance that is almost more important than physical sustenance for a human being to survive the worst that his fellow humans can subject him to. The second half is a brief description of Frankl's chosen psychological discipline of logotherapy, a type of therapy which seems to descend from Stoicism and have left a legacy in modern cognitive-behavioral therapy. It was not nearly as affecting as the first half, but as Frankl himself considers it the more important part, the two haves together are more valuable than either alone. Outside of questionably authentic thriller novels like Papillon, prison literature tends to be on the grim side. It's just really hard to avoid emphasizing how brutal prison is, and that goes more so for anything about gulags or concentration camps, where death is typically the only way out. The short fiction of the Kolyma Tales remains my gold standard for depictions of bureaucratized horror, but the added realism of Frankl's experiences is not any less harrowing. This section is full of ethical dilemmas, inhuman atrocities, nightmarish gambles (should you volunteer for an extra shift of duty, which could bring you some extra favor but also carries the risk of a quick death?), and cruelty that is not any less cruel for being done out of impersonal duty rather than personalized malice. The only way to remain sane is to concentrate on the good, to find something to live for beyond yourself, yet with the knowledge that fate has its own ideas (Frankl mentions the fable "Death in Tehran", which I'd previously read as "Appointment in Samarra", wherein a man's efforts to avoid his scheduled death only hasten it). The peculiar mixture of constant background risk of death and unbearable tedium reminds him of a Bismarck quote: "Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already." To find your purpose won't save you from death, but without something to live for you're dead even before your body grows cold. Though it's those narrative parts that will be most likely to stick with readers, in the Preface to my 1992 edition Frankl mentions that the first half of the book is really just an explication of the second half about logotherapy, which is very important to him: his precious manuscript which he lost on his first day in camp was about logotherapy, so it's interesting to see how his drive to see it through to publication helped him survive four different concentration camps before he even published it. I won't pretend to fully understand it - there are too many terms like "noögenic neuroses" and "the existential vacuum" for me to be really comfortable - but it's striking how the purpose of publishing the manuscript helped Frankl popularize a discipline that's intended to help people find purpose. There is much of his real life experience in that quotation from Nietzsche: "He who has a WHY to live for can bear almost any HOW." As he says: "Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively we might say: The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest." There's a great Kafka aphorism that I wish Frankl had referenced, because it bears directly on that insistence that logotherapy be attuned to action: "You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided." We know that not nearly all psychological issues can be solved by calm discussion with a therapist, no matter how well trained, and that sometimes suffering isn't ennobling but merely enervating. Frankl is a powerful example of someone who used his suffering to find meaning and achieve good things in the world, and he acknowledges that there were many others who tried no less hard who never made it out of Auschwitz. But while suffering is not a necessary or sufficient condition for finding a purpose, Frankl is absolutely correct in asserting that finding meaning is possible even in the face of seemingly unendurable suffering, which should cheer up people who are in circumstances less dire than Auschwitz (i.e. just about all of us). Perhaps meaning is where you find it, and the clear corollary - that almost any road could lead there - means that logotherapy is no shortcut to psychic satisfaction, but if "the journey can be the destination", and "the real meaning is the friends we made along the way", and so forth through those clichés, then merely by encouraging people to actively find meaning in their lives Frankl has done the world a valuable service, and proved his own point in the process. Not bad! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2018
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Aug 29, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0753545772
| 9780753545775
| 0753545772
| 3.85
| 2,914
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jul 12, 2018
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really liked it
|
The concept of a Universal Basic Income has been around in various forms for quite a while, but it's become more politically relevant recently for sev
The concept of a Universal Basic Income has been around in various forms for quite a while, but it's become more politically relevant recently for several reasons: rapid technological change combined with international supply chains, growing global wealth yet widening inequality, and the sense that not only do we now have the social structure to truly end poverty forever, but that the best tool is also the simplest. There are many examples in miniature of what a UBI could look like; Lowrey covers both historical and recent programs in places like India, Kenya, and Alaska to explore what has worked to reduce poverty, and what has not. For example, delivering unconditional cash grants via India's Aadhaar program (a vast biometric digital identity scheme tied to pensions, banking, census, and various welfare functions) has had many of the intended poverty reduction benefits, but at the cost of great disruption to established patterns of life; requiring that individuals receive their benefits themselves reduces fraud, but sometimes the system crashes, or someone can't send their relative to pick up the money and has to take off work, or they can't make the side deals they used to. That kind of James Scott's Seeing Like a State central control vs local knowledge stuff would be critical in any kind of implementation, both between countries (would a UBI dramatically increase illegal immigration from countries without them?) and within them (would poor people just waste a non-means tested UBI or otherwise stop entering the labor market?), so even beyond the philosophical question of "should we?", the "how exactly?" question remains. Science fiction has dealt with these questions for a long time, so in addition to the extensive analysis of real pilot programs, Lowrey touches on what, if anything we can learn from those explorations in terms of program design. The founding text for modern sci-fi worlds of plenty is probably Keynes' famous 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren", where he accurately predicted that by 2030 we'd be between 4 and 8 times as rich as in 1930 but inaccurately predicted that we'd all therefore choose to work much less. Star Trek is the most famous fictional example of a society that has solved the "economic problem" and allowed people to work for fun rather than out of necessity, but the questions of how one would actually acquire wine from Picard's family vineyard or gumbo from Sisko's restaurant were usually left offscreen (Manu Saadia's pleasingly nerdy Trekonomics is cited at length). For a different take I wish she had also discussed Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, in which free replicators simply increase inequality, a fantastically wealthy overclass taking full advantage of technological cornucopia while the proles squander their dole in a manner familiar to Dickens. I think the question of whether free money corrodes the work ethic is an empirical question, and as Lowrey shows, while of course some people in Alaska do spend their free money on luxuries, the idea that most or even many people would waste precious funds is more fantastical than Star Trek, where everyone is an amateur archaeologist or chef or what have you. There are even some conservatives, like Charles Murray, who advocate a UBI as a replacement for the existing welfare state precisely because it maximizes personal choice in that way, and is not susceptible to the familiar incentive-warping problems of means-tested programs: if a program like Medcaid is only available to those with an income less than $X, the strong incentive not to make more than $X can end up entrenching poverty rather than reducing it, to say nothing of how complex overlapping benefits programs are. However, the seemingly more dystopian concept of a federal jobs guarantee seems to be competing for mindshare as the preferred solution for poverty, particularly among liberals. I haven't seen a jobs guarantee show up in fiction to a great degree, but as Nick Taylor's superb history American Made shows, in the real world America still depends to a surprising degree on the infrastructure built during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration, the first real experiment with guaranteed jobs. The two concepts need not be opposed - I don't see why people couldn't choose to supplement their UBI by also accepting a government job - but it is striking that a UBI seems much more popular among intellectuals than a jobs guarantee, given the historical record of each. Perhaps the worry is that guaranteed jobs could become mandatory jobs, combining the worst aspects of the medieval corvée with Soviet subbotniks. A UBI seems much more difficult to run poorly than a jobs guarantee, but the work requirements that conservative states are trying to inflict upon their Medicaid recipients should indicate that a government that's determined to harass its poorest or most vulnerable citizens will find a way. Keynes was a big champion of capitalism as the best tool to raise living standards, and ultimately the idea of ending poverty is an economic question as much as a moral one. It may be that truly ending it involves a sort of struggle against diminishing returns: a typical capitalist economy working well enough for most people (80%?), with guaranteed jobs picking up the majority of the slack (15%?), and a UBI covering those few who for whatever reason can't handle employment in either the private or public sectors. The last mile of anything is always the most difficult, but since a UBI covers everyone, it's less susceptible to the "programs for poor people are poor programs" issues that that currently plague America's haphazard, rickety, and often racist welfare state. The single most difficult aspect of a UBI is the funding structure, and here Lowrey predictably is less able to give useful guidance, since these are bitter political and practical questions. Alaska's scheme is funded from oil, but not only is every state not Alaska, but even Alaska might find its wells running dry someday. As FDR said of his own attempt to fund a UBI for the elderly: "We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program." We don't have as much fiscal space as FDR did back in the welfare state's infant days, so either coming up with new taxes, such as on financial transactions or wealth, or finding acceptable ways to increase existing taxes, will prove the most challenging part of all. But, as Lowrey shows, there's no real mystery to ending poverty - just give people money. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 2018
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Jul 02, 2018
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062426990
| 9780062426994
| B01C2NIUPO
| 3.87
| 643
| Nov 15, 2016
| Jan 17, 2017
|
really liked it
|
Barack Obama has been criticized in so many ways for so many different things, it would be refreshing to see a forthright and unapologetic defense of
Barack Obama has been criticized in so many ways for so many different things, it would be refreshing to see a forthright and unapologetic defense of his legacy just for the novelty factor alone. The audience here seems to be mainly disappointed liberals who have bought into some variant of "he started off well, but either got only half-measures done or didn't even try". Chait demolishes these criticisms one by one: over a staggering range of policy issues, Obama was not only pretty good at getting things done, but right up there in the pantheon of liberal heroes like FDR and LBJ. Seen in full context, Obama's accomplishments were tremendous, and unlikely to be fully reversed even by the most determined efforts of the current Trump cadre of reactionary Republicans. While one could have always hoped for more (Guantanamo Bay, etc), given the maddening institutional constraints of the United States political system, Obama made remarkable progress in health care, climate change, education, and seemingly dozens of other areas that looked permanently out of reach during the Clinton and Carter years. This is not a "neutral" work of scholarship but an argument; Chait is advocating for his point of view, but on the merits I think he's correct that Obama is underrated. A successful contrarian take must not only assemble uncontroversial truths to package them into a surprising conclusion, it must also make that conclusion seem obvious in hindsight, and by the end of this book the idea that Obama was in any way a disappointment seems laughable. By the standards of US Presidents (admittedly not always a very high one), Obama has very few peers in American history.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 2017
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Jun 01, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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my rating |
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| 4.26
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it was amazing
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Dec 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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| 4.16
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it was amazing
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Nov 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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| 2.93
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liked it
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Apr 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 3.95
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it was amazing
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Feb 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 3.96
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it was amazing
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Dec 2022
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Jan 03, 2023
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|||||
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| 4.67
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it was amazing
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Sep 2022
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Jan 03, 2023
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| 3.82
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it was amazing
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Aug 2022
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Jan 03, 2023
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| 3.91
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really liked it
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not set
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Jan 03, 2023
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| 4.17
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did not like it
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Jun 25, 2020
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Jun 25, 2020
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| 4.11
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really liked it
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Dec 2019
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Jul 19, 2019
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| 4.55
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it was amazing
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Jun 2019
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Jun 06, 2019
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| 3.62
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liked it
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Sep 2019
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Apr 18, 2019
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| 4.33
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it was amazing
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May 2019
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Apr 03, 2019
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| 4.11
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it was amazing
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Mar 2019
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Mar 12, 2019
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| 4.11
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really liked it
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May 2019
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Feb 15, 2019
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| 3.94
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really liked it
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Jan 2019
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Jan 19, 2019
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| 3.92
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liked it
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Nov 2018
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Nov 13, 2018
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| 4.37
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really liked it
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Aug 2018
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Aug 29, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.85
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really liked it
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Sep 2018
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Jul 02, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.87
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really liked it
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Oct 2017
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Jun 01, 2017
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