30 May 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on May 30th, 2009 @ 08:02:43 am, using 569 words, 127 views
Haven’t said much about our friends the economists lately after a spate of silly books a few months back trying to convince us that the discipline really wasn’t the amoral wad of spit that its high priests and academic churches had enforced on us and policy for years. Hasn’t really seemed necessary, given the monumental evidence of their dogma’s failures piling up around us, obvious to all, it seems, but the priests and churches. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a valuable economic literature out there, as our earlier review of Hirschman indicated or praise of Heilbroner, Lindblom, Galbraith and others, including Smith himself, here has indicated. Those who didn’t let their stat models and neurotic hubris get in the way of the complex reality they were trying to understand and relate. One of the most important works of that group of unfortunate and basically forgotten realists is The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, published decades ago butcurrently getting a new review at one of the most important econ/finance blogs, Naked Capitalism (which comes without pictures, no matter what the title implies, although its keeper is in fact an attractive woman who could boost hit rates enormously and thereby enlighten American thought even more, but that’s her own matter of taste).
Polanyi, unlike his more faith-based colleagues, actually took the market seriously, not as descending from the heavens, and investigated how it developed, what it took to create and maintain it, and what some of the implications were. Writing after the First Great Depression and during WWII, he demonstrated the importance of sovereign action in making markets happen and what happens when those growing to dominate and de-compete the market (the logical outcome of long-term competition) capture the sovereign. Sound familiar???? Which is why Naked Capitalism probably chose this review as its first in what we can enthusiastically look forward to as a series of book reviews to be posted. Here’s just a taste of the review to get you over there and to introduce you with Naked Capitalism and its owner in case you’ve never visited (you always hear “he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer"? Well, SHE is the sharpest one):
Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation during World War II. With depression and war, the previous two decades had been a cataclysmic time for the planet. His central thesis was, “The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.” The book decisively pooh-poohs many of the myths of our ruling economic doctrine. Most importantly, he eviscerates the idea of laissez-faire and uniquely documents Europe’s century and half revolution to a market society. Time after time, Polanyi shows the very visible hand of the government interfering in all aspects of society in order to insure market dominance.
Now this point is especially relevant to us today. For the last several decades, we have witnessed a resurgence of economic liberalism — neo-liberalism. We were told once again that markets could self-regulate, and once again it has come crashing down. Most importantly, over the last year, we’ve watched government step in to save some of our largest market institutions, including the locus of laissez-faire, Wall Street itself.
Get that? History and experience may tell us more about what we face than the over-extended models of brokerages? The truly intelligent economists always knew that. Both of them.
27 May 2009
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Published on May 27th, 2009 @ 07:34:34 pm, using 1140 words, 203 views
We talk here occasionally about the massive but rarely recognized tumor on the American body politic known as its prison policies. Despite other much more effective methods of stopping most crime and victimization at far less cost, our fears and egos have led us for years into throwing away money we’ll never get back while having more crime than we needed to. This isn’t opinion. It’s the conclusion of every nonpartisan investigation of the impact of prison versus policing versus juvenile justice versus practically any social program oriented toward kids. Of course, all you need to know about American criminal justice is to know that the latest buzzword is “evidence-based practice,” which, yes, is more than one word and which should also reveal exactly what practice has never been based on to date.
The result? A prison system, social dysfunction, and fiscal profligacy not even a mother could love. It’s really coming to a head now that most states can’t afford to burn dollars anymore and are looking at other ways of dealing with social threats and disorder. It’s only because of the fiscal crisis, though, and we’ll go right back to locking everyone up for anything as soon as the dollars start rolling in again, so don’t worry too much. But for now we might actually pay attention to programs that show that you can turn offenders around and not into better criminals if you just know what you’re doing and run more effective programs.
Such as a restorative justice program in California detailed by Sunny Schwartz with David Boodell in their Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice to All, reviewed here. What did the program do?
Shortly after she began work at San Bruno, Schwartz attended a conference in Minnesota where she heard for the first time about “restorative justice.” Contemporary justice in the United States is largely based on the idea of retribution, and relies primarily on punishment. Restorative justice, as Schwartz explains it, is based on the concept prevalent in more traditional societies that offenders must also try to repair, as far as possible, the harm they have caused others. In order to do this, offenders must first confront what they have done, and then make amends to their families, their communities, and, if possible, their victims as well. Schwartz writes that she very soon came to believe that restorative justice could be a means of transforming these men from chronic offenders into productive members of their communities.
The first step, persuading the San Bruno inmates to face up to their own violent behavior, would be the most difficult. What is particularly striking about violent men is how remorseless they often seem, as if they were devoid of feeling. Schwartz shows how their experience under the justice system only reinforces this sense of detachment. During their trials, defense lawyers coached them to deny or minimize their crimes. In jail, they spent their days complaining about the conditions, their sentences, the behavior of the deputies and other inmates, and society at large. At no time were the men ever required to assess their own behavior or acknowledge the pain they had caused.
Schwartz was familiar with various kinds of “anger management” classes, most of which simply taught violent men to suppress their rage or walk away from situations that might provoke it. She wanted something different, a program that would help the men examine and ultimately “rewire” their own emotions. She decided to experiment with Manalive, a community-based program for men who had committed domestic violence that had been created years earlier by Hamish Sinclair, a San Francisco–based educator and community organizer. Manalive soon became the foundation for all of Schwartz’s other programs, which collectively came to be called the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, or RSVP.
And what did it accomplish, you ask?
In 2004, the psychiatrists James Gilligan and Bandy Lee of New York University and Yale, respectively, evaluated RSVP and found that it sharply reduced recidivism rates. The longer the men stayed in the program, the better it seemed to work. Among those who took the full sixteen-week course, 82 percent fewer ended up back in jail a year later, compared to a control group of men who had not been through the program.
This is all good for you to learn, if you don’t already know about these things, but what makes the review itself even better is its backgrounding of the prison policy issues and the insanity that are their results. For example, a small sample:
America’s prison system is in a dire state. Some 2.3 million people in this country are now behind bars, five times more than in 1978. Our incarceration rate is now higher than that of any other country in the world. Many, if not most, inmates probably should not be there. Sixteen percent of the adult prison population suffers from mental illness and should be in treatment; a similar fraction is made up of children under eighteen. Although there is little evidence that blacks are more likely to use drugs than whites, they are six times more likely to be imprisoned on drug-related charges. Of those, most have no history of violence or drug dealing, and were arrested mainly for possession of drugs.
Sexual and other forms of abuse in prison are common, reported by some 20 percent of inmates. These “monster factories,” as the lawyer and author Sunny Schwartz calls them, do little to break the cycle of violence in society and may even accelerate it. Roughly two thirds of those released from US jails and prisons end up back inside within three years. Some studies suggest that the experience of imprisonment can be so brutal and humiliating that it actually makes men, in particular, harder and meaner, so that the crimes they commit the next time around are even worse than what got them incarcerated in the first place.
We’ve said frequently here that, were we to start practically any American policy area from scratch and base it on what we know that works and doesn’t work in those areas, we would do virtually nothing that we do today. Sunk costs, vested interests (and, lord, are there people who make money off us having criminals and victims), lack of imagination, you name it, all the arteroschlorosised failures that plague all our major institutions, we’ve got a system that is flat-assed stupid but only Senator Webb so far has managed to confront realistically (which you can read a little about in the review as well). We don’t have to do it this way, as this book and review show. But we do have to support the Webbs and any others who have the cajones to try to change it. Read this review, then the book, then get started.
25 May 2009
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Published on May 25th, 2009 @ 07:50:01 pm, using 566 words, 44 views
A sad shadow hangs over Bill Barich’s A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub. The tour he gives us of Ireland, its drinking history, and its evolution into the “Celtic Tiger” as he searches for the ideal “Irish” pub that captures the “real” Ireland (you know, the one in “The Quiet Man") is worth every minute and page. But, as he explains, that old Ireland, unable to be captured in one single pub, was changing economically as he wrote and taking that old land with it in its growth. Here’s one of many good recent reviews of the book, and an excerpt that will give you a taste of the book and the review for further perusal:
Mr. Barich then sets out to find the archetypal “devoutly Irish” pub, “where a sense of tradition prevailed, and a genial but hardnosed publican kept the intrusions and distractions of the civilized world at bay to allow the art of conversation to flourish.” He begins with his own Dublin neighborhood, where the average price of a pub is (or once was) about $7 million, before venturing along Ireland’s automotive capillaries to Yeats’s country in the west of Ireland, to the village of Cong, where “The Quiet Man” was filmed, and to small villages of the Irish midlands.
His journey reveals precious few pubs that satisfy his idealized standards but allows him to taxonomize the choices into three large categories: “carefully curated trophy pubs” that do “preserve an element of tradition"; “neighborhood bars” that are “pleasant spots but not worth a special trip"; and “faceless corporate pubs operated strictly for profit.” Alas, the faceless numerically overwhelm the trophies in Mr. Barich’s study.
Ericka BurchettHe cites two common explanations for the dearth of quality oases where a satisfying jar of the creature can be found: the rigorous enforcement of new drunk-driving laws and “lifestyle changes.” At the time of Mr. Barich’s investigation, the Irish were still very much “in the goo” – before the economic downturn declawed the Celtic Tiger – and they were increasingly interested in spending said goo on “foie gras and prune terrine” at haute wine bars or buying bottles of foreign plonk to enjoy at home. The combined effect of these forces has been to supplant the flow of regulars and conversationalists into pubs with tourists streaming from buses.
The problem, of course, is that the economy has collapsed on Ireland, sweeping the new wealth away, but not leaving the old mainstays like the local and especially rural pubs to recover. You read this book thinking, what will they do now? As one of Irish blood who was fortunate to do a bit of pub searching and pint tasting (four was my limit, and that was one night, but I did discover that it’s true you’ll draw your best pint at the Guinness plant itself, at the time the holy shrine of St. James Gate), I knew practically every type of pub Barich describes, if not in the quantity. The bad ones won’t really be missed, but they were few. It’s tough to think what Ireland will be like without the others and now without the wealth that made it seem worthwhile. Hard enough that I might have to go pour my own pint now. In any case, read the review, get the book, and discover the Ireland that will have to go forward.
24 May 2009
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Published on May 24th, 2009 @ 09:18:22 pm, using 279 words, 38 views
No, this isn’t about a new comic book, sorry, graphic novel, hero. Instead, it’s to tip you off to a book highlighted over at Neuronarrative, SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce Hood. In an interview, Hood describes his view that our brains structure reality very on, even before culture gets to work on us, creating a framework onto which we can build unreal narratives about that reality [my words, not his]. Here’s the question and response in the interview that gives you the point, but go read the whole thing. Then go look for the book.
The main argument of the book is stated as, “Children generate knowledge through their own intuitive reasoning about the world around them, which leads to both natural and supernatural beliefs.” Do children arrive at supernatural beliefs entirely before culture makes an imprint on their developing minds? If that’s true, then what’s the role of culture, to provide content for these beliefs?
Not entirely. Rather, children are inclined to those beliefs from culture which resonate with what they believe could be possible. For example, pre-school children do not understand death as a final state. When they are told that something has died they want to know where it has gone, so after-life beliefs either from religion or paranormal accounts are readily accepted.
However, if there was no culture to feed the children with after-life beliefs then the SuperSense theory predicts that such notions would arise spontaneously. What we need is a “Lord of the Flies” scenario to test this prediction but the fact that after-life beliefs are present in all cultures strongly suggests that this is a universal belief.
21 May 2009
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Published on May 21st, 2009 @ 05:50:51 pm, using 86 words, 19 views
Haven’t checked in lately with that new book notifier, My Mind on Books, lately. They’ve got some nice ones up right now, ones that seem to have a theme going, but I can’t quite put my finger, you know. Below are some of the titles. Let us know if you can figure it out.
In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, Fiction
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
19 May 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on May 19th, 2009 @ 04:43:40 pm, using 751 words, 36 views
All the things Jesus told us were the most important things to pay our attention to, let’s see. Homos? Uh, no. Abortion? Uh, no again. Tax cuts? Well, no. Getting rich? What was that “camel’s eye” thing anyway?
At least we do give major efforts to the things he really did say were key. You know, like divorce. Good thing that’s not easy to do. Suffering the little children? Letting little children suffer? The poor? Well taken care of. The sick? No one sick in this country. Treating the least among us as if they were Jesus? What was the question again? And those prisoners? Lord knows we love our prisoners. We have more than anyone in the world. . . . uh, that wasn’t exactly what Jesus meant?
There actually are some people who profess to follow Jesus who take the ministering to prisoners seriously in this country, although you won’t find them even a substantial portions of Christians (but then, it’s really doubtful Jesus would be a Christian in this country). And some of those serious people write serious books about what dealing with crime and criminals would look like if this were truly a Christian nation. And some serious people write good reviews of books by those serious people, like the review here of Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment by James Samuel Logan and Changing Paradigms: Punishment and Restorative Justice by Paul Redecop.
The reviewer is a former prison guard turned Christian ethics professor who has blended his two careers well, as shown here. He outlines the costly and frequently counterproductive US incarceration obsession and how the authors describe the costs to both inmates and correctional staff:
The punitive approach to imprisonment not only has adverse effects on prisoners, it leads to results that are the reverse of what society expects. According to Logan, the prison-industrial complex, which is “rife with practices of violence and degradation,” reproduces criminality. Redekop writes that imprisonment creates a “criminal culture” that amplifies “the likelihood that people will commit crimes” and will be “therefore more likely to return to prison.” Especially disturbing in this connection is how common it is for inmates to be raped, or “punked out,” in jails and prisons that Logan refers to as “punk factories.” He quotes ex-offender David Lewis, president and cofounder of the California-based outreach program Free at Last, who says, “Prison is a school and violence is the curriculum.” This is particularly troubling given that 75 percent of new inmates are imprisoned for crimes that don’t involve violence.
Logan and Redekop also detail the effects of large-scale punitive imprisonment on prison staff, prisoners’ families and communities, and the wider society. In their view, this form of punishment has brutalizing effects and brings out the worst in people. Logan notes a number of times that jail and prison personnel are also “doing time,” albeit in eight-hour shifts, and that they bear the scars of imprisonment too. In the rest of society, Logan contends, retributive degradation exacerbates alienation, atomistic individualism, racism and an overall decline in “fellow feeling.”
He also recognizes how much money is to be made off incarceration, the companies and careers that depend on that revenue, but attributes the three decade binge to our cultural need for retribution, despite that old Jesus guy. The authors get that actually following Jesus means the offenders are treated like prodigals, returning to their home communities with true remorse and being forgiven, despite the difficulty of that sometimes and how it might affront our sense of immediate justice. One of the surest things we can say about how Jesus would do criminal justice is that he, too, would emphasize restorative justice, as these guys do.
Neither the reviewer nor the authors are naive about those offenders who have no remorse or the ease of doing any of this. But they do understand just how we end up hurting ourselves and future generations by playing the retribution card. We could do far worse than to follow their prescriptions:
Both authors allow for the confinement of dangerous inmates, though in places much smaller and more humanizing than current prisons. They could have devoted more imagination to this sad necessity. Shortly before his death, John Howard Yoder shared with me an unpublished working paper on providing “a life for lifers” in secure communities modeled after the cities of sanctuary in the Hebrew scriptures. What if churches undertook such a project, just as in the past they built and operated schools and hospitals?
14 May 2009
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Published on May 14th, 2009 @ 05:08:45 pm, using 840 words, 37 views
I was willing to let rest the silliness of a late post that exemplified what can only be called The Gladwell Derangement Syndrome, detailed here, the obsessive rants by critics [sic] about Malcolm Gladwell’s works, the contentions that Gladwell’s enormous success isn’t based on merit or knowledge, especially since the critics are oh-so-much-smarter if only people would understand. But the particular reviewer I hit with the GDS charge just won’t give it up and, in fact, provides all the evidence ever needed to prove the point and to show why reviewers need to be reviewed themselves.
The reviewer, here, notes how much he likes Jonah Lehrer, another popular science writer, one we’ve raved about here as well. Why does he like Lehrer but not Gladwell? Praise be, he tells us:
The biggest reason is that I am not beset by Jonah Lehrer fanboys. If Lehrer gets to be as inescapable as Gladwell, with countless people talking about his latest book or article in that breathless “oh, what a visionary genius” tone, I’ll probably get just as sick of his work.
Did you get that? Not substance, not merit, just that Gladwell has fans who really like his work. Unlike the reviewer, we would note if we were of that ilk. Oh, he goes on about how Gladwell, as a science writer, doesn’t know the material as well as he, the Ph.D. in Physics writer, does, but what this boils down to is nothing more than the old nose-in-the-air, if-it’s-popular-it-must-not-be-good bullshit that academics use to bolster themselves against a world that doesn’t see the genius this guy does in his mirror.
The good part, though, is that the reviewer doesn’t stop there. He, by implication, accuses Gladwell of hubris and immodesty. Which shows he hasn’t bothered to read Gladwell’s latest book at all, even though he doesn’t hesitate to say its author is full of hubris and immodesty.
I think, though, that what ultimately makes this book more appealing to me is that there’s a certain modesty to the claims that strikes me as more scientific than the typical Gladwell article. Lehrer doesn’t ever claim, or even hint, that he or any of his subjects have the Answer to anything– he’s quite clear that what science has found is that the process of decision-making is more complicated than we think it is, and that we’re only scratching the surface. Even his ultimate recommendation– that you should spend some time thinking about how you’re thinking about things when making decisions– is a modest one.
It’s that lack of hubris (or at least perceived hubris) that makes this book work better for me than Gladwell’s stuff.
Those of you who actually have read Gladwell’s latest, Outliers, know that the book is a treatment of the role of chance in everyday lives, even the lives of those outliers who make it to the top of their professions and society. How mundane, says this reviewer about Gladwell’s work. Everyone knows that chance plays a big role, why is he called a genius??? “Everyone” except those policymakers who have set our national and state policies on everything from education to corrections, health to welfare, on the rock-firm assessment that individuals alone are responsible for their conditions and deserve no humane consideration because they had it in their complete power not to be the way they are. Gladwell’s ability to make millions of Americans sit back and even reconsider that for a millisecond is more than this reviewer will accomplish in his entire life. But, no, that’s not the point I was getting at.
If you read Outliers, you know that a substantial portion of it is a summary of the remarkable role of repeated chance in his Jamaican mother’s ability to get a scholarship to England, whereupon she met and wed Gladwell’s father, whereupon Gladwell escaped an alternative fate of greeting tourists when they walked into the tourist resort. Gladwell uses his own life as an example of how much individuals owe the rolls of the dice that came before and should not take themselves and their successes as inevitable or judgments of their own worth. IOW, the exact opposite of hubris and immodesty. Either the reviewer didn’t read this or didn’t understand it. His choice.
The reviewer calls himself “an everyday guy.” Yes, an everyday Cliff Clavin. Look, there’s nothing wrong with not liking someone’s work. There’s nothing wrong with stating so and pointing out legitimate problems. But there’s an entire universe wrong with condemning someone’s work simply because he’s demonstrated popularity. There’s an entire universe wrong with creating straw men of an author’s purpose and impact and then bravely slaying them, especially when the reviewer literally has nothing but a small-time blog to point to as his own achievement. (And, yes, I do know whereof I speak, but this post is not one of them.) There may be 3 or 4 people on this planet who could legitimately take the orientation toward someone like Gladwell that this reviewer does. But he’s not one of them.
12 May 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on May 12th, 2009 @ 08:12:01 pm, using 386 words, 48 views
Neuronarrative continues its tradition of bringing us interesting interviews with interesting authors of interesting books here. This time it’s an interview with Philip Alcabes who manages to time a book with our swine flu fun, Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Plague to Avian Flu. It sounds like a good aspirin for the situation we see now and maybe in the future. Here’s his take on the recent media explosion:
The question I ask myself is, why is it so important to us to see this small, thus-far mild outbreak of flu as a scary situation? Why should W.H.O. feel the need to act?
In part, it’s because we’ve been primed for this. Our health agencies (the W.H.O. most notably) have been telling us for years that a flu pandemic is “inevitable.” All those agencies needed a case-in-point to justify their dire warnings, otherwise the “pandemic preparedness” campaign might have gone the way of the prior “bioterrorism preparedness” campaign (2002-2004): simply withered away from lack of interest.
But more deeply, the preparedness rhetoric influenced our thinking. Repeatedly gesturing toward the terrible 1918 flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of people died worldwide, authorities and flu researchers reminded us to think of 1918 when we think of flu. The result, as we see now, is that the few facts available about the new flu serve as the basis for projections of our horror fantasies. People (again, including W.H.O. officials) talk about the inevitability of a “pandemic,” about the likelihood that there will be more cases and more deaths.
So, if by “real thing” you mean, is this a public health problem, I’d say yes. People are sick with a contagious disease. More might fall ill. It demands attention from public health authorities.
But if you mean, is this the disaster that is being depicted, I would say not yet, and probably not ever. The problem is that once the fantasy scenarios start being painted, the facts become scenery on the stage. It’s the fear that drives the drama. We’ll undoubtedly see more fear-driven pronouncements. I hope we’ll also see good public health.
The whole interview will partly calm you and partly make you worse. I’ll let you decide which parts. Go read.
11 May 2009
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Published on May 11th, 2009 @ 08:19:18 pm, using 71 words, 60 views
What’s that, you say? Haven’t had a good reading list of useful management works lately? Ever?? Well, your wait’s over. GOVERNING has a nice set of books up, complete with short summaries to entice you to them, covering a wide range of management topics. Any list that goes all the way from Moneyball to Predictably Irrational can’t be bad. Comes with helpful links for your ordering convenience. Sounds well managed, right?
09 May 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on May 9th, 2009 @ 09:19:38 am, using 1216 words, 41 views
We have made a point of shining light on the reviewers rather than the reviews a lot here, both when done well and well done badly, to highlight the common superficiality and frequent mediocrity in the enterprise, especially from what are reputed to be the best journalism has to offer. The greater point, of course, is that the mediocrity and superficiality, not the Internet, are the reasons for decline of newspapers and the corruption of journalism and the First Amendment that we see so prevalently today.
Usually it’s something like the New York Times or its sibling the Boston Globe on whom we train our concern, but even a more often credible paper like the Christian Science Monitor can provide insights into the dumbing down by the Wall Street/Beltway corridor that has enfeebled this nation. This review on Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Age of the Unthinkable is a classic example in two separate ways.
Let me note that I have a natural tendency to perceive anyone like Ramo linked to Kissinger Associates as someone better at knowing people and hyping himself than anything substantive that should be taken seriously. Perhaps I’m unfair. But this review of this reviewer has nothing to do with the author or the book. It’s to show how bad reviews get done and why who does them reveals so much.
First, the predictable. The reviewer actually starts out fairly well, describing the creativity of the author and the timeliness of the topic, how to adapt to the greatly changing globe with its greatly changing dangers and demands we’re now dealing with. Here are Ramo’s key points that we should follow, according to the reviewer:
•Don’t be mesmerized by the most obvious – or most recent – threats. Look at the periphery.
•Be nimble, adaptable, resilient.
•Learn to see the signs of change and embrace it.
•Understand that small things can have big impacts.
•Don’t fear chaos; work with it.
•Promote peer relationships and tap the wisdom of crowds.
•Don’t beat your enemies; empathize with them and manipulate them.
•Be willing to give up grand strategies such as bringing democracy to the Middle East.
Okay. Had he stopped there, the reviewer would have delivered a useful and workable review. But he didn’t. He had to play the reviewer game of finding flaws and proving himself smarter than the creator being reviewed, which might also have been useful and workable had he really, you know, been smarter than the creator being reviewed. Here are the “flaws” he discovered:
Like St. Augustine, who asked for chastity, but not yet, Ramo asks for epistemological modesty, but evidently not for himself. His description of the ideal foreign-policy worker smacks of self promotion.
And his dismissal of centuries worth of foreign-affairs thinking – and the Bush administration’s approach in particular – betrays an overconfidence in his own thesis and a surprising inability to hedge the possibility that decades hence may vindicate some of the strategies he finds so stupid.
Some of his prescriptions appear contradictory. In an account of fighting disease in South Africa, Ramo concludes that success depended on bureaucrats stepping aside and empowering individuals to take full ownership over their health. Yet elsewhere he calls for national healthcare in America.
Might that lead to some of the government oversight and centralization that was so detrimental in Africa?
Finally, his concept of grand strategy seems untethered to the granite post of ideology. Ideology has a bad taste today, but many of America’s enemies are driven by it and some of them think in terms of centuries, not years. Might it not be wise to match that will with a set of principles that are equally durable?
Ramo’s strength is his power of perception. Like Malcolm Gladwell – the author of “The Tipping Point,” “Blink,” and “Outliers” – Ramo amazes us as he effortlessly connects the insights of visionary figures as diverse as an Israeli intelligence chief and a venture-capital legend.
But, unfortunately, also like Gladwell, Ramo doesn’t bring that perspicacity to his own thesis. What are its weaknesses? What’s the counterevidence? Wrapping his argument in a bow is pretty, but it doesn’t let readers examine the contents of the box.
Where do we start? Someone shining new light on old problems that have gotten worse under old ways of thinking and saying we should become more modest in our beliefs needs to be more modest? And how, exactly? By saying we should pay no attention to him? And do we seriously have someone who thinks decades from now Bush II will be vindicated? Even assuming that everything is hunky dory that Bush II paid attention to “decades” from now, we’re to credit everything to Bush II and nothing to the intervening years? Why do I think this guy sits around still saying Jimmy Carter’s to blame for everything now? Especially since he equates greater individual control of their health care with a government-dictated system, despite all the European systems that have accomplished exactly what Ramo has advocated? And I love the further confirmation that we’re dealing with an ideologue here in his insistence that ideology should be fought with ideology and Ramo left out any principles to guide us. Uh . . . :
•Don’t be mesmerized by the most obvious – or most recent – threats. Look at the periphery.
•Be nimble, adaptable, resilient.
•Learn to see the signs of change and embrace it.
•Understand that small things can have big impacts.
•Don’t fear chaos; work with it.
•Promote peer relationships and tap the wisdom of crowds.
•Don’t beat your enemies; empathize with them and manipulate them.
•Be willing to give up grand strategies such as bringing democracy to the Middle East.
Then finally, yet again, we have a sufferer of the Gladwell Derangement Syndrome which we have just detailed here and here. You’re not a “serious” writer if you don’t give complete and equal time to your critics. Well, I clearly would have liked to have seen the same logic applied to this review. It might have kept me from having to point out all the silliness inside this “not even wrapped in a pretty bow” review.
Here’s the second and worst part, though. Were I still grading papers for a living, this might, might get a C+ since the first part was worth the paper it was written on, if it weren’t more that 20lb. paper, anyway. The second part was the snobbish and supercilious musings learned for the worst kind of grad school seminar. Poorly thought but superiorly stated. Sort of like the general tone and intelligence of the Wall Street/Beltway media who have poisoned our thinking and actions for decades now.
What? That’s just my first point restated? True, that’s not the point. This is. The reviewer is the Monitor’s Opinion Editor. The guy that supposedly quality paper entrusts with deciding all things smart to be printed on the opinion page. Poorly thought but superiorly stated and in charge. Like the Times, the Globe, the Post, all the others who have failed us so spectacularly and now seek others to blame as their ship sinks. Not all of them should worry, though. Murdoch’s rich. He can come up with jobs for them that will suit their intellects and talents perfectly.
05 May 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on May 5th, 2009 @ 07:39:56 pm, using 546 words, 48 views
Well, that didn’t take long.
Yesterday we noted that Malcolm Gladwell had a piece out allegedly talking about how “little guys” can frequently take down Goliaths by refusing to play the conventional games and doing things that suit their particular talents instead. We noted also that it seemed obliquely possible that Gladwell was giving the one-finger salute to his high-and-mighty sophisticated and “learned” critics who can’t forgive good story-telling in getting important concepts across, who couldn’t and haven’t had the impact in their entire careers that Gladwell had with his first book. The folks who suffer what has to be called The Gladwell Derangement Syndrome.
So, surprise, surprise, surprise. Here’s a review at Science Blogs that, along with the supercilious comments, encapsulates perfectly the GDS. The guy’s name is Orzel. Ever heard of him? Think you ever will again? But, see, he has something you and I don’t. An academic position. Which means he can say things like this and not see just how pompous and (a word only people like him understand) jejune the whole GDS is:
I’m never quite sure what to make of Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of smart people seem to be favorably impressed by his writing and ideas, but whenever I actually read anything by him, there doesn’t seem to be much there.
And to drum the point home, like a spike through our ears, read the comments. I’ll wait.
Shorter Orzel and commenters (as they say): Gladwell’s really a big dummy, and I’m a lot smarter and better. People should listen to me. And prettier, too. No, really. Uh-huh. Uh-huhhhh . . . MOMMMMMM!!!
I’m sorry, but this is junior high. I know envy is never pretty, but these whiny little mirror-gazers are so clueless. They sound just like those “artsy” but as yet unaccomplished movie critics who still pound “Crash” whenever they can, you know, an Oscar-winning Best Picture, because on their planets earnest effort to talk about our great national disease is so, so . . . done. Better to talk about gay cowboys who can’t quit. I promise you, one of the deadliest, most mind-killing things you can do is to attend a faculty party with these types of people, topping or reaffirming each other’s brilliance against the poor dunderheads out there. It’s the same pseudo-intellectual crap Isaiah Berlin had to put up with, claims that he never produced “real” philosophy (aka mental masturbation that ranks high but not at the top of disasters Plato left us). He just took the turgid offerings of higher-minded seers and shaped and synthesized them for use and understanding by tons of people not on academic time or duty. Good thing that “freedom from” and “freedom to” thing proved so unimportant. And no one refers to foxes and hedgehogs anymore.
Academics have bad reputations in this society precisely for this “smartest person in the room” psychosis that these kinds of reviews and comments exemplify. People so tone-deaf to others often don’t even see the problem. You could tell them to wake up or grow up, but what do you know? You probably hadn’t ever thought of the stuff Gladwell writes about and are glad he can get it to you in a way that won’t have you asleep in 2 minutes. You must really be a big dummy, too.
04 May 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on May 4th, 2009 @ 06:24:36 pm, using 451 words, 32 views
A couple of interesting cases of the superficiality and silliness of mediocrities criticizing people far more intelligent and capable than they. Here you find that mush-mouthed, spineless, MisterRogers replacement Kevin Drum blasting The Black Swan because, yes, indeed, Taleb annoys him with his tone. The content? Well, Drum says it’s all pretty well known beforehand. That, of course, is why we’re not in the middle of the economic mess we would be in if it weren’t all pretty well known beforehand. But mainly it’s more of Drum and the accommodationists (the Commies had them down well as “useful idiots") who have done so much damage by lowering the barriers to the nonsense and bullsh*t that have flooded our politics in the last couple of decades. The fact that someone like Drum has moved from his blog to one smalltime Beltway “don’t stand for anything but not standing for anything” magazine to a bigger one that claims to be progressive is just another sign of the mediocrities that Taleb rightfully blasts and why we’re in the position we’re in. “Nice” has covered and enabled so much evil and stupidity in my lifetime that I’ve come to believe it outpaces pure evil itself. That Drum and his enablers don’t get that says everything we need to know.
Which leads us here to Malcolm Gladwell’s latest in The New Yorker, ostensibly an analysis of how, if little guys refuse to play by the big guys’ rules (games, war, whatever), they usually do very, very well (think David and Goliath). The article is classic Gladwell, taking a concept that others think they can describe better and more intelligently and supplying the memorable stories that not only get the points across but give us the means to remember them (who believes Drum will come to anyone’s mind a year after he finally gets dumped as a pundit??? wish he were still writing??? wonder what insight he would bring to a conversation???). But I came away thinking that, intentionally or not, Gladwell just lifted a giant finger to all those academics, intellectuals, and bloggers who place themselves above little weird-haired guys like Gladwell. The Goliaths of science writing hue to the traditional modes of exposition and lift the edifices of their establishment to fend off the “popular.” But, by writing outside that stifling box, “David” Gladwell gets to a bigger audience and has greater success getting the concepts across than they could ever dream. Pointing out how and why the little guys overcome the institutionalized power types could be just another way of saying “f*ck you” to the traditional academic establishment.
Did Gladwell mean it? Well, he probably won’t say. Kevin Drum might get annoyed.
01 May 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on May 1st, 2009 @ 07:11:42 pm, using 262 words, 53 views
Cool new feature at Cognitive Daily. Something called Cognitive Monthly.
Huh?
Well, actually it IS a cool new feature. One of the best blogs over at Science Blogs, Cognitive Daily can explain itself better than I can:
. . . Every month, in addition to our regular blog posts, we’re going to create a downloadable mini-book (or maxi-article, take your pick) about an issue related to cognitive psychology. Surprise, surprise, it’s called Cognitive Monthly.
Although based on posts that have appeared in CogDaily, it goes beyond what’s in the blog, synthesizing and incorporating interviews and other insights. . . .
Here’s their first topic:
This month’s report, “The Illusion of Theater,” covers the remarkable science behind what theatrical professionals seem, to laypeople, to do intuitively: create an environment that encourages us to believe that what we see on stage is a true representation of reality. We interviewed a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, along with several other key participants in the production of a play, and applied their explanation of the process of theater production to the science of perception. We think you’ll find our report surprising and engaging.
Here’s all it will set you back:
The price is $2 per download, available now from Lulu.com in PDF format (compatible with nearly all computers, plus the Sony e-reader and iPhone), and from Amazon.com in Kindle format. The Kindle version also works on an iPhone, but it’s black-and-white, so you may prefer the full-color Lulu version.
And they promise links to reviews to let you engage in further conversations. Good folks, good idea. Give them a try.
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