29 June 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on June 29th, 2009 @ 06:01:13 pm, using 267 words, 27 views
Looking for a different take on biographies of famous Americans? How about considering how each of them learned to read, would that be good? Here’s your book, not just about how Abe learned to read but other types ranging from Ben Franklin to Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks to Elvis. Want an idea of how Elvis learned? Try this interview with the author, with this excerpt to tempt you:
Q: And for readers who think they know Elvis every which way, you want them to realize what about the man?
A: I want them to learn how he learned. I want them to get a sense that his success wasn’t inevitable, that he paid attention to some things and ignored others, that it wasn’t the myth of rags-to-riches but a kid growing up in the midst of the Depression. What it meant for his parents to get out of the cotton fields and finally own a refrigerator. I’d like readers to ask how his family managed to live in a black neighborhood and not end up stereotypical racists. To wonder what it felt like for Elvis to see another sharecropper’s son turn into Hank Williams. I tried to provide readers with the information to reconsider who the guy was.
Let me put it this way: Who said: “At one time, when I got out of school, I thought I wanted to be a doctor or something in the medical profession … but I didn’t have money to go to college"?
Answer: the same guy who sang “If I Can Dream.” A guy we still have lots to learn about.
24 June 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on June 24th, 2009 @ 04:50:22 pm, using 268 words, 42 views
When we were hailing Abe’s 200th birthday anniversary a while back, we failed to pay much attention to a similar occasion for Charles Darwin, also a notable. So, in the “Year of Evolution” (you know, that theory, just as goofy as the theory of, oh, gravity), several books on Chuck have come out, and Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s View of Human Evolution is one of the most remarked. Here is a very nice and quick review of the book along with some of its continuing relevance. And here is a brief excerpt to tempt you to look into it and the whole book:
Questions of human evolution and the common ancestry of all races were on Darwin’s mind almost constantly, but it was such a complex (and loaded) topic that he held back until he had collected enough information to more fully make his case. Darwin had collected a lot of material for his large (and ultimately unpublished) manuscript, Natural Selection, but the rush to publish On the Origin of Species caused him to shift focus and excise everything he had written about humans. This was probably just as well. If On the Origin of Species had considered race and human evolution critics surely would have seized on those passages for the prospect that humans had evolved has always been central to the controversy surrounding evolution. (It didn’t matter that Darwin was cautious; his critics acted as if he had written about human evolution in On the Origin of Species anyway.)
Imagine that . . . Darwin abused. Good thing we live in smarter times.
23 June 2009
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Published on June 23rd, 2009 @ 06:17:20 pm, using 546 words, 31 views
On a roll with econ/finance books right now. Here you’ll find a really nicely done review of Akerlof and Shiller’s Animal Spirits, the book that’s opened the wedge on what econ might actually become once it lands on Planet Earth. The reviewer is a noted academic himself and it shows. But don’t let that scare you. He knows how to blog well, too, and that frees him from a lot of the snooty, stick up your ass approach as well. He does a thorough analysis of all their main points and notes the overall significance for the field. Here’s a brief bit of what you should set some precious moments aside for:
Akerlof and Shiller focus on the interaction between the exposure of corruption, inevitable with the bursting of a bubble, and the effects of declining confidence and loss of faith in fairness on ‘animal spirits’ in the economy. These factors then affect the kind of ‘stories’ people tell about the economy. In bubble periods, as Shiller has shown in previous work, stories about a ‘New Economic Era’ emerge in which prosperity will be unending and old-fashioned constraints, such as the need for careful accounting, no longer apply. In the 1890s, stories focused on the railroads and the opening up of the West. A century later, during the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s, the central role was played by the Internet, but the narrative was essentially unchanged.
Akerlof and Shiller add a new element to the analysis, looking at the fearful stories that circulate during periods of depression. This is the idea that in such periods, people will lose faith in the existing economic system and propose radical changes. Under such circumstances, owners of capital will be less willing to invest. Akerlof and Shiller cite both the bitter 1896 election campaign, and fears in the 1930s that the New Deal would lead to the end of capitalism and the adoption of a largely socialist system.
If your taste is a little less academic, over at Angry Bear (yes, Angry Bear) there’s another take on the book, lauding the potential to reintroduce “fairness” into econ considerations. Honest to God, doesn’t it say everything that has to be said about the discipline that someone could seriously write about that? Here’s a bit of that one, too:
So what economic theories of fairness do the authors suggest merit consideration? They highlight socilogy’s equity theory of exchanges, which consider far more than the monetary value of the counterparties’ positions, adding subjective evaluations about status, gratitude and similar factors. Another if the theory of social norms, that suggests that people are happiest when they live up to what they think they should be doing, including conducting themselves fairly with others (and being treated fairly by others).
And how should fairness be taken into account? Essentially, Alerkoff and Shiller argue that the old way of treating “real” economics as fundamental and fairness as an afterthought has to go. In stead, if fairness motivations are discounted, justification must be provided for doing so.
The book has the potential to be the seed from which a new discipline is formed that might make a valuable contribution to both knowledge and policy. It would be a nice change. Be there on the ground floor.
22 June 2009
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Published on June 22nd, 2009 @ 06:33:53 pm, using 670 words, 47 views
One of the only entertaining things about this economic disaster we’ve had brought down on us has been watching the high priests of the Temple of Economics still defending their religion myth highly structured theory when they should be fleeing city streets like citizens in front of Godzilla. Fortunately the knives are out, and reviews here and here will give you plenty of ammo to fight back when their inevitable blowback occurs. The first takes apart the one non-president most responsible for the worst downturn since the Depression–Alan Greenspan (you remember, the guy lionized by David Broder). Here’s just a taste of the review but you’ll get the incentive:
It’s the misallocation of capital that gets at the heart of Grant’s criticism of both Greenspan and the Fed. Grant saw Greenspan as the Chairman of Perpetual Intervention, juicing the money supply 1. When a big hedge fund had a serious hiccup 2 When computers might go bonkers over two-digit dates. 3. After Nasdaq tanked. But the former chief saw no need to raise rates to stem speculative excesses. (Recall the 2001 essay is before the most pernicious bubble of all.) Greenspan practiced a lopsided monetary policy.
Compounding his folly, Greenspan was slow to react to the Nasdaq crash and start lowering rates when boom turned to bust in the second half of 2000, Grant writes, adding: “Because that year at the “monetary jamboree” of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “Alan Greenspan washed his hands of responsibility for the bubble he said he could not have pricked even if he had noticed it floating above his desk on a string.” Again we are talking about the tech bubble – a warning that Greenspan was a deeply flawed policymaker. . . .
And this one pokes holes in yet another favorite delusion of economists, the idea that cooperative action is self-defeating and individual entrepreneurs rule. Take note:
Despite its title, Hayagreeva Rao’s Market Rebels (Open Library link, publisher’s page) challenges the economic analysis of innovations. At 180 pages and full of case studies … Rao does not hammer the reader over the head with the implications of his case studies, but for me as a non-sociologist and non-economist the implications are huge and I’ll be thinking about the book for a long time.
The case studies are diverse, but are centered around a single claim: the “joined hands of activists” play an important part in the creation, diffusion, and blocking of innovations. Collective action matters. Rao describes how hobbyists were key to the cultural acceptance of the car and the development of the personal computer; how microbrewers brought diversity back to beer; how nouvelle cuisine grew from the rebellious student movements of Paris 1968; how shareholder activism has pushed large companies to change behaviours; how community activists attempted to stall the spread of chain stores and then of big-box stores; how the green movement blocked the development of biotechnology in Europe. . . .
I realize in a world in which we’re repeating many of the same mistakes of the Depression and Japan’s Lost Decade, in which we let leaders lie us into war just like James Madison said they would, in which we name monuments for Ronald Reagan and let fourth-rate nitwits and their self-serving henchmen into the White House, that world does not speak well for our ability to learn the lessons of history. (The lesson of history is that we don’t learn the lessons of history.) So I have no hope that shortly the revisionists will start hauling out the old verities despite the clear evidence of their historical falsehood (right to work will bring industry, tax cuts spur econ growth, minimum wage hurts workers, consumers always have the info necessary to set the right prices, we must have unemployment to offset inflation since they never rise or fall together, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit). But hopefully you’ll remember these reviews (better, buy the books) and at least see it coming the next time they lead us into this hole. Because they will (See Idiot America review below).
21 June 2009
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Published on June 21st, 2009 @ 08:25:12 am, using 766 words, 41 views
The new book, not the old(ish) song. Charles Pierce has been commenting at various blogs for years and has regular columns and radio spots that you probably are familiar with. I’ve followed him for years because of the sharp blade that is his wit and because of his understanding of the American Legacy and how we’ve been pissing it away gleefully and stupidly for several years (decades) now. I bought Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free to support and encourage him to keep up the good work, and the reviews are starting to come in. This one is good in the review but then, as always, the reviewer decides to critique based on a view of the world that not only isn’t in the same league as Pierce’s but really not even on the same planet. Go read the good parts but be prepared when you get to these two paragraphs:
But if America is so idiotic, why has hooey not always prevailed? Romney and Palin, of course, were not elected. The cause of the anti-Darwinists has been on the wane. Global warming has ascended quickly on Washington’s list of priorities. Other periods have registered just as high, if not higher, on the hooey scale. Creationist fervor attained such a pitch in 1925 that Tennessee did not merely require creationism doctrine as part of the biology curriculum but tried and convicted John Scopes for teaching evolution. In the ’30s Father Charles Coughlin, a firebrand who spewed fascist invective, drew a radio audience of tens of millions.
If this decade has veered deeper into idiocy than others, one factor might be the potential magnifier effect of the 24/7 news cycle and the bang that nonsense receives in the blogosphere and other quick-hit Internet technologies. As Pierce implies, couldn’t those technologies also have a rapidly self-correcting effect? That is not the sort of wonky question that Pierce explores in “Idiot America.’’ He’s too busy having fun at his idiots’ expense.
As they say, where do we start? An electorate that allowed at least one and likely two rigged elections to start this century suddenly gets credit for hooey not winning when the next standard-bearer for the nonsense has to run in the worst econ downturn since the Depression? (And hooey, be reminded, got 47% of the vote even then.) And Romney and Palin didn’t get elected to anything ever?? And Obama didn’t feed his voters a giant wad of hooey which he has since made clear???
And please. Creationism on the decline. Mr. Reviewer, please type “Texas” and “textbooks” into Google. Or go interview biology teachers in any small school district from Virginia across the South to New Mexico. Climate change policy is moving fast? Maybe Mr. Reviewer wasn’t yet born when the first legitimate (and since highly accurate) predictions of global warming started, oh, over 30 years ago. And the hooey-ers will likely be far more successful than an intelligent species could dream of at preventing the passengers from getting to safety even now (the hooey-ers have already let the ship crash on the CO2 rocks, it’s just a question of how quickly we can save what we can now). And, yes, the same media that Pierce excoriates could play a self-correcting role. Just like they could have gotten the global warming policy going when something good could have been done, could have alerted us to the dangerous nonsense of the dot-com and housing bubbles, could have provided the real story behind the non-existent threat of Iraq, could have led the charge against the stolen election(s). They could also fly up my ass and wiggle their ears.
What Pierce gets right above all is that, when the history of this disastrous period is written, the ultimate blame for it all isn’t going to be placed mainly on the venal politicians, greedy corporate and finance types, or the professional wrestling mangling of the First Amendment. It will be placed on a culture that allowed all the Cliff Clavins of our society to hold such a prominent place and, more, on their enablers. No, not the right-wing think tanks and news channels. Yes, the “moderates” and “tolerants” who let the idiotic notion that “everyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s” have full play and disabled the blame, shame, and ridicule that come with being consistently wrong, consistently stupid, in any halfway well-functioning society. The real idiots who can look at America in 2009 and can say things like the paragraphs quoted above.
Mr. Pierce’s sequel should maybe focus on book reviewers.
14 June 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on June 14th, 2009 @ 06:58:03 pm, using 952 words, 71 views
I grew up in a gas station, worked through high school and college in a mom-and-pop drive-in, got a Ph.D. Blue collar, white collar. Been there, got the greasy shirts and the statistical software training. Makes for a little different view of the world, I think, an unwillingness to see one as better than the other but also understanding how those only from one side could come to see themselves as standing for what was good and right in the world compared to those less savory types on the other side. Which is the only real problem I have with Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. He’s also been on both sides but has somehow come to believe that one is clearly better than the other. His book stands as a paean (Ph.D. lingo, watch out) to the joys of hand and brain work as opposed to mere brain work and it’s very good at it. To the extent that he details the intellect and skill that go into jobs like his, motor cycle repair (to which he fled after the Ph.D. life failed him), he does a great job advocating a return to availability of shop classes and the like and prohibition of this insane view that everyone and his grandmother should be going to college. They shouldn’t and both higher ed and the rest of the culture and work world would be better off. But when he starts claiming the high ground for the “spirited” man who knows that it’s best to work with things you see completed (like repaired motorcycles) than the Dilbert world too many college degrees lead to, those of us who’ve been around way too many of those guys whose “spirit” is either demented and/or alcoholic to find the clear edge of moral high ground on which he builds this book. For its sound judgment parts, this book is definitely worth your time; for its insistence that everyone’s judgment is sound if left unstructured by evil liberals and corporations and if given niche market handcraft to work in, it’s fantasy, well written by a Ph.D. with a chip on his shoulder.
This review gives you a nice sounding of the good, bad, and biased in the book. Here’s a bit to tip you off well:
What is special about manual work? Crawford argues that a mechanic is not really so different from a doctor: Both must try to understand situations not of their own making, drawing on factual knowledge reserves, but more importantly, a kind of personal knowledge or intuition that is uniquely human. They must enlist cognitive skills and exercise creativity in their search to first understand the problem and then create a solution. In a sense, the philosopher’s love of knowledge and the mechanic’s desire to know what is wrong and how to fix it are one and the same. (It is also an apt description of much of experimental science and engineering.)
Furthermore, embodied and essentially human expertise represents tacit knowledge that cannot be replaced by algorithms, and so defines a refuge from the instabilities of a global economy: jobs that are physical and inherently situated cannot be offshored; jobs that require human kinds of understanding and dexterity are not easily automated for machine implementation.
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In Crawford’s account of his trade, it becomes clear that he has found a particular, perhaps boutique, brand of manual labor, one very different from the assembly line or janitorial beat. The rewards of his work include doing a job from beginning to end, face-to-face interaction with customers, and the feeling of being embedded in a community — not to mention being his own boss. But most laborers are not as lucky as Crawford, and many of these satisfactions will be missing from other manual jobs, even skilled ones. And the economic viability of manual labor as a livelihood depends at least partly on supply and demand. If everyone decides to become a plumber, will that job market start resembling the one facing freshly minted humanities PhDs?
What, then, is the spirited human to do? Crawford acknowledges some of the difficulties when “opportunities for self-employment and self-reliance are preempted by distant forces,” in an economy dominated by what he terms the “Giant Pool of Money.” But where Marx called for revolution, Crawford settles for Stoicism. “Every job entails some kind of mutilation,” but some jobs are worse than others. The electrician may suffer bruises and shocks, “but none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.” Learn a trade, Crawford exhorts the new graduate. Find good work in the world we have (not the world we want). Seek out a crack in which to flourish.
There is much to like in Crawford’s vision, but also some blind spots. He doesn’t give much consideration to the moral dimensions or larger consequences (social, environmental) of what we choose to do. Must the Stoic be as resigned to work in the skilled construction of a better landmine or private jet as in the skilled repair of useful things? And if true understanding is in use rather than theory, then what is the role of philosophy?
The whole review, like the relatively short book, is worth your time and thought. I just hope at some point in his life Dr. Crawford comes to terms with himself as well as he has diagnosed a sad neurosis of this country and its future. The guy who can put together a treatise on work that recognizes its true value wherever it resides rather than in just one type of work group will give “spirit” to us all.
09 June 2009
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Published on June 9th, 2009 @ 08:51:33 pm, using 663 words, 52 views
We’ve noted before the great finance blog Naked Capitalism and its recently begun book review series. Yves Smith has a guest reviewer in right now with a post on Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb, the “Black Swan” guy. Fooled by is the precursor to Swan and both should be on your “I want to learn how the world really works list,” much like Gladwell’s works. The reviewer “gets” both authors and how they fit together in theme and counterbalance. He also seems to get the Gladwell Derangement Syndrome and why it overlooks the unique and valuable contribution makes that the normal “intellectual” doesn’t. In fact, you could probably propose a kind of Turing Test to tell if you were talking to a computer or the intellectual of a certain ilk simply by asking what they thought of either Gladwell or Taleb. The “intellectual” wouldn’t be able to conceal him/herself. Here’s a little of what I mean:
. . . Haven’t you asked yourself this question? Come on, what gives with Bill Gates? Why is he such an outlier? Is it just Talebian randomness? In Outliers: The Story of Success Malcolm Gladwell takes up this specific question, as well as the general version. Why are some people such enormous winners? Is it something intrinsic to them or is there something more? Gladwell asks (he really does ask) why have you never heard of Chris Langan? What, apart from fabulous wealth, did Rockefeller, Carnegie, Weyerhaeuser, Gould, Field, Morgan, Pullman, and Armour share? What is the most important non-athletic characteristic of professional Canadian hockey players? Why were 19th century Appalachians so fantastically quarrelsome? Why are these people outliers? What is going on?
The answer from Fooled by Randomness is grim, except perhaps for those readers who were clinically depressed before they picked it up. We are Chance the Gardener careening through life around open manholes with speeding taxis missing our knees by inches… until we are crushed in our living rooms while cautiously assembling a flat-packed bookcase from IKEA according to the manufacturer’s detailed instructions. Our lives ebb and flow according to some hideous Pareto distribution, and it is just as well only a few depressed people understand the mathematics. We should all hunker down with a copy of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic.
In contrast, Outliers succeeds, in Gladwell’s typical narrative salad style, as a balm on the psyche of the constitutional optimist. Have you seen that black and white image of the two faces in profile that suddenly turns into a cup, and then back into two faces, and then you realize you can make your brain look at it either way? Gladwell does something similar, but different. When I was young and unencumbered by material things I lived by the tracks. One morning a train was parked on them loaded with large brightly colored metallic objects. I stood staring at the train trying to make sense of the apparently random pattern of lines formed by the intersection of the silhouettes of the train cars and their cargo. I stood there longer than I like to admit. And then all the lines miraculously resolved themselves into a train loaded with automobiles. The point here being that unlike the faces and the cup image, once I saw that the train was loaded with automobiles the random pattern of silhouettes was irrevocably ordered, crystalized. In similar fashion, in Outliers Gladwell displays his talent for putting together crystalizing explanations. He looks at life from a weird perspective and then points out the order in the randomness, thereby irrevocably reordering our understanding of reality.
Much more good stuff there for your review, plus it will get you to Naked Capitalism, a place you should have already been regularly. And when people lament the possible passing of such things as the NY Times and its Book Review because “whatever will replace them, oh, no, oh, no,” well, just point to Naked.
08 June 2009
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Published on June 8th, 2009 @ 08:34:53 pm, using 132 words, 36 views
A couple of good pieces on the difficulties associated with good science writing and reporting. Here, at Real Climate, the best scientific blog on climate change, the poster describes the fatigue that comes with refuting dumbass Cliff Clavin commentators and respondents over and over and over again ("Groundhog Day” is his metaphor) and why it’s still important to keep going. And Neuronarrative has an interview with Carl Zimmer, one of the big-time science writers right now, on the state of science writing, the true difference between journalism and blogging on science and why both are contributors (IOW, not the usual anti-blogging crap), and thoughts on where the future of both are heading. Intelligent stuff and a nice antidote to any cable tv you might have accidentally ingested (or Big 4 network silliness either).
07 June 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on June 7th, 2009 @ 11:08:55 am, using 123 words, 33 views
Not only are mainstream writers getting airtime for the critiques of the “rational market” that anyone living on Planet Reality could make, they’re getting them in big-time papers (WaPo) and big-time finance blogs (The Big Picture). Here’s a little bit from the WaPo review to get you moving (Big Picture has another excerpt from another review):
The emerging school of behavioral finance fills in many of the gaps left by the efficient marketers. Behavioral finance, which Fox discusses at length, holds that financial man – far from the perfect, mechanical trader depicted in textbooks – is a rather neurotic fellow. He follows the crowd, fails to plan ahead and often makes mistakes. To think that his every price is perfect is a remarkable error indeed.
04 June 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on June 4th, 2009 @ 03:58:23 pm, using 801 words, 116 views
There are several lessons it took me a long time to learn. One was that very much of the necessary harm and evil in the world comes not from the mean people but from those whose outer demeanor is nice. Another was that those who test and verbalize well may score high on measures of “smart” (that people like them tend to create) but you’d do well to ignore them and run in the other direction as fast as you can. (As one who tested and verbalized well, I can testify to batting average of being right.) Tied to this second lesson was the realization that some academic disciplines, like law and econ, load up on people from the second lesson (the people who combine one and two are especially dangerous) who then want to imperialize every other discipline. The worst of these folks are the ones who combine law and econ, never understanding that both, founded on the notion of rational people (who tend to be judged those who test and verbalize well for some reason), are set on very loose sand. The guy credited with linking law and econ in one area the most is Richard Posner, who somehow always manages to find in law and econ exactly the principles to justify what he already believed. Because both fields unduly deify the high testers and verbalizers, Posner is held high in both disciplines, proving the point about their collective wisdom.
So it is rare that Posner ever gets taken down in print, but this review of his recent analysis [sic] of the current econ crisis (it was . . . wait for it . . . government errors that caused the market to explode, not his rational men running the banks and brokerages, can you beeeelieeeeve it???) does as good a job as you’re going to find (and, to be fair, written by a noted but not nearly as influential an economist himself). And just for fun, it takes down yet another idiot New York Times book reviewer who got the book to review despite the reviewer’s own history of publications saying exactly the same bilge that Posner once more tries to pass. Here’s the start of the long review:
Richard Posner, leader of the Chicago School of Economics and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judge, uses his new book, “A Failure of Capitalism,” to try to rescue the Chicago School’s foundational assumption that the economy behaves as if all economic agents and actors are rational, far-sighted calculators. In some sense, Posner must try. For without this underlying assumption, the clock strikes midnight, the stately brougham of Chicago economic theory turns into a pumpkin, and the analytical horses that have pulled it so far over the past half- century turn back into little white mice.
Thus he writes: “At no stage need irrationality” on the part of markets or their participants “be posited to explain” the collapse of financial markets last year and the current deep recession.
Posner’s effort looks to me like an earlier effort to “save the appearances” in the face of discomfiting contradiction. The Jesuit astronomers of 17th-century Rome wanted above all to maintain the assumption that the sun revolved around the earth—for if it did not then the Bible’s declaration that Joshua called on God to make the sun stand still in the sky was a lie, and a Bible that lies even once cannot be the inerrant foundation of faith.
Thus the Jesuits created much more complicated models than the elegant heresy of Copernicus, in which the earth revolved around the sun. They succeeded in their attempt to save the appearances. Posner’s attempt does not: It is definitely a retrograde motion, for we see many things in the financial crisis and the recession that are not what we would see in an economy populated by smoothly rational utilitarian calculators.
Exactly. We’ve made the point here before with regard to the recent spate of books trying to claim that econ as a profession is really taking seriously the shifts in knowledge about how humans actually operate, books that, like Posner’s, are just current examples of the mental [sic] gymnastics that Thomas Kuhn told us come before major paradigm shifts. The odd thing is that Posner and the others, with their silly intellectual [sic] routines, are actually good signs that the shift may be nearer than further and take us away from the stunted deformations of what Adam Smith really said that have poisoned and warped our ability to think and act socially and politically for decades now. Should the wall be crumbling, maybe we’ll come to look on this review as the shot that finally put the hole in the dyke. You’ll want to read the whole thing to make sure you took part in it.
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