29 July 2009
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Published on July 29th, 2009 @ 07:30:36 pm, using 365 words, 22 views
My mom marveled in her last years at the amount of change that had occurred in her lifetime and was literally one of those people who would speculate about what changes her greatgrandchildren would see at that rate of change. You can play the game, too, probably even better since she passed away before iPods, DVR, much less iPhones, Kindles, everything you speculate about. One of the areas that will bring major change (already is) is obviously bioengineering and genetic selection. But we don’t have to just include genes in this. We can include bio products like hormones and their uses as we discover the horizons in them. Growth hormone, for example.
I know, a decade old, no big deal. Well, maybe not the tech, but, as is the way with tech, we’re really only now just dealing with the social consequences of growth technologies. A book to help you out in this is Normal at Any Cost by Susan Cohen and Christine Cosgrove, which gets you straight into the personal and ethical problems raised. This review will give you some idea of why you should partake, and this excerpt will get you to the review:
It was in the years after World War II that a handful of basic hormones, discovered decades earlier, were transformed into powerful drugs. First they were used to correct deficiencies in sick children. Then they were tried in healthy children. Then, in the words of the authors, it was suddenly “Glandward ho!” — a vast new horizon of entrepreneurial medicine.
Who was the most miserable kid in your seventh-grade class? Was it the tiny boy in his fourth-grade jeans? Was it the six-foot girl, a hunched-over stork in flat shoes and horizontal stripes? Perhaps neither of them was particularly miserable. But you can bet that in their pediatricians’ offices a script was playing out.
How tall would the child grow, parents asked. Even now, nobody can answer that basic question with any precision. How unhappy would the child be? Many opinions, but no good data there either. What could be done? Ah. Finally, a question with answers.
So how about it? It could be good for your personal growth.
Sorry.
28 July 2009
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Published on July 28th, 2009 @ 05:55:28 pm, using 664 words, 29 views
Not the cheeriest of topics, we know, but that doesn’t make it unworthy of attention, especially with the stories of wrong convictions and violent crime its never-ending concern (at least on local news and Lifetime). Lots of good stuff out there, pro and con, but right now the Law & Politics Book Review at the Amer Poli Sci Assoc has a couple of very interesting reviews up on the subject. The book reviews here are a little different as a rule, more academic, less polemic, although some good shots can be taken. Nevertheless, since it’s a poli sci site, its audience’s predilections and concerns are already taken into account, and the analysis is usually as good as the books being reviewed (or better). So, even if you’re not into the death penalty (so to speak), go check it out and familiarize yourself with the site.
Here’s a bit of the No Winners Here Tonight review to give you incentive:
Unlike many books on capital punishment, Welsh-Huggins actually devotes a chapter to what he terms “the bargaining of death.” This chapter is undoubtedly the most valuable chapter in the book. Welsh-Huggins meticulously outlines how various county prosecutors in Ohio decided whether they would seek the death penalty. This area of research is especially valuable to political scientists because it addresses both the politics of the state as well as the role of public opinion. Explaining clearly that the criminal justice system would collapse without plea bargaining, Welsh-Huggins analyzes how plea bargaining affects the goal of the death penalty: “punishing the worst of the worst with the ultimate penalty” . . . .
Another outstanding chapter and wonderful addition to the field is Welsh-Huggins’ chapter on judges. He looks at the rural and urban relationship with capital punishment and subtly demonstrates the inequity issues that surface. Ohio, like many states in the U.S., has its share of struggling cities, towns, and counties. Welsh-Huggins explains how state and national politics affected Ohio’s death penalty history. The Justice Department’s 2000 analysis of the death penalty system showed bias in various areas, including geography. This fact does not get past Welsh-Huggins, and his work on the issue shows his ability to see that bias, in regards to capital punishment, comes in numerous forms and not simply the classic themes like race or mental capacity.
And here’s one of Against the Death Penalty, an international perspective:
The Yorke text clearly continues a decade-long trend toward global studies of the death penalty topic. The contributors are well-known experts, many of whom have published their own research on capital punishment. Yet, there are some deficiencies in both organization and content. First, the inclusion of three chapters on America’s utilization of capital punishment in Part II creates an imbalance. Because Chapters 6 and 7 overlap somewhat and are distinct from the Chapter 8 focus on public attitudes about the death penalty, one of the aforementioned chapters could be eliminated. Second, Part III ends without a dedicated Conclusion chapter. Given that void, the order of the two chapters found here should be switched, such that Chapter 11 on various alternative strategies to the death penalty should follow Chapter 12 on the specific proposal of life imprisonment. Third, while the content of information within chapters is generally adequate, the repeated reference to international treaties, conventions, and protocols probably necessitates including some of those documents in appendices to the book, even if in an excerpted form. Fourth, while the first seven chapters of the text employ footnotes as the main citation protocol, the final five chapters either use the in-text citation format or mix the in-text method with explanatory notes.
Despite the flaws discussed above, AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY: INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVES AND IMPLICATIONS makes a positive contribution to the literature on the death penalty. At the least, the book reminds us that the fight to eliminate capital punishment in the United States cannot be properly understood without awareness of how other regions of the world or individual nations treat the death penalty.
27 July 2009
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Published on July 27th, 2009 @ 05:47:58 pm, using 195 words, 26 views
A brief review here of a new book on Adam Smith, which serves as an excuse to introduce you, if you don’t already know about it, to one of the best niche sites on the web. Like the Bible and MLK’s speeches, there’s an awful lot of cherry-picking and outright ignorance regarding what Adam Smith actually said, coined, and believed. Came up with “invisible hand"? Uh, no. Loved and trusted businessmen. Again, no. Said it was okay to screw over your neighbor because good was inevitable from it? Uh, noooo. Said government should never regulate, shouldn’t step in to help people in the society? Hell, no. Do you really need to read A Theory of Moral Sentiments or The Wealth of Nations to find everything out that you don’t really know? No, you just need to check in regularly with Gavin Kennedy’s blog, Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy, and its companion site with some of his more involved writings. For now, go tour, catch up to speed, and then bookmark. Both of them. It won’t cure the misunderstandings and false quotes that permeate our debates but at least you won’t be the one responsible for them.
26 July 2009
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Published on July 26th, 2009 @ 12:16:46 pm, using 644 words, 36 views
Been a little while since we’ve highlighted some books on the current debacle we call our economy and the politics that brought it about, so here’s a review that will catch you up on how we are now governed by the Goldman/Harvard/Baldwin Party and the Enron/Limbaugh/Dobson Party. Of particular importance is the addition of Kevin Phillips’ Bad Money as one of the books along with more recent ones. No mention of Phillips’ other older books that have been documenting all this for going on two decades now, but at least it will get him notice, too. Here’s a bit of the review to give you the flavor and, hopefuly, incentive to have big pile of books on your table to get through:
In Greek mythology, Apollo gives the beautiful Cassandra the gift of prophecy. Later, the spurned Apollo, “Cass”, it seems, did not return his advances, cursed her so that no one would ever believe her predictions. Kevin Phillips’ “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism” and Barry Ritholtz’s “Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy” are “Cassandra books”.
There has been “bad dreams”, “bad love” so why not “bad money” – shorthand for excessive dependence on mega-finance to drive economies. Veteran commentator Kevin Phillips warns of the consequences of U.S. economic policy, addiction to debt and its dependence on imported oil. Published prior to the onset of the crisis, Mr. Phillips presciently anticipates some of the key issues in the GFC. “Bad Money” does not further the case that the author made in his previous works such as “American Theocracy” but repeats and updates the argument. Cassandra too seemed to frequently repeat her warnings to no avail.
Barry Ritholtz is the epitome of new financial renaissance. A prolific blogger, his site, www.ritholtz.com, is hugely popular (at least, that’s what the site says!). Multi-talented, he is also the CEO and Director of Equity Research at FusionIQ and obligatory media star, appearing frequently on the money channels. One of the editorial reviews of “Bailout Nation” states that it anticipated the great credit crash of 2008. While Mr. Ritholtz may have seen it coming, the book suffers from the disadvantage that it was published in 2009, someway into the GFC.
Notwithstanding any timing issues, “Bailout Nation” (the title is a self conscious reference to “Prozac Nation”) provides a series of well practised rants about the transition of the U.S. from free markets to a form of socialism where the government bails out troubled firms. At times entertaining and never less than forthright in its opinions, the book makes similar arguments as Mr. Phillips and also identifies the familiar list of the “evil villains” responsible for this tragedy - from financial regulators to politicians. “Bailout Nation” provides an interesting history of U.S. Government intervention in the free markets commencing with Lockheed in the 1970s, in banking in the early 1990s, and eventually the entire market in 2000/ 2001 and in 2008.
The polemic arguments of “Bad Money” and “Bailout Nations” themselves are perhaps not as clear as they might appear at first glance. Surely, government have a role in modern economies. Debt also has utility if used sensibly. The build up of debt in the U.S., especially government debt, may seem egregious but Japan’s level of government debt relative to GDP far exceeds that of the US. In addition, the world, especially emerging markets, has relied on U.S. growth to pull itself up from previous recessions and as the basis of economic development. In the final analysis, it may be that the fate that the authors are trying to avoid is the final evolution of all dominant economic powers, a fact borne out by a study of a longer stretch of history than the last 20 years.
25 July 2009
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Published on July 25th, 2009 @ 06:50:29 pm, using 819 words, 53 views
One of the areas most people would say that they know the most about, are most sure about, is themselves, the “I” who comes out of their heads. We’re so sure there’s someone in there distinct from the machinery that we dream up lives for that “someone” after our bodies cease to function. That’s why the creationists have fastened their sites on the wrong science for so long. They focus on evolution when the real threat to religion and to our traditional perceptions of the world are coming from cognitive science. The notion that the “I” in our heads is someone our brains have created and deal with the same way it represents and deals with the others and events around us, just with more direct connection to basic body parts is science fiction to most people, but it’s also reality. But it’s not just our “consciousness” of who we are that is 180 degrees reversed from that planet but also how the interaction between those brains and other brains, the entire world we find ourselves in, actually makes us what we are.
You may not be in a place to handle that right now, but do yourself a favor and read this review of two books that will do a much better job explaining it that I can. And probably have more credibility with you. Here’s a bit about the first, SUPERSIZING THE MIND: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension by Andy Clark:
Clark critiques what he calls the “brainbound” model, which depicts the mind “as essentially inner and, in our case, always and everywhere neurally realized.” He puts forth a contrasting model, which he refers to as EXTENDED, “according to which thinking and cognizing may (at times) depend directly and noninstrumentally upon the ongoing work of the body and/or the extraorganismic environment.” He further characterizes this model as follows:
According to EXTENDED, the actual local operations that realize certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward, and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body, and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world.
The first section of Supersizing the Mind surveys work in which considerations of embodiment and extended informational resources have transformed theories of perception, cognition and motor control. Consider the problem of walking—easy for us, but a challenge for robots, especially if their walking is highly engineered via exact mechanical control of every joint, precalculated in a central controller. Such highly motorized and micromanaged movement is inefficient both physically and computationally. Biological walking, in contrast, exploits the “passive dynamics” of the material body. We ride on springy, free-swinging limbs. Once set in motion, animal bodies like ours saunter on their way with minimal shoving and shaping from the brain.
Our bodies lighten the load for our brains in many other ways as well. Expressive gestures, including words, Clark observes, are not merely communicative output but may also “function as part of the actual process of thinking.” Gestural information can interact with language. As we talk (to others and to ourselves), we also listen, using our bodies and words as reminders and abbreviations. Outsourcing is truly powerful, however, when we exploit the myriad cognitive scaffolds of the world around us, particularly the world of artifacts. In general, when information is available in the environment, we will use it instead of framing a “brainbound” thought. For example, to play the video game Tetris, one must anticipate whether moving shapes will fit together. To test for a match, one can manipulate the shapes mentally or try out the rotations on screen. Skilled players use on-screen manipulation rather than tax their minds.
And here’s some from OUT OF OUR HEADS: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noë:
Alva Noë’s target is consciousness, and in broad terms his position is compatible with Clark’s. Noë writes that in Out of Our Heads his central claim is that
“to understand consciousness—the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us—we need to look at a larger system of which the brain is only one element. Consciousness is not something the brain achieves on its own. Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body, and world. Indeed, consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context. I deny, in short, that you are your brain.”
Now, the reviewer doesn’t take either of these guys as final words. In fact, the review is a careful analysis and, in some cases, refutation of their arguments. But that’s the point. This is a field that is just now forming the revolution that will change human pictures of ourselves. You’re going to be in it. You might as well start learning about it.
23 July 2009
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Published on July 23rd, 2009 @ 07:55:58 pm, using 528 words, 29 views
One of the more depressing and/or annoying things about the wailing and moaning from the blogs and pundits about the conspicuous corporate serfdom of our current president and his advisers, Congress, our courts, the media, well, you get the idea, is the surprise that this has happened. Aren’t we a democracy? Political equality and all that? How did these rich a**holes get control??
Well, maybe it’s the moments when the rest of us actually have a voice that are the rare events. This isn’t news but it’s also not part of the story we tell ourselves about what this country is supposed to be, the Legacy that has inspired people all over the world, will be the history we’re extolled for. Smart people have revealed this dark side of us to us for years. There are those who have fought and died for the Legacy and given us our greatness, the Lincolns, the Kings. And there are those who see nothing more than their mirrors and how they can turn the Legacy into jargon, slogans, and propaganda to pursue the same small, putrid, unjust goals their types have littered throughout history all over the world. We were fortunate that, as we cycled back and forth from one’s dominance to the other, we had the Legacy protectors at the helm of the time of the Revolution and Constitution. And the Civil War. And WWII. But not since.
However, in the “since” we had observers who could see it coming, who knew that we were hurtling toward what we are today. One of the most prescient and memorable was C. Wright Mills, whose The Power Elite reads more contemporary than practically anything out there today even though it’s over half a century old. And it just got re-reviewed at the outstanding sociology site, Understanding Society. If you haven’t read the book, or if you have, go read the review to get the importance and the ideas. Then end your surprise about today by reading the book. Here’s a tempter:
The central thrust of the book stands in sharp opposition to the fundamental assumption of then-current democratic theory: the idea that American democracy is a pluralist system of interest groups in which no single group is able to dominate all the others (Robert Dahl (1959), A Preface to Democratic Theory). Against this pluralistic view, Mills postulates that members of mass society are dominated, more or less visibly, by a small group of powerful people in the elite. . . .
So what is Mills’s theory, exactly? It is that there is a small subset of the American population that (1) possess a number of social characteristics in common (for example, elite university educations, membership in certain civic organizations); (2) are socially interconnected with each other through marriage, friendship, and business relationship; (3) occupy social positions that give them a durable ability to make a large number of the most momentous decisions for American society; (4) are largely insulated from effective oversight from democratic institutions (press, regulatory system, political constraint). They are an elite; they are a socially interconnected group; they possess durable power; and they are little constrained by open and democratic processes.
Really. Read and learn.
21 July 2009
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Published on July 21st, 2009 @ 08:10:35 pm, using 474 words, 24 views
The QWERTY syndrome is pretty well established in organized behavior by now. This keyboard is waaayyyyy worse than what we could have had, but it got in first (uh, WINDOWS anyone?) and structured everything that followed. If we go back and do it over, pick a better one or wait for one, we’d be so much better off. But water under bridge and all that. That I’ve typed this is proof that QWERTY doesn’t really mess us up too badly.
Not so for many of the writers and philosophers who got in first, structured their ideas and history in ways that we ended up building off of instead of ignoring, picking better, or waiting for better like we should have if we would have a better world today. John Locke with that “state of nature” crap that never existed? Marx worked out well, didn’t he? Augustine, Eve, and original sin? Please. But, really, the ones who set us down so many goofy and just wrong paths were Plato and his bud, Socrates. (Poor Aristotle was about as zany, but he was basically working off of and sometimes in opposition to Plato’s agenda, not reality.) And yet, for all this, we still manage to hold up Socrates as a hero of noble values when, in fact, he was clearly more like a Podhoretz or, worse, Tucker Carlson.
My opinion only? Well, maybe. But Robin Waterfield’s Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths is an academic turn on the same argument. Basically Socrates sided with tyrants, led a bunch of sophistics astray, and paid a high price. Today we’d make him a full professor at a private university and he’d get to write for National Review. Here’s the lowdown from Waterfield:
The Peloponnesian War, like failed wars of any era, placed significant stress on Athenian society and it was over these fault lines, Waterfield argues, that Socrates stumbled. The city lost more than a quarter of its population to disease in just four years, and massacres and other wartime brutalities tested Athens’ sense of its own virtue. Dissent generally divided by age, with a cadre of grasping young aristocrats arguing that Athens’ loss to Sparta proved the inefficacy of majority rule. Many of them were known to have studied under Socrates.
Socrates himself was equally critical of both the willy-nilly democrat and the vain aristocrat. He believed that it was the job of the state to guide citizens towards knowledge and that power should be vested in the wise in order to accomplish this. Waterfield argues that Socrates took it upon himself to identify and train these philosopher-kings, many of whom were no doubt happy to receive philosophical cover for their ambitions.
The review lays out the argument in more detail so check it out. The book sounds like a keeper, unlike QWERTY, or its philosophical equivalent.
14 July 2009
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Published on July 14th, 2009 @ 05:42:52 pm, using 163 words, 24 views
Okay, yes, we promised to stop doing this topic for a while, but, via Naked Capitalism, we ran across a review of The Myth that adds a bit to our understanding of what happened in this mess we call an economy. AND the review does something all reviews should do. It details who would benefit from the book, even if the reviewer doesn’t or didn’t. Here’s the key point:
Who would benefit from this book:
Those who are too certain about their positions on market efficiency.
Those that assume that the market is always or rarely right.
Those that select asset managers, because there is a lot of volatility around investment returns. What is luck? What is skill? We know less here than we imagine.
Academics in economics that are not familiar with the finance literature, because this would give an outline of the questions involved.
Not talking about you? Fine. Just read the review. But also appreciate the consideration of the reviewer.
13 July 2009
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Published on July 13th, 2009 @ 06:18:49 pm, using 310 words, 24 views
We promise to get off this theme for a while, but couldn’t help noticing a review of The Myth of the Rational Market over at Angry Bear that brings the circle complete with the last 2 posts on how the econ blow-ups of the late 18th C., the 1930’s, and today can speak to each other, noting that the “rhyming” that history supposedly does instead of repeating actually does depend on how you define “rhyme” and “repeat.” The reviewer makes the point explicitly:
I think we would all be well served by having all economists study the way markets actually operated back in the Gilded Age. What happens to a market when insider trading is not only not illegal but valued as a best business practice? The old adage “What the market will bear” implies a lot more than a simple affair of supply and demand setting price, not when the vendor has the ability to control supply and influence demand.
And then after mastering the methods of Cornelius Vanderbilt they could move on back and study the history of wage setting in industrializing England from 1790 to say 1848. I am currently re-reading E.P. Thompson’s ‘Making of the English Working Class’ and can say that the reality of the wage market in those years bears no resemblance to the sanitized market models found in text books. The notion that some Invisible Hand was busy adjusting compensation to marginal productivity is belied by facts on the ground, wage suppression was a national policy backed as necessary by the use of State force (see Peterloo Massacre).
Old sayings besides “history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes” keep playing. “Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.” “The only lessons of history are we never learn the lessons of history.” No, no, here’s the one that applies–"The definition of insanity is . . . .”
12 July 2009
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Published on July 12th, 2009 @ 07:59:17 am, using 556 words, 42 views
In the post just below, we noted that, just as Jack Beatty’s Age of Betrayal was about an earlier episode of national crippling greed, venality, and illegality too common in our history, “Some are already writing of their triumph under Nixon and Reagan and the tragedies that are following.” One of those “somes” is Barry Ritholtz, keeper of one of the very best blogs on today’s financial disaster, The Big Picture, who has provided us a contemporary description of today’s financial disaster in Bailout Nation. And here is a review (at another of the irreplaceable blogs, Naked Capitalism) that does it justice while being very interesting and entertaining, not to mention supplementary to Ritholtz’s thesis as well. Here are a couple of examples of the pithy writing and deep understanding. Read, go to the link, then go to the book:
The blog’s hallmarks are a pungent style (sometimes ribald), irascible disdain for unevidenced assertions of all kinds (especially, partisan ones and trolling), a hapless love for enormous graphical charts, and a knack for apposite quotation and concise summary. Ritholtz is, if you like, a serial producer of soundbites that have content. With some training in law and mathematics, he has good background for making sense of the crisis in the markets. Oh, he talks about his fund on the blog from time to time, but that’s only to be expected, and you really couldn’t call it hard selling.
Evidently that’s still not enough hats for him, since in ’08, with the financial crisis just getting into its stride, he embarks on a high level economic history of the US from 1791 to the present, covering the early incarnations of the Federal Reserve, the Depression, the manufacturer and railway bailouts of the 70s and 80s. Its (sadly) rare perspective is that it is all written from a moderate Republican viewpoint (be suspicious of the Federal Reserve, see bankruptcy as a natural and desirable aspect of capitalism, concede that well-functioning free markets do need some kind of regulation, admit that there were some good things about the institutions established as part of the New Deal). It is a plausible and detailed story to a non expert like me. Dealing with the slow demise of the automakers, he gives a perhaps excessively concise summary of American car design and manufacturing quality post war (“…shit…”).
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Ritholtz had his own run-in with red herrings, and won: his pretty uncontroversial attack on the practices of the rating agencies appears to have led his first publisher, McGraw-Hill, a subsidiary of ratings agency Standard and Poors, to start making difficulties with publication. No Chinese walls there, eh? McGraw Hill underestimated their author, and made the fatal error of suggesting to Ritholtz that the reason for cold feet was that the claims in the book were poorly documented, leaving them with nowhere to hide when, as readers of his blog might have expected, he came up with 30 closely written pages of references. They are still in the book and are a nice set of primary sources, at least if the web links last for a bit – Barry, take local copies! Anyhow, Wiley stepped up and that particular exercise in truth suppression failed. What an indictment of American publication practices that episode is. But what an advantage to be able to blog about it…
11 July 2009
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Published on July 11th, 2009 @ 03:51:22 pm, using 1160 words, 21 views
An unusual Reviewing Reviewers this time (insert punchline here). We found a reviewer reviewing a review of Jack Beatty’s 2008 Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, a title which should more than tip you off to the book’s current relevancy and now out in paperback, which gives you no excuse for ignoring this extraordinarily important, and depressing, book. Both documents will give you the basic summaries of Beatty’s work, which should burn names like Stephen Field and Tom Scott into your memory with appropriate Hell-like intensity, since that was the only fit place for either of them to end up. Field was a sociopathic Supreme Court justice as responsible as anyone for the undermining of the promise of the 14th Amendment to black Americans and extending its rights to corporations, who ran with the demented interpretation and turned us into what we are seeing for a third time economically now today. Scott was one of the early socially destructive users of the interpretation, giving the world people like Carnegie. Literally giving us Carnegie. Attempts to claim that turning corporations into “persons” was needed to turn the US into the powerhouse it is today are both unproven since we don’t know what would have happened otherwise and even so, what the hell? The globe is warming, the energy on which it was all built has shackled us, and the end result should perhaps be judged after all its ramifications have been felt. Our grandkids are not likely to be real impressed with these corporate outcomes.
Anyway, here’s a taste of the reviewed review to give you a boost to go read both:
Jack Beatty’s interesting and pointed new book offers a different assessment. Yes, he proclaims, American capitalism does have a history, and it is a history that has compromised, if not undermined, our democracy and set us on a course of social and political crisis. In “Age of Betrayal,” he takes us to the decades when the course was set, when “our” nation was born, and tells what he describes as “the saddest story.”
What makes his ” the saddest story” is a great moment of promise betrayed. In the bloodbath of the Civil War, two measures – the Emancipation Proclamation and the Homestead Act, which took effect on Jan. 1, 1863 – offered a radical vision of freedom, citizenship, and economic independence by ending slavery and providing cheap land for settlers in the trans-Mississippi West. It was a vision that would give national footing to Lincoln’s America and enable the United States to stand apart in the 19th-century Atlantic world. Unfortunately, the promise steadily gave way before the twin engines of racism and industrial capitalism, leaving a very different society by century’s end.
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But even more arresting is Beatty’s account of the elite attack on democracy between the 1870s and the turn of the 20th century. Through the use of money, gerrymandering, disfranchisement measures, vote suppression, the admission of new, underpopulated states, and the employment of the US Army and National Guard to put down labor unrest, the elite set out to weaken democratic politics and strengthen oligarchic power.
“The United States in these years,” Beatty writes, “took on the lineaments of a Latin American party-state, an oligarchy ratified in rigged elections, girded by bayonets, and given a genial historical gloss by its raffish casting.”
Ring any bells? So, if we’ve already been through rehearsals of today’s total capitulation to capital and corporate business that has been the BushObama Administrations, that means, okay, maybe some Depression, but we’ll come out okay, right? Well, may depend on what you call okay. Here’s another review that says that the “betrayal” wasn’t a betrayal at all but just the fulfillment of what America is really about–greed, subservience to the rich by the politicians and media, regulatory capture of the agencies supposed to stop abuse, lip-service to that Franklin/Lincoln/King belief in raising the average person (biological, not pretend–the worst part of this book is Beatty’s description how the “corporation = person” disaster slimed its way into accepted law without being an actual decision in any actual case). One bit for your consideration, then go consider the rest of the argument:
The triumph of money was the triumph of big business, and in the economy of the time big business mainly meant one thing: railroads. Roughly equivalent to today’s Big Oil, the railroads were the top rails that stayed on top after the Civil War. Such consistency leads to a general observation that turns Beatty’s thesis inside-out. In short: The Gilded Age didn’t represent the betrayal of American ideals, but their fulfillment. The Civil War’s rhetoric of equality made for good war-time propaganda, but how many people really believed in it? And what, exactly, did they believe? In an end to inequality? Is that an American ideal?
Hardly. The radicalism of the American Revolution was that it did away with old aristocracies of birth and privilege and substituted an aristocracy of wealth. Rutherford Hayes was not the first American statesman to see the triumph of money as a great betrayal of national ideals, but rather a typical minority voice. In the immediate wake of 1776 (and all that) there were similar dyspeptic comments about how money-making and self-interest had replaced republican virtue. In periods of crisis (revolution, depression, war) some progressive gestures are called for (Reconstruction, the New Deal), but when things settle down the pursuit of happiness, so dependent upon the unhappiness of others, reasserts itself. Equality in the United States has been a historical aberration. What seemed like a regression in Beatty’s Age of Betrayal was really just a return to normal. . . .
The problem for this reviewer is the mirror image of Beatty’s problem. The fact is that the US has always had two sides, the typical and unexceptional grubbers and back-stabbers who live on “us v. them” (with “us” being limited greatly to their mirrors) and the ones who understood this nation’s potential to rise above the greed, selfishness, delusion, and dementia that have written human history. The Legacy of this country was set by the latter and will remain a human aspiration for those who manage to come out on the other side of the miasma into which the world is marching right now. The Legacy is what Beatty sees as betrayed. As the last reviewer notes, however, for waaayyyy too many “Americans,” that legacy is fine . . . for them. But f*ck anyone else who wants a part of it. Those people win regularly in our history, the Lincolns and Kings admired in irony and hypocrisy. Beatty has done a masterful job outlining how they won after the Civil War and the tragedies that followed. Others have written of their triumph preceding the Great Depression and the tragedies that followed. Some are already writing of their triumph under Nixon and Reagan and the tragedies that are following. In fact, you could actually say that Beatty is in the latter group, too.
09 July 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
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Published on July 9th, 2009 @ 05:10:56 pm, using 98 words, 25 views
Yes, yes, Newsweek’s general contribution to the world has, all totaled, been right up there with Vanilla Ice, but it actually does have a halfway interesting piece up at the moment on the 50 books it recommends to get you in touch with these bizarre times in which we live. Can’t say I agree or have even read many of them, but the concept is good and the selection is diverse and unpredictable. Go on over and see what you can get fired up about. Any list with Predictably Irrational and Benjamin Franklin in it can’t be completely goofy.
07 July 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
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Published on July 7th, 2009 @ 05:58:15 pm, using 596 words, 49 views
This review of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future at The Island of Doubt gets just about everything right in its short life. Here’s the basics, then I’ll follow with what’s important:
What they’ve discovered is that America isn’t really “unscientific,” just burdened by irrational forces that impede the country’s full potential. They also spend a fair bit of their short book taking aim at scientists for failing to do their part to bridge the cultural gap. Most instructive are the lessons to be learned from the fiasco that followed the unsuccessful nomination of Carl Sagan (a hero of mine, as well as Chris and Sheril’s), to the National Academy of Sciences.
Indeed, so sharp is their criticism of the scientific establishment that the book’s subtitle is perhaps a little misleading. It’s not just the public’s failure to grasp the basics about the world around them that we should worry about; there’s plenty of blame to go around the halls of academia, it would seem.
But here’s why I won’t buy or read the book. It’s written by Chris Mooney, the Kevin Drum of science writers, that is, the white bread of food, another “oh, my ears, don’t be mean” of blogging and media in general. The reviewer is much nicer but (along with his commenters) gets the point across well, which hopefully means you’ll credit him where you think I’m just passing gas again:
Which brings me to my primary complaint. Chris and Sheril point too many fingers for my taste. Religion and the media are obvious and richly deserving targets. But Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists are singled out more than once, for failing to understand that if you want to change minds and win friends, you can’t be rude to your audience. True, but I’ve long believed that there’s a place for pointed barbs, especially if those barbs are as well crafted as they are in Dawkins’ prose.
Just as the environmental movement needs Earth First! and other voices of impatience to help redefine the center and make others appear more reasonable by comparison, so the science-atheism debate need Dawkins and his allies to call a spade a spade. The genteel enthusiasm of Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson are critical to the campaign to engage the public. But there’s also room for more pugnacious criticism of that which threatens progress.
In fact, the insipidly “moderate” writers like Mooney are only taken credibly because of the “pugnacious” out there, the ones who set the anchor for debate on the “scientific” side far enough out that the Mooneys of the world get treated as “reasonable” when, without the “pugnacious,” the Mooneys would be seen as extremists and treated the way he treats the Dawkins of the world. That the Mooneys and Drums are so consistently critical of “confrontation” and ignorant of the need as outlined above AND its role as the buffer for their own success makes you have to check yourself about accepting their judgments on things such as found in this book. The only people who might be persuaded by the “reasonableness” here are the same ones Dr. King came to believe were a bigger threat to black progress than the racists and paternalists, those “moderates” who pooh-poohed the value of standing up forcefully and thus truly meaningfully to those who would make ignorance and failure our hallmarks. So it’s too bad that Mooney is so blind. But maybe more attention will go to reviews and reviewers like this. And that would mean Mooney has some value after all.
05 July 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on July 5th, 2009 @ 10:33:43 am, using 824 words, 33 views
I know that I would never want to sit down and have a beer with Jimmy Carter. Even if he was smiling and friendly, you just know that he’s putting a black mark down in your book. BUT. Where every other president of my lifetime put on a show of their religion for political purposes, Carter lived his. Carter has shown what all other post-presidents really are made of inside with his own good works and their continuing narcissism and preening. Someone who could be demanding and directive? Absolutely. Someone who didn’t play the DC games or suck up to the narcissistic media and Congress even at the expense of his political goals? People have been saying that for years like it’s a bad thing. In fact, it was the course all our leaders should have been taking for decades to give us any chance of the avoiding the abyss that we have now, like Wily Coyote chasing the Road Runner off the cliff, just begun to see and feel as the drop starts.
Jimmy Carter’s biggest mistake as President was actually believing we Americans were grown-ups. Ready and able to address the undeniable tsunamis just forming way out there on the horizon. Tsunamis that we denied, choosing instead the Pied Piper of California and all his minions whose touch on reality was Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and Armegeddon rolled into one. Had we listened to Jimmy Carter 30 years ago, the Middle East would be now be a matter of curiosity, not our lifeline and tar baby, and our political arguments would be over the spoils of a transitioned green, non-carbon economy. But we didn’t. We were told, and we chose stupidity and vapidity. We still are for the most part. But at least we will never be able to say that we were never warned.
And fortunately Kevin Mattson’s “What the Heck Are You Up to, Mr. President?” Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country, will be a permanent record of how we had it all explained to us, initially accepted it, then let our retarded media and Republicans ("retarded” applying to both) sabotage the chance we had, with the connivance, it must be said, of the forefathers of today’s gutless, synapse-less, but Beltway party-going Democrats. This review captures a lot of what was at stake when Carter gave his famous “malaise” speech in which he never said “malaise” but our media were already at their best. It also details the reactions and the failures. Here’s a bit for flavor before you go read:
Carter felt compelled to tell people what they didn’t want to hear. Mattson recounts the president witnessing block-long gas lines and informing reporters two months before the speech: “I don’t want to mislead you. It’s going to get worse. What we need is a massive effort at conservation.”
Mattson contrasts that statement with the contemporaneous words of Carter’s likely Republican challenger in the 1980 election: “If the government will get the hell out of the way, the oil industry could produce more oil and compete freely in the marketplace.” Out on the stump, Ronald Reagan made political hay out of what he perceived as Carter’s hand-wringing and pessimism.
After Carter abruptly canceled a speech about the energy crisis scheduled for July 4, 1979, media speculation on his state of mind soared. “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?” borrows its title from a characteristically barbed New York Post cover line. In many ways, none of them subtle, Mattson’s slim, tightly packed narrative is as much a study of burgeoning media power as presidential oratory.
I do have a couple of quibbles. The implication in the review again is that Carter made a political mistake not coddling and babying Americans. In truth, history will record that it was the Americans and their media and leaders who thought they should be coddled and babied who did this country’s historical legacy and fortune in. Carter wasn’t a great leader? Maybe his mistake was trusting us to be the kind of citizens we were supposed to be. He had faith in that vision of the American people’s intelligence and goodness. Subsequent events have proven how wrong he was. And the idea that his shake-up of his cabinet, and not the media hysterics that followed it, was disconcerting to the voters is very questionable given the previous analysis in the review. But still, the reviewer gets it about the importance of that speech, which in years to come will be held up the way post-disaster Hebrews held up the words of the Prophets as outlining the course that could have saved them from the destruction that followed unheeded words. Carter may be dead by then, but you just know he already knows. He reads the Bible after all, rather than thumping it or pretending that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. But you could drink a beer with the Jesus guy.
03 July 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on July 3rd, 2009 @ 07:34:07 pm, using 341 words, 28 views
One of the biggest problems that reality/science writers have competing with the nonreality/propagandists for public education in this warped time is the scientists’ general inability to make the science into a bumper sticker slogan or “just-so” stories. The effect has been the debilitating dumbing down of our culture at precisely the time when wisdom is needed more than ever. Which means science writers need to figure it out quickly.
Maybe they’re getting there. This review of Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne sounds promising. Check out this part of the review, go be impressed by the rest of it, then tell your friends and their dumba** neighbors:
In each chapter, Coyne lays out evolutionary predictions, and then uses well-chosen examples to show how those predictions are confirmed.
Coyne then takes the argument one step further. Evolution generates clear expectations of what we should find in nature, while creationism can only explain nature by appealing to arbitrary, inscrutable decisions made by an inaccessible designer. Certainly an omnipotent designer could have chosen to make the world this way, but creationists have no testable explanation for why the designer chose to do it one way, instead of another. Thus, intelligent design advocate Michael Behe ascribes a peacock’s tail to a designer’s whimsy, while biologists say the tail is the result of sexual selection. Behe’s idea is arbitrary; biologists’ claims flow naturally from evolutionary theory. Behe’s idea can’t be tested; biologists have tested theirs.
While underscoring the intellectual bankruptcy of a design explanation, Coyne wisely steers clear of an outright attack on religion, and in fact he hardly spends any time at all refuting specific arguments of creationists. This book is not a take-down of creationism; it’s a primer on evolution intended for a broad audience. Coyne is interested in science, and leaves readers free to draw their own religious conclusions, which is exactly how this issue is also treated in professional science circles. Scientists agree on the science, and differ with each other over religion.
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