Author: JohnMatel

The author delivered what he promised; I was hoping for more. He promised to share experiences and voices of those left behind, the ones he calls the “last row”. This he does
I would question his choice of subjects to interview in depth. He acknowledges people who are poor but reasonably well ordered and content but tends to give much more space to the real losers. In his defense, the author never tried to get truly representative samples. He started his “research” as a way to get to know things for himself and shares them. It is worth reading.

The author honestly airs his own prejudices. He is (or was) a well-educated, rich and privileged progressive atheist. He admits that he thought he did his duty to the less fortunate by voting in progressive ways, supporting higher taxes and occasionally tossing money in the general direction of the very poor.

There are a few surprising insights, although they make sense when you think about them. One is that the centers of society among the poor are churches and McDonald’s. Poor people do not much like to go to community centers or those various helping NGOs. They feel too much judged at these places.

The author was surprised the strong positive role religion played in the lives of the poor. He came to see it as instrumental in helping the poor and even came to question his own atheism.

In the end, the author provides no solutions, but he points to some of the prejudice progressives have. For one thing, they do not appreciate McDonalds or religion, but those are small things. The big thing is the belief in credentials and the overvaluing of things that can be easily measured in money or credentials. Educated and prosperous people have trouble understanding that some people just do not want to move to better jobs or do the things necessary to be successful in economic terms. They want to stay were they are for various community reasons.

The book is useful for the many stories he has learned from talking to real people. He was more than a tourist in these places. He spent literally years getting to know the tough neighborhoods and the people who just are not making it in today’s society. It is a world few people who read the book will really experience.

There are many books being written about the need for community. This is one of them, but it is different from others like “Alienated America” or “Third Pillar” in that it talks more about the very poor and disordered parts of society. “Dignity” is more personal, but also more hopeless. For many of the people profiled, I just could not think of any way out and neither could the author. He says in the first part that the only way most people get out of these predicaments is to get arrested or die. He provides no more hope at the end, except to say that if we talked to the more unfortunate and treated them with dignity, it might be better. And maybe this book will help us notice people we so easily overlook.

audible.com   Dignity Check out this great listen on Audible.com. “Candid, empathetic portraits of silenced men, women, and children.” (Kirkus) Widely acclaimed writer and photographer Chris Arnade shines new light on America’s poor, drug-addicted, and forgotten – both urban and rural, blue state and red sta…     1

“Range” is a good title for this wide-ranging book. The subtitle is also descriptive – why generalists triumph in a specialized world. I want this to be true, not sure that it is. Everybody purports to value the generalists as leaders, innovators and visionaries, but nobody wants to hire generalists. The generalist challenge is sequencing. You need some sort of specialty to get most jobs. After you have cleared that threshold, you can spread out. Being a generalist is essential at the higher levels of leadership, but you have to get there first by a specialized route.

Diverse sources
Returning to “Range,” the author is very wide-ranging. He refers to dozens of books that I have read over the past couple years. In fact, you could read “Range” as a kid of frame for others. I wonder, however, if I would have gotten the same benefit from “Range” had I been less familiar with books like “Peak,” “Grit,” “Late Bloomers,” “Where Good Ideas Come From” or “Super Forecasters,” among others.

The advantage of borrowing
The author freely borrows ideas from all those, which is part of the main theme of the book. Lot of ideas are out there. Generalists find them, compile them and put them into new context. Discovering is important; assembling is too. Generally, assemblers are responsible for more effective innovation.

Innovation cannot be created directly; else it would not be innovation. Epstein encourages lateral thinking and that is best accomplished by broad knowledge and broad contacts. Recall that innovation is not the same as invention. Innovation involves using new inventions but more often by applying existing – sometimes very prosaic – factors in new ways.

Foxes & hedgehogs
Epstein uses the old Izaiah Berlin metaphor of hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs know one thing very deeply; foxes know lots of things but not in detail. Both sorts are necessary. Hedgehogs develop inventions and ideas. Foxes assemble. In settled or limited situations, hedgehogs do better, since they can apply bodies of knowledge and experience. This is where grit pays off. MOST of life is like this. If this was not true, there would be little use in any sort of professional expertise or practice. When board a commercial airline, we hope the pilot and crew do NOT need to innovate, that they will follow well-known and established procedures. The division of labor works and innovation can be overrated.
In new or uncertain situations, however, it is the foxes that excel. Foxes beat hedgehogs consistently when trying to predict uncertain events. Epstein mentions the work of Phillip Tetlock, who did a multi-decade study of experts in political pundits. He found that the experts were no better than random chance in predicting big political events out more than a short time or innovations. In fact, the specialists were often WORST in their own specialties, and the most famous were often worst of all. (I recall this from when the Soviet Union fell. Nobody predicted this, although some have now implied that they did.) Tetlock (and Epstein) speculate that the reason is that famous pundits get famous by making radical predictions and then not backing down when they are wrong. They can also tell better stories. Those experts are hedgehogs.

The foxes do much better because they are willing to listen to broad and new information and to change their minds. Theirs is a more iterative procedure, incorporating new information as available and a willingness to “flip-flop” when it makes sense.

Is grit overrated?
One of the things I liked a lot about the book was that it was wide ranging, but that means that the story line is something a little tangential. Epstein spends a lot of time talking about grit and persistence. He is not against it but says it may be overrated. This is especially true for young people. They have to make commitments to studies or career before they know themselves, before their personalities are formed. It might be a bad fit. Sometimes the best thing you can do is quit and move to something more appropriate.
We tend to double down because of the sunk cost fallacy. The more time or money we spend on something, the less likely we are to abandon it. It is called a fallacy because that is exactly what it is. Even if you spend $1 million on something, if the payoff from additional investment does not pay off, the sunk cost does not matter.

It reads more logically than it was lived
His closing advice is that you have to experiment and try lots of things. Epstein points out that the stories we tell of success and innovation tend to be more orderly than the reality. It is the narrative fallacy. It is hard to tell as story w/o a narrative, which explains it. Stories are more logical and plausible than reality.

I recommend the book. It is well written and the themes appropriately diverse. My only complaint is one I have for almost all such books. They include too many personal stories. They are kind of larded into books. I cynically think they are there to make the book long and heavy enough to be taken seriously, but I suppose readers like the human stories. My problem is that lots of the authors use the same stories or at least the same people. As I wrote, I read a lot of these sorts of books and I have heard many of them before.

audible.com   Range Check out this great listen on Audible.com. “Urgent and important…an essential read for bosses, parents, coaches, and anyone who cares about improving performance.” (Daniel H. Pink) “So much crucial and revelatory information about performance, success, and education.” (…     1

Prosperity is a process, not a place. Having money is important to prosperity, but not enough to ensure it. There are people and countries with lots of money that are not prosperous. The key not to have wealth but to have the capacity to create it, and that capacity comes from innovation that create sustainable markets.

He starts the discussion with South Korea. When the author lived in South Korea as a young man, it was abysmally poor. It was poorer than most of the poor countries today. Now it is one of the richest, and most prosperous, countries in the world. It got that way by innovation and market creation. You have to concentrate on the non-consumers and on what they want AND are willing to pay to get. It is easy to underestimate this.

There is the example of mobile phones in Africa. Today they are ubiquitous. Not many years ago, it seemed ludicrous that poor people in Africa would have mobile phones. After all, they needed so many other things. But selling mobile phones in Africa met a need.
The author points out that the USA was abysmally poor only a few generations ago. In 1860, for example, the USA had per capita incomes less than places like Angola, and there is no place on earth today so poor in the measure of overall human development as the USA was then. We came out of it through innovation. The book profiles innovators like Henry Ford, Charles Goodyear and Isaac Merritt Singer. None of these guys invented so much as made things more generally available. Singer’s case illustrates. He figured out how to make sewing machines accessible. Investors told him that the market for these machines would be too small to make money. But they filled an important need and they created markets. Sewing machines made clothing more efficiently and cheaply, and then spawned related industries, creating jobs and further growth.

So what is the prosperity paradox?

You cannot create sustainable prosperity directly. You cannot eliminate poverty by trying to fight poverty. The authors make a distinction between pushing and pulling. Development agencies often push. They give the example of building wells in developing counties. Who does not want that? If only people had easier access to water. Problem is that the recipients cannot or will not maintain the wells. It is not that they are lazy or stupid, but rather that this piece of development is plopped down without an the human ecosystem to support it.

There is also a strong limit to generosity. For something to be sustainable, it needs to make a profit, at least be self-supporting. It is not to say that everything must be bottom up, but that prosperity cannot be granted. Thinking of it in relationship terms, it must be something that the people themselves want and can sustain. It is much better to have a job than to be granted money. Having a job, doing something that you know is useful, is what gives people dignity. W/o dignity, wealth is not much use and prosperity impossible.
Good book. I recommend it.

audible.com   The Prosperity Paradox Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Clayton M. Christensen, the author of such business classics as The Innovator’s Dilemma and the New York Times best-seller How Will You Measure Your Life, and coauthors Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon reveal why so many investments in economic de…

I would have been a socialist back in 1946. Who could have believed that we could have done so remarkably well with the free market, with “capitalism?” The world was really in sorry shape right after the world’s greatest and most destructive war. And if you looked to the fascist/communist dreadful economics of the decades immediately past, you would not have had reason to expect better.

Never before or since in the history of the world has a country or a group of men acted with such wisdom and generosity as Americans did after World War II. I understand that this is a bold statement, but I think it is easily defensible with the simple challenge to name a more enlightened ending of a great war. Of course, there is a lot more to it. We could make a long list of leaders in Europe who were necessary for the success and a longer list of various contingencies of history that could have gone the other way.

Like any pivotal time in history, the closer you look, the less magisterial it looks. As the saying goes, it is not pleasant to watch laws or sausages being made.

We talk today about the Marshall Plan, but this is much easier to see something that looks like a logical plan with the perspective of history than it was at the time. At the time, there were a lot of false starts, improvisations and muddling through. It was much more an evolutionary process than it was an intelligent design. We are often beguiled by “plans”, when what is really happening is process.

“The Marshall Plan” by Benn Steil is a great book because it goes into detail about the process, personalities, conflicts and uncertainty w/o getting lost. It is a superb book.
It is hard for us to look back at those times w/o reference to subsequent history. We know how it came out. We know that Western Europe recovered, that the world recovered from the worst war in history. We know that NATO succeeded in its fundamental – if not officially stated – goal of keeping the USA in Europe, the Communists out and the German under control. People at that time knew none of this.

The war destroyed a lot more than the buildings, bridges and factories. They system in general was broken. Society was torn. Habits and spirits were broken. The author points out that people in occupied Europe faced a moral problem. During occupation it had been moral and patriotic to resist the occupation. Not working hard, stealing, lying to the authorities and actual sabotage had been positive virtues. Trust & habits required for a functioning market democracy were damaged or lacking. Rebuilding physical structures may be easier than building culture and human capital – the habits of the heart that make society work.

Europe was on the edge. Communists thought – and the Soviets actively tried to make it happen – communism would take over in Europe. The Soviets actively tried to sabotage recovery. Their goal was to keep the ruin and rule those ruins. Communist propaganda portrayed the Marshall Plan as a way for the USA to enslave Europeans. It is amazing that it turned out as well as it did.

Of course, this period was also the start of the Cold War. Could the Cold War have been avoided? I don’t think so. Communism is antithetical to free market democracy and Stalin’s regime was truly evil. He really did want to establish communist control. We were not wrong to think that about them. On the other side, the USA DID want to get communists out of governments in Western Europe. We DID want to reestablish market democracies. Stalin was not wrong to think this about us. There was no middle ground. The Marshall Plan helped the good guys win.

I enjoyed the ending – the coda – talking about the fall of the Soviet Empire and the birth of our world. I recall those events. They were momentous. This was also a time of great risk. Things could have turned out a lot worse, and many feared they would.
The world is never as good as we could imagine, but it is better than we could logically have expected in 1988 and worlds better than we feared in 1946. Lots of people made good choices and we were lucky.

audible.com   The Marshall Plan Check out this great listen on Audible.com. In the wake of World War II, with Britain’s empire collapsing and Stalin’s on the rise, US officials under new secretary of state George C. Marshall set out to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism. Their massive, cos…..     1