Category: Book Reviews

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

They jump right out of the water
People are familiar with Asian carp because they leap spectacularly out of the water, sometimes causing injury to boaters and water skiers. Absent that, most people are unaware of the big changes in lakes and rivers. What you don’t see, you don’t notice.
This book is good on the history of Asian carp. They were introduced often deliberately, often with government support and usually with good motives.

Grass carp providing ecological service
Species like grass carp were introduced to ponds and irrigation ditches to replace damaging herbicides. The carp do an excellent job of cleaning up ponds and ditches and would be ecologically beneficial but for their proclivity to breed and out-compete native species. They have become invasive.

What is invasive?
The author discusses the term “invasive” and why that term is imprecise and misused, but there is not currently a better term for newly introduced species that rapidly change and dominate ecosystems. This brief and tangential discussion is one of the better parts of this book.

He talks a lot about how we might stop the spread of the carp and even if we should always fight them.

The most effective counter so far has been fishing them out. We have over-fished all sorts of species we like, leading to collapse of some valuable fisheries. Maybe we can do the same with these carp. To that end, studies are being done on the fishes (there are different species) breeding habits.

If you can’t beat em, join em
Parallel to this are studies of profitable uses of the fish. Carp are bony fish, but they are part of Asians and European diets. Gefilte fish is made from carp. The carp meat is mostly tasteless, so it can pick up any flavors sauces and preparation. Ground carp recipes are being developed. On the cheaper level, the fish can be made into fertilizer.
The general principle is that when you have too much of anything, you have both a problem and an opportunity. The Asian carp perform some useful ecological services and they could prove economically viable in the right circumstances. This leads to the other old saying, “if you can’t beat em, join em.”

We cannot beat the Asian carp. We can manage, tolerate and maybe even benefit from their invasion. Like almost everything when talking about ecology, it depends.
Michael W. Fox might be interested in this book, because of his interest in the Great Lakes and the fact that Chicago is the epicenter of the fight against Asian carp. This is a good book to accompany “The Death & Life of the Great Lakes.”

audible.com   Overrun Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Politicians, ecologists, and government wildlife officials are fighting a desperate rearguard action to halt the onward reach of Asian carp, four troublesome fish now within a handful of miles from entering Lake Michigan. From aquaculture farms in Arkans…..     2

I am not eager about beavers chewing down trees on my farms or flooding, but it depends. This book gave me some better appreciation of beavers as ecological engineers and creators of green infrastructure.

History was interesting. Beavers were exceedingly common in pre-settlement North America. You can still see that in place names. Many of the most fertile fields were former beaver ponds.

Beaver ponds are transient. They silt up, become wetlands, then forests or prairies. Beaver move on. The useful part of their green infrastructure is that the beavers never stop. The challenge of beavers is that they never stop and they can flood lot of other places. Besides that, the beavers never “build to code.” In places with human infrastructure, beavers are less welcome. Beaver ponds slow water, help with flood control and help recharge aquifers. They provide wetland habitat & fields. On the other hand, they can be a real problem for irrigation systems, culverts, roads and buildings. Are they good or bad? It depends.
We cannot “re-beaver” all, most or even much of America, but we probably can benefit from using their never ending passion of making dams.

audible.com   Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter Check out this great listen on Audible.com. In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape…     2

Not a bad book, but I would not rush out to buy it. His best, IMO, was “Truman”. This is not like that.

It is mostly about the settlement of the area of Ohio around Marietta, told through the stories of a few people. You get a good picture of some of the hardships. These people worked all the time and the work was very hard.

Interesting subjects include the struggle to set up public schools and the fight to keep slavery out of the Northwest Territories (hard to think of Ohio as Northwest). The slavery issue is featured prominently in many histories today, sometimes inserted awkwardly. In this case, it makes sense. The Ohio River was the border between slave and free. Imagine if slavery had been allowed to infiltrate into places like Ohio. It is likely that the Civil War would not have played out the way it did, or at all. Slavery might have persisted longer. Recall that Brazil did not ban slavery until 1888 and it persisted in much of world until well into the 20th Century. The African nation of Mauritania did not end it officially until 1981. How different world history would have been if the USA had not banned slavery when it did and given a few changes among a few people, because settlers were so few in Ohio in the early years, everything could have been different. History is contingent.

audible.com   The Pioneers Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough rediscovers an important and dramatic chapter in the American story – the settling of the Northwest Territory by dauntless pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals t…..  

I read the “sequel” – “1493” a couple years ago, so I was looking forward to this book. I was disappointed at first. The book drags in the first parts. There was too much detail of history that was precise beyond the available data and too much personalized accounts of the authors explorations.

His strength is ecological history and the author does well in the last chapters talking about anthropomorphic landscapes. For example, he talks about the terra preta land in the Amazon, which human created soil.

The big idea is that landscapes in the Americas were not untouched by humans, but rather the creation of humans over the centuries. This includes the wild Amazon. It was a different sort of agriculture, sort of a natural gardening with many species of trees and roots.

Where no man had gone before
When Europeans arrived, they thought they found a virgin landscape. They were mistaken. Native Americans had altered the landscape for thousands of year though their hunting and especially the use of fire.

European  settlers also came upon a “widowed” landscape, not a virgin one.  Disease killed the native population often before the arrival of Europeans.  Natives had burned and used the forests, hunted and controlled game.  When large numbers of natives were eliminated by disease, the forests grew thicker and animals proliferated. Large herds of bison, elk, deer, thick forests and flocks of passenger pigeons that Europeans found represented rebounding populations, not the previous situation.

Meaning for the land ethic
This is a sign of hope and helps in the understanding of a regenerative land ethic. Following a land ethic, we seek to live in harmony with nature.  Harmony specifically does NOT mean apart or not interacting.  In our context, it means means neither dominating nature nor mimicking it nor setting it apart to “save” it, but rather trying to understand and use natural principles.  Similarly, we should not try to mimic the techniques of the past nor try to restore what was. We can use these methods & principles of the past and make a once and future way to manage our land.

“And I am not throwing away my shot; I am not throwing away my shot; Hey yo, I’m just like my country; I’m young, scrappy and hungry; And I’m not throwing away my shot”
We worry that if we miss the on-ramp to the success highway, we will be forever stuck on the bumpy little roads to nowhere. Our culture is full of references to getting that big break, and we emphasize youth and energy, as the words above from “Hamilton” epitomize.

But it is not a true story for most people. Worse, if we believe in the story, it leads to misery & failure.
“Late Bloomers” is a book I could have written, if I had more literary talent. As I read it, I saw myself in many of the anecdotes, especially now that I have become a gentleman of leisure.

Many opportunities beat equal opportunity
America does not need to be the land of equal opportunity, since none of us want the same thing. Equal opportunity implies the one highway in the metaphor above. We should be – and we are – the land of many opportunities. The one shot, the one on-ramp is not how life works and not how it should work. We have diverse desires and diverse skills. A good life is one that finds purpose and a good society is one that enables most people to look for the good life.

Scientific management
The author talks about how we got into this one-way highway mind-set. In many ways, it was a bargain we made to create the fantastic prosperity we now enjoy. It has to do with the needs of an industrial society, the progressive “science” of management and even with different life expectancy of the past. There is better detail in the book, but we need to consider Fredrick Taylor’s scientific management and the way our school systems responded to needs of an industrial society.

I have written about Taylor before and will not go into detail now. Most of us recognize his methods, even if we have never heard of him. This is the idea of making work-processes most efficient, sometimes called time and motion studies. Taylor and his students would observe work environments and optimize everything. Good as far as it went. The cost was that it made people into exchangeable parts. They all needed to do the same sort of things. A craftsman, who customized and thought about his work was unwelcome on the assembly line. These kinds of ideas so permeated American, and in fact world society that we sometimes forget that it is not natural. Our school systems were also designed with these sorts of ideas in mind. The schools we grew up in were designed to the industrial model. The kids come in a group. They do the assigned stuff. There are even bells to tell them when to move.

Thanks to people like Taylor, we no longer need to behave in the ways he advocated. We needed the industrial process to break the poverty trap. Now our society has built enough wealth and prosperity that we can more freely indulge our individual humanity. And that is what we should do.

Not everything you can measure is important and not all that is important can be measured
The author talks about late blooming, which he defines as not doing things on schedule. People develop differently. Most young men are not mature at 18 years old. Their brains are literally not physically mature, and they are not ready to get onto that success ramp. Maybe time off doing something else would be useful, give them time to develop. Do not expect instant success.

I have seen this in boys I know and in myself. At around 21-years old, they just kind of click into place. Tasks that were impossible for their immature selves become easy. Girls develop faster, which likely accounts for much of their success in college earlier on. It may also explain why the boys catch up after graduation.

Many chances mitigate the problem of the quick start, lets lots of people flower in their own way and helps society in general. Unfortunately, we are sorting people at younger and younger ages. Parents are training their kids to get into the “right” kindergarten, so they eventually get into the right college and achieve the big success. This is pernicious.
It is impossible to measure the potential merit of young people with any precision. Yet we apply increasingly precise measures. Most of these are just bull shit, but they are much loved by bureaucrats seeking to justify their choices and protect their phony-baloney jobs. We could eliminate most of the workers in college admissions, for example, w/o harming – maybe helping – the composition of classes. The process is much less precise that we admit. Admit it and design from there.

The crab pot syndrome
Later in the book he talked about the need for “re-potting.” Sometimes you just have to move to find your place. Community is a great thing, but it can also be limiting. People you know well don’t help you change. They know what you were, not what you are or what you aspire to become. This applies to people who love you too. (One of the best things I did for my son Alex was to go to Iraq for a year. W/o m to “help and advise” him, he was able to develop in his own way.) And of course, not everybody even wants you to succeed. Communities after have a “crab pot syndrome,” where others pull down any individual who tries to climb higher. (I checked, BTW. Crabs trapped in a pot actually do pull down any of their number that tries to climb out.)

Of course, there is a lot more to the book than I can summarize. It is worth reading. I won’t claim that it gave me great insights that nobody has though of before, but it did remind me of things I have observed over my life and made me think of others in new ways.

Very optimistic & interesting talk at Smithsonian today. The speaker neuroscientist Susan Hockfield, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, talked about her book, “The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution.” I bought the book at the event. Bad form not to buy the book if you attend the event, but in this case I look forward to reading it.
The author explained that the last century was a physics-engineering period. Physics figured out enough of how things worked to make it possible to put it to practical use. The next century will be a bio-engineering period with similar wonders but from this new form.

She went into some history. Our electronic revolution is remarkably new. It was only in the 1930s that it started in earnest.

She talked about Vannevar Bush. I have read about him many other places and if you have not I suggest you do. He was a truly visionary man. There is likely no single individual more responsible for the fantastic scientific, industrial & technological advance in post-war America.

After that, she gave some examples of possible advances. One involves using a virus to made batteries at the nano-level. Another was biological water filtration. There are lots of examples. Most will not pan out, but some will and they will be be glorious.
Government has a strong role to play in funding basic research. Nobody else can do this. It is too risky for private firms. Private firms spend a lot on R&D, but they are much more interested in the D – development part.

The lecture makes me think that it will be along the lines of a couple other books I read – “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson & “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly.

I bought the book at the presentation and read it. It was an easy read, but there was not much more than in the lecture.