For some reason, a lot of the books that I’ve delved into recently have dealt with political theory. These include:
–10% Less Democracy, by Garett Jones
–American Secession, by F.H. Buckley
–Power Without Knowledge, by Jeffrey Friedman
I am unhappy with the writing style that I am finding. Although I learned enough from Jones that I recommend his book highly, for my taste his style is too folksy. Buckley also strikes me that way, although less so.
I suppose if you were talking political theory to someone with an average college freshman level of background and interest (and I have low expectations for both), then informal language and cultural allusions might help. But the average college freshman is not going to pick up a book on political theory.
On the other hand, Friedman’s prose is laden with academic jargon. If you are a graduate student trying to signal to your professors that you have been listening to their lectures, then that may be a good strategy. In fact, the technical terms may appeal to the typical reader of a book in political theory. But not me.
As to substance, the authors avoid the mistake of acting as though the problem for political theorists is to get the political system to reflect the will of the people. But so far I do not come away from these books, either individually or collectively, with a clear sense of the problem that political theory is supposed to solve. What are the goals that we want to achieve, and what are the constraints under which we operate? If and when I write on political theory, I will want to try to be as clear as possible on those questions.
I’m fond of Francis Fukuyama’s two volumes on the history of the modern state: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day.
“I suppose if you were talking political theory to someone with an average college freshman level of background and interest …”
That sounds like the typical quick-take commentator for mainstream publications, “explainer” journalist, or writer of reviews and critiques of new books of political arguments, who have to let their own “will never actually read the book” audience what they are supposed to think about it, expressed in at least as folksy a manner, if not much more downmarket. They need a quickly and easily digestible, dumbed down, executive summary style of writing, with readily excerpted money quotes that won’t stick out too obviously in quality and difficulty from the rest of the review.
So maybe authors and editors are partially tailoring to target these “participants in marketing”.
But also, this is what one might expect of even the typical readership in an increasingly post-literate society with no patience for long form crafted with care and artistry.
If authors and editors are tailoring their books to people who digest the books for the much smaller “‘will never actually read the book’ audience”, well, that seems like a pretty small market.
That should be “for the much LARGER “‘will never actually read the book’ audience”. The reviewers and digesters are a much smaller audience.
My guess is that a lot of books are bought and never read. I buy a lot of books used, and one gets a rough feel for how many are offered cheap in pristine condition, vs how many show the kind of wear indicating close reading, trying to correct for levels of popularity or compulsory purchases for academic reasons.
Most people don’t read most of the things they buy carefully cover to cover, and some always promise themselves they are going to start, but never do, but just hoard them in a collection instead. In Japan this is known to be a common enough human tendency that they even have a popular word for it, “Tsundoko”.
It turns out that Amazon does what most people would deem to be shockingly intrusive levels of surveillance on Kindle reading habits, so I’m guessing there is some decent data out there to bolster my hunch, though to the extent any analysis has interesting conclusions it’s both potentially valuable and proprietary and would remain a closely-guarded secret. To the extent publishers want to know these facts, they may have to pay Amazon for them, and promise not to spread them around. So a normal person may never find out.
And all of this is completely aside from other factors contributing to the weird and often mysterious economics of publishing industry business.
Jordan Ellenberg came up with some numbers years ago.
He worked out that Sheryl Sandberg’s readers stop about an eighth of the way in. That’s almost twice as far as Stephen Hawking’s readers are prepared to go.
Ellenberg called it the Piketty Index. Piketty’s readers stop 2.4% of the way through. (“Mr. Piketty’s book is almost 700 pages long, and the last of the top five popular highlights appears on page 26.”)
Perhaps political science should strive to be accurate and descriptive, rather than prescriptive.
I think this applies to science as well; we all seem to have a tendency to jump to conclusions and apply our models to different scales and scenarios.
After finishing Part 1 of Murray’s “Human Diversity” on gender differences, I’m kicking myself for foolishly assuming that the disparity of women in engineering was due to peer influence (say at age 8 or age 13). I’m convinced now that it has a genetic/nature basis, and unexpectedly, more hope for shifting the female workforce towards the STEMs with this new perspective in mind.
What did you think about the results of the “draw the water line of the tipped container” test?
I didn’t stop to think about it. Between books like Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” and my engineering background, I can’t distinguish between what is intuitive and what is learned anymore. What I am sure of is that none of the women in my engineering courses would stumble over that problem; you don’t get through advanced fluid mechanics while getting stuff like that wrong. It would be interesting if men and women who once mastered that kind of physics later lost that skill at different rates.
Did I miss something important? I thought it was a generic example of a spatial problem that men on average are better at.
I’m not sure how being convinced of a genetic basis and having more “hope for shifting the female workforce towards the STEMs” are compatible ideas. Or did I read you wrong?
For those who would like the context, it’s to the results found by Diane Halpern and reported in her book, Sex Differences In Cognitive Abilities.
And image of the test question is here: http://www.isegoria.net/images/Halpern-Bottle-Tilting-Question-Diagram.png
“40 percent of college women get it wrong. Effect sizes favoring males range from –0.44 to –0.66.” Those are big effect sizes.
You read me right but I should have been more specific; my optimism is for more women adopting technology fields, specifically computer science and data science which are in dire need of talent.
Part 1 of the book answered many of the inconsistencies I perceived in the different cognitive science research. The big one is reflected by the question I ask every intelligent person I meet that works in a non-STEM field: “you obviously have a very high IQ, the research says math and language skills are correlated, why didn’t you choose a math oriented STEM field?”.
So the answer is that for women, IQ is a pure predictor of math/STEM ability. For men, there is far more variation. Women choose language centric fields because of perception and preference; they perceive the STEM fields as less people oriented and they rightly prefer work life balance which the STEM fields don’t [presently] accommodate.
It is my experience that tech is morphing into a highly social experience. Amazon’s two-pizza teams, pair programming, daily SCRUMs; working on a top-performing technical team is fun and thrilling and the best part is working with people that are as smart and talented as you are. Tech needs to move away from the “two-pizza” part, the impromptu meals for teams working long hours. The size is right, about 10 people max, say “two-table teams” in the restaurant table sense but the impromptu hours is bad. The same thing holds for medical residency that emphasizes long sleep deprived shifts as some kind of sign of dedication.
I’m rambling. Young girls/women should have their IQ measured and be exposed to the thrill of working on a SCRUM style team solving a technical challenge at an age before they can opt out of advanced math and science streams. Tech can change to accommodate the natural preferences of smart women.
I can’t remember where I read it but someone suggested, “In school, males get Bs in STEM and Cs in humanities. Females get Bs in STEM and As in humanities. So after a while, they stop taking STEM courses.”
Murray says that women get identical scores in STEM and humanities: A/A, B/B, C/C, etc. When you are equally good at either, different preferences kick in. For many men, the choice is much easier because the STEM talent is just obviously much much better than the humanities talent.
The interesting discrepancies in male/female abilities, like the visuo-spatial example that Handle gives, end up being inconsequential as the different paths taken end up at the same solution (according to Murray). Female performance is predictable based on IQ. Male performance requires extra cognitive testing to tease out the inconsistent talent.
Out government is a value added chain. Politics is about resolving congestion in the government factory.
All institutions are value chains, including corporations built around a specific business model. I think the question is how to categorize/compare/rank different political models. Removing congestion is about continuous improvement. What we are missing is an understanding of why one model is superior to another and when a mature and successful model needs to pivot to an upcoming new model.
“What are the goals that we want to achieve, and what are the constraints under which we operate?”
Legitimacy? (Or legitimation. Or better still, Legitimation politischer Ordnung.)
The problem political theory is supposed to solve is how people can live together. Man is not a bear or a leopard that he can live alone. People can only survive in groups. The larger the group, the greater certain potential benefits resulting from the division of labor, but also the higher the difficulty in making it cohere and the greater the potential resources a tyrant can extract.
Peter Schweitzer’s excellent Profiles in Corruption provides the bottom line answer to the question of why political science: to follow the money. Profiles in Corruption is the ideal high school civics text.