1. How the Old World Ended, by Jonathan Scott. Just read a sample, and I may not have reached the meat of the book, which I believe is focused on political and cultural change. Looks like another try at what Charles Kindleberger used to call the “well-squeezed orange” of the history of the Industrial Revolution. Scott’s version prioritizes water transport as a stimulus to trade and political freedom as a stimulus to innovation. These elements first affect the Netherlands. Then they move to England, where they are amplified by natural resources (coal) and vast population expansion, including large settler populations in America.

2. The Power of Bad, by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister. Their main point is to advise us to lean against our tendency to focus on the negative. My favorite passage:

The modern world will always be in crisis because its wealth and freedom have created a crisis industry. In the agricultural era, society could afford to support just a few intellectuals, usually beholden to royal patrons who didn’t welcome criticism of their policies. . .But after the Industrial Revolution. . .a new class of secular doomsayers emerged armed with charts, theories, and printing presses.

Some other excerpts:

The precise term for the adults scaring these children is availability entrepreneurs. They’re the journalists, activists, academics, trial lawyers, and politicians who capitalize on the human tendency to gauge a danger according to how many examples are readily available in our minds.

The one bit of good news on September 11 was that this new terrorist threat to aviation was already obsolete [because pilots would not longer passively hand over control of a plane].

But the horror of the bad news overwhelmed everyone’s judgment. . .In its rush to protect travelers, Congress created a bloated bureaucracy to screen passengers, the Transportation Security Administration. . .squandered more than $50 billion over the next decade

In the experiment, people who saw the negative version of the review rated the critic as significantly more intelligent than did the people who read the positive version.

Blackmailers shake down hotel managers and restaurateurs by posting a bad review on TripAdvisor, Yelp, Google, or Facebook

That is the title of a book by A.C. Grayling. On page 417:

in all other areas of philosophy–ethics, theory of knowledge, political philosophy, aesthetics–the history of the subject continues to be a resource which enriches contemporary thinking. But in the philosophy of language there is relatively little, other than in the way of some suggestions and insights, that is not original to the twentieth century itself, and to its second half in particular.

Grayling seems to score this as a point for twentieth century philosophy, as his section on Analytic Philosophy covers 131 pages (out of 585 total), which is as much as he devotes to Plato and Aristotle plus everyone from Bacon to Hegel, put together. For me, that was like encountering a history of the New York Yankees that pays as much attention to the 1970s squad as it does to the Ruth, Dimaggio, and Mantle eras combined.

The book displays an amazing breadth of Grayling’s reading. I can see it as a monumental reference work. But as an actual history of philosophy it did not work for me.

UPDATE: Michael Huemer offers praise for Analytic Philosophy. Comparing it with continental philosophy, Huemer writes,

analytic phil is better. These things:

Clear theses
Clear, logical arguments
Direct responses to objections

I read a baseball book called Year of the Pitcher. The title refers to 1968. I attempted to give
it a review of two stars on Amazon. My headline was not for baseball fans I wrote

If you’re looking for a lot of pages on how Jackie Robinson wrestled with his political loyalties, then this is your book. And if you did not know that African-Americans, including baseball players, suffered from Jim Crow laws in the early 1960s and a good deal of residual prejudice well beyond those years, then you will learn something. If you haven’t read David Halberstam’s book on 1964 then the stories about Bob Gibson’s sensitivity and the Cardinals’ relatively good internal racial relations will be new to you.

But if you are curious about the career years that several pitchers had (in terms of ERA, Luis Tiant and Sam McDowell come to mind) or about how many more fans showed up when Gibson was starting than when other Cardinal pitchers were starting, or about how the new St. Louis ballpark in 1966 affected Cardinal pitching statistics, you won’t find answers here.

As a fan, I found myself going to baseball reference’s page on annual major league pitching statistics (https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/pitch.shtml) to see what made 1968 different. It turns out that home runs per 9 innings were low, but not at an all-time low. Walks per nine innings were at an all-time low. Above all, the batting average on balls in play was the lowest of all time. You get the impression that with the strike zone favoring pitchers, batters had to swing at marginal pitches, making weak contact.

The review was rejected for violating their guidelines. The guidelines include not allowing external references so technically the review violates that guideline.

I have only had two reviews ever rejected. In each case the review was less than three stars. Perhaps this is coincidence, but I wonder whether bad reviews may be filtered more carefully through the guidelines.

William Voegeli writes,

Unfortunately, the “essential unity of the human species,” noble concept though it may be, is a cosmic or moral axiom rather than a scientific principle. Guarding science against abuse begins with making empirical observations accurately and reporting them scrupulously, even when the data cast doubt on our most cherished beliefs and aspirations. No intellectually honest writer would say, “Some have speculated that Kenyans might have, on average, longer, thinner legs than other people,” any more than she would say, “Some have speculated that Pygmies might be, on average, shorter than other people.” These are verifiable facts, not tendentious conjecture.

He reviews several books, and he argues against the approach of making some beliefs sacred rather than contestable.

To me, the essay illustrates how much easier it is these days for a non-Progressive than a Progressive to write about race without getting tied up in intellectual knots, contradictions, or racism.

Here I recommend five. You know, I didn’t even think of Sebastian Mallaby’s The Man Who Knew, about Alan Greenspan. It’s another terrific biography and I enthusiastically recommend it, but I don’t really think of Greenspan as having contributed anything important to economics.

I recently re-read Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and it holds up well. One way to think of the book is as a defense of evolutionary psychology and a survey of its political and philosophical implications. The entire book is worth reading, but here are a few quotes.

p. 143:

Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do. . .

But. . .Individuals are not genetically identical, and it is unlikely that the differences affect every part of the body except the brain. And though genetic differences betwee races and ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not nonexistent. . .

p. 147:

The best cure for discrimination, then, is more accurate and more extensive testing of mental abilities, because it would provide so much predictive information about an individual that no one would be tempted to factor in race or gender. (This, however, is an idea with no political future.)

p. 222-223:

Children don’t have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.

. . .children are equipped with a toolbox of implements for reasoning and learning in particular ways, and those implements must be cleverly recruited to master problems for which they were not designed. . .They cannot learn modern biology until they unlearn intuitive biology, which thinks in terms of vital essences. And they cannot learn evolution until they unlearn intuitive engineering, which attributes design to the intentions of the designer.

I would add that they cannot learn economics until they unlearn intuitive economics, which Pinker suggests is based on what Alan Fiske calls Equality Matching, which is the form of trade that takes place in primitive societies. p. 234:

Fiske contrasts Equality Matching with a very different system called Market Pricing. . .Market Pricing relies on the mathematics of multiplication, division, fractions, and large numbers, together with the social institutions of money, credit, written contracts, and complex divisions of labor. Market Pricing is absent in hunter-gatherer societies, and we know it play no role in our evolutionary history because it relies on technologies like writing, money, and formal mathematics, which appeared only recently. Even today the exchanges carried out by Market Pricing may involve causal chains that are impossible for any individual to grasp in full.

On p. 276, Pinker offers a long list of things that have become moral issues recently, including “big box” stores, oil drilling, Columbus Day, and IQ tests. He writes,

Many of these things can have harmful consequences, of course, and no one would want them trivialized. The question is whether they are best handled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villains, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste.

It seems to me that when people adopt the psychology of moralization they become intolerant of deviant behavior. I think that this is a big challenge for libertarians these days.

In a chapter on politics, Pinker adapts Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. Pinker re-labels them the Tragic Vision vs. Utopian Vision. p. 287:

In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. . .

In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world.

On p. 290, he quotes Michael Oakeshott on the side of the Tragic Vision. “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.” I believe that the quote comes from Rationalism in Politics and other essays.

p. 293-294:

The ideas from evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics that became public in the 1970s could not have been more of an insult to those with the Utopian Vision. . .

My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life. . .Among them I would include the following:

• The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance
• The limited scope of communal sharing in groups. . .
• The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurobiological mechanisms that underlie it.
• The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.
• The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems. . .
• The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themsleves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.
• The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.