Category Archives: books and book reviews

More with Less

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Andrew McAfee writes,

Our wants and desires keep growing, evidently without end, and therefore so do our economies. But our use of the earth’s resources does not. With the help of innovation and new technologies, economic growth in America and other rich countries — growth in all of the wants and needs that we spend money on — has become decoupled from resource consumption. This is a recent development and a profound one.

I have not yet read the book from which this essay is excerpted. Of course, those of you who have read Specialization and Trade already are clued in. Both McAfee and I were influenced by Jesse Ausubel.

By the way, could this decoupling be responsible for low interest rates? Think of a Hotelling model of resource storage but with the interest rate as endogenous and the path of resource prices exogenous. As long as economic growth required more use of resources, you expect a positive return from storing resources. You get a positive interest rate out of that. But when growth is decoupled, you do not expect a positive return from storing resources. If you want to create a store of value with a positive rate of return, you need to find some productive investment.

For more on McAfee and his latest book, see Alex Tabarrok on McAfee’s long-term bets.

James Flynn censored by his publisher

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He writes,

Discussing why free speech should extend to questions of race and gender necessarily involves presenting views (such as those of Jensen, Murray, and Lynn), if only for purposes of rebuttal, which upset those who believe that racial and sexual equality is self-evident. If upsetting students or staff or the public is a reason for banning speech, all such discussion is at an end. I end the book by quoting from George Orwell’s original preface to Animal Farm, which was itself rejected by Faber and Faber for being too critical of Stalin: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

His publisher decided not to publish his book on free speech. Read the whole essay. Note that this is the Flynn of “the Flynn effect,” which is the most prominent scientific argument against DNA determinism.

Populist leaders as father figures

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Mary Eberstadt writes,

In every case, the signature of the new populism is a particular kind of masculine authority figure who makes a series of characteristic promises: to clean up the messes left by others; to take care of “his” people by protecting them; and to call off the bullies in any form they appear—illegal immigrants, rapacious elites, menacing foreign nations, and so on.

. . .Nor is Trump alone in functioning as a super-daddy in a world where more and more children and former children grow up without an ordinary father in the home.

I recently read Eberstadt’s new book, Primal Screams, in which she argues that the sexual revolution resulted in a dramatic decline in the number of children growing up in intact families with siblings, creating identity crises for such children, with identity politics stepping in to provide a substitute for the loss of strong family identity. I will re-read her book, which includes interesting reaction essays by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel (you can think of them as representing the three axes, respectively). But at the moment I would describe her thesis as at best speculative.

I had the same skeptical reaction to the essay on populism. Does the causal analysis hold up under scrutiny? It seems to me that authoritarian “father-figure” leaders have emerged at different times and in disparate countries without being preceded by a sudden increase in broken families. I think that she needs to make a more rigorous attempt to demonstrate the validity of her causal model if she wants to avoid the accusation of practicing right-wing normative sociology.

Kronman on universities and excellence

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Anthony Kronman writes,

at their best, our colleges and universities have resisted the demand to make themselves over in the image of the democratic values of the culture as a whole. Even while striving to make the process of admission more open and fair, they have held to the idea that part of the work of our most distinguished institutions of higher learning is to preserve, transmit, and honor an aristocratic tradition of respect for human greatness.

I hope that elsewhere in his book he is a bit more hard-headed and realistic.

Later in the excerpt, he writes,

How can the cultivation of a spirit of aristocratic connoisseurship make our democracy stronger? The answer is by developing the habit of judging people and events from a point of view that is less vulnerable to the moods of the moment; by increasing the self-reliance of those who, because they recognize the distinction between what is excellent and common, have less need to base their standards on what “everyone knows” or “goes without saying”; and by strengthening the ability to subject one’s own opinions and feelings to higher and more durable measures of truth and justice. In all these ways, an aristocratic education promotes the independent-mindedness that is needed to combat the tyranny of majority opinion that, in Tocqueville’s view, is the greatest danger our democracy confronts.

I gather that his book argues that contemporary universities are not performing this task well. I would put this point in the strongest terms: for the purpose of promoting a culture of rigor against a culture of dogma, the universities have not only ceased to be the solution and are instead the crux of the problem.

Ouroboros

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It means a snake eating its tail, and Robby Soave, in Panic Attack, uses it to describe the hard left. I was reminded of it when reading this article (not by Soave) on California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum for high school.

Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat from the San Fernando Valley and vice chair of the caucus, said he supports teaching ethnic studies in schools, but found the draft offensive.

The draft’s glossary defines BDS as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” Gabriel, the Democratic assemblyman, called the definition “one-sided propaganda” and said the draft appeared to bend over backwards to include BDS.

The article notes that there is proposed legislation mandating ethnic studies as a graduation requirement.

It also notes that the course is supposed to be about American ethnic studies. But the curriculum is really driven by intersectionality, which is the theory that all forms of oppression are linked, and all must be opposed together.

As Soave points out, this approach fosters ideological purity but alienates some potential supporters. The article illustrates this ouroboros effect.

Russ Roberts and Arthur Diamond

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on Diamond’s book, Openness to Creative Destruction.

One point of interest is that Diamond offers a contrarian take on the common story that the Internet came from government and DARPA. He argues that DARPA’s vision was largely to connect mainframe computers at research institutions. The full personal computer revolution and network-of-networks owes more to Bob Taylor, who quit DARPA in frustration to go to Xerox PARC. I am not necessarily ready to give up the conventional story, but I recommend listening. This segment is somewhere in the final third of the podcast.

To explore this point further, I went back and re-read Where Wizards Stay Up Late, a history of the Internet published in 1996 by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. The book centers on the development of the first router by Bolt, Beranek and Newman, using a Honeywell computer. It was the size of a refrigerator and weighed 900 pounds. The book becomes uneven after that. Some of the sections are quite interesting, but others cover events and controversies that are long-forgotten, and justifiably so.

In the end, I am not persuaded by Diamond’s take on the Internet. ARPA (the predecessor of DARPA) really was at the heart of developing the long-distance computer network. Once it was up and running, it was transferred to a different defense department agency, which stopped innovating. But then the National Science Foundation started developing a research network, and that evolved into the Internet as we know it, with TCP/IP as created by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. A lot of research and development took place outside of government, but overall I think that government sponsorship deserves the bulk of the credit.

Diamond also has an interesting take on the way that the requirement for clinical trials in medicine constrains and distorts the sort of research that is undertaken.

On Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, and LSD

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Scott Alexander writes,

The best I can do in making sense of this story is to think of Kesey as having unique innate talents that made him a potential cult leader, combined with the sudden rise in status from being a famous author and the first person in his social scene with access to LSD. Despite the connotations of “cult leader”, Kesey was overall a good person, genuinely wanted to help people’s spiritual development, and genuinely thought LSD could do this. LSD formed the content of his cult, the same way Messianic Judaism formed the content of Jesus’ cult. It also made his life easier because of the drug’s natural tendency to make people think they are having important insights. When he, attempting to genuinely discover a spiritual path, decided to change the content and go beyond LSD, he lost that crutch, his people betrayed him, he became less confident in himself, and eventually he gave up.

My interpretation of Kesey is a bit different. He could only depict the power struggle between Nurse Ratched and Randle McMurphy because he understood the strengths of both. (Note that more than one pundit has seen an echo in the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.) So he had a natural sense of personal power, but I think in the end he did not want it. Maybe it bored him. Maybe having a cult following even turned him off after a while. These days, you can watch Jordan Peterson and suspect that he sometimes longs to retire to a life of isolation and anonymity, which is what Kesey did.

When I was in high school, I read and re-read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Alexander gives a good plot summary of the latter. Of the three, I would say that Cuckoo’s Nest holds up the best, followed by Acid Test.

I recommend Alexander’s whole post. The key paragraph:

One of two things must be true. Either psychedelics are a unique gateway to insight and happiness, maybe the most powerful ever discovered. Or they have a unique ability to convince people that they are, faking insight as effectively as heroin fakes happiness. Either one would be fascinating: the first for obvious reasons, the second because it convinces some pretty smart people. If the insight of LSD were fake, its very convincingness could tell us a lot about the mind and about how rationality works.

My money is on the latter.

A treatise on conservatism

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My review of George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility.

For Will, the apotheosis of the first phase of liberalism was the American Founding, with a capital F. Madison and the other Founders took at as given that human nature made us sufficiently equal to deserve identical treatment under the law, sufficiently different to benefit from liberty and autonomy, sufficiently bellicose to require a government that could resolve disputes peacefully, and sufficiently factional that preventing one coalition from dominating the rest required a system of checks and balances.